The fourth school year at Hillview was both ordinary and the least ordinary year of his life.
Ordinary in its texture: classes, lunch, the daily routines of a school that sat in the space between the mortal world and the divine one and did not fully belong to either. Dominic's engineering projects, now spanning a full table in the workshop and generating the specific anxious pride of someone who has built something complex and is not sure it will hold. Maya's painting, which had developed over four years from talented to something that belonged to a category Kael did not have a word for in English — he used the Japanese concept of ma, the space between things where meaning accumulates.
He had told Maya, carefully, that her color perception was unusual and that he thought it came from something in her blood that was worth knowing about. He had not said: your mother is probably Iris, goddess of rainbows. He had said: the way you see color is different from the way other people see it, and that is a gift, and you should treat it as one rather than trying to see more ordinarily. She had looked at him for a long time and then said, 'I've always known that. I just didn't know if I was allowed to say it.' He thought: that is the thing that the mortal world does to people who carry something unusual. It teaches them to doubt the evidence of their own perception.
The letter writing continued. He and Cece wrote every month, reliably, with the consistency of people who had decided that the letter was worth the discipline of writing it. She was fifteen now, with her mother's steady attention and her own developing relationship with the Loa that was becoming less observational and more participatory. She was not a practitioner yet — she had decided to wait until she was certain she was ready, which he thought was the correct instinct. But the relationship was deepening.
She wrote in November: 'Mama asked Baron Samedi about you, not about anything specific, just about how you were. He told her you were at a crossroads. She asked which kind. He said: the real kind. The kind you walk toward rather than arrive at.' She added: 'I don't know exactly what he means but I thought you should know he's still watching.'
He wrote back: 'Tell him thank you. Tell him I know. Tell him I'm walking.'
He went home to New Orleans for Christmas. The herb garden was dormant, the way December gardens are, but the shimmer was there — it was always there, that deep Hecate-warmth he had put into the soil five years ago on the morning he left. He sat in the garden in the December cool and thought about what was coming and felt the garden breathe around him in its slow winter rhythm.
He thought about Aurelie's diary. About the choice she made and the choice he was making and the way the same blood in two people across a century could lead to completely different roads and both roads could be right for the person walking them. He thought: she kept her magic small and she was at peace. I am making my magic as large as it can be, and I am not at peace — I am at attention, which is a different quality — and I think that is also right.
He thought: when this is over, when the war is done, I am going to come back here and sit in this garden for a long time and let it be small again for a while. That is the reward I am saving.
He pressed his hands into the winter soil and felt the garden's sleeping warmth answer him.