Torture would have been preferable, Croe decided one day, months into her confinement. A little bleeding, a little pain, would have made the time go faster. Anything to break up the monotony of these bare, boring walls, and the relentless demands of early motherhood.
It was always one or the other – the child-rearing, or the silence. Croe tried to sleep when Mallos took the baby, but she had never been able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, even as exhausted as she was. She filled the remaining time training, like any stereotypical villain locked in a cell. Pushups, crunches, dance-like series of movements she’d learned during her training in the Alliance…weapons practice. The magic blades shimmered, ghostly, as she swung them, careful to make no sound that would alert her captors. She could only imagine the King’s reaction, if he knew she kept up her bladework even without the weapons they had confiscated.
But today, nothing eased her ennui. Her loneliness, she realized. Her half-written letter to Alliannah would not finish itself. Her psychic-blades fizzled. She tried yoga, of all things, pointedly remaining in a headstand until the blood thundered in her head and her vision went blurry. And then she roused herself from the dead faint that followed, stuffed some pillows under the blanket in an approximation of a body, and teleported to Mallos’ rooms.
Thankfully, her lover was so near to passing out that he did not have the presence of mind to argue with her, as she pried the squirming baby from his arms and pushed him down onto the bed, smirking. You’ve had her all day. Rest, she’d thought, worried her words would have the guards breaking down the door. Then she’d carried the child into the main room, and sealed his bedroom behind her.
It was a change of scenery, but still confinement, and it was an effort for Croe to resist the clawing claustrophobia. Fetching a crystal paperweight from the desk, she set it and the baby on the rug, pleased to notice that her daughter’s growing mobility had lessened her desire (perhaps “requirement” would be a better word) to be held. Angela crawled in eager circles, pausing only briefly to pick up the paperweight and whack it on the rug when she passed it in her orbit. Croe watched her, wondering what she was thinking – if she was thinking. Wondering when thinking really began. Her own earliest memories were half-formed pictures and feelings, mostly of her childhood bedroom and an immaculately tended garden.
Her heart clenched a little around that, like an oyster around a grain of sand. But there was no way to roll her past into a pearl, no way to knock off every sharp, painful corner until it was smooth and harmless and pure. Part of her wondered if it wouldn’t be better for Angela to live without her, free from the shadow of her crimes…but another, louder part of her remembered what it was like to grow up essentially motherless, and did not wish that upon a child. As flawed and terrible as she was, Croe reasoned, it was still better for Angela to grow up knowing her mother loved her, surely. Better to know she had not been abandoned, even if that would have seemed logical.
“Hello.”
Croe was on her feet in a heartbeat, heckles raised, standing between the stranger and her daughter. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.” Adrenaline forked through her blood like a lightning strike. How had this woman gotten in? The same way you did, a small, logical part of her reasoned, while her fingers clenched and unclenched around that blinding instinct, wrestling it into place. She swallowed past the tension in her throat.
“Sanekhu,” a voice, her voice, whispered. As if her subconscious realized, independently, what the rest of her motherhood-addled brain could not. She straightened, shook the tension out of her dominant hand. Her probing gaze drifted over the goddess, taking in her diminutive frame, her ageless face that was belied by the focus in her blue eyes, the scythe clutched in her hand. Croe blinked. “A bad time for…what?” she queried, with a pointed glance at the weapon. Not a great time to die, she wanted to say, but thought better of it. If that was Aura’s purpose here, she doubted it was up for negotiation.
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