The Goddess's Gift

I had too much to think about as we made our way back to the cottage.

“Are you alright?” Lear asked softly as we soared through the sky once more.

“I’m just…baffled. I…I’d never really heard anything like what I found out today, which means my parents didn't know any of it, either."

“I’m not surprised, unfortunately. Information about the past is so easily lost, in some ways. It’s very sad. Especially in this case, when it’s important.” he murmured, then paused and said, “I wonder if those books in the loft can shed any more light on the matter. Your family had to have kept them all these years for a purpose. They couldn't even read them, but the still kept them, you know? Surely that means they have some kind of significance.”

“Maybe. I wouldn't know.” I sighed. There was still so much I didn’t know. There was so much my parents hadn’t known. Although my father not knowing was less surprising, given he was a normal human. But my mother not knowing...that was troubling to me, somehow.

The cottage appeared, and Lear landed, but didn’t put me down, and instead carried me inside, announcing, “We’re back, ladies!” to Lou and Diana, who both looked up from the couch as the door opened. He carried me over to said couch, and put me gently down on a cushion. “There.”

I rolled my eyes on him, but couldn't keep from smiling. “I still have to go take care of the animals.”

“Nope, you stay right here and love on the cats. I’ll be right back.” he told me, then darted towards the door, then went out.

I sat there, petting the cats as I turned over everything we’d learned that day in my head. I was…a lot.

My family had come from another place to live in these lands. They’d had more power than just healing, but had hidden all but the healing power from everyone else for some reason. They’d lived in the manor house, and their power had dwindled over the long years as we’d intermarried with the locals. Any wealth and influence had slowly ebbed as well. Then the manor had burned, and they hadn’t been able to rebuild it, and we’d moved to the cottage we still lived in because they hadn't been able to afford to replace it.

Where had we come from? Why had we left wherever we’d come from? What was the reason we’d kept our full magical abilities a secret, and just let everyone think we were just healers?

I sighed, petting my kitties still. “Oh my babies.” Lou maowed, stretched luxuriously, then rolled onto her tummy for pets. I giggled, and pushed my fingers into her fur.

Diana maowed softly, as if amused.

“Diana, my love, are you feeling alright?”

Another, confirmatory, maow.

“Good.” I murmured, scratching the bridge of her nose the way she liked.

The door opened, and Lear came back in. “Done.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course.” he nodded, coming to sit beside us on the couch.

It was quiet for a few moments.

“Diana, can I ask you something?” I asked my familiar quietly.

The diluted grey tabby maowed in reply.

“She said yes.” Lear told me.

“I assumed as much.” I smiled, then spoke to my cat familiar again. “Do you know the name of the goddess who gave you to my family?”

My sweet queen was quiet for a little while, then maowed and started to purr, her tail flicking slightly.

“She said it’s been a really long time since she thought about it.”

“Does that mean you don’t remember?” I asked her, vaguely amused.

Diana maowed once more, and set her head down on her paws, her iridescent ocean eyes half-closed.

“She said she knows what she calls her, but it’s not in any language we speak.”

“Ah, I see. So I guess it wouldn't be very helpful, then.”

“Probably not.” Lear shrugged.

“Annie, do you know where my family came from?”

A soft maow.

“A long way away.” Lear murmured.

My familiar followed that up with a few more maows.

“She said she remembers that after the goddess gave her to your family, they traveled around for a long time before they came here.”

“I see. I guess you lived in the manor house before it burned?”

Diana continued, through Lear. “She said that she did, and that the fire was frightening, but that they all escaped with their lives, then came to live here. She likes it here, it’s much warmer than the manor, which was drafty.”

I smiled at my little cat, “I like it here too.”

She purred contentedly.

“I don’t think she knows much, powerful and wise though she is. She is still a cat, like I said.”

Diana maowed happily, and the fey man chuckled at whatever she'd said.

“What’d she say?”

“She said she’s certainly just a cat.” Lear snorted. “Diana is surprisingly funny.”

Annie’s tail twitched annoyedly.

“Calm down, I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” Lear laughed. “You’re a gem amongst cats and familiars, Diana.”

My oldest friend gave a contented maow, clearly pacified.

“I love you, Annie.” I bent and kissed her forehead, which made Lou jealous, and so of course I had to give her kisses as well. “You two are so silly!”

Diana maowed again a couple more times, stretching out and closing her eyes.

“She wonders why we’re so curious all of a sudden. It’s all ancient history.”

“Because I love you, Miss Annie. And I want to get you some help, if I can, and so we can keep helping other people. I know the villagers count on us.” I sighed, stroking my sweet cat’s soft fur.

She merely purred happily, likely half-asleep by now.

We sat there quietly for a little while.

“Let’s have some tea.” Lear said, getting up and going to the kitchen.

“Do you need help?”

“No, stay there.” he assured me.

I waited a little while, then got up anyway to help him. “I can make the snacks.” I mumbled.

“No, it’s alright, I would have done it after I’d gotten the sugar and stuff onto the tray.” He said as he filled the sugar bowl.

“I don’t mind. I want to help you too.” I told him, adding the treats I wanted to the tray he was preparing.

“Alright.” I could hear his smile.

After a few moments, his arms slipped around me, and he pulled me back into his chest, planting a kiss into my hair. “Gotta wait for it to steep, now. This seems like a good way to pass the time.”

“Oh…alright.” I leaned back into him.

Lear kissed my neck for a moment, then broke away to ask, “Are you okay? I imagine that what we learned today was kind of unexpected."

“That’s an understatement.” I muttered.

“Fair. So it was…jaw dropping? Befuddling? Astonishing?”

“Something like that.” I sighed.

He shifted, pulling away slightly and turning me around to face him. “How can I help?” His iridescent green eyes were gentle.

“I…I don’t know, honestly.” I shook my head, “I just need to be able to think it over.”

“I understand.” Lear nodded, leaning down to pull my mouth to his lips for a brief moment. When he pulled away, he plucked my curls gently with his long, deft fingers. “Your family was sort of royalty around here for a little while.”

“Not really.” I rolled my eyes a little, “Sounds like they set themselves up as a power in the region. That’s hardly royalty.”

“I guess.” he smiled. “I get the sense they did do their best to help people, even if they did keep the better part of their power under wraps…until it started to fade to just the healing powers.”

“I…I don’t know.” I sighed, then leaned forward and into him.

“It’s alright” the fey man murmured, planting a kiss in my hair.

“I wonder why they were traveling? Why they decided to hide their power? I even wondered how the manor burned down, if they had other powers!”

“Well, I think the powers had waned by then. Maybe it was enough that they couldn't stop it.”

“That’s probably true.”

“And none of it helps us get any closer to which goddess we need to look for.” I muttered.

“We’ll figure it out. Now I have some frame of reference for when your family came to these parts.”

“I guess, if you can find a fey person who was closer to the family than Sagebark was. I don’t know if you will, it seems like they kept to themselves, even if they did do what they could to help folks around here.”

“While that’s true, I was thinking about it being helpful for when I look in the books up in the loft. There’s got to be a reason they were kept. Think about it, the house burned down, but the books were saved? How important must they be that they, among all things, were saved?”

“I…I hadn’t thought about that.” I lifted my head from his chest, chewing my limp. “I’ll help you look, but I don’t think that I’ll be much help, I’ve looked through them before when I was a kid, and it all just looked like gibberish."

“That’s okay. There’s no guarantee that I’ll understand them, either. Although I’m much, much older than you, and have known several languages since I was born, so there’s a chance I might be able to decipher some of it. We’ll see.”

“I know I’m young compared to you, but how old are you, Lear?” I asked, frowning and leaning back to look at him better.

For the first time since we'd met, he flushed slightly, and looked away, muttering, “Far too old for you. Let’s leave it at that.”

I stared, open-mouthed at him, then burst into giggles. “You’re blushing! I can’t believe it, you’re embarrassed!”

“I…can’t…lie.” he muttered haltingly, then admitted, “And I can’t think of anything to suggest anything other than the truth at the moment.”

I blinked, then had to laugh again. After a few moments, I wiped my eyes, telling him, “Lear, I love how honest you are with me. I do know you’re older than me, likely a very good deal older than me. I just never thought about how much until now, so it prompted me to ask.”

Lear was quiet for a few moments, then mumbled, “One thousand, seven hundred and thirty two.”

“Years older than me, or altogether?”

“Altogether.” the fey man sighed.

“How does that fit into the fey ideas about age? I suspect it’s not very young, but is it very old?”

The flush was slowly fading from his entirely too attractive face. “I’m neither here nor there in regards to age. Not old but not particularly young anymore. I’ve seen civilizations rise and fall, but not all of them. Some of us have been around practically since the beginning of everything."

“I see.” I studied him for a little while.

He turned his gorgeous emerald eyes to me, and I found it was a little easier to meet them now, though doing so still made me blush. Lear smiled, apparently finally regaining his composure somewhat. “Well, at least I still make you blush too.”

I rolled my eyes at him, “You’re ridiculous, really.”

“Ridiculously attractive.” the fey man’s brilliant smile flickered across his face.

“No, just ridiculous.” I snorted, shaking my head, but then leaned forward into him again.

Lear leaned down and kissed my forehead, “The tea is probably done steeping.” He pulled away, and picked up the now fairly heavily-laden tray of tea things in one hand without any difficulty. There was no way I could have managed it, but I wasn’t fey-strong, like he was. Lear took my hand and gently pulled me back over to the sitting area, setting the tray down carefully on the coffee table.

This time, instead of sitting with the cats between us, I sat down directly beside him, and though he slipped an arm immediately around me to pull me close, I leaned forward and poured us each some tea.

“Here.”

“I could have done that.”

“I know. But I also can, so…it’s fine.” I shrugged, leaning back into the couch and curling up with my own cup.

“Thank you.” he kissed my temple.

I leaned into him. “You’re welcome.” I sighed contentedly.

Yes, we’d learned some admittedly kind of surprising things that day, and it was taking me a little while to adjust to it all, but nothing we’d learned had been anything bad. No, they were just things I hadn’t known or expected, and really, that wasn’t so bad.

I was curled up with the people I was closest with in the world, Lear and my kitties. And despite my worries about Diana, we were all alive and doing well enough. Things weren’t so bad, really.

“Will it upset you if I get up to grab some of the books from the loft?” Lear asked after a few moments.

“Not at all.” I shifted so he could get up more easily.

“You just were so cozy, and I hate to ruin that.” he stood.

“Well, you’ll be right back, I’m sure.” I smiled at him.

The fey man grinned, “Yep.” He darted away, and was back in the blink of an eye with several old tomes, which he sat on the table. “Let’s make sure we’re careful and don’t spill any tea on them.”

“Of course.”

Lear settled back down beside me, and I curled up against him once more. He opened the book, and started to leaf slowly through the pages, studying them closely.

“I don’t even recognize the language the words are in.” I sighed.

“They’re familiar to me.” he muttered, reaching out a long finger and tracing a line of writing, “These are handwritten.”

“Yeah, not printed. Maybe older than printing presses?”

I frowned, shrugging, “I don’t know, we’ve had them since before I was born, so I think it’s unlikely, but that does make me think that it’s not a book there are many copies of.”

“Probably not. I think all of them are handwritten.”

“The ones I took all were.” he nodded. “I think they’re journals of some kind, if I’m being honest. Maybe personal journals.” Lear fell silent, studying the book for a while. I drank my tea happily as he poured over the text. “It’s not dissimilar to Faerie, when written.”

“Oh? Is it fey?”

“No, but I think…” he frowned, “Faerie is a magical language, even when written. That’s why we usually use the common speech, so we don’t have to use our magic just to communicate.”

“I didn’t know that.” I blinked.

Lear tore his eyes away from the book to smile at me, “That’s alright. You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s also why we can’t lie. Faerie doesn't permit lying, given it’s magical, and fairly binding in nature. So unless it’s the truth, and as things are in reality, it simply can’t be said.”

“But you can’t lie even in the common speech.” I pointed out, a little confused.

“The gods decided when the common speech was slowly becoming more and more prevalent, that if fey folk were able to lie, we’d get up to far more mischief than we already did, so they made it so that we couldn't lie in any language. To be fair, all that did was make us apply all the fun ways to be deceitful that we’d already learned, as far as our own language went, to all other languages. Loopholes, half-truths, implications, just generally talking in a way so that we’re not technically lying, stuff like that.”

“Fair enough!” I laughed a little.

“But if this language is at least partly magical, I might be able to…hmm…” Lear put his hand flat against the book, and I felt his magic surging, which in turn drew a grimace of pain to his face.

“Don’t hurt yourself.” I murmured.

“I’m fine.” he grunted, but then gritted his teeth and gasped in pain, “Ah!” The letters on the page suddenly glowed with a golden light, and he smiled triumphantly, then let the magic fade, and wiped his face. “That…was maybe too much.” he admitted.