Page 57 of Skysong

Andala steeled herself, stiffening her resolve. She only hoped her mother would be able to give the help she sought.

Her hand looked white as a glove as she reached towards the door. She froze. She had almost seized the handle out of habit. Clenching her fist, she knocked softly instead.

It seemed an age before any movement sounded inside. But then there were footsteps, and the click of a key turning in a lock, and the creak of the door as it opened, familiar as a loved one’s voice.

And then there they stood: Leilyn and Andala, mother and daughter, face to face after ten long years.

Did Leilyn recognise the woman who had run away as a girl? Or was it a stranger who now stood upon her doorstep, with nothing but a faint echo of familiarity in her features? One hand on the door, a candle in the other, Leilyn stared, stock-still, half her face in shadow. For a moment, it registered nothing but shock. Then—

‘Andala?’ she whispered.

Andala nodded. ‘Hello, Mother.’

‘Andala.’

And then Leilyn had flung the door wide, and pulled Andala to her.

‘Andala,’ she kept saying, tears in her voice. ‘You’ve come home.’

No tears formed or fell from Andala’s eyes. She did not know what she had expected to happen; whether she had thought the206years between them would fall away, her becoming a child again, her mother an angel in her eyes, all crimes forgiven. Instead, she felt oddly detached from the scene, as if it were somebody else her mother was embracing, and she a bystander watching on. There was a chasm inside her that held the two of them apart – a vast emptiness that had opened all those years ago, grown wider with the death of her father, continued expanding in the years since. It was part of her, and no brief reunion would close up its edges.

Eventually, Leilyn stepped back. She kept her hands on Andala’s shoulders, surveying her face by the scant light of the candle she had set to the side. Andala could not imagine what she saw there.

A frown finally appeared on Leilyn’s brow, but all she said was, ‘Come inside out of the cold.’

A strange mixture of resentment and longing came over Andala as she followed her mother into the house. It was much as it had been the day she had left. The same cushions on the comfortable chairs, the same vases full of flower cuttings on every surface. They moved into the warm glow of the kitchen, where Leilyn busied herself with the kettle.

‘I’ll make tea—’

‘I don’t want tea,’ Andala said abruptly. Then, after a beat, she added with forced politeness, ‘Thank you. I’m quite all right.’

Thankfully, Leilyn hadn’t seemed to notice Andala’s harshness, or had chosen to ignore it. ‘Sit, then,’ she said, smiling, pulling out a seat at the worn wooden table. Andala took it, and her mother sat down opposite her.

There was a moment of silence as they looked at each other. The past decade hung in the air like an oppressive scent. The two of them had resembled one another ever since Andala had been born, and now that she was older, she found the similarity more striking than207ever. It was like looking into some enchanted mirror, seeing herself in the future. It made her throat feel tight—

A muffled thud sounded above their heads, a noise like a footstep landing on the floor of the room upstairs – the one that had once been Andala’s.

Her eyes shot upward, then back to Leilyn. ‘Who is here with you?’ she whispered.

Leilyn looked uncomfortable, almost sheepish. ‘I was about to tell you,’ she said. ‘They—’

But before Andala could find out whotheywere, she heard the footsteps move across the room, down the stairs, into the hallway outside.

Andala shot up from her chair. A man stood in the doorway, just beyond the kitchen’s light, features hidden in the shadow of the hall. But she knew who it was. She’d know that silhouette anywhere.

‘Girard?’ she breathed.

Before he could respond, a smaller figure appeared from behind him. A girl of five years old peered shyly around her father’s back. A girl with pale skin, just like Andala’s, almost luminescent in the gloom. A girl with long black hair, just like Andala’s, that fell over one of her wide, dark eyes. And before Andala could still her tongue, she had whispered her name. The name she had given the girl herself.

‘Amie.’

It had been there from the moment Amie was born. Before that, really. From the moment Andala had known she would exist.

The fear. The temptation.208

Girard had been overjoyed when she’d told him. That had only made it worse. This was the last thing the two of them needed. Had he not felt them drifting apart? Or had he felt it the same as she had, and thought that this would be the solution, the thing that drew them back together?

It was not that she didn’t love Girard. She did. She had done since a week after they’d met, when she was a bargirl of just seventeen. But things had changed. Andala had changed. She loved him still, but not in the way she had before.

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