Then Jehenne, sitting beside Miande on the next bed over, screamed with startled joy and jumped forward into Nemienne’s arms. Nemienne reflexively caught her little sister and held her tightly. Lifting her eyes, she met Miande’s wide bewildered gaze, and then found Liaska and Tana, equally astonished, clinging together and looking not quite certain whether they should be happy or alarmed.
It was Miande who came forward after that brief pause and took Nemienne’s hands, exclaiming at how cold they were. It was Miande who sent Tana to bring Enelle, and who fetched a blanket from her own bed to toss around Nemienne’s shoulders, and who pulled Nemienne over to the fireplace at the far end of the gallery. Jehenne clung to Nemienne’s hand through this, and then sat on the floor nestled up against her when Nemienne, shivering with cold and reaction, sank down by the hearth.
“Go bring some mulled cider,” Miande told Liaska, who clearly needed a job to settle her down. Then Miande knelt down next to Nemienne and looked anxiously into her face. “Are you well?” She did not ask, Where did you come from? Or, How did you come like that out of the air?
Nemienne, though she had known her sisters loved her, had somehow not expected such evidence of it. She felt almost overwhelmed by affection for Miande and Jehenne—for all her sisters, but perhaps especially for these two, who had so clearly missed her. Guilt at how little she had missed them in return scored her heart. She missed them now, retroactively, as though their absence in the past days echoed suddenly forward into this startling present. She put an arm around Jehenne and hugged her close. “I’m well—I’m happy—except I miss you, love. All of you,” she added, reaching out to pat Miande’s arm. “And have you been well? I know you’ve been busy. Have you been helping Enelle?” she asked Jehenne.
“Yes, I wrote out all the invitations,” Jehenne answered, with shy pride. “And Miande is making these amazing cakes for the wedding.”
Enelle came up the stairs and into the gallery, not running, but at a very dignified adult pace. She had Liaska with her and the same questions Miande had not quite asked in her eyes. But Enelle didn’t ask those questions either. She said only, as Liaska pressed a mug of cider into Nemienne’s hands, “Ananda is with Petris. They’re drawing up plans for their wedding. I didn’t want to alarm Petris. If you don’t need to see Ananda, I think we oughtn’t disturb them. I left Tana with them to preserve propriety.”
The care and thoroughness with which Enelle always approached every task was exactly as Nemienne remembered, but the edge of bitterness was new. Nemienne put her hands up for Enelle’s and drew her sister down to sit with her by the fire. Enelle resisted the tug for a moment, but then yielded and sank down. Jehenne pressed in from the other side and held Nemienne’s hand. The fire, burning with a somehow more ordinary kind of heat than Mage Ankennes’s fires ever seemed to, warmed their backs.
“Everything is very well,” Nemienne told Enelle—told them all. This reassurance tasted oddly ambiguous on the back of her tongue, and she hesitated for a second. But it was perfectly true, after all. “Mage Ankennes is kind and generous, exactly as the mother of Cloisonné House said. His house is strange but not—not generally alarming. I took a… a wrong turn, I suppose, and got…” She edited her explanation hastily. “… lost.”
“Lost? In the house?” Liaska seemed more intrigued than alarmed by this. “I’d like to see a house you can get lost in!”
“It’s… well, it’s a strange house. But beautifully strange,” Nemienne assured her youngest sister. “Usually. I like it. And I love what I’m learning—Mage Ankennes is teaching me wonderful things.” She tried to think of some things she’d learned that seemed charming and harmless and didn’t have anything to do with frightening reaches of heavy darkness. “How to find small things that have been lost. How to read words in a language you don’t know. How to call a fire out of the air to light a candle.”
“Is that better than lighting a candle with a candlelighter?” Miande asked, baffled.
“Well,” Nemienne said, laughing a little at this practical question, “it’s different. I like it.” She met Enelle’s eyes as she said this, and Enelle gave a little nod, her tight expression easing a little.
“It would be really splendid to be able to read languages you never learned,” exclaimed Jehenne, who had recently begun learning the languages of the far islands, Erhlianne and Samenne, and found them heavy going.