Chapter 156 The Woman Who Gave Me a Life

Chapter 156 The Woman Who Gave Me a Life
Rae
I stay tucked against Cian’s chest long after the lake goes quiet.
His shirt is soft beneath my cheek, ruined with tears. One arm stays around my shoulders, his other hand over mine. Menace is stretched between us like a grief-stricken scarf, three tails limp against Cian’s chest.
I sniffle into Cian’s shirt and mumble, “So I had a mother who despised me, and a father who could have loved me. What a great backstory.”
Cian’s arms tighten around me.
The silence that follows is gentle rather than awkward. Alaric stands near the water, his gaze resting on me sadly.
He says softly, “And a grandmother who did everything in her power to make sure that you were loved.”
I lift my head, and Alaric inclines his.
Silver spreads through the dark surface, and then Glassmere gives me Nanna.
Not the Nanna I knew with soft cardigans and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. This woman is younger, her hair darker, her face thin with fear. She stands on the edge of Glassmere in a raincoat, clutching a handbag against her ribs.
Her mouth is moving fast across her furious face.
The vision shifts.
Nanna stands before the lake, staring down into water that shows her things no mortal woman should have to see.
Roots beneath black soil.
Green-gold light moving through them like a heartbeat.
Courts rise in flashes around the roots. Greywater with pale halls. Bright Thorn with flowers too red to be innocent. Bellgrave with silent mouths. Skyfall with lightning caught in glass. Other courts too, sliding past before I can name them.
Hands reach toward the roots from every direction.
Jewelled hands. Clawed hands. Elegant hands. Desperate hands.
Then the water shows a baby wrapped in cloth, small and sleeping, one fist tucked near her mouth while the roots turn toward her.
Toward me.
Nanna presses both hands over her mouth. I see her understand enough to be terrified.
Alaric says something to her, and even without sound, I know the word from the shape of his lips.
Heartroot.
The word still feels too large for my skin, but watching Nanna learn it before I was even born makes it feel different.
She did not look honoured. She looked afraid.
The water darkens, then reforms.
Greywater rises in the lake. Elara stands in one of its halls with jewels at her throat and a smile that does not reach anything real. King Osric is there too, surrounded by courtiers who look at Elara as if she is precious because she has allowed them to admire her.
And Nanna stands opposite her. Older by only a little, but changed. Her hair is loose from its pins. Her coat is soaked at the hem. Her eyes are red, her face white with rage.
In her arms is a baby wrapped in a pale blanket.
Me.
The world inside me tilts, and Cian’s hand finds mine, but I cannot look away.
Elara speaks, and I see the careless movement of her mouth, the faint lift of one shoulder, the way her gaze drifts from the bundle in Nanna’s arms as if I am already less interesting than the jewels at her throat.
Nanna looks down at the baby, then back at her daughter, and something in her face breaks before it hardens.
The lake flashes.
A road opens in darkness.
Nanna runs.
There is no beauty in it. No graceful escape. She runs like a frightened woman with bad knees, and no time, one arm locked around the baby beneath her coat while branches drag at her sleeves and pale lights flicker between the trees.
She reaches the cabin.
My cabin.
The old front door appears in the lake, and Nanna stumbles through it, slamming it shut with her shoulder. Rain lashes the windows. Baby me cries against her chest. She locks the door twice, then drags a chair beneath the handle as if mortal wood can hold back an entire realm.
For a moment, she only stands there, shaking.
Then she looks down at me, and everything in the vision softens.
Nanna sinks to the floor with her back against the door, gathers me close, and presses her mouth to my forehead. Her eyes close, and her shoulders shake as she rocks me while the dark presses against every window.
The lake does not stop.
It shows her pouring salt into bowls and placing them in every room.
It shows her hammering iron nails into window frames with clumsy, determined hands.
It shows her tying rowan thread above the doors, untying one knot, swearing silently at herself, and tying it again.
It shows her walking the garden boundary with baby me bundled against her chest, whispering over rosemary, lavender, mint, and thyme.
Then I am older.
Barefoot in the grass. Hair tangled. Knees muddy. A basket of berries in my hands.
Nanna stands beside me at the edge of the woods, one hand on my shoulder while she points toward a ring of mushrooms beneath the trees. Her face is stern, but her fingers are gentle.
Her mouth shapes the words I remember so clearly that Glassmere does not need to give them sound.
Don’t enter the fairy ring.
The visions keep coming, softer now. Birthdays at the kitchen table. Flour on my nose. Muddy boots by the door. A schoolbag dropped in the hall. Fever nights with her palm on my forehead. Her brushing my hair while I complain about tangles. Her standing at the window after I go to bed, checking the dark beyond the glass.
The protections were always there, but so was the life inside them.
The salt bowls. The iron. The rowan. The warnings. The rules. They weren’t the whole story.
The story was warm bread and scraped knees and bedtime books. It was Nanna pretending not to notice when I stole berries from the bowl. It was her teaching me which plants helped bruises and which ones made good tea. It was ordinary, small, mortal days built inside a ring of protections strong enough to keep destiny waiting at the tree line.
Alaric’s voice reaches me softly.
“She could not keep the realm from you forever.”
The lake shows Nanna older now, sitting at the kitchen table, a salt bowl on the windowsill and rowan above the door. She looks tired. Her gaze moves to the dark window as if she can feel something waiting on the other side.
“But she could give you time to be a child before it came.”
The vision fades, and I do not move.
The lake returns to itself, silver beneath the dusk, Alaric quiet at the shore. My own reflection stares back with tear-wet cheeks, Cian behind me.
All my life, I thought Nanna’s rules were fences.
Maybe they were.
But they were fences around a garden.
I thought she kept the world from me because she was afraid.
Now I understand she was afraid because she knew it.
My hand presses against my chest, right over the place where something old and sore is breaking open.
Nanna had not hidden me from my life.
She had given me one.