Chapter 173 Chapter 174
Chapter 173 Chapter 174
Amara's POV
She tells me on a Thursday evening.
We are in the study, just the two of us, with the winter outside the window and the lamp between us. Tomás has gone to the coastal village for two weeks — he goes back periodically, as they agreed, settling things there and returning. The young wolf and Esna are not in the palace in the evenings. The study is quiet.
She says: I want to tell you what I have decided.
I say: all right.
She says: I am not going to stay permanently.
I say: I know.
She says: you know.
I say: you are not a person who stays in one place permanently. I have been watching you for three months. You are here in the way of someone who is present and engaged and also aware of the larger map. You are not someone who settles.
She says: the founding elder was the same. She called it being a moving elder rather than a holding elder.
I say: a moving elder.
She says: one who maintains the connections rather than the centre. Who visits, carries, returns. The holding elder stays in the coven’s territory and maintains the foundation. The moving elder travels the network and keeps the connections alive.
I say: and you are the moving elder.
She says: I have been moving for thirty years. I am not going to stop now. I am going to do it with a purpose it did not have before.
I say: the southern pack.
She says: yes. And whatever else the outer network still holds. The founding documents suggest there were smaller affiliate connections beyond the four bloodlines. I do not know what remains of them. I intend to find out.
I say: and the winters here.
She says: the winters here, yes. To teach, to maintain the knowledge transfer, to see what Caian becomes in each year I am absent.
She looks at me.
She says: I want to be clear about something.
I say: yes.
She says: you do not need me here to be the coven. That is important and I want to say it explicitly rather than leaving it implied.
I say: I know.
She says: I mean it specifically. Not — you are capable and you will manage. I mean that you are what the coven is. The founding elder said that the coven is not a building or a collection of people or a set of documents. The coven is the practitioner who holds the lineage and the knowledge and the responsibility. That is you.
She says: I am not the coven. I am the memory of what the coven was. The tradition before you. The knowledge that predates your training.
I say: that is not nothing.
She says: no.
She says it with the specific quality of someone who is receiving a thing they needed to hear.
She says: it is everything, in the sense that the memory of what the coven was is what gives the current coven its roots. Without the memory the coven would be new. With the memory it is continuous.
I say: and you carry the memory.
She says: and I carry it to wherever it needs to go.
I say: when do you leave.
She says: spring. After the winter here, when the roads are passable. I want to spend the winter consolidating the fourth principle work with the young wolf. She is close to being able to work with it independently and I want to ensure that before I go.
I say: and Tomás.
She says: Tomás is yours now. What I can do for him in the time we have left this winter I will do. What remains is longer work than I can provide in short visits. He needs sustained contact with a practitioner and that practitioner is you.
I say: he is making progress.
She says: faster than I expected. The wall is coming down in a way that suggests it was always going to come down — the suppression was maintained by choice, not by nature. When the choice changed, the suppression released.
She says: he will surprise you.
I say: he already has.
She says: he will continue to.
She picks up her cup.
She says: the coven is well. I want you to know that I believe that before I say I am leaving. I am not leaving because there is a problem.
I say: I know.
She says: I am leaving because the work that needs me is not here. The work that needs you is here.
I say: and the work that needs both of us.
She says: is this. This conversation. Which we have been having, in one form or another, since I arrived. The passing of what I know to you and what you know to me.
I say: we should do it every winter.
She says: yes. Every winter I come back and we do it again.
She says: that is the moving elder’s work. Return, exchange, continue.
I say: I can do that.
She says: I know.