Leonora winces behind her handfan as the cart wheel splashes through another divot in the road back to Hrafnakastali. Age has given her the right to ride on the cart instead of horseback, but today it feels like all her bones are grinding together with every bump and jostle. Getting old isn’t for the weak, as her mothers were fond of saying.
Ahead of the creaking wagons, Leonora can see Lorelei swaying on her horse next to her brother. The usually boisterous knight is quiet now, hunched under the veil draped over her hair and snagging on the edges of her armor. Jacqueline says nothing to her, but Leonora’s experienced eyes can see that he is sitting straighter than usual, shoulders shifting as he scans both sides of the road, picking up the slack for his distracted sibling.
The gesture brings a warm smile to Leonora’s face. Protecting each other. Shouldering burdens. “The kind of love he has to give,” she has told Lorelei before. “Just like you have your own ways of showing love. You cannot force yourself, or others, into a narrative. No one is just an archetype. And if you think of people that way, you will miss all the best and worst parts of them. You’ll miss all the best parts of yourself.”
A welcome breeze picks up, rustling the purple banners of their convoy and tugging at the edge of Lorelei’s veil. The motion pulls the knight out of her slump for a moment, and her spine straightens as she readjusts her posture. Leonora resists the urge to call out to her, to pin her veil a little tighter, to ask if she’s thirsty. Her love, the mother-henning variety, will be the most unwelcome at the moment. What young person wants their peers to see them be cared for like a child? What lord or lady needs those they command to see them being coddled? No, Lorelei will have to soothe herself while they travel.
And I will do the same, Leonora reminds herself. Her gaze drifts further up the column, catching the white flash of Lady Olivia for a moment before the crossed spears of the House crest block her view again. If it is the duty of the young to learn their lessons and grow into their responsibilities, it is the duty of the old to teach those lessons and then get out of the way. We cannot teach them how to stand back up after they fall, she thinks. They have to prove to themselves they can live through the pain and try again.
But it is hard to let these children walk out into the world on their own when she can sometimes still feel the warmth of their tiny hands tugging at her sleeve. The knight who marches into battle and returns covered in gore and glory still has the eyes of the child who brought her a handful of tadpoles. The lord who now speaks so openly about the uses of sex and power once cried when he learned that bumblebees died after they stung you. She loves them, every version of them, and can’t help holding on to her overlapping memories. It is her lesson to learn how to step back and let them find their glory alone.
The cart rattles its way across another set of puddles, and Leonora sits up a little straighter and begins to scan both sides of the road.
