annabeth
Wrote this piece a few months ago and it’s just been languishing quietly in my docs. figurin out the deal with marigold and evie’s mom after a lot of trial and error was very satisfying so i am putting it here.
takes place in the same universe as wizards fic!
Mum and Evie didn’t really get on. Mum had the same sort of thing as Mari happening, the fluttery, sharp excitement, and they got on like a house on fire, but whenever Mum tried to loop Evie in, things always went very wrong, very fast. Evie wasn’t good at following instructions, she didn’t have a lot of patience for or interest in most of the things that Mum and Mari liked doing, and the things she liked doing were things Mum thought little girls oughtn’t to be doing.
Mari never actually helped with these situations, which Evie didn’t begrudge her. It wasn’t as though Evie actually needed Mari’s help to fight with Mum anyway. And it wasn’t like Mari was on Mum’s side, because if Mari was on Mum’s side, she wouldn’t help Evie open the attic window after Mum was asleep. Wouldn’t come out with Evie, either, to sit on the roof and read Mum’s old wizard books while Evie threw rocks down the side of the house.
Mum had been a wizard. She liked to say she brewed up Mari and Evie in a big cauldron and that’s how she got them both. Evie didn’t believe it for Mari, really, because Mum and Mari had the same hair, but there was nothing about Mum that looked like Evie, and there was nothing about Evie that looked like Mum.
Mari said that their dad was a lot like Evie. Adventurous. Piratical. There was a picture of him on the mantel. Mari was four years older than Evie—one, two, three, four, she’d counted it out on her fingers once for Evie to see—and she knew everything, or at least everything worth knowing, and when Evie begged, she’d cut Evie’s hair with the kitchen scissors. They’d thought that Mum would be mad, but she’d just thought it was funny.
+
Dad came home one single time when Evie was little. He tossed her around and made faces at her and laughed and laughed and Evie felt perfectly in line with someone for the first time in her life. He brought jewels and dresses for Mum, and dresses with big ribbons for Mari, and he said next time he came back, he really would be back, but this wasn’t nearly enough to live a life on. Certainly not the sort of life Mum ought to have.
Mum had smiled in a way that reminded Evie of cracks spreading through glass and nodded like her life depended on it.
+
Mum didn’t really have anywhere else to go. None of them did. Dad paid for the house—sent money from wherever his ship was—but he wasn’t paying money for Mum’s wizard studies, which Mum laughed off and didn’t explain and didn’t like talking about when Evie started asking too many questions about it. He wrote a lot of letters that Mum stacked up and pored through when she was sad, and sometimes Evie tried to read them too, but she was no good with letters and all the funny shapes and sounds she had to remember to understand them. Her favorite parts were always the little sea monsters he drew in the margins.
Mum read them some of the letters sometimes. She said that Dad could have been a really good bard, if he wanted to, or a writer, or something that wasn’t an adventurer, but he had an unmatched thirst for knowledge and he wanted to see the world. Evie had asked, then, if Mum wanted to see the world too, and Mum had said that there’d be time for all of that once the girls were a bit older, and once she was sure Evie wasn’t going to just walk off the side of a ship to see what happened.
Mari wanted to be a wizard like Mum. A bakery wizard, specifically, which Evie was pretty sure she’d just added on to make herself feel special. It couldn’t be argued, though, Mari had a knack in the kitchen, in a way that always seemed to make Mum a little twitchy.
“Magic is meant to be used for bigger things than this,” Mum said. “Magic is—it isn’t just something to make people happy with, you know, Marigold, it’s an art form. It’s a language. And with the sort of aptitude you have, you could go marvelous places, you know.”
“Can I go marvelous places?” asked Evie immediately.
“Let’s let your sister have her moment, darling, all right?” said Mum, handing Evie the spoon to lick.
“Oh, I needed that,” said Marigold unhappily. At the expectant look from Mum, she sighed, shoulders dropping, and said, “I don’t want to go marvelous places. I like the kitchen! It’s nice.”
“We’ll see how you feel about this kitchen when it’s ten years on and it’s the only place you’ve been,” said Mum, with a laugh in her voice that didn’t sound like she actually thought any of this was all that funny.
+
Mum did try to get on with Evie. It wasn’t her fault Evie and her weren’t anything alike. Evie missed Dad, which she said only once, because when she said it, Mum reeled back like she’d been hit and then went to bed for almost the whole rest of the day. And Evie apologized, after, still not knowing what she’d done wrong, and Mum had buried her face in Evie’s hair for a moment, then said, “I miss Dad, too, Evie, that’s—that’s all. I’m so sorry he’s not here.”
But it wasn’t just Dad that Mum missed, Evie thought. Mum missed her family. She had been one of three sisters—the youngest, the prettiest, the most promising, at least that’s the way it looked in the miniature she wore around her neck. Two boring-looking, stiff wizards, and Mum, all lit up and glittery, with Mari’s big, big smile and Mari’s bouncy hair.
Evie asked about Mum’s family, because Evie asked about everything, and Mum said that they’d practiced magic differently than her, and they had expected her to do things a certain way, and when she hadn’t, they’d made her give up the family name. And Mum said that that was why she’d never, never, ever do anything like that to Evie or to Mari, that they’d be free to do whatever they wanted when they grew up, no matter how she felt about it.
“Not anything evil, mind,” she said. “But anything you really want to do.”
“Can I be a pirate?” said Evie immediately.
“I think you just want a hat, love,” said Mum.
+
Dad’s letters started slowing down after a while. When they came, they didn’t come with pictures anymore, and they didn’t come with stories, either. They just came with money, and the money was less and less each time.
Mum didn’t really have anyone to talk to—none of them did, living in a wizard tower in the woods—so sometimes, when she was washing dishes, she talked to herself, and Marigold listened. It was only about two steps away from talking to Marigold.
“He said he’d take care of us,” she said. “He said it wouldn’t be sensible for me to carry on as I’d been doing, to carry on as—as we’d been doing. He said he’d try very hard to make it feel like I wasn’t just stuck here. And I’m not. I’m not, of course I’m not, of course I’m—I’m just—”
She cut herself off, fingers in the soapy water.
“I want you girls to grow up in the best home possible,” she said. “I can’t give you what I had growing up, but I can give you something. Can’t I give you something? What can I give you, if all I have is the money he’s sending me? All I do, all day, is look after the two of you, and I wonder—I worry—”
“Mother,” said Marigold. “Mother, your hands—”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m fine!” said Mum, but her hands were going from pink to red under the hot water. “I’m just thinking. That’s all. I’m just—you girls like it here, don’t you?”
Marigold and Evie exchanged a nervous look.
+
“I was top of my class, you know,” said Mum, about a tenday later, eyes on the water and the dishes and the food scraps that weren’t coming off. “Everyone expected immensely amazing things from me. The youngest Riverborn. The most magically gifted. And then he comes along, and he’s so…debonair. He’s been places. He goes places, and he—he finds the best thing there, makes it the jewel in his crown. Collects people.”
Marigold and Evie exchanged another nervous look. Marigold said, “Mother, do you want to see the spell I learned, with the—”
“No,” said Mum, and wrenched her hands out of the sink. “You girls finish the dishes. I’m writing a letter to your father.”
So then Mum was in the study for most of the rest of the day, writing a letter to Dad, and Marigold and Evie finished up the dishes and tried to act like everything was fine. Mum was usually happy, but even her happiness had edges, and this felt like an edge that could cut if you weren’t careful.
“What does she mean?” Evie asked Marigold. “Collecting people? Does she want to leave?”
“I don’t want to leave,” Marigold said immediately. “I like it here. I don’t know why she wants to leave. It’s nice here. I want to show her the spell I learned when she’s done with her letter. She always likes my magic, she says it’s good I’m practicing for when I get older—”
Marigold was not always the most helpful person to talk to about these things.
+
Annie,
It grieves me greatly to know that this is how you have come to view our union. I assure you, there is no ulterior motive, no desire of mine to leave you—I explained to you when we began this arrangement that there would be slow years, long years, years where our separation wore on the both of us. I still want what I wanted when we promised ourselves to each other: to share my life with you on the high seas.
Of course such a life is no place for children, as we agreed. But the very moment the girls are of age, I will greet you with joy—and them, if they are inclined to join us on the waters. I hope that they are. Evie especially seems well suited for the life I live.
Be patient just a few years more, my love. All will work out in time.
Your Basil
+
Annabeth had been a prodigy. She’d been the pride of the Riverborn family. She had left that behind, in disgrace, when she’d fallen in love with Basil. Not just with Basil, but with the life she’d imagined them living together—and they had lived it for a handful of months before she’d fallen pregnant. She’d been the one to insist that she retreat from the road to raise the girls, but she’d thought that Basil would follow her, and she hadn’t expected him to insist that he continue on without her. To provide for her, he said, as his experience on the road would do so much more lavishly than any job rooted down on land.
It had been all right, at first. The money supported her and the girls. The letters were just as florid and as earnest as he had been when he’d begged her to run away with him. But Annabeth’s skills as a wizard were atrophying, all of her time taken up with the girls, who were—they were good girls. They were wonderful girls. They were simply not wonderful enough to eclipse how badly Annabeth wanted her life to be her own again.
There wasn’t very much to be done about it. She couldn’t abandon the girls. She couldn’t send them to their father, or, gods forbid, to her father, who had burned her off the family tree the moment she’d told her parents she was pregnant. But the money was no longer enough to buy pretty dresses and hair ribbons and wizard tomes she’d never have time to read, and all that was left was the pointless work of raising two little girls who had absolutely no interest in the life that Annabeth had once wanted to live.
Evie could be forgiven. Evie was really just like her father. There was no hope in raising Evie to understand and appreciate all that Annabeth had given up. But Marigold—
+
Basil,
I beseech you. Come home. I know what we agreed to all those years ago, but times have changed. I have changed. I need someone here.
Annie
+
Annie,
I have always offered you everything that I can give you. If what I can give you is no longer enough for you, perhaps what you need lies beyond these walls.
No one is forcing you to raise the girls in that tower. I know you are resistant to returning to the city, but perhaps it really is the best course of action. It cannot be good for you or for the girls to live in such total isolation.
Your Basil
+
Basil,
There is no way that I can return to the city, disgraced as I am.
Annie
+
Annie,
I cannot abide by you calling our girls a disgrace.
Basil
+
Basil,
If there was anything honorable about them, you would claim them, and you would marry me.
Annie
+
Mother read Father’s letter as soon as it came in—it had been quicker than usual, the last few days, a back-and-forth flurry of letters that Mother wasn’t reading to either of them—and then she tossed it in the fire and watched it burn, staring tightly down at it with an expression Marigold had never once seen on her face before.
Marigold said, uncertainly, “Mother?”
There was a letter opener in Mother’s hand.
+
Mum had a lot of magic necklaces. One took you straight to town and back. She used it for emergencies-only, like that one time Marigold got sick with a bad case of something worse than just the sniffles, and she’d been really clear about it, that necklace was emergencies-only and Evie wasn’t ever to use it for anything other than if someone’s life was in danger.
Maybe it would have been different if it had been Evie first. Evie didn’t want to think about that for too long. Mari would have thought that she could talk Mum down, and Mum would have gone at Mari with the letter opener, and Evie would have—well, whatever was happening to Marigold now would be happening to Evie, no one to stop it.
Mum knew the tower better than Evie. She was going to find Evie eventually. But Evie had hidden in with all of Mum’s dresses and hats and magic necklaces, because that was the one place Mum would think Evie would never lower herself to hide inside—not a cool enough hiding place, not a hiding place with an exit—and so she could close her fingers around that emergencies-only necklace, and she could wish herself away.
+
Marigold was lying there at Annabeth’s feet, which made her feel…better, almost. Halfway to untethered. Evie was somewhere, presumably, and Annabeth’s life was her own again. She set about doing her chores—the blood on the floor would have to be addressed last. There was so much of it.
Marigold kept on making noises, as if trying to speak.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love the girls. Of course she loved the girls. It was just that they’d become rather overwhelming, day in, day out, plaguing her with their selfishness, their indifference to her terrible situation. Annabeth needed some time away from them both, that was all. Some time away to do things that suited her. And she couldn’t give the girls to their father, and she couldn’t give the girls to her father, and she could hardly be blamed for Evie running away. Evie ran away all the time. Marigold had simply needed alternative methods.
Annabeth would grovel to her family, if that was what it took. She would come to them and she would cry, like Clarissa when she lost her scholarship, like Noelle when her husband proved to be a disappointment. She would say that her life had led her to ruin, that she was not too proud to admit when she was wrong, that she would do anything, be anything, if only they would let her in the house again. She would wait their tables. She would shine their shoes.
Marigold made a noise like a wounded little animal. Annabeth knelt down on the floor and took her daughter into her lap, feeling curiously removed from the blood and the tremors and the letter opener.
“It’s just that he doesn’t appreciate you,” she said. “He’s never even here. Never here to see you. He reprimands me for calling myself disgraced, but what am I supposed to think, Marigold? I can’t go home. I gave that up for him. He doesn’t even try to understand how that feels.”
Marigold coughed up a mess of blood.
Annabeth would have said more—it was a relief, to be able to speak candidly with her daughter like this—but they were then interrupted by the shimmering of magic, and the shine of a sword. Standing across from her in the tower was a Flaming Fist officer, Annabeth’s necklace in hand.
Annabeth, bewildered, stared up at the woman, trying and failing to work out exactly what had happened and why. The woman stared down at Annabeth, then at Marigold, then said briskly, “Can you stand? We need to get her to a healer.”
Always Marigold. Always Marigold, and Evie, what would be best for them, never what would be best for Annabeth, never what Annabeth wanted, never—
She took the letter opener and drove it deeper into Marigold’s chest.
The woman moved more quickly than Annabeth thought possible. One moment, she was with her daughter, her first baby, the girl who really had changed her life, and the next, the woman was wrenching them apart, Annabeth knocked unceremoniously to the floor as Marigold was lifted into the woman’s arms. Marigold was bleeding more, now, eyes glazing over, and the woman lifted her awkwardly up and over onto the table, pulling a glass vial out of her sleeve to pour it down Marigold’s throat.
Annabeth scrambled to her feet, running forward without any clarity as to what she was running towards. The woman turned around and punched her square in the face.
+
The Fist came back with Mari wrapped up in a cape.
“That was very quick thinking,” she said, giving Evie back the necklace. “Thank you.”
Mari was barely awake, and there was still blood all over her dress and at the corners of her mouth. Evie stared at her until her eyes hurt, not quite processing what the Fist was saying.
“—hear me?”
Evie looked up.
In a tone of voice that suggested she’d said this before—not impatient, just careful—the Fist repeated, “Is there anyone that the two of you can go to? Anyone at all?”
Evie didn’t want to tell the Fist about Dad on his ship, writing letters and sending jewels like that would fix the things wrong with Mum. It didn’t really feel like they could go to him, anyway.
“No,” she said.
“Oh,” said the Fist. She looked a little troubled. “Well. I’ll…I’ll take your sister to the nearest cleric, and we can work things out from there.”
Evie fiddled with the necklace, trying to find the magic. All of it seemed to be gone. Where had it gone?
“I cracked the stone,” said the Fist, almost apologetically.
Evie ran her fingers along the groove and thought about Mum smiling.
+
Annabeth came to in an empty tower.
She realized, in fits and starts, what must have happened—what the world outside would make of the story, without the larger context. It wouldn’t make sense to them. It had made sense to her, when it happened. It had felt like the only possible way out of her situation, and so she’d done it, and now—well, now it had been done. Evie would be fine. Nothing kept Evie down for very long.
Marigold…
She reached for sympathy for Marigold and found only a corrosive fury. She had given that little girl everything. Everything she had, everything she was, poured into Marigold, whose unexpected arrival had marred what would have been a beautiful voyage with Basil. She had wanted to be a good mother—she had decided to settle down, to make sure Marigold and Evie were raised right—and no one had noticed or even cared about the life that Annabeth had given up to do it.
Basil would be horrified, she thought distantly, but even he felt like some sort of dream—something that had belonged to someone else a very long time ago. Her parents had been quite right. No self-respecting man would let her raise the children alone.
Annabeth sat up, stepped around the blood—it had dried into the rug, how frustrating—and washed her hands in the basin, then changed into a nice dress without anything unseemly splattered across the front. She saw Marigold behind her eyes—that aimless, unambitious child who would have been happy with nothing, who had enough talent to be something, wasting her talent and her bloodline and her blood on the floor. She reached, again, for the remorse she knew any good mother ought to feel, and felt only that same bitter anger.
She could never have left the girls. She could never have raised the girls. She had wanted to be someone, to do something, and this was what she’d made of herself—a failed wizard, a failed mother, a failed lover. If she’d had enough sense to listen to her mother, she would never have found herself here—here, in this rotted-out pastiche of a wizard tower. She’d still never scraped together enough money to properly fix the roof.
Someone had taken the girls, she presumed. Probably for the best. She would treat it like she had in the academy, when she’d made some horrendous experimental mistake—scrub her station clean, document her failure, and return to her work.
She had been someone, once. She would make herself someone again.
+
When Basil finally did come, Marigold would have been twelve, just old enough to be one of those children underfoot on a ship. They’d had one in the month that Annabeth had traveled with him—an irritating little child who never seemed to be properly supervised. Evie would have gotten on with him swimmingly.
Annabeth didn’t recognize him at first, and then, when she did, she just stared, feeling something close to that old anger she’d long since hollowed out.
“You came back,” she said slowly.
“I promised I would,” said Basil. He hesitated. “I know our letters were…but after I stopped hearing back, I…”
“The girls are gone,” said Annabeth.
Basil flinched. “Gone?”
“Yes. The girls are gone.”
Somehow, it was easier to tell it like this—omissions, reshapings, still unforgivable but not so unforgivable as what she knew she ought to regret.
“If you don’t want to marry me,” said Annabeth, “there isn’t any need for them.”
Basil stared at her like he was seeing her for the first time. Then, horribly, he said, “It’s never that simple. You loved those girls. What—”
“There isn’t any need for them,” Annabeth repeated, and then, “they’re better off without us, anyway.”
“Annie,” he said, and tried to take her hands.
Annabeth stepped back. “You shouldn’t have left me. This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t left me.”
“I told you, I never—it wasn’t—I sent money—” He floundered, then said uncomfortably, “We made a plan, Annie. What happened?”
“The girls are gone,” Annabeth repeated. “A Flaming Fist officer took them away. If you’d like to find them, you find them, but I don’t think we’re suited for a thing like this. You or me.”
“Annie, they’re your daughters,” he said, like he was trying to appeal to some sort of conscience within her. Like there even was anything close to a heart inside of a woman who would do something so heartless.
“They’re your daughters too,” she said. “And if you cared so much—”
“Is that why you gave them up, then?” he said tightly. “To spite me?”
Annabeth thought about Marigold and her baby-soft hair and her big, big eyes, the color of honey. Riverborn eyes. Evie hadn’t inherited those—she was all Basil—but Marigold had always come with pieces of her.
“Not everything is about you, Basil,” she said.
