Chương 18: “What Cecile Knew”

Lauren called her mother on a Sunday. Vorrath heard one side of it, Lauren's side, in the kitchen, coffee going cold.

"I know, Mom... I know... she's fine, she's really—" A pause.

"What do you mean, the rock—" Longer pause. Her face did something strange.

"Mom, it's a rock." Another pause, very long.

"... What river?" She came upstairs after. Leaned in the doorframe. Looked at Vorrath, really looked, the way she looked when she picked him up in the empty room. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"My mother," she said to the general air, "wants you to know that if anything happens to her granddaughter she will find a river and she won't be particular about which one." June looked up from her book.

"Is Nan threatening Mr. Grumpy?"

"Apparently."

"She can't do that. Can she do that?" Lauren looked at Vorrath for one more moment.

"I have genuinely no idea," she said, and went back downstairs. June looked at him.

"She's seventy-one," she said, with the respect of someone acknowledging a legitimate threat. He had survived gods. He had unmade empires. He had won eleven brutal minutes in a garden against something older than language. He was a bit afraid of Cecile. He was not going to examine why.