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chapter eleven. plucking strings
Memory greeted Fallon in the folds of unconsciousness.
The sound of a plucked harp stirred movement, her eyes remaining closed with the tender grip of sleep's webbing. Senses awoken, her skin prickled with warmth from a woollen blanket, head cushioned on a plump duck feather pillow. Crushed lavender greeted her nose, fresh and bright. Melodic chords mixed with the soft hum lyrics, tender and soft in their familiarity. The lullaby, she recognised it at once with a start. Yet who could the singer be?
Fallon's eyes fluttered open. She had had the sleep of a lifetime, so impenetrable that for once she felt truly rested. However it was not calm that greeted her but confusion, as she slowly began to take in the wooden walls around her. Her eyes swept the room, a low roof and the whistle of a pot bubbling within a bricked fireplace. Tension stirred in her chest.
She knew this house but she had been a mere girl when she had last stepped foot inside of it.
The little thatched home in the Lower City, where the air thinned from the icy gusts carried by the River Chionthar. The floorboards pale from lack of varnish, covered by a thin rug woven on the ancient wooden loom. A hanging rack of dried herbs by small square windows, the sills of which were decorated by an assortment of collected glass jars, bulbous and emerald green in colour. The sighing wardrobe with its rusty hinges, the small cot which had once been her refuge, the little round dining table where she more often ate alone than not, and beside it all in the centre of the room on a wooden stool with an arm wrapped around her harp was her mother.
Fallon blinked in quick succession, pulling the blanket up to her chin as she sat upwards. She realised only then that she had been sleeping in her mother's bed. Cosmel's fingers paused their plucking, the song on her lips falling mute. Her slender arms relaxed by her sides as she met her daughter's eye. Then, with a curl of her lips that was as mellow and sweet as rich honey, Cosmel smiled.
Her mother was not as Fallon remembered her, as the tenuous skeletal frame that coughed blood so thick it looked near black and heaved with each agonising breath.
Cosmel was fawn eyed and thin browed, with the same pinched nose and angled cheek bones as her daughter, her skin glowing with vivid life. She was dressed in deep violet, a dress with trumpeted sleeves, the fabric cinching at her waist where the dark brown of her hair stopped just short of her skirts. More than anything, what struck Fallon most was the fervour in her eyes. A mother's love, in all its riveting splendour, and it ran a shiver of discomfort deep in Fallon's core.
