Chapter 100: Chapter 100

An hour later, we took the direction of the chalet aboard the machine. Carmichael at the controls, we flew over the mountains, and it reminded me of the first time he had taken me to the highlands. The landscape, the nature, and the loneliness of the place allowed Carmichael to bring me back to life once. Was it still possible? The feeling of being dead inside hadn’t left me for two years. I had lost the taste, the happiness, the desire, and a void had taken hold of my whole being. My own daughter constantly worried about my listless state. And this worry had plagued her for a long time.

A few weeks after Eric’s death, I fled on his favourite horse. Galloping in torrential rain, I howled my pain and uprooted all the trees or any obstacle in my path, before spending three days lying on his grave, mourning my suffering, mourning his absence. Then it was catatonia, chaos had invaded my existence. Isabelle was therefore relieved when, recently, I asked her to accompany me to the castle. She knew perfectly well what this return implied, and yet, she immediately accepted. The speed of her response then made me understand that it had become unbearable to see me in such a state.

We arrived at the cabin. The sight of the sun setting over the mountains plunged me into contemplation, but exhaustion made me yawn, which Carmichael noticed. He pulled me inside, took off my shoes and carried me in his arms. I then put my head on his chest, and the warmth that radiated to my cheek brought me such comfort that I emitted a weak smile. But the tears resurfaced as he laid me down on the bed. He snuggled up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist. I felt his breathing in the lines of my back, through the movements of his chest.

I was still feeling the effect on my body when we slept until dawn.

The sun penetrated my eyelids, and I blinked before my vision was clear. I got up, dressed in my clothes from the day before, and went to join Carmichael on the terrace. A pleasant smell of coffee reached my nostrils. He poured me a cup as I sat next to him, facing the breathtaking view of this hot summer morning.

“Really,” I say, staring at the mountain range, “I’m madly in love with this place.”

“We had some happy times here, many years ago.”

“Did they seem so long to you?”

All I got was a penetrating look. I immediately regretted my question.

“I mean,” I continued, “I’d like you to tell me what you’ve been doing all these years. Ethan was never very talkative, you know that. And I haven’t seen Thomas in a very long time, except at the funeral, of course…”

I didn’t finish my sentence, and my gaze was lost again on the horizon.

“If you want to know everything,” Carmichael said, “not much happened during those forty years. I ruled but your legend continued. It has survived the decades, and the castes of today, even if they didn’t know you, worship you.”

“Yes, I saw that yesterday. It was awkward after all these years, I didn’t think anyone would remember me.”

“You’re still their Queen, and you forget that your exploits on the Isle of Eos have been seen by many of our people. Consider yourself lucky, because if we had fought this war in the Middle Ages, we would have composed songs in your honour!”

“So, luckily we’re not then!”

I let out a little laugh, and the feeling warmed me.

“I ran into some trouble with a group of Danish castes,” Carmichael continued after a pause, “but it’s been quiet for three years now. Other than that, nothing stirred my intention. Life simply went on at Mortain.”

When I left the castle, we had decided, Carmichael and I, that, despite the marriage and our common responsibilities towards the castes, I should stay away from the affairs of the kingdom. It was better for everyone, and I was now aware that I could never have lived such a happy life with Eric if it had been otherwise. We had also decided that, barring a new war, we wouldn’t communicate under any pretext.

I still kept in touch with some castes like Salomon and Prisca, Thomas, and even Carly Stanton! She was Eric’s friend, and I couldn’t help it. Over time, I learned to appreciate her better. My brother, who had been able to overcome the death of our mother, spent almost half the year with us, and the rest of the time he lived in Canary Wharf Tower in London, the place where he had grown up. He also had more and more responsibilities, a sign that he was integrating a little better among the castes. Despite this, Ethan remained alone and still had no one to warm his nights. He always tried to reassure me by expressing that this solitude pleased him, despite my heart of a sister who would have liked so much to know that he was surrounded by love. To my knowledge, he had never killed again, because, even if the pain of losing our mother was insurmountable at first, their meeting had definitely changed him. I felt even more fascinated by the memory of this woman whom I had known so little, and to whom I had paid homage by baptizing my daughter with her first name. Johnny came to visit us regularly too, and for the past twenty years, it was alongside his husband, Alonso, that we received him. Alonso was Spanish. Johnny had fallen in love with him one evening at a ball at the castle with a giant paella on the menu. The caterer was Alonso, and he hadn’t left Johnny since that night. Recently, they had both moved to Paris, and enjoyed a golden retirement in a huge apartment, while the company that Johnny had built still managed the organization of caste events around the world. His brother, Elvis, had been living at Mortain for about ten years and had taken over the business of the vineyard when Papa Forbe died. During this disastrous event, we met in London, where Papa Forbe was buried with all the honours we could give him. Against all odds, Elvis then decided to settle in Mortain, surrounded by his family. He now had two twin boys, aged in their twenties, and was enjoying happy times with his wife. He only returned to Brixton to visit Mohamed Belhak, his lifelong friend.

Thomas came to see us regularly for the first few years, but you had to be blind not to realize that it cost him to know that I was with his brother. A palpable embarrassment had settled between us because he was no longer free to entrust me with his most intimate thoughts while experiencing my gift of attraction became unbearable for him. He was married at the age of forty-four to a young woman named Leticia. A splendid telepath, but ultimately not very tolerant of my past relationship with her husband. We had hooked up well at first, and that was until Johnny mentioned in an innocuous conversation that I had already slept with Thomas, the brother of the man with whom I lived. Shocked by this revelation, not to mention my magnetic power, which was straining her husband’s emotions, she cut ties shortly after learning about it. I could easily understand her discomfort and felt no animosity towards her. However, I regretted that this disclosure took us away from Thomas, and my fears were confirmed. In the end, he and Eric only communicated through a few phone calls from time to time. I had tried to hide my guilt over their estrangement, never having intended to separate them. My past actions, however, had left little way out of such a relationship. Thomas’s son, Guillaume, who knew my involvement in his mother’s death, had long maintained a correspondence with his uncle and made the trip every three or four years. Intelligent and witty, he had become a splendid and respectable man, in the image of his father, from whom he had inherited the power. I also knew that he was about to get married.

Most of the castes of my generation had therefore left the castle and lived in the four corners of the world, a well-deserved retirement. They had all won a war and restored a peaceful monarchy when previously a dictatorship had reigned for centuries. But life had also taken away many loved ones, starting with Sam. He lived with us for a year before returning to London, where he died a few months later of late-diagnosed cancer. Salomon, whom Prisca mourned for many years, left to join him a year later. Henry Capshaw, whom Sonia had married shortly after the War of the Six, died the following year. But others were still alive and still living in Mortain, such as Estelle and the Hanlons, whose gifts of clairvoyance had become indispensable to the castle.

All these years made me realize the difficulty of being eternal. I saw them all leave one by one, and I remained inexorably young. Until Eric’s death, when it was no longer possible to bear it. Then suicidal thoughts began to well up in my mind, darkness becoming my only source of life. It was only recently that I decided that I no longer wanted to hide this depression. I had to fight it for Eric, for my daughter, and finally for myself. I knew that only the man next to me right now could understand what I was feeling. Carmichael had more than three hundred and fifty years behind him, and I needed him so badly.

“Did you doubt that I would come back one day?” I asked.

“Obviously!”

I waved my arm, and my hand went to rest gently on his face. His gaze locked on mine. I put my other hand over his.

“I always knew I would come back.”

He greeted my statement with a smile. My fingers mechanically searched for his missing locks.

“But by the way, where did your dreadlocks go?”

“It doesn’t please you?”

“Yes,” I admitted, smiling, “I really like it. It’s just that I liked hanging on to them when…”

I didn’t finish my sentence. His magnetic presence and charisma had filled my eyes, and after his brief observation of my charred cheeks, he laughed in his tenor voice. I smiled, biting my lower lip, and slapped him on the chest.

That night we went to bed only lightly dressed. The cabin had no air conditioning, and our bodies were sweaty from the heat. But it was nothing compared to that produced by his fingers which came to caress my neck and my arms and then lingered on my hips before doing the course in the opposite direction. Facing him, lying on the pillow, I put a hand on his shoulder and imitated him. We caressed this way until sleep took us.

The next day, he took me to a clearing shaded by tall fir trees and which a stream separated into two parts. I smiled when I discovered the picnic basket in which there was a blanket and enough to eat, carefully prepared by His Majesty the King himself. I teased him for this attention, aware that it wasn’t at all in his habits. We settled down near the stream and had lunch, telling each other anecdotes from the past. That afternoon, I confided everything to him, and henceforth feared no subject. I was captivated by his adventures in Denmark and his difficulties as king. It seemed to me that in the shade of the fir trees we were, little by little, rediscovering each other. We kept talking until the sun went down and we decided to do the same. We lay down facing each other, our eyes were one.

“What do you expect from me, sweetie?”

I smile. It had been ages since he had called me that. And even if, at our beginnings, I hadn’t liked this nickname, today it caressed my ears with infinite sweetness.

“I’m waiting for you to be my husband,” I said, putting a hand on his. “Well, that’s what I thought when I came here.”

“Do you have any doubts now?”

“No, I…” I hesitated, tears surfacing again, “I’ve been so unhappy lately. I don’t know if I can make you happy. And I can never forget him…”

“Who asks you?”

“Nobody, I know.”

“He will always be a part of you. I’ve known that for a long time.”

“But I love you too…”

“You what?!” Carmichael blurted as if my words had hit him like a punch in the stomach.

“I love you,” I repeated as sobs gripped my voice, “and this love will grow, I know it. Because, if it hadn’t been for Eric in my life, I would have fallen madly in love with you, forty years ago. Admittedly, we both had a rough start, and for a long time, I thought I had married you just to win the war against the Six. But, the more the years passed and the more it seemed obvious to me that we are both made for each other, as you have always said. Our immortality, our common gift of attraction… And as I grew older without my features betraying me, there wasn’t a single day that I didn’t think of you. Eric knew it, he always knew it. I was madly in love with that man, but I never forgot you. And when you let me go to him, I knew that no one else would ever be able to offer me such proof of love. There you go, I love you for all these reasons, Carmichael Burton Race.”

After a startling silence, he brought his lips closer and kissed me passionately. I thought I saw his eyes fill with tears, but his greedy kiss was already setting my face ablaze and eventually irradiating the rest of my body. I no longer paid attention to anything, I was swept away in an endless flood of sensations.

We kissed with all the passion that still inhabited us for a good part of the night. A page was slowly beginning to turn on my past.

The following days, we spent most of our time on the couch on the terrace. Carmichael sat, I snuggled up against him or lay down with my head on his thigh. In silence, we remained there, in the shade of the branches of wisteria wrapped around the beams of the pergola, welcomed by this radiant sun and this suffocating heat. I never left his arms, and when evening came, the temptation was so overwhelming that, if we had given free rein to our emotions, our bodies would have burst into flames like two torches. But we had plenty of time. Especially since the image of Eric had the annoying tendency to interfere in my mind at any time, followed by a hint of guilt that I hoped would disappear over time. However, I didn’t feel like I was betraying his memory by returning to Carmichael. Eric had always known that I would join him when the time came. There had never even been a debate on the matter. He would never have wanted to know that I was alone for eternity, and I had never hidden anything from him about the feelings I harboured for the man I had married forty years ago.

A week after our arrival, I got up on a hot full moon night. I let His Majesty, my husband, sleep when, after a quick wash, I decided to levitate towards a very precise place: the waterfall. The one where Carmichael had taken me when we first came to the cabin. The whiteness of the moon illuminated the scene. I slipped into the opening near the torrent, sheltered by the cavity in the rock. I ran my fingers through the curtain of water and remembered when Carmichael had made love to me there. A breath caressed my spine. I slid my dress and my soaked underwear to my feet. I dived through the waves, using my telekinesis not to fall miserably, and immersed myself at the foot of the torrent, which threw itself into the river with a deafening crash. The coolness of the water triggered a shiver. Moonlight reflected off the surface. I looked up at the sky when suddenly I noticed a presence to my right. Carmichael was standing there, on top of a huge rock.

“Can I?” he only inquired.

I nodded shyly. He undid his pants and dove in, completely naked. The sumptuous sight of his body made me blush. When he resurfaced, I looked away, and he immediately noticed my confusion. The water was up to his chest. He approached slowly. I looked up. His broad shoulders towered over his streaming muscles, while the moonlight shone on his bronze skin. The temptation to put my hand there was strong. When he grabbed me by the waist, I couldn’t suppress a slight jolt. A gasp of surprise escaped my throat as his arm came closer to me. Then his emerald eyes locked on mine, my breath quickening. And after a time that I cannot determine, his lips finally came to rest on mine, and it was no longer possible for me to fight. I gasped as our bodies met under the starry sky. Tears that I couldn’t hold back rolled down my cheeks, sadness and mourning soaking into every drop. They poured over my face, slipped on my skin and went to mix with the water of the river. But, at this moment that seemed to me to last an eternity, I realized that I was beginning a new life, and, at the same time, a light lit up in the depths of my soul. Overwhelmed by emotion, my kiss became more passionate. I wanted this glow to grow, to take over my whole being and for the light to reenter my body forever. My tears stopped flowing. I stuck to him. Every bit of his skin radiated voluptuous sensations into every one of my muscles. Against my stomach, I felt his excitement and rubbed myself there to feel it better, to better savour this moment, because I wanted it, here, now. My gift freed itself, his did the same. The warmth that reached my brain brought a smile to my lips. My arms wrapped around his rib cage, and my hands roamed the curves of his back. Carmichael lifted me to the edge, his fevered lips never leaving my mouth. Gently, he laid me down on a tiny beach, formed by a carpet of fresh grass. While my legs were still soaking in water, his fingers rediscovered every inch of my skin. The smile hadn’t left my face, I lost myself in the warmth of his being. And, while my heart was pounding, my breathing was scarce and my body was consumed by the effect of his caresses, my husband made love to me for the first time in our second life.

He was My King, and I had become His Queen again.