Day 306
After catching up with Alder the night is starting to settle around Dreamfall and I have the chance to go find Miriam. She's nowhere near camp but I find her sitting atop a boulder alone, lost in thought.
Apparently she and Dawn spoke a bit but it felt sort of like talking to a stranger. Miriam lashed out a bit and Dawn is probably hurt.
After some companionable silence she asks simply "Did I make a mistake coming with you?"
It's a tough question if you turn it over in your head enough. Back in Whitewater she didn't know who she was and she might never have figured it out. Now she knows who she is and what she wants but it seems just as out of reach here as it did in Whitewater.
We talk about how Alder scared his sister when he went home for the first time after fighting. I remember my own family bowing low to me as I returned home. She thinks about how she could keep her sister safe if she was in Whitewater and the boys were harassing Annette. I can hear her yearning for home in her voice even before she confesses that she misses being a baker and doesn't really like this dangerous, adventuring life we've been leading.
But what's left there? She tells me that she and Annette had thought they'd end up as old women together with all of Annette's grandchildren running around. But now Miriam has seen so much and probably won't ever be that quiet old lady - she wants to protect people. Standing between the sleeping Vanguard and the ice wolves that threatened them felt right, and she wanted to be able to do that for Trisienne as well when she sleeps. But still, she doesn't like the fighting. Beasts are one thing but hurting people would be different.
The core of her hurt, though, is adjacent to what I've been turning over in my own mind like a pebble in my mouth. She'll live a human lifespan and she's afraid of asking someone to experience the pain of outliving her. And at the same time, afraid to walk away.
More than anything she wants to be part of Alder's family forever. The two of them together are so close, so much like me and Doraal with the teasing and familiarity and love. But where Doraal and I are used to standing back to back in a battle and guarding each other's lives, Miriam wants the peaceful future with a cake shop in the city.
So does Alder...but not for another few centuries.
"I'll be nothing but dust by then," she says sadly, "And I don't want to keep fighting but I also don't want to leave him and I don't want to change to live forever the way an elf might. It hurts no matter which way I turn,"
If I loved them more I'd be able to handle the pain, right?
I wrap an arm around her while she rests her head on my shoulder. I don't know what she's thinking about in this silence but I'm thinking about the city that once stood near the Northern Grove. The elves who simply left when their fae family would never be able to live alongside them for more than two decades. I wish I could call the ones who left and ask if it was the right choice. I wish I could ask the fae who were left behind how they felt. Maybe one day I'll hear one of those songs and find out.
But for now there is no answer, and so Miriam and I camp out just the two of us. She makes some proper tea and we just sit and think, probably in two nearly parallel but diverging directions, about the time we'll have with family and the time we won't.
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