Oh, wow. I can't believe how long it's been since I posted here. There were business trips and injured fingers and other excuses, but two months!
Sorry!
Anyway, here is a super long update, and then Pascal and Claudia will start cooking up that next generation.
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The next thing I knew, we were inside the barn from my childhood. It still smelled of raw wood and horses and hay, though the stalls were empty, and the stage where my parents had practiced their music was covered in dust and cobwebs, and strange collections of plants and rocks and gems from what must have been all over the world.
As the glowing door closed behind us, blocking the sound of the wind and leaving us in silence, Pascal was gaping around at the drawings and charts and shelves of curiosities that covered the walls. But I had eyes for my grandfather alone. He looked exactly as I remembered him from twenty-five years before, and just the same as the picture on the back of the novel that he'd dedicated to me.
"But how..." I asked. "I don't understand…"
"Don't you?" he replied with a tilt of his head. "You must understand some of it, or you wouldn't be here now. You never would have found me, and you never would have opened the door."
Pascal finally tore his gaze away from the strange objects that had drawn his attention. "We didn't know there was a door," he said, pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. "This is entirely unexpected."
My grandfather turned to regard him, one eyebrow raised. "And you are?"
"I-- uh-- P-- Pascal Morel, sir." Something about my grandfather's steady, assessing gaze made him stammer.
"And what brought you here, if you weren't expecting to find me, Mr. Morel?"
"I-- that is, the books-- I mean, you wrote about--" Pascal turned toward me, looking for support.
"He's my husband," I added, linking my arm through his. "This is our honeymoon. I wanted to come home."
At that, my grandfather finally smiled -- the kind, friendly expression I remembered. "I see," he said warmly. "Well good. And congratulations to you both. Now, come. Come upstairs. We have a lot to discuss."
In the same whitewashed room with the same blue rug where we had played make believe games about Ajri, and at the same little table where he had taught me to read, my grandfather laid out the story of his last twenty-five years. How he had tried to find us when my parents had taken me to France in the middle of the night. How he had traveled the world for a while looking for the things he needed for his experiments. How he had always come back to Aurora Skies, hoping to find a letter or another sign of where we might be. And then how he had eventually become a curiosity in Aurora Skies -- where both strangers and close friends were starting to really wonder why he never seemed to get any older, and what all of the strange smells and noises in the basement and barn were. That's when he made the difficult decision to erect a perception charm and withdraw from the world, using magic to obscure any memory the locals might have of himself or his hideaway.
"And I locked it in a way I knew only you or your father would be able to open it. You had to speak a language only the three of us would know: the language I brought from Ajri."
"But I don't know that language," I said, my brow furrowing.
"And anyway she was speaking French," Pascal interjected. "I heard it."
My grandfather just smiled. "You were speaking the language of your ancestors, Claudia. Pascal heard it as French, and Reynar would have heard it as Icelandic, but make no mistake, it was the language of Ajri, just as I taught it to you. The same as I'm speaking right now."
"But you--"
"Did you ever study French?" my grandfather interrupted.
I stopped to think, and he was right. I couldn't remember when I'd ever learned French, but Pascal said I spoke it like a native. My father had as well. It was my mother -- who used to vacation in France every year as a child -- who had the accent, and who had a hard time remembering words.
My grandfather was watching me closely to see when realization would hit me. "Never a day's study," he confirmed, "But you went right to school in Champs Les Sims. Did you never wonder how that was possible?"
"I don't understand," I said, still confused. "Are you saying this is magic?"
"The language charm! Of course!" In an instant, Pascal was on his feet, and he had transformed once again into the excited enthusiast I'd first met at his father's alchemy shop. "You remember, don't you? No of course you don't remember. You didn't read it. In the first book. Before Jaffaran left home." His words tumbled out in a choppy, breathless rhythm. "Lady Ybeline put a charm on him so that everyone in the other world would be able to understand him. Everyone here, I mean. In our... world."
Pascal suddenly stopped, eyes wide as if something else had just dawned on him. He turned back to my grandfather and stammered once again. "Y-you're him. You're really… Claudia, that's him! The door! The door was magic! And downstairs… the... the…" He gestured randomly toward the stairs, trying to evoke the piles of collected natural treasures. "It was alchemy! Real alchemy! And he's… And you're…" His hand went to his forehead as he stared at me, shocked. "I'm married to…" And then his eyes fluttered back, and his knees buckled beneath him as he fainted.
Luckily my grandfather had sharp reflexes, and caught him before he collapsed in a faint. "He seems to know a lot about us. Where did you say you two met?"
"At his father's shop," I replied, helping to lay my poor overcome husband on the bed. "They sell things there that are based on your books. It was in Champs Les-- Wait." I looked up from loosening Pascal's collar. "You knew! You knew I was in Champs Les Sims! You knew I went to school there! "
My grandfather hesitated, looking nervous for the first time I could remember. "Claudia, maybe we should talk about this later…"
"No, I want to know! I missed you! And I thought you missed me too."
"I did," he said quietly. "I missed you every day. You and your father both."
"But you never wrote back!"
He sat down on the foot of the bed, and patted the space beside him, inviting me to join him. "I never got your letters," he said sadly. "Your father must have taken them. He didn't want us to have any contact."
I took the offered seat, trying to make sense of things. "How did you know where we were if you never got the letters?"
"I went looking for you," he said with a shrug. "I used magic. Traced your passports, followed you to France..."
"But I never saw you there."
"No, you didn't…"
And then he was telling me another story, of how he had come to the coffee house where my mother and father were playing music, and how he had found my father in the back as he was loading their equipment into the car. How he had apologized for not telling my father that Ajri was real from the very start, and for just assuming that my father would give up his own life and dreams for people and places he had never seen.
"Just stop," my father had said in response. "Stop saying we're den'Rhelys heirs! Stop saying you're a character from one of your books! Stop lying to everyone like you lied to me, and my mother -- all of our lives!"
That brought my grandfather up short. "Alden, I've never lied to you. Whatever my faults as a father, and I know they were many, I have always told you the truth. Just as I always told your mother the truth, even when neither of you wanted to hear it."
"You lied to her!" he snapped back. "You told her you loved her but you didn't. You asked her to marry you but you never loved her. How is that not a lie?"
"It's more complicated than that," my grandfather had said after a pause. "You don't know everything about your mother and me."
"I saw enough. You made her miserable. You made her lonely. And she died."
"Alden, listen," my grandfather said kindly. Even in the dim light he could see Alden's cheeks flushing red with emotion. "I know it was hard on you to lose your mother when you were so young--"
My father bristled at the comforting tone and started to protest, but my grandfather held his ground: "I never lied to your mother. I never promised her anything I couldn't give her, or misrepresented my feelings for her. But she believed what she wanted to believe, and she wanted to believe in a fairy tale."
"And you took advantage of that," my father spat.
"Yes," my grandfather said plainly. "I'm not proud of it, but I did. Because I'm here for a reason, Alden. I need to do what I came here for."
"Oh, right," my father said, crossing his arms in front of him. "Because you're 'magic'."
My grandafther's lips tightened at the sound of the sarcasm, but he just nodded. "Yes. I am. And so are you. And I need you to help me, Alden. I came to ask--"
"Why do you not understand this?" my father shouted. "I never want to see you again. Never. My life is my own, and Claudia's is hers. Not yours. And certainly not some make-believe magical family's."
"All right," my grandfather said quietly. "I'll go. I'll leave you alone for as long as you like. Live your life, enjoy every minute of it. Love your wife, and your children. Play music and see everything you want to see. But take this, please." He held out a scrap of parchment, covered in writing. "It's a recipe for a potion -- a meal, really, that will keep you alive when you're finished. When you've done what you want with your life, when it's over... please Alden... Please come find me again."
"You want me to believe you have a cure for death?" my father spat back. "Then why did you let my mother die?"
My grandfather shook his head, with a sad smile. "It doesn't work that way, Alden. I'm sorry. I wish it did, but--"
"But it's a lie. Just like all of the other stories you want me to believe."
"No, Alden. It's--"
"Go," my father interrupted. "Stay away from me, and stay away from my family!" He could hear my mother and I coming down the stairs with the rest of the band. We were almost outside. Snatching the paper away to appease my grandfather, he stuffed it into his pocket and turned toward the door. "Hey, hey!" he called, stopping us at the bottom of the steps and blocking our view with his arm. "Where are you all going? I thought I said it was my turn to buy drinks. And I promised Claudia one of those pastries in the case. What do you mean, I didn't? Well I'm promising now. Because I want one too..."
Our happy chatter faded away as we climbed once more up the back staircase to the coffee shop, leaving my grandfather alone in the pool of streetlight."That doesn't make any sense," I argued. "If you really are Jaffaran den'Rheyls, if Dad and I are really your heirs, and the future of Ajri depends on us, then you need us to be here. You should have tied us up and dragged us back."
"That's not the right way. It doesn't work to trick people or force them. That's the very kind of manipulation we're fighting against in Ajri, and I'm not very good at it anyway."
"So then you just hoped it would all work out?"
"Yes," he said plainly. "Hoped and trusted. It's always better than tying and dragging."
I gave him a skeptical look.
"Well, all right," he admitted. "I would have come looking for you again, now that you're old enough to decide on your own. And I did leave you some clues in case you wanted to find me sooner. Apparently you were able to decipher them."
"That was Pascal," I had to confess.
"He seems like a good man," my grandfather said. "I'm happy for you, Claudia. But…"
"I'm awake!" said a voice from behind us. Pascal was clambering back to a sitting position. "I'm awake. I apologize. I was just… it was just… it's a lot."
"It is," my grandfather said solemnly. "And I won't ask you to decide right now. You can take as long as you need."
"Decide what?" Pascal asked.
"Whether or not you want to stay here and help, or live your own lives."
I wanted to. If the magic portal, and the perception charm and the alchemy pots downstairs hadn't been enough to convince me, my grandfather's earnest sincerity had done so: Ajri was real, I was an heir of the den'Rhelys, and I had a destiny far beyond the small world I'd lived in so far. But it was my destiny, not my husband's and I wasn't sure I had the right to ask him to--
"I'll stay," he said, interrupting my thoughts.
"Pascal!"
"This is a serious decision," my grandfather cautioned. "If you stay, you'll be living with secrets and lies. You'll be asking your children to do the same. And you'll be signing on for a burden that isn't yours, Pascal. For a world that you'll never see. Claudia can always come back to me later, but you only have a certain amount of time -- forgive me, but I cannot change that -- and…"
"I'll stay."
"PASCAL!"
"No, no no," Pascal replied, waving away my grandfather's objections and my alarm. "Please. I've seen more to amaze me in the last hour than in my entire life before. Things I wanted to believe in, things I wished for -- now I know that they're real. How could I possibly walk away from that? What kind of life would it be, knowing I had thrown away a chance to do and see what others only dream about? That I had a chance to make my life mean something. How many people can say that they had a hand in saving an entire world?"
And so it was decided. My grandfather wasn't one to display strong emotions, but I could see the relief in his eyes.
Later that evening, as Pascal and I were settling into my parents' old room, I pulled him close for a warm embrace. "Thank you," I said with a proud smile. "For everything. For coming home with me, for making me open that magic door, for walking through it with me, and for believing in the impossible. You are the most incredible man I've ever met."
"Yes, of course," he replied with a sly smile. "I'm French."
I couldn't help but laugh, and gave him an affectionate kiss. "Well if it's decided, we may as well start saving Ajri."
He tilted his head at me, curiously. I wagged my eyebrow and nodded toward the bed. "Nine generations," I reminded him. "We have a lot of work to do."
