Acotar retelling

Bonding?

Inventing stories about my time with Aunt Ripleigh required minimal effort: I read to her daily, she instructed me on deportment from her bedside, and I nursed her until she died in her sleep two weeks ago, leaving her fortune to me.

And what a tremendous fortune it was: the trunks that accompanied me hadn't contained just clothing—several of them had been filled with gold and jewels. Not cut jewels, either, but enormous, raw jewels that would pay for a thousand estates.

My father was currently taking inventory of those jewels; he'd holed himself up in the office that overlooked the garden in which I was sitting beside Elain in the grass. Through the window, I spied my father hunched over his desk, a little scale before him as he weighed an uncut ruby the size of a duck's egg. He was clear-eyed again, and moved with a sense of purpose, of vibrancy, that I hadn't seen since before the downfall. Even his limp was improved—made miraculously better by some tonic and a salve a strange, passing healer had given him for free.

Gone were his hunched shoulders and downcast, misty eyes. My father smiled freely, laughed readily, and doted on Elain, who in turn doted on him. Nesta, though, had been quiet and watchful, only giving Elain answers not longer than a word or two.

"These bulbs," Elain said, pointing with a gloved hand to a cluster of purple-and-white flowers, "came all the way from the tulip fields of the continent. Father promised that next spring he'll take me to see them. He claims that for mile after mile, there's nothing but these flowers." She patted the rich, dark soil. The little garden beneath the window was hers: every bloom and shrub had been picked and planted by her hand; she would allow no one else to care for it. Even the weeding and watering she did on her own.

Though the servants did help her carry over the heavy watering cans, she admitted. She would have marveled—likely wept—at the gardens I'd become so accustomed to, at the flowers in perpetual bloom at the Spring Court.

"You should come with me," Elain went on. "Nesta won't go, because she says she doesn't want to risk the sea crossing, but you and I ... Oh, we'd have fun, wouldn't we?"

I glanced sidelong at her. My sister was beaming, content—prettier than I'd ever seen her, even in her simple muslin gardening dress. Her cheeks were flushed beneath her large, floppy hat. "I think—I think I'd like to see the continent," I said.

And it was true, I realized. There was so much of the world that I hadn't seen, hadn't ever thought about visiting.

"I'm surprised you're so eager to go next spring," I said. "Isn't that right in the middle of the season?" The socialite season, which had ended a few weeks ago, apparently, full of parties and balls and luncheons and gossip, gossip, gossip. Elain had told me all about it at dinner the night before, hardly noticing that it was an effort for me to get my food down. So much of it was the same— the meat, the bread, the vegetables, and yet ... it was ash in my mouth compared to what I'd consumed in Prythian. "And I'm surprised you don't have a line of suitors out the door, begging for your hand."

Elain flushed but plunged her little shovel into the ground to dig out a weed. "Yes, well—there will always be other seasons. Nesta won't tell you, but this season was somewhat ... strange."

"In what way?"

She shrugged her slim shoulders. "People acted as if we'd all just been ill for eight years, or had gone away to some distant country—not that we'd been a few villages over in that cottage. You'd think we dreamed it all up, what happened to us over those years. No one said a word about it."

"Did you think they would?" If we were as rich as this house suggested, there were surely plenty of families willing to overlook the stain of our poverty.