My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 217

Lyra

My hair had been up and down twice tonight before the maid knocked, and I knew before she said it that the carriage had come through the south gate.

Three taps, even and polite. She did not wait for an answer. She opened the door a hand's width and put her head through.

"My lady. The Queen's carriage came through the south gate."

The pin fell out of my mouth and I was on my feet before I had decided to be.

For five weeks I had sat at this vanity every evening, putting my hair up and waiting for someone to come and tell me what she had just told me. I had pictured the moment so many times that the words sounded slightly off in real air.

"Where is she."

"Her chambers, my lady. She's just gone up."

I left the brush on the vanity and the cooling tray of dinner on the writing desk. The pair of shoes I had not yet decided between stayed where I had set them. I went out past the senior maid and into the corridor.

The corridor was lit for evening, lamps every six paces, the soft kind, not the brass ones from my father's audience hall. Stone under my feet, cold enough that the cold became its own information. I had run this corridor before. Two summers ago, when Sera came back from a hunting trip I had been watching for from the window for six days. Three years before that, after her first season at Blackwater. The route never changed.

I did not run fast. I ran with my mouth open. Five weeks of holding my breath came out in the breathing.

Two maids in the long gallery stepped back against the wall as I passed. One of them said something. I did not catch it, and I did not stop. I think she said welcome home, my lady, which made no sense, because it was not me coming home.

The door to her outer chamber was already open, lamplight spilling across the rug, and I crossed the outer chamber at a half-run and pushed the inner door wide without knocking.

She was on the floor.

Not the bed I had pictured her in, but the floor at the foot of it, her knees drawn up and her dress bunched at the hips and her hair half down, both hands flat on her thighs.

My mouth opened and nothing came out for a moment.

Then I was across the room and on my knees in front of her, both my hands going for hers, both my hands finding them. I was saying her name in the voice I had not used since I was small.

"Mama. Mama, you're home."

She did not hug me back at first. Her hands stayed flat on her thighs under mine. After a moment they moved, slowly, slowly, one to the back of my head and one to my shoulder.

"Lyra," she said, and her voice was hoarse from the road or from something else, and I could not yet tell which.

"You're back."

"I'm back."

I pressed my face into her dress. The dress smelled of the road, of two days of carriage and horse and air that had been moving across snow.

She pulled back, and by the time she had her face was under control, though her hand stayed in my hair.

"Where are your shoes."

It was the first whole sentence she had spoken. I laughed, and the laugh came out wet.

"I forgot them."

"You ran."

"I ran."

"Lyra." She shook her head, the smallest movement. "Your feet."

I helped her up and steered her to the edge of the bed, and she sat hard. My mother had never sat hard. She had been raised to sit by degree. Tonight her body had stopped consulting her.

The senior maid had come in behind me without my hearing her. She set a tray on the side table: wine, water, a cloth. On her way out she gave me a look I read three different ways before giving up on it, and the door clicked behind her.

I poured my mother a cup of the wine and set it in her hand. She drank in long swallows, two days of not drinking coming out of her in one breath.

"How was it."

"Long."

"The road?"

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