Cedar Sweep you have to get what you want your own way

it’s not simple to say
that most days i don’t recognize me
that these shoes and this apron
that place and its patrons
have taken more than i gave them
it’s not easy to know
i’m not anything like i used be, although it’s true
i was never attention’s sweet center
i still remember that girl

As he often does, Arturo gives Lotte a gift she doesn’t realize she needs. He has married a soldier, not a princess, and it is all too easy for the young queen to lose herself in duty and responsibility. These things fuel and drive her, but she is helpless in the face of their demands. Without someone to forcibly take the bit from her mouth, she is too easily consumed by them. The dawn of the year has brought event after heavy-hitting event — the Donnelaith fire, her move to Teaghlaigh, and her marriage to Arturo; her ascension to leadership, her first heat cycle, and her ensuing pregnancy; the threat of Blackfeather Woods, the exodus to the hinterlands, and the exile of Olive and Dakarai. Add to these things the departure of her kaksonen, the birth of her children, and the constant struggle to keep them happy and healthy despite their dicey arrival, and what you have is a stretched-thin girl with a hard-lined mouth and cool silver eyes.

Some days it feels like Lotte Ansbjørn died in that fire. Some days it feels like she left with Dagfinn. Some days Banríon looks at her reflection in the water and searches for that girl, that reckless, hoydenish girl who wooed and won a gangster in gentleman’s clothing, and doesn’t recognize the harsher set to her black-masked features. There’s a stranger in her body, and only her eyes know that what she’s seeing isn’t what’s inside — but not with any concrete certainty. Where is the laughter? Where is the spice, the sass, the spirit?

Where is Lotte?

At present the soot-stockinged songbird is seated riverside, and when her mate’s call rises above the trees her charcoal-colored ears flick and swivel to catch it. Her children are already under Hemlock’s capable care, but there is still a moment of sluggish hesitation that delays her. Every day that Dagfinn’s gone, it gets harder to answer to the sound of her own name, not out of spite or despondency, but because without him to ground her it’s all too easy to forget who she is. This time, she is not Kaniini, Kitku, or Solene.

She is a stranger even to herself.

After a beat, she rouses herself to respond to that call. She doesn’t know how much time has passed, if any. She doesn’t clock the hours the way she used to. Her surefooted paws draw her away from the river and out of the strath, into the sweep of fragrant cedar where a forest clearing and a good, solid man who loves her waits. There is no ecstatic flutter of her heart as she stands, breathing deeply, looking at him; but there is a feeling of weightlessness that melts the ice in her argent eyes degree by slow degree. She warms to him, softening, a smile curling the sharp corners of her lips and making something sweet of them. “Turo,” the nightingale sighs, instinctually defining herself by her place at his side. It’s easy to cross the distance. Easy to snake her body hard against his in the old, familiar way, and walk a circle around him before pressing her lips to his cheek, his mouth, the base of his ear. It doesn’t fix the problem, but she doesn’t see that. Doesn’t care.

“I have missed you,” she murmurs, and these words are true.

she’s imperfect, but she tries
she is good, but she lies
she is hard on herself
she is broken and won’t ask for help
she is messy, but she’s kind
she is lonely most of the time
she is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie
she is gone, but she used to be mine