“You’re beautiful, Asha. You deserve for your appearance to reflect that.”
My gut clenches.
“You want to heal my scars,” I say, my throat tightening.
He presses a kiss to my forehead, as if to say, You’re welcome.
There’s a numbness within me when he leads me out of the tiny alcove I had hoped might be my salvation.
The guard who fell asleep on my watch is gone. I don’t want to think about what Az did with him. A messenger slips into the library, breathing heavily as he bows before Az.
“A message from the King of Dwellen, Your Majesty,” says the courier, handing Az a delicate slip of parchment.
It looks like the kind of message King Marken would send, wrapped in silky thick silver parchment with a seal of blue wax hardened over the front.
Az rips it open anxiously. I watch his eyes dart back and forth, but the message must be short, because he doesn’t linger on it for long.
Anxiety slips through the numb fog in my head. If Az is in contact with King Marken, that can only mean trouble. While the King of Dwellen allowed my and Kiran’s extended stay in Othian, the male never bothered with the pretense that he was pleased with the situation.
I wouldn’t put it past him to ally with Az, especially if Az has offered him the protection of his army of Others.
“What does it say?” I ask, infusing my voice with worry, hoping to tug on Az’s sympathies.
He smiles down upon me and plants a wet kiss on my forehead. “You don’t have to worry about it, love.”
I don’t miss the way his hands shake as he caresses my cheeks. Don’t miss the crazed aura in Az’s expression as he pulls away. The twitching that’s returned to his left eyelid.
On the way out of the library, he rips the correspondence to pieces.
I reach for the Fabric one last time, begging it for a gap to slip through.
It doesn’t reach back.
CHAPTER 68
ELLIE
Gentle rays of sunlight waft through the warped glass window—one that I suppose the palace ordered from a competitor before I married into the family, as I don’t see my initials anywhere—whispering that morning has finally come.
Well, finally is probably a generous word.
Truth be told, I don’t exactly want morning to come, not when Cecilia was up screaming all night.
Peck keeps telling me Cecilia’s nocturnal sleep schedule is because I did too much riding while I was pregnant.
“Lulled the baby to sleep during the day. Taught her bad habits from the beginning,” he’s commented, unsolicited, multiple times.
When I complained to Evander about it, he told me that was what I got for teaming up with Peck against my husband so often.
I wasn’t quite in the mood to admit that he was right, so I’d just stuck my tongue out at him wearily.
Either way, Cecilia is not a good sleeper. At all.
Which is fine, because I adore her so much my heart might explode at any moment.
Other parts of me might explode too. For instance, my bladder, which, despite Peck’s potions, has yet to recover from my unfortunately traumatic labor. Then there’s my patience, which I find is always ready to detonate.
It’s been a rough few weeks, that’s for sure.
But then there are moments like these, moments when Cecilia is sleeping, her pretty little face as peaceful as the surface of an abandoned pond, her little pointed ears poking out from underneath her dark ringlets. And I think perhaps I understand why people look back on these days so fondly.
Even if I am convinced part of the reason is that all species would cease to exist if anyone remembered these days accurately. Well, maybe not cease to exist. But there certainly would be a shortage of second siblings.
Still, as I rock Cecilia in the chair Evander made for me (complete with the comfiest pillows he could bribe out of the local seamstress), I have no choice but to feel immense gratitude. It swells in my heart just looking at her. Usually, I glance back and forth between my daughter and husband. When he isn’t training with Orion, Evander is typically fast asleep across the room, exhausted from the several times he’s gotten up to change her in the middle of the night between feedings.
There’s something about these moments I want to keep close. We haven’t officially announced Cecilia’s birth yet. Enough people know about her that she’s not exactly a secret, but with all the chaos surrounding her birth and Az supposedly rallying an army in Naenden, I’m not eager to share her with the world yet.
Cecilia’s screaming isn’t the only reason sleep evades me. Even when she’s quiet, and sleep comes, it’s hardly ever restful.
Nightmares, filled with images of my child’s death, the lack of her screams and the continuation of mine, punctuate any slumber I might have stolen otherwise.
It tortures me when the part of me that keeps control of my mind goes off duty. During my sleeping hours, I’m at the mercy of what could have happened. What life might have been like if Cecilia had not survived.
It’s in those moments that I think of Blaise, and my heart aches for my friend. My friend who’s somehow made herself my enemy, though out of no malice for me.
Before, I couldn’t imagine the pain she’s suffered. Now, I think perhaps I can taste it, in the memories of the moments when I lost hope that Cecilia would survive. When I convinced myself the labor pains had come too early, that there was no reasonable way she could endure outside the womb.
Evander and I are fortunate. I’ve since found a few documents describing various gestations between fae and humans. They all varied, some lasting as long as twelve months, others much shorter. As far as I know, mine with Cecilia is the shortest recorded.
The thought makes me ill, but in more than one way. Ill, because it terrifies me thinking of what could have happened to my child. Ill, because Blaise would have been to blame if Cecilia had died.
Can I ever forgive Blaise, knowing that her actions almost caused my daughter’s death? Does it make me a horrible mother if I forgive my child’s potential murderer?
Not that Blaise intended for me to be caught in the cross fire. I suppose that’s part of the reason she broke off from the camp. Suppose she hoped the ritual for opening the Rip would cease before the rest of the party could catch up to her and Az.
But still.
It was a betrayal, nonetheless. And after Evander gave so much of himself to prove he trusted her.
Perhaps it’s my duty to hate her, to brand her as an adversary. An enemy to the family I would protect with my life.
But then, when my mind starts down that path, I always end up circling back. Back to the moments when I thought I lost my baby. Back to the shadows that surrounded me, threatening to drown me.
I’m not sure what I would have become had Cecilia died.
I don’t think I would have ended up like Blaise, foolishly trusting those who seek to use her, rather than depending on her loved ones and friends.
But I likely would have hated her. Hated her in the permanent sort of way, the sort of way I wouldn’t bother debating about.
