“All right. Show me where Ina is. I don’t want to spend any longer with you than I have to.”
“Thank you,” Nismae said. “Come this way.” She turned and led us toward the Nightswifts’ camp.
Hal followed us, wisely keeping his mouth shut.
Nismae led us through the camp to a cave. Warmth enveloped me when we stepped in; it must have originally been a bathhouse for miners. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lantern light as Ina let out an agonized—and quite human—moan from the back. As I’d warned her, she had to labor in human form. Poe crouched near the fire, anxiously folding and refolding blankets and minding a kettle of boiling water.
“What have you given her?” I asked Poe.
“Nothing,” the mousy girl said. “She won’t take anything from me. She shouts if I go near.”
“Is there anything in this that will help?” Nismae asked, flinging my satchel into my arms.
“Yes,” I said, hugging it to my chest and feeling a quick burst of gladness. I never thought I would see it again. I dropped to the floor and started rummaging through it. “How long has she been in labor?”
“Since early this morning,” Nismae said. “Is this normal? Should she be like this?”
“She should be all right unless the baby is breech or something else has gone wrong,” I said. “I’ll have to examine her.”
Ina moaned again from the back of the cave, where she was submerged in a pool of water. I hurried to her side and tested it with my hand. Not too warm. At least they’d had the sense not to let her get into one of the hotter pools.
“Hal, set aside some of that boiling water and let it cool a little so I can wash my hands.”
He obeyed as quickly as if we’d been back in our easy rhythm of setting up camp. My heart squeezed uncomfortably at the memories.
“What can I do?” Nismae trailed anxiously behind me.
“Get over here and help her out of the water. If she has another contraction, support her under her arms so she can squat,” I said. “You’ve got two working hands, unlike some of us.”
Nismae ignored the jab, seemingly grateful to have something to do. She helped Ina out of the pool and wrapped her in a blanket, then lowered her over the straw they’d laid beside the pool.
“You’re here,” Ina said. Tears sprang to the corners of her eyes. She grasped my hand, sending uncomfortable twinges up my injured arm thanks to the damaged nerves. For the first time since leaving Amalska, she looked like the Ina I remembered. One who relied on me, who had a sweet side to balance her ambition and fierceness.
I felt nothing.
The vulnerability in her eyes didn’t sway me as it once might have. I wanted to help her, but I wasn’t enslaved by that desire. I left the job of hovering and soothing to Nismae, who stroked Ina’s brow and whispered comforting things in her ear, only to earn a glare and a yell during the next contraction.
“These contractions are coming close together,” I said. “Poe, heat more water and make tea.” I flung several sachets of herbs at her and listed out the proportions of each. She rushed to do it, looking more confident now that someone else was in charge.
As soon as the contraction subsided, Nismae helped Ina lie down, propping her up with stuffed cushions and folded blankets to support her back while I washed my hands in the hot water Hal had prepared.
“Is it all right if I examine you and check on the baby?” I asked Ina.
She nodded, breathing heavily, strands of her sable hair sticking to her face.
I examined her, trying to ignore the strangeness of revisiting such an intimate part of her for such different reasons.
“Ina.” I returned to her side. “It’s time. Push when you feel ready.”
“All right,” she said, her voice a raspy whisper.
Poe rushed over with swaddling blankets and fresh rags. Nismae helped Ina into a squatting position again, even as Ina moaned and cursed and gnashed her teeth.
After fifteen minutes of Ina continuing to labor to no avail, Nismae spoke up. “Is this supposed to take so long?”
“Be quiet and hold her up,” I said, and Ina and I bestowed her with matching glares. “The baby will come when the time is right.”
Ina’s contractions continued to intensify until she couldn’t get comfortable. She alternately cursed us and demanded we do something about her situation. I stayed steady, familiar with this phase of childbirth, while Nismae looked half-panicked.
A few minutes later, I held Ina’s son.
“Look at you!” I said to the baby.
He let out a good healthy cry.
I couldn’t help but smile at the miracle of him—his tiny hands, his angry scrunched-up face, so unhappy to be out in the world. While I no longer felt anything for Ina, looking at this baby flooded me with emotions I didn’t entirely know how to manage. I wanted to hold him close and keep him safe, to tell him every day how perfect he was.
Instead I enjoyed the few minutes I had, humming him a lullaby as I carefully wiped him clean. I swaddled him, then moved to put him on Ina’s chest, where he could rest until she delivered the afterbirth.
Ina put up her arm. I thought she was reaching for the baby—until she spoke.
“No,” she croaked.
That one word cut me to the bone.
“What?” I asked. Stupefied, I knelt beside her with the baby in my arms, instinctively holding him closer to myself.
“I don’t want to touch him,” Ina said. “Get him away from me.”
This couldn’t be happening. She wouldn’t do this.
“You have to. He needs to nurse. He needs his mother!” I pleaded with her to understand, to look at how tiny and helpless he was. How could she not see how much he needed her? How could she deny him the comfort of resting on her chest, of hearing her familiar heartbeat to welcome him to the outside world?
“I’m not his mother.” She turned her head away.
“But—”
“No,” she said firmly. “I cannot be both a mother and a queen. Raise him as your son. You’ll be a far better mother than me.” She closed her eyes. Labor had exhausted her.
After everything we’d been through from Amalska to here, she expected me to keep him.
A wave of anguish hit me. I thought about setting him down on her chest anyway so that she could feel how soft and small he was. So that she could hear his cries and feel compelled to give him some nourishment, some love. How could she refuse him? How could a mother turn her back on her own helpless baby?
But I knew it was possible, because my own mother had done this—turned away from me the moment I was born, leaving me to be raised by someone else, abandoning me to never truly know who I was. I couldn’t let that happen to this little boy.
In the wake of my empathy for the baby, rage swiftly followed.
I hated her.
I looked for Hal, only to realize he was right behind me, peering over my shoulder at the baby. He looked just as horrified and dismayed by Ina’s words as I felt. We exchanged a look of understanding that temporarily bridged everything that was broken between us.
“Can you hold him for a minute while I gather my things?” I asked softly. I trusted him to do that much, at least.
He nodded, and I nestled the baby in his arms.
“He’s so tiny,” Hal said with wonder.
Moments later, he was already walking around having an animated one-sided conversation with the bundle in his arms. “Can you smell the cook fires? I can. But no rabbit for you. You don’t have any teeth yet!”
I slung my satchel over my shoulder. As angry as I was with Ina, she’d get what she wanted. If he couldn’t have his mother, he would at least have me.
As for the next time I saw her, it would be from the opposite side of a battlefield.
“Wait,” Ina said, weakly reaching out a hand.
I paused, wondering if the threat of my departure had finally changed her mind, but all she said was “Call him Iman.”
His
name meant “faith.”
She’d chosen to put hers in me after all.
CHAPTER 33
HAL’S NETWORK OF FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES helped us find a wet nurse for Iman, which was how I ended up with a sweet, freckled girl named Zallie sharing my little room at the castle. As cramped as we were with both of us and two babies, she didn’t quite seem to believe the luck of receiving free food and shelter in exchange for her services. The boy who had been courting her had disappeared as soon as he found out she was pregnant, and her parents had thrown her out shortly thereafter.
I hadn’t forgiven Hal, but he kept showing up anyway. His draw to Iman could not be denied, and between me, Zallie, and Hal, Iman never lacked for food or a loving pair of arms. I tried to stay angry with Hal, but it was increasingly difficult. Hal brought me and Zallie food and herbs. He told the babies stories that were so ridiculous it took all my self-control not to laugh until I cried. He shared openly with me what he learned in the city. At night when Iman was safely asleep under Zallie’s watch, he accompanied me on my walks in search of the Fatestone and its elusive thread of magic, even though I never told him about meeting my mother or what we were looking for. I didn’t want to admit it, but his presence helped keep my despair at bay enough so I could stay focused. Now that Iman was here, time was running out. The only thing standing between now and the battle for the crown was the first snow.
On one such excursion, after another futile attempt to locate Atheon, Hal and I climbed the stairs to K’vala Falls—the largest waterfall on the mountain. Though exhaustion weighed on my bones, I thought it might be worth venturing up above the city to see if that provided my Sight with any additional information.
Together we continued up the stone steps that wound their way toward the waterfall. Long before we reached the bridge that passed in front of it, the crash and rush of it soothed me. If we got close enough, the sound would be deafening, perhaps enough to drown out the endless loop of thoughts in my head.
The night air was cold and wet after an evening rain. Winter weather would be coming soon. I recognized the smell of it in the air, and the equinox was only a week away. That meant snow was coming, and not long after, the battle for the crown. Anxiety lanced through me every time I thought of it.
I sighed, feeling the weight of responsibility on my shoulders more heavily than ever. We stopped early on the bridge, away from the part sprayed with continuous mist from the falls. If I couldn’t find the Fatestone, what would my future hold? What would Hal’s?
“What are you going to do after all this is over?” I asked him.
He leaned over the stone railing of the bridge, peering at moonlight reflecting on the ripples of water below. “I don’t know. I suppose it depends on whether we survive.”
“But what would you want if you knew anything was possible?” I asked.
He looked at me with sadness in his eyes. “I’m afraid to let myself dream of that.”
I was too. The future seemed impossible to plan for when I didn’t know what would happen if I found the Fatestone and changed the past. In a different version of our lives, Hal and I certainly wouldn’t have been standing on a bridge in Corovja right now.
“I’m afraid of losing Iman,” Hal added.
A pang of something fierce tightened my throat. “Me too,” I admitted. The thought of it gutted me. And Hal loved Iman as much as I did. I could see it in his eyes every time he held the baby. Maybe in another life, we would have been a family.
Perhaps the time had come to forgive Hal for what he’d done. Did his recent loyalty outweigh one betrayal? Was there even such a thing as anyone who was truly honest?
“Asra . . . I think we should talk about what happened,” Hal began. “I should have told you the truth from the beginning. You have to understand that I grew up here in the city. On the streets you can’t afford to trust strangers. It can get you killed.”
I almost laughed. Trusting strangers—including Hal—had certainly come close to getting me killed every step of the way since leaving home. “Truer words may never have been spoken.”
He nodded. The only acknowledgment of my jab was the flicker of hurt in his eyes, but he soldiered on. “The only person I could trust was my sister, who protected me from the time I was young. She was my hero. She could do no wrong. I didn’t understand until recently that her protectiveness wouldn’t extend to people I cared about. And . . . there was never someone I had feelings for like the ones I have for you.” His expression was so raw, so vulnerable. The wrong reaction from me would surely break him.
Seeing him unbox his heart crumbled the walls I’d tried so hard to maintain. All I wanted now was to cradle his cheek in my hand, lean into his embrace, seek out the familiar planes of his body and find safety there. Most of all, I wanted to take what he was offering me and protect it with all the fierceness I had.
When I didn’t say anything, he kept going. “If I had your gift and could do it without harming others, I would rewrite the history of us. I wish I could give us another beginning, one in which I had told you the truth from the moment we met,” he said, his voice firm.
“Oh, Hal . . . ,” I whispered.
“I wish I could rewrite taking you to Orzai. I wish we could have taken the Moth and flown past there. I wish we could keep going forever. See the world. Us, Iman, and the open sky.”
“I understand that wish.” If it hadn’t been for the sorrow I’d left behind in Amalska, the fear driving me forward, and the knives always at my back, traveling with him might have been the happiest time of my life—until he betrayed me.
“I knew when I heard you sing those vespers that they would change my life. I just never knew how much.” His voice was so tender it broke my heart.
“I knew when I heard you sing ‘The Tavern Lamb’ that you were the most ridiculous person I’d ever met,” I said, teasing.
He smiled, the slightest upturn of his lips.
I missed that mouth. I missed that smile.
“I just . . . I never expected . . . you,” Hal said. “I didn’t expect how special you are.”
I leaned on the railing of the bridge, burying my face in my hands. Heat rose in my cheeks, and I wanted to push it back down. The compliment was so bittersweet.
“Special is why your sister took my blood,” I said. “Special is why the king keeps me close and puts up with me having a girl and two babies in my room. I would give anything to not be special. I would give anything to be just like you or, better yet, to be human. Even one without a manifest. Someone simple. Uncomplicated. Someone who hasn’t been chased across half a kingdom for the power that runs in her veins.” Now that I knew what the world would do with someone like me, I longed to be something, anything, other than myself.
“I didn’t mean anything to do with your abilities. I meant the way you watched over me when I was unconscious in the Tamers’ forest. Mukira said you never left my side. I meant the way you look at Iman like he means the world to you, like he’s your own. I meant the way you’ve kept fighting even when it seems like all is lost. Even now. Most people aren’t like that. That’s what makes you special. Not your blood.”
Hal reached for my left hand, and I jerked it away before he could touch me. Letting him touch the broken part of me was still too intimate, still too much.
“How is your arm?” he asked quietly.
“There are some things magic cannot repair.” I tried to close my hand and was rewarded with the usual stab of pain through my wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it will never be enough, but I am so, so sorry.”
“If it had been my writing hand, perhaps Nismae would have done me a favor,” I said bitterly.
“No. There is no light in which it was a favor,” he said.
“It’s fine. It’s just more damage to someone who was already broken, and a lesson in whom not to trust.” I couldn’t stop lashing out at him. The pain was too much.
“You aren’t broken
, Asra.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what I am!” I said.
“You’re right, you don’t, but I wish you could see yourself the way I do. You are all goodness and light. You’re as bright and beautiful as a star—one I feel like I’ve been searching the sky for my whole life. I felt pulled to you from the very first time I heard you singing.” He could have used his compulsion to try to make the words more moving, but he didn’t. They were delivered raw and unpolished, simple as an ugly truth.
“Feelings are a terrible reason to do anything,” I said, but the fight was starting to seep out of me. I tried to cling to the knowledge that feelings were what had started the avalanche of disaster that got me here. It had started the moment I put pen to paper to help Ina find her manifest, and that had been about nothing if not feelings. Selfish, stupid feelings.
“I know I made a mistake,” he continued. “When we met, I didn’t know that you were the kind of person with whom I could have been honest from the very first breath and you still would have helped me. I didn’t know you would stay by me even when I collapsed in the middle of the woods and you could have left me behind. And while I knew you were the one my sister wanted me to find, I didn’t know that your gift was something she would injure you for, and I am so sorry for the suffering that my actions and choices have cost you. But I want to do better. I want to be better. Maybe I don’t deserve that chance, but I’m asking you for it because if I don’t, I know I will regret it for the rest of my life. And I know you now, Asra. I know you. I trust you. Please give me another chance.”
Somewhere in the middle of his speech, I met his eyes, daring him to try to use his compulsion on me, to try to touch me uninvited, to do anything to undermine his own words.
He simply waited for me to say something, his face tight with fear, but his eyes holding the smallest flicker of hope. I couldn’t cling to my anger with him looking at me so humbly. I let the last of it slip away like a bird released into the wild. It would still exist. It would still be part of our past, but it didn’t have to define our future.
In spite of it all, I had to face the truth I’d been denying for moons.
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