“Why not?”
“The mist takes everything it can. It doesn’t answer prayers or listen to anyone.”
“It still took everything. It just gave nothing to the beasts.”
He growled. “To my kind, you mean.”
“Can you really speak for it? Are you more powerful than you let on?” she argued. “To speak for a curse that is beyond us?”
“In all my travels, the mist has done nothing but take, reap, and distort the land and its creatures in a monstrous way. It has taken the light from us and killed the land. It’s a disease.”
“And yet the mist hides us when we need to move quietly, it gifts its creatures the strength to survive it, and maybe sometimes, when a witch—or a priestess—is willing to curse the world in her despair for protection, it answers because it understands? Perhaps my mother’s dormant magic and her prayer were the last things the mist needed to take this land. Because it did not just take the settlement, it took the entire swamp.”
“It did not take you.”
She curled her fingers into her palms and brought them up to hug herself. “Sometimes I wish it had.”
His eyes narrowed angrily and she quickly looked away. Calavia waited for him to force her to look at him again, but it didn’t happen. Instead he stormed away with another growl, but in the next moment, he was back at her side handing her a bowl full of simmering roots and meat from the hearth.
“Eat,” he ordered.
She lifted the bowl to her mouth and blew on the broth. Once it had cooled, she sipped carefully. As it entered her mouth, there were tastes she couldn’t quite name but disregarded it for weakness. He was right, she had eaten little since he arrived, and had extended herself greatly. The flavors made her light-headed, and before she could swallow and chew the contents, her thundering pulse quieted, and a calmness took over her.
“Thank you,” she said once she finished eating.
Astegur took her bowl away and placed it on the hearth ledge.
Calavia wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her aches and pains were fading faster than usual.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Better than I did earlier.”
“Tell me how you’re not a thrall when everyone else who survived is?”
“Did you put cove and blimwort into the stew?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Calavia stretched her arms, feeling good. “Mmm.”
“Calavia, tell me why you’re not a thrall like the others, including your mother.”
She turned her head to peer at him. His words were hard to concentrate on. She smiled instead, and raised her arms high, feeling much better than she had a right to be. All she wanted to do was lie back and run her hands all over herself.
Astegur towered over her and caught her chin. “Answer me,” he ordered.
“What?”
“Why are you not a thrall?”
Oh.She pushed his hand away from her. “I told you.”
“You did not.”
“The mist still took everything. Those that remained succumbed to the curse long before I was even born. My mother…” Her vision blurred and spun as she spoke. “My mother succumbed when I was young, many years after the others.” Suddenly, the memories of those times flooded her head.
The frightened girl she was, watching her mother, ever so slowly fight a battle she could not win. Worldspin after worldspin, seeing her go from a human to someone more like the thralls that lived around them. It had been so slow and devastating when her mother finally lost all her humanity. Tears formed in her eyes, and the pang of that memory sliced through the good feelings running through her. She’d been afraid and young enough that her body had not yet even developed.
