But Lady Freya’s face wasn’t angry, nor was it even stern when she appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Rather, it was full of joy, and she was waving something in the air.
“Look!” she exclaimed breathlessly, shoving whatever she held at Norah. When Norah took it, she realized it was the scrap of paper Lady Freya had placed beneath her mattress when she’d first arrived.
“Read it!” Lady Freya gasped. “Read the word!”
She was right when she saidword. Most of the parchment’s nonsensical scratches were still there. The parchment had been torn from a list, Norah remembered, one Phillip had been trying to write after he’d lost his ability to do so. But in the corner of the paper, Norah could just make out a single word where there hadn’t been one before.
Pea.
Chapter 15
Jump
Somehow, just a day after their first kiss, Norah stood on a little cushion that lifted her off the ground, fidgeting nervously with the hem of her sleeve as she waited for the seamstress to finish making adjustments to her dress. The white fabric seemed to flow on for miles behind her, swamping her in the reality that had become hers in less than twenty-four hours.
She loved Phillip, she reminded herself. She had to. The list couldn’t have changed if she didn’t. Still… she had more misgivings than she was comfortable with.
“But it didn’t change all the way,” she had pointed out to Freya the day before, when Freya had dragged her toward her room for the gown fitting.
“Love, you haven’t given your magic time!” Freya had said, tears in her eyes, which somehow still sparkled with joy. She laughed a little. “Perhaps if you hadn’t gotten up so early, it would have finished!”
“He can’t talk yet, though,” Norah had said. “He’s not healed! What if–”
“If I remember right, your sisters had married their husbands before their healing became complete.” Freya had waved her off. “You’re worrying too much. This,” she held up the paper scrap, “is proof that it’s working! Your magic can heal what the plague destroyed!”
Norah wasn’t sure about that. But, as Freya had pointed out, they were running out of time. He’d just lost his ability to play his violin. What would he lose next? His ability to paint? Pointing to objects? Eye contact?
Freya was right. There was no denying that the word on the scrap of paper had changed. So Norah must feelsomelove for him.
But when she took stock of her emotions today, the only one Norah could fully feel was panic.
“How can I be so ignorant of my own heart?” she whispered to the mirror.
She went back in her mind for the hundredth time that day and tried to retrace the feelings she’d experienced the day before, when all of it had begun.
The fear and terror her nightmare had produced were real. So real that her heart started hammering in her chest every time she recalled his cold, empty eyes as he lay in the bed where she had slept. It had been all too real–too much like the day that would inevitably find their marriage if healing was never done. She might as well have traveled through time to the future where her husband was never healed.
The relief at seeing him awake and aware had been real as well. It was one of the richest sensations she’d ever experienced, as was the thrill that had rushed through her veins when he’d kissed her.
But how did one jump in from such fledgling feelings to pledging one’s life to another forever… especially when she was worried she might be falsely raising his hopes for a kind of healing that might never come.
Because, as she’d thought so many times in the last day, he still wasn’t fully healed. And Norah didn’t care what Freya said.Yes, her sisters’ husbands had been healed fully at their weddings. But there was no proof that Phillip ever would be.
“If only you were here, Nanny!” Norah whispered again. “You could tell me what to do!” Then, to the Maker, she thought,Why is this so hard?Why, if this was her story too, did she still feel like she was on the outside looking in? She looked up at the ceiling as though it might reveal some sort of answer. But, as she had expected, no answers appeared.
“What was that, Your Highness?” one of the seamstress’s girls asked.
“Oh, nothing, thank you.” Norah tried to smile, but even that felt brittle.
She was the bride. This was her day. Even if it was to be a small wedding, it was hers. She was getting the dress and the shoes and the crown and the jewels that she had dreamed of as a little girl. Norah, Phillip, and their guests would be surrounded by flowers, and she was entwining her life with that of the kindest man she could have imagined.
So why did she feel so much like crying?
Norah looked beyond the room’s western window, toward the ocean upon which she might have started her adventure. Back when she hadn’t had Phillip, those plans had seemed so easy and free. Then she had been free of her fear of pirates, and Nanny had been safely at her side. Her past might have been filled withwhat-ifs,but her future had been full of promise.
Now, though, she was making a life-altering promise to a man whom she couldn’t be sure she could heal. Because, in truth, she didn’t know if her love was enough to heal him–ifshewas enough to heal him. And by doing so, she was diving right back into the world she’d sought to escape for so long, the fate of thousands resting on her unreliable shoulders yet again.
And, should her love or her power fail to heal him, that awful responsibility would all be hers for the rest of her life, or at least until a suitable heir could be produced. Even this wouldn’t havebeen so bad if Lady Freya and Sir Oliver were ever able to have children. Norah would have happily handed the crown to one of them. But as they hadn’t thus been able to have any children, Norah knew a nephew probably wasn’t the most reliable plan. Which meant that if Norah ever wanted to escape a throne she had never desired, she would need to produce an heir herself before Phillip–
