Sabine
Ibroke the natural world.
It’s the first thought that comes to me when I’m able to find words. Has it been minutes? Weeks? Time feels like a slippery thing. Flashes of memory come to me in bursts. Falling snow, despite the warm sunshine. Vines thrusting up from the earth.
Slowly, I swim up through my mind’s haziness until I blink my eyes open.
The light around me is dim, orange.Candlelight.
Soft feather pillows hold me upright in a bed carved from a single tree trunk. Warm reindeer pelts drape over my bruised knees.
At the foot of the bed?
It’s the delicious weight of the man I’d recognize through any haze.
“Basten,” I gasp through cracked lips, sitting upright and reaching out for him.
My father stands near my bedroom’s arched window, speaking in a low rumble to Basten, but at the sound of his name, Basten whips toward me with a hunter’s instinct. His eyes springwide. Before a sob can rise up my throat, he wraps his arms fiercely around me.
“Sabine. Sweetheart. I’ve got you—you’re okay now.”
He smooths his hands over my shoulders, then down the length of my arms. Where my shift’s capped sleeves end, there’s only warm peach skin. No fey lines blister along the length of my arms.
I feel my teeth with my tongue—no sharp incisors press back.
The tight knot in my chest works free, and I collapse against Basten’s chest, burying my face in the solid, sturdy rock of his shoulder.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpse stars winking beyond the bedroom window.
It’s nighttime—and we’re still in Drahallen Hall.
No, no, no, I think weakly, too spent to feel much of anything but Basten’s steady breathing beneath my cheek.We’re supposed to be halfway to the border wall by now.
“How do you feel, Solene?” Vale asks, coarse and clinical.
I flinch as though he’s struck me, and Basten instantly folds me tighter in his protective hold.
“That name…” I start, but choke it off.
Hearing that name stirs a tangle of long-buried memories, emotions, images. Most I don’t even recognize, as though they belong to a stranger. They press behind my ribs, sharp and demanding, like a swallowed fish bone.
“Call her Sabine,” Basten barks. “At least, until she decides for herself how she wants to be called.”
Vale’s nostrils flare with impatience, but he nods. Relenting on this one battle.
“What…happened?” I manage to utter. “I only remember pieces.”
Vale looks out the window at his kingdom rolled out far below. As though reporting the weather, he explains calmly,“It all comes from a mistranslation, really. In the Book of the Immortals, the ancient scribes wrote that between the First and Second Return, the gods ‘slumbrian o tornn’. That phrase was interpreted to mean “slumbered underground,” when it truly meant “slumbered underskin”. It led to the long-running rumor that fae rest in underground tombs between our Returns. While it’s true that we go dormant, it does not happen in tombs. Rather, we lose our mortal bodies; only our souls remain. Our resting places are within godkissed bloodlines, remaining hidden through generation after generation, until something triggers an Awakening.”
“You.” I press a hand against the base of my raw throat and rasp, “You triggered it this time.”
The hint of a smile touches Vale’s lips as he rests a hand on the window’s latch. “Yes. The Third Return is now upon us. We have the potential to rise during any generation, but as King of Fae, I am always the first to awaken. You see, S--Sabine,”—he stumbles a little over the name, “For generation after generation, I slumber until one of my human selves is strong enough to Awaken. Then, I search for the other nine gods. I find them one by one. Not in buried tombs. Inpeople. It can take months. Years, even. To follow rumors of godkissed people throughout the kingdoms and determine if they are one of us.”
“Sabine is your biological daughter.” Basten’s hand falls on my knee, holding tight. “Not that hard to find.”
Vale moves to the bedroom dresser, where he digs through the jewelry box until he finds a garnet ring. He cups it in his palm like it means something to him—like the weight is heavy with memories.
“Yes,” he says, voice distant. “It is no coincidence. In every Return, there are patterns. Solene is always intimately connected to me, in the form of a daughter or sister or niece. I believe it is because Solene commands nature, and naturecannot be separated from the core of our power—which resides in me.”
