“My grandmother, actually,” she replied, her voice tight with emotion. “My mother never got to be a queen. My grandmother outlived her, and then when she passed, it became my responsibility. But by then it was just me and my grandfather. When he died, there was no grove to guide or family to share the memories with. Nothing but ghosts and the end of a line that saw the beginning of all things.”
Taevas wanted to say something. He wanted to offer her some profound words of comfort or a speech about how she was a fuckingqueen,and that meant something even now. But the words wouldn’t come.
It was nearly impossible for him to comprehend the enormityof what she’d told him, what itmeantto her, to the world, or the ocean of grief that rippled in slow, dark waves beneath every word.
No wonder she didn’t want to speak of how she’d ended up alone in Birchdale, cut off from the world.
Taevas tightened his arms around her. “You’re not alone anymore, Shiya. You’ll never be alone again.”
“You can’t make promises like that. We barely know each other.”
He let out a shaky breath. “I think we know each other better than anyone else in the world.”
The fresh scent of salt tinged the air. Alashiya was crying, but she didn’t make a sound or shake in his arms. She simply wept in the way one might bleed — silently, continuously, until eventually it stopped, one way or another.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I’m so sorry.”
Alashiya sniffed. “What for? You didn’t do anything.”
Regret curdled his stomach. The sour taste of it climbed up his throat to settle on his tongue and the backs of his teeth in a thick, toxic film. It tasted like salt and cowardice.
He closed his eyes. “For making you wait so long.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Alashiya woke before dawn.When she blinked, her eyes stung. Her body was faintly sore, as if speaking of her past had taken a true physical toll.
She watched as a tiny sliver of pale light began to take shape on the floor, cast by a gap in her thick curtains, and tried to summon some embarrassment for how she’d fallen apart in front of a stranger-who-wasn’t-a-stranger. There was none. There wasn’t much of anything, save a sense of peace as soft and new as the little sliver of light.
Taevas’s arm was heavy over her middle and his breath tickled the top of her head with every slow exhale. They hadn’t moved an inch in the night. Alashiya couldn’t remember a time when she’d slept more deeply. There were no dreams. She didn’t wake, as was her habit, whenever the old house made one of its favorite noises, thinking that an intruder had come at last.
She slept in the deep-dark, the hidden gap between life and death, and when she woke, it took a long time for her to settle back into her body.
Taevas slept on, no doubt exhausted by his exertion the previous day. Not wanting to disturb him, Alashiya took her time getting out of bed. She suspected he was normally a light sleeper,which would’ve made the maneuver more difficult, but when she peeked at his face, she found it relaxed in the deep sleep of the ill.
She rearranged the blankets so they covered him before she tiptoed out of the room.
Her mind remained blissfully blank as she shrugged on her robe. The sun was just kissing the horizon when she stirred her sugar into her coffee, and the sliver of light had taken on a gold hue when she returned to the living room a little while later, mug in hand.
Whispers, always so close and yet so far, filled the silence in her mind. She took a sip from her coffee as she padded across the room, to the opposite side from the bed and her work area. Her destination was the little sitting nook, with its antique loom and spinning wheel beside the two ratty loveseats she and her grandfather used to sit in. Tucked behind one of the chairs,herchair, was a cedar chest the same color as wild honey.
Alashiya quietly set her coffee down on the small, doily-covered table between the chairs, ever-aware of the slumbering dragon across the room. The chest had always seemed so big to her, so precious, when she was a child. When she lifted it from its hiding place behind her chair, Alashiya was struck, as she always was, by how very small and fragile it seemed to her now.
She sat in her chair and placed the chest on her lap. It was an heirloom all on its own. Her grandmother said it was made from wood gifted by Blight’s cedar, the one who held and fed the first nymph. Alashiya had her doubts about that, but they didn’t matter. It was a good story, and when she brushed her fingers over the silk-smooth surface of the wood, she felt the generations of her family doing the same.
The latch had been replaced many times, but it was still old enough to squeal a bit when she eased it open. Alashiya cast a worried look at the bed and was relieved to see that Taevas hadn’t so much as twitched. Satisfied that his rest hadn’t been disturbed, she peered inside the chest and found all the familiar shapes she expected.
There were old photos from the various places her ancestors had lived. Dried flowers pressed between yellowed tissue. Two golden arm bands formed to look like branches, undoubtedly more ancient than the chest and the only gold the grove could never bear to part with. A coiled ball of purple silk was the unassuming shape of an ancestral gown made of several yards of pleats so small, each fold was only as deep as the tip of a pencil.
And above it all, neatly folded and perpetually unfinished, was Alashiya’s veil.
She extracted it from the chest with the utmost care. The silk was so fine it fell through the gaps between her fingers like flowing water. In the blushing glow of dawn, she could make out her hands through it.
It was a deep, luminous green shot with strands of shimmering gold. Her mother had ordered the fabric for it the day she discovered she was expecting, and when Alashiya was born, the oldest woman of the grove had cleaned her and wrapped her in it before she was presented, as all babies were.
Her parents had sewn the gold around the scalloped edge. Her grandmother’s skilled hands had added tree branches and wildflowers. Over the years, when she had scraps from her commissions and the will, Alashiya had added her own designs in silk thread: blue robins, fat honeybees, a proud stag, and so many other creatures that had become her companions over the decades. Between those beloved creatures were tiny designs in various jewel tones, all of them miniature replicas of work she’d done for the dragon who slumbered in her bed.
It was unfinished by design. It was supposed to remain that way until after she married. The story she’d been told was that an unfinished garment confused the spirits who brought bad luck, and since she would only wear the veil again when she died, then such things wouldn’t matter.
