“I’ll watch out for her. Please.” A thin woman stood behind him, dressed in a long skirt and a simple blouse, wringing her hands. “She could work in the fields, Gerald, and then help me around the house. You know I’ve longed for a daughter forever. And she’s pretty.”
“Looks mean nothing when you’re pulling weeds.” With a huff, he stooped down in front of me, latching onto my shoulders and making me meet his gaze. Frowning, he studied my face, and it was clear from his sneer that he found me lacking. “Can you work hard, girl? I don’t allow laziness.”
Why them?I shouted in my mind, but no one replied.
Biting down on my tongue to keep from crying out from the agony jerking through me, I nodded.
“Alright.” He released me and straightened, taking the bag of coins Aunt Vera held out to him, weighing it with a frown. “Not enough.”
“For the time you’ll have her, it will be.” Vera stroked my hair and tilted my chin gently to guide my eyes to hers. “Trust, love. Believe. And remain strong.”
How could I do anything when pain seared through my leg so badly, I wanted to curl into a ball and whimper?
“When the time is right, you’ll know what to do.” Bending down, Vera grabbed my forearms and stared into my eyes. My mind floated and . . .
I pulled away from a gray-haired woman I’d never seenbefore in my life, yelping when my left thigh burned from the movement.
A blink and the woman I felt I should know, but didn’t, disappeared.
“Well, get to work,” my father said with a heavy sigh. After giving me a lingering look, my mother went inside the rickety house. He took my hand and dragged me around the building and over to a ragged field behind, where he stooped down and pointed at a scruffy plant. “See this? It’s a weed. I want you to pull every one of them from this field. No dinner or rest for you until you do.”
“I will.” My little girl voice wavered, crushed with the tears I didn’t dare release. “I will.”
“What’s your name, girl?” he asked.
Name? I frowned. “I don’t know.”
If he was my father, why didn’theknow it already?
“Alright, then, we’ll find one for you,” he said. “Ask her, and she’ll give you one.”
Tempest. My mama told me my name was Tempest.
“Work, girl.” He turned and strode toward the house.
As I bent forward and started pulling weeds, my leg screamed and blood trickled across my thigh, wicked up by my coarse dress.
Yes?the voice asked.
Could I leave a small, wounded child in a place like this?
Vera could foretell, so . . .
“Yes,” I whispered.
Aunt Vera cast a spell on me to keep me from remembering—to protect me. It had always been about keeping mesafe, never about abandoning me to whatever the fates had in store.
I was pulled from this scene and into another.
My father and mother lay bleeding in front of our home while dregs stomped around us.
“Grab her,” a woman dressed in a black tunic and pants cried out shrilly. She landed a fearsome deep green beast nearby and leaped off its back, running toward me with a sword in her hand and blood trickling down her face. “Come with me, child. Please.”
When she stretched out her hand, I took it.
Agony lanced through my thigh as she hurried me to the enormous creature with wings as wide as the building I called home. With a muffled growl, it shot fire at the lumbering creatures who’d just killed Father and the mama who’d stroke my brow until I could fall asleep through the pain in my thigh.
I gaped at the beast. A dragon. Someone I once knew used to ride them but his had dark red scales. He told me one day, he’d let me pick a dragon for myself, that I could be a fearsome rider like him.
