My shoulder throbbed where Faun had stabbed it. Infection, maybe, or just the herbs wearing off. One of my eyes still didn’t open, and my face felt tight and fat.
I thought of Dorian, where he was, and whether he was safe. Maybe he was still headed to the iron gates. Maybe he would pass through them and never return to Feyreign.
I hoped that was true.
Alone down here, the landscape of my feelings became less muddled. It had begun during the first trial, in Thalassa’s hedge home. It was the night I’d sat above him and sewn his wounds together. Thatlook.
No, I realized with a start, it was before that.
It began that first night, when I was shivering. He’d wrapped himself around me in my sleep. He had kept me warm.
That was when flint and tinder had sparked—that morning, waking to his breath on my ear, unconscious and warm. Every day we were together, I carried that memory like I was still in the alcove with him wrapped around me. Walking, running, drinking, but always in the alcove, always enclosed by him.
And at some point it had tipped into desire.
But when I kissed him—when I pulled him into me with my own strength in that cave—that something changed. That was when it settled, weighty and real. His mouth had tasted of blood and breath and warmth, the press of him inevitable.
And now I couldn’t deny it. I had fallen so fucking hard, I would rather stay a prisoner in Feyreign forever if it meant he was alive somewhere up there.
I wished we were still in that cave. I wished we had never left.
On some level I knew I had entered the kind of shock I’d felt after the southern district was attacked. Waves of feeling hovered just below my chin, wanting to overtake me, but I forced myself to stay head-above-water. Maybe I had never allowed myself to feel the grief of what had happened that night in the Dip. Since then, death had always been around the corner, and I had learned to keep moving.
Rhiannon’s handmaidens had left me my cloak, my crystal, and my mother’s journal. I wrapped my cloak around me and removed her journal from my jerkin. I slid my hand over the supple leather and set it against my cheek. My eyes closed, and I could almost smell her.
I lifted the crystal, opened to the first page—where her script was written in a tight scribble across the paper, familiar enough from childhood—and I began slowly to decipher each shape.
My love,she’d written.You were born today, during a storm.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I readher journal for hours, deciphering it one shape at a time. I read about my infancy, my early childhood. I was a baby born under a round moon, a baby with eyes like well water. The first time I walked, it was to a window. The first time I formed a sentence, it was a question—“Where wall?”
The first time I snuck out, I was five. She watched through the window as I met Theo at the corner, and the two of us ran off toward the wall. She didn’t sleep until I returned, but pretended to snore when I did.
She knew every time I left the house at night. Every time. She watched, she waited, she pretended to sleep.
She never once stopped me. Never a sharp eye, never a word. Because, as she wrote one day when I was eight,Stopping you would be stopping the rain. Impossible.
The deeper into the pages I read, the clearer it became: the entire journal was about me. Every day she had written in it—a few lines, usually—about something I had done or said.
Everything delighted her. Everything was fascinating.
Each entry was addressed to me, asthough she was watching me as she wrote, as though she was penning a letter I would someday read.
She wasn’t wrong, in the end.
On my ninth birthday, she wrote,I baked you a wheaten cake, and you gave me the first piece. For me, you said, who you love best.
I set the journal down in my lap. I had forgotten about that cake. I had forgotten about that day.
She whom I loved best. Yes, yes, it was true.
How had I forgotten? How had I fucking forgotten?
It was like she and I had lived different lives. Together, yes, but as though a skein lay between us. She saw what I did not, and I saw…
I saw a bread-baker.
