Tay seemed pleasant on the surface. Smooth like still water, but the queen’s enchantment was working beneath it. Sooner or later, it would be a problem.
Maris had found a way to make herself busy. She was packing their few belongings for the road. She straightened, turning to me, and her face lit with recognition. Other emotions flickered over it after. She was not entirely thrilled to see me.
“I’m taking you somewhere safer.” I wondered how much she remembered.
“To the rebel encampment.” She came closer, purposefully, as if she were trying to shut out her son. Quietly to me, she said, “You cannot trust him, but you must understand it’s not his fault.”
Well, that seemed to be a family trait: being untrustworthy and yet somehow blameless.
“I understand. I’m going to ask you all to accept a small enchantment that will keep you from remembering the route to the rebel encampment.” The queen removing it later would not change the altered memories they would form along the way or if they left. “Once we get there, Corbyn’s magic will shield us from the queen.”
“I feel as if I’ve been enchanted enough for a lifetime,” she said, a bit bitterly, but then caught my eye and added, “I understand why it is necessary.”
I nodded. “Thank you. I am sorry to do it. I understand what you lost.”
“Do you?” She tilted her head. It was a familiar gesture. “My time in the palace now seems like a dream. Or maybe a nightmare. But lately, it’s a dream I can better recall. I think I remember you. No, Iknowthat I do.”
“What do you remember?”
She took a long time answering, and into that moment, I found myself whispering in my own mind to Shadowbane. I didn’t even know what I was saying to him. I wasn’t asking for advice. Even though I didn’t know what to do.
“I’m here,”Shadowbane promised. The promise that I was not alone anymore, I never had to be alone again.
Unless, of course, I freed Cara from her bond.
“If it’s you that I’ve begun to remember, you were very small,” Maris said. “You carried a stuffed toy everywhere.”
“A raven,” I filled in.
“Yes, a raven. I think I remember bringing it to your bed when you were sleeping. I tucked it into your hands, and I wondered if someone would take it from you.” There was a question in her gaze. She looked at me as if it really mattered, as if she would be destroyed if it had been stolen from me.
I had brought the raven with me from the barracks today, afraid that the queen would destroy the barracks now thatwe were gone, or thinking, in that rather unfocused way one sometimes tries to cover up an emotional reaction with some messy logic, that perhaps Lidi would like the toy.
“I have it.” And then, ridiculously, I pulled it from my pocket. I felt like a fool immediately as her lips parted in surprise. “I do not usually carry it.”
Maris’s deep brown eyes flooded with sudden tears. “You have it? You had it all this time?”
Seeing her reaction, I did not feel quite so foolish for having carried it with me today. “It was a great comfort.”
“It all seemed as if it wasn’t quite real, but seeing it…. It always was real. Oh, Fear. I meant to come back. I’m sorry I never came back.”
Cara suddenly came to her mother’s side. She’d put Lidi down, and her gaze swept between the two of us, confused. She looked at me as if I had done something to her mother.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I survived.”
“You did more than survive. You have no idea how things have changed even in Stonehaven. People are full of hope. Because of you.”
It was a gratifying thought, especially from this woman who still meant so much to me, but I corrected it anyway. “Because of your daughter.”
“I’ve had the strangest feeling of something tugging at my memory every time I’ve seen a raven ever since. Or a crow, too, for that matter.” She smiled through her tears, and I found myself smiling as well. “Crows are much more common.”
Cara was still looking at the two of us as if there was something here she could not understand, and she did not like that.
As we were moving out into the green space in front of the cottage, Cara came so close her arm brushed mine. The impulseto touch the small of her back, to stay near her, flared, though I defeated it. Yearning for my own wife. How ridiculous.
“Maris looked after me when I was a little boy in the palace. From what I’ve heard, I was dreadful.” I confided in the Bismyth shifters who waited outside. Dairen looked up, grinning, as I’d intended.
But Cara was frowning, clearly in no mood for jokes.
