When Emma and I had gotten our skates off, the door opened again. Emma’s expression brightened as she turned, watching Kalina and Kazim run forward. “There you are.”
She stooped down to sweep Kalina into her arms. Kazim was below us, bouncing up and down, raising his arms and asking to be picked up. I scooped him up and fixed his hair, which was sticking up on one side. Lucien approached, keeping a fair distance as the twins clung to us.
“Did you enjoy your sleepover with your babcia and bapa?” Emma asked, tweaking Kalina’s nose.
“Kazim slept soundly,” Lucien replied. “Though Kalina stayed up nearly all night. She wanted to hear all my stories.”
“Of course she did,” I said. She was full of energy, and hardly slept. She always was ready for a new adventure, it seemed. I could barely keep up with her rowdy personality.
“How’s Mom?” Emma asked as Kalina wiggled in her arms, trying to escape.
“Doing well. The restaurant is back up and running again,” Lucien said.
Emma frowned. “I didn’t think it would take her this long.”
“Yes. She needed some… time.”
Lucien and Evonna had reconciled after Arthur’s death, though their relationship didn’t quite seem the same. They were together, and they were happy, but there was a sadness that hovered over their marriage that shadowed whatever they shared.
I held great respect for them, keeping themselves together after the loss of a child. Though out of the two, I think Lucien held the most guilt.
“I offered the Spring Queenyears off my lifein order to leave her island when I was a child,” Lucien had told me shortly after Arthur had died. “I believed she’d cut my life short, but now I understand that she bartered for my son’s existence, and not mine. A true fae trick, to ask for your child’s life instead of your own.”
“Fae contracts are never straight forward. You couldn’t have known,” I’d insisted.
“All the same. It is my fault my son is gone, and none other.”
I hadn’t managed to convince him otherwise. He’d stopped drinking, and led somewhat of a productive life. But he’d refused teaching altogether, and had retired from everything that ever mattered to him, despite Emma and I’s protests.
He was content to live out the rest of his days as a grandfather, although I privately thought he was much too young to do so.
Some of us bore deeper scars from the war than others.
“Do you think you two will have another baby?” Odette asked Delmare curiously as she came out of a spin.
“We’ll have as many as the gods are willing to bless us with,” Stefan said.
“Or as many as I can stand,” Delmare joked. “What about you?”
“I’ve got my hooves full with three rambunctious, spirited girls,” Theo stated, and Odette giggled. “That’s quite enough.”
Emma and I hadn’t discussed the idea of attempting for a biological child of our own, because there was no desire to, from either of us. Kazim and Kalina might as well have been my own flesh and blood. They were my son and daughter, and the best of my life. I would devote the rest of my existence to raising them, giving them everything I had.
Emma and I set the twins down, and they ran off to play with the triplets. Lucien strode forward with his hands in his pockets. “Your mother and I have been to Eiragrad recently. I must say,dzika, well done.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s the Unseelie fae. They’re putting in all the work,” Emma said.
“All the same, it was your idea, and you should be honored for it,” Lucien said.
Emma had begun an Unseelie settlement in Eiragrad. The previously empty city was now bustling again with all kinds of dark fae. Many of the citizens of Trua Gleann had moved there to start a new life. It was the official fae capital in Edinmyre, and the Unseelie city would be Emma’s legacy as she grew it to become a safe haven for all Arcanea.
A quiet moment stretched on, before Lucien said, “There have been sightings. Of a raven-haired child that resembles the former queen.”
I knew what he was getting at. After the final battle, Signe had gone missing. Gabby’s daughter had vanished once we’d reclaimed Dolinska, and no one had any clue as to where she might’ve gone. It was presumed the child was dead, a casualty of the war, although there was no way to know for certain.
“And the sightings will continue, as long as the fae continue their love of rumors,” Emma replied. “They don’t mean anything to us.”
We hadn’t dispatched spies to search for Signe, and refused to do so. An error, some would say, but we refused to fear an innocent. Perhaps Signe would pose a threat when she was grown, many years from now. Or perhaps we’d never hear of her again. What would be would be, and there was no point in continuing to worry. Hunting her down would turn us, and possibly, her, into the very monsters we feared, and we wouldn’t be responsible for causing trauma to a child.
