He fingered the hem of his cloak. “I saw your mother.”
Thia’s lips parted in surprise. “You what?”
He inspected the deck. “In the dream last night. It was—I had a memory. A real one, from before I was cursed.” He couldn’t quite keep the awe from his voice, despite his apparent irritation with her.
She didn’t doubt him. If the Losrohiri dance could summon Oskaren out of her curse for a night, surely it could break through Dess’s for a dream. “You knew my mother?”
“I think so,” he said, eyes wide. “I dreamed I was imprisoned within the Lightning Tower. She was there too. She…didn’t say anything. But she looked like you. Older though. And her hair was redder.”
Thia tucked her knees up to her chest. “She didn’t say anything?” How disappointing, to finally have access to a real memory of her mother in Eldris, of what might have been some of her last days, for it to be nothing but an image of her face.
“I’m sorry,” Dess said. “She was humming, though.” He imitated the tune, which Thia recognized immediately.
“‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”
Dess frowned. “What?”
“It’s a song. A children’s rhyme from my world.”
“Oh.”
They sat in silence, listening to the gentle prattle of rain on foliage.
“Why do you think it showed me that?” Dess asked, after a long moment.
To haunt her with a memory of nurture she had never experienced? But she swallowed her bitterness and focused on his young face. “I don’t know. It didn’t show me anything useful either.” Deciding it was worth the invasion, she asked Thran, “What about you? What did you see?”
Thran offered a sad twist of his mouth. “Nothing helpful to us, lass. I saw my family—before everything that happened.”
She nodded sympathetically. “Oskaren?”
Across the ship, the girl cast her a look Thia couldn’t decipher. “Is it really a mystery?” she asked, echoing her words from last night, when Thia had asked for the meaning of Faelyn. And she knew. Oskaren had seen her home.
She didn’t understand why the Mirror had shown the other three something similar, and her different. Each of them held something from their pasts before the king had destroyed them. In contrast, Thia’s was not a comforting memory, and it was the most recent of the four of them.
“Yes, it is,” Dess said in response to Oskaren’s question, unaware it had been for Thia alone.
The girl just gave him a cold glare and said, “Pity for you then,” before focusing on the river ahead.
“Dess,” Thia started, when he winced, stung. But the boy shrugged her off, standing.
“I just thought you should know,” he said, a bit harshly, and returned to the center of the ship, leaving Thia to stare after him.
Was this how their journey would end then? With distance and tension there was no solution for?
Alone at the stern, Thia felt despair creep in. Even if they were successful, if they killed Xercae and returned her head to the king, there could be no real victory, not for all of them. Oskaren would still be cursed. And then what—Thia would just leave?
What alternative was there? If she stayed here, fought with them against his tyranny, became the Storm Crow—
She would never see Riley again, never see her grammy. Never hear her out, never make it right.
The Mirror of Souls had offered no guidance, despite what Lythia implied. Instead, it taunted her, throwing her feelings in her face and reminding her through Dess that even her own mother, for all that she was a mage, had died here, leaving Thia an entire world waiting with expectation for her to take up the mantle. The irony wasn’t lost on her: she’d been killing herself to live up to her mother’s false legacy, only to find out she might literally die for the real one.
She wasn’t a hero. She’d never known that mother; she’d been raised by a grammy who’d kept her close and taught her the importance of home.
And that was the problem, the very reason she was crumbling. What did home mean when it was only a reminder of what you’d lost?
She tucked her knees up to her chest and, this time, couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.
