A smile lit his face, an emotional nod encouraging me to read on.
I devoured the letter, reading it over and over again as if the words might change from one reading to the next, but they didn’t.They stayed the same, speaking to a piece of my heart I thought had died long ago.
“Is it true?”I asked, tears slipping down my cheeks.
He nodded, his own eyes shining.
And I wept.
Wept with sorrow, with happiness, and for the first time in a longlongtime—with hope.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Valeris
Paravellia would neverbe the same again, but maybe it could be better.
The entire kingdom attended my parents’ funeral, but they did not mourn.They were not rulers to be missed.If anyone was to be missed, it was Zandyr, and he was.While there was nothing traditional or conventional about our family relationship, the void of three different people made itself known in my heart—even if I didn’t miss them as much as I knew I should.
Had it once again not been for my uncle, I didn’t know how I would have gotten through it.I returned the ring to him without asking any questions, and he slid it onto his finger like it had never left.Both of us were aware of how very different our lives could be right now if not for Analleia’s quick thinking.
I strolled the corridor to her room, fidgeting.The memory of carrying her to the physicians, both of us drenched in her blood, haunted me both in dreams and in waking.I had thought she was dead, that I had lost her, and I didn’t know if I could live with that.
I hesitated outside her door, pacing and worrying my lower lip.What was I going to say?Maybe I had misread her.Misread us.
I bolstered my courage and knocked on the door, waiting for an answer.
“Come in,” her voice called out.
My throat bobbed as I opened the door.She wore riding breeches and a tunic, her hair braided back as if she was preparing for a long journey.A bandage wound around her head, and I couldn’t remove the picture of her covered in blood from my mind.
“You’re alive,” I stated, at a loss for anything else.
She faced me, betraying no emotion.“So it would appear.”
“What a shame,” I said.“To have even the dead reject you.”
