That Dinah will not choose to throw her Goddess’s gifted to the king’s dire wolves.
My eyes scan her face for any sign of movement, but she doesn’t react the way I expected. She does not rear back. There is no shock. No denial. Only a long, searching look, as though she is measuring the safest possible response.
She knows something.
I’m sure of it.
I hold my silence and pray that she will fill it with the answers I desperately need.
‘Then we must speak of your mother,’ she says at last.
I frown. ‘What? Why?’ My heart thunders in my chest. What has my mother got to do with the Issen powers I possess?
It makes no sense.
Dinah’s gaze flicks away, her magic brushing the courtyard like a careful hand smoothing water. She is laying further wards around us.Despite her earlier reassurances, she does not think the existing protections in place are sufficient.
When she speaks again, her voice is barely more than a breath. ‘Because, my child, some legacies do not sleep as deeply as we hope.’
Legacies? My frown intensifies. ‘I don’t understand.’
Mother’s magic was green.Always.She dealt with healing, with flow and growing. Not once did I ever see the slightest hint of ice.
‘You raised her,’ I began. ‘Did you see?—’
‘We must not speak of it baldly,’ Dinah warns me. ‘Even here, within this warding, there are those who canhear.’
I think of poor Loch’s power and nod grimly. Riddles and half-truths it is, then. The national speech of Wrohelm.
‘She never spoke of it,’ I begin, hurt to think she might have kept something like this from me.
‘She would not,’ Dinah interrupts gently. ‘And not because she wished to deceive you, but because she was unable to.’
With a slight sigh, she presses a hand to her temples and clearly tries to work out what is safe to say. ‘Your mother was brought to the temple as a child.’
‘Yes, as a baby,’ I say, reminding her that I already knew this.
She shakes her head. ‘No, not as a baby. She was a child. Old enough to speak. Old enough to remember a little.’
A chill creeps into my spine. ‘Remember what?’
Dinah’s mouth tightens. ‘Enough to be afraid.’
My throat dries instantly as questions form in my mind. Questions I’m not certain I want answers to.
‘Afraid of what?’ I whisper.
‘Of being seen too clearly.’ Dinah presses her lips together, disapproval in every line of her face as she whispers the next confession. ‘Your mother … she took gladden root.’
My jaw drops open.
My mother made herself forget? What could be so heinous from her past that she wanted to wipe it from her own mind?
‘More than once,’ Dinah continues. ‘Not because she was in pain, or ill, but because remembering frightened her more than forgetting.’
My chest is so tight that each breath is an effort against the cage of my ribs. ‘You’re saying she erased her own memories.’
‘Yes.’ Dinah’s voice softens. ‘And each time, when I told her again what she had decided to forget – because I thought it was safer if she knew – she chose to forget it all over again.’
