Sleep came soon afterward. Fitful. Shallow. She dreamed that David stood at her bedside, gaze flickering over her, cataloguing every flaw, but when she woke the next morning, she was alone.
Anna’s head ached and her ears rang. The gray vision replayed against her eyelids.
The plague is not coming. I am already here.
What did it mean? And why had it chosen her as a herald? Would it return?
Most importantly, whowasshe? Now more than ever, she needed to understand her origins.
You have a bigger role in this story than you know.
Princess.
What could it mean? Would she ever find out?
Autumn was the first to check on her, sometime after sunrise. Anna attempted to rise from the bed, but a wave of dizziness toppled her right back onto the sheets.
“Whoa,” Autumn said, rushing to right her. “I’m going to fetch some help.”
Anna nodded and drifted back to sleep.
When she woke again, the spae who trained Cole was at her bedside, her hands pressed to Anna’s temples, eyes closed.
“I see nothing wrong, sir,” she said, and Anna searched the room to find Sean standing near the windows, arms crossed, expression inscrutable. “You said she saw something?” the spae prodded. “What was it?”
Sean shook his head. “A gray being, she said.”
Head pounding, Anna floated back toward the oblivion of sleep, waking only when the spae asked her to drink a pain tonic that did nothing but put a bad taste in her mouth.
The next time she woke, Maddy sat at her bedside, knitting.
“Maddy?”
The girl jerked her head up, her scarf dropping to a table as she rushed toward Anna, perching at the bed’s edge. “How are you feeling?”
Anna managed a short conversation and asked for some food, but she fell asleep before it arrived.
Besides Maddy, a rotating menagerie of people visited her temporary bedroom—Cole and Autumn, Kywyn and Elenya, even Cathaire and Leyla. The spae returned daily, but her report remained the same.
Mostly, she spent her convalescence with Sean.
It was Sean who brought her food. Sean who sat with her late into the night when the headache kept her from sleep. Sean who helped her to the chair beside the windows so she could stare atsomething other than the ceiling, always mindful never to brush her skin.
“I was careful what I told the Council,” he said one evening, two nights after the vision.
“Yeah?”
Uneasy blue eyes slid her way. “I didn’t mention what the creature said about you. I only said that it had threatened me. I didn’t want them suspicious of you.”
“I would never join someone who planned to kill you.”
His answering smile was soft. “I know.”
With a sigh, Anna stared out the window, the starry night reflecting over the pristine blanket of snow coating the forest. “I’ve wondered my whole life who my mother is. Now I’m not sure I want to know.”
“Sure you do,” he said. “You’re not a coward.”
Anna was no longer certain of the truth in that statement. She was terrified to learn the truth. Whose blood ran in her veins? Who gave her this magic?
