“He’s hiding himself again?”
“Maybe.” Or maybe this was just another effect of his prior attack. Maybe he’d well and truly broken me.
“Is there nothing that can help you?”
“I don’t know. Luna is looking.”
He nodded. “If you need something, just tell me. I’ll find it.”
“Right now, I need to get off this balcony.”
When we made it back inside, he gave instructions to a nearby guard to bar the door to the balcony, then walked me back to my room and helped me climb shakily onto the bed. I toed off my shoes.
“Thank you,” I said. “And sorry for the trouble.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. But you should rest.”
“I will.”
He turned for the door, and I found myself disappointed that he was going, and wishing that I had some reason to ask him to stay. Which was ridiculous, so I said nothing. “Be careful, Your Highness. Just in case anything else is rotten.”
“I’ll have someone take a look.”
“At all of it. Just in case.”
“At all of it,” he agreed. And if my eyes hadn’t been closing, I think I’d have seen him smile.
Nineteen
Iwas falling, tossed through the sky as if by a giant’s hands, and then I landed on soft grass, the sky brilliantly blue above me and the world full of promise. I heard a child’s giggle and realized the sound had come from me.
“Supper!” called out a familiar voice, and I sat up and saw a man wave at me from the pretty courtyard of a pretty house, beneath a flowering tree.
I rose and ran toward him, the dandelion I’d plucked squeezed in my tiny hand, the seeds shedding with each footstep.
When I reached him, he crouched down and smiled at me with adoration. “What have you got there?”
“Flower,” I said, and held it out to him. He laughed and looked it over, the stem broken, the thistles mostly gone. “It’s beautiful. Thank you for bringing it to me.”
He rose and held out his hand for mine. “Let’s find Mama and have some food.”
I took it, and we walked together into the house, oblivious to the shadow that was creeping across the courtyard.
Sunlight was slanting across the room when I shuddered awake.
The images began to fade immediately, but I sat up, forcing myself to see them again, to commit them to memory. I wouldn’t forget again.
I’d seen my father. There’d been fewer lines across his face, fewer scars, smaller shadows in his eyes. I didn’t have memories of him healthy and happy—not both together. In the limited time I remembered before the Lady, he’d been weakened by a trauma I didn’t remember, one hip causing nearly constant pain, gnarled scars across the back of his left hand that led deeper into his sleeves. He’d never let me see how far they stretched, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever thought to ask. They were just part of him.
This dream, these fragments, opened a small window into my memories, and I remembered the woman, and the blood. She was my mother, and the blood had been hers.
Little wonder I had an aversion to it now. Maybe my body remembered, even if my mind didn’t.
Was that the trauma that had hurt my father? Had she died from her wounds, leaving us alone to scrape by?
We’d been running, I realized with a start. Never staying too long in one place, never long enough for me to make friends. Never making eye contact.
Never be noticed.That lesson hadn’t just been about theft, but about survival. Who did he believe was chasing us? The same people who’d killed my mother?
