“Congratulations!” She throws both arms around my neck, nearly knocking me into Mara’s lap. “Oh, this is the best news. Now we can trade off babysitting duty, you watch my two terrors and I’ll take your little one?—“
Mara laughs again, her tail swaying behind the chair, the worry gone for now, and I’d give the Glen, the crown, both my hands to keep it like that.
Nala steps back, beaming between us, and I turn to my mate.
“I have to go up to the Conjuring Hall,” I tell her. “Talk to my mother and my sisters about something. You want to come with me?”
Mara’s eyes lift to mine, the nerves right there in them again, the question she hasn’t asked. For half a second I think she’s going to say yes, and I don’t know whether I’m hoping for it or dreading it. Then she shakes her head.
“Nala said she’d give me some ideas for the nursery,” she says. “We were just getting to the good part.”
The relief comes first, and the shame right behind it. I’m not ready to say it in front of her, not yet, not until I have the words in an order that won’t break her. But I won’t lie to her either, and if she’d stood up and taken my hand I’d have let her walk in there and hear all of it.
“I’ll catch you later, then?” I lean in and kiss her once more, soft.
She nods against my mouth. “Later.”
I straighten and make myself walk away from them, their heads already bent together over our future. I head for the Conjuring Hall.
The great doors swing open for me before I reach them, sensing me. The hall opens up tall and round inside, the conjuring marks burning faint gold in the floor. My mother and my sisters are up on the second tier at the rail, the four of them turning toward me as I climb the stairs.
Tiana folds her arms across her chest and arches a brow at me.
“About time you showed up,” she says.
“Hey, baby.” My mother’s voice is softer, but her eyes are sharp on me, already reading more than I want her to. “You ready to tell us the news?”
I roll my eyes, and standing in front of them, some of the weight slides off me. “I swear, word travels faster than light. I haven’t told a soul.”
“You didn’t have to.” Samara is already coming for me, my smallest sister, launching herself across the tier and wrapping me up hard enough to rock me back a step. She looks up at me, glowing. “I’m going to be an auntie! Tell me, tell me—is it a boy or a girl?”
I look at her, and under everything else, under the goodbye, the Glen, the crown waiting at the bottom of it all, there’s this one clean true thing, and I let myself feel it.
“A boy,” I tell her.
44
Aaron
My mother hasn’t stopped talking since I said the wordboy.She’s got both hands going, painting the whole future in the air in front of her, and it’s a good future—a second cabin out at House of Zorah, close enough that the cub grows up under all of them, Sunday dinners, the girls trading off so Mara can teach. She’s wanted us pulled in tight like this her whole life, and now that she finally has it she’s holding on with everything she’s got. I stand in the middle of it and make myself memorize her like this, happy, because I’m the one who’s about to take it from her.
“That’s what I came to talk about.” The room quiets around the words. Tiana stops mid-laugh, Kiara’s hand drops off Samara’s shoulder, and my mother turns from the future she was building and lifts both hands, palms out, like she can hold off whatever’s coming if she keeps it far enough from her body.
I raise mine to match her, slow. “The Witching Glen needs a leader. What you’ve all been doing, taking turns going in, sitting with them—it’s good of you. It’s honorable. But it can’t hold. If those people don’t get someone to stand for them soon, they’llslide right back into what they were, and everything I tore out of that realm will have been for nothing.”
My mother comes a step closer. “And what exactly are you saying to me, Aaron?”
“Mother Fate handed me this magic, and I’ve been sitting on it a month, pretending I don’t know what it’s for.”
Tiana’s arms fall open. “No. Yousiphonedit. Out of every soul in that Glen. That’s how you got it, so don’t stand there talking about Fate’s gift like it fell out of the sky.” I cut my eyes at her, and she holds the look without giving an inch.
“No,” my mother says again, firmer, talking over both of us. “Absolutely not. You’re about to be a father. You’ve got bigger things in front of you than a realm full of strangers.”
My hands drop to my sides. “You think I want this? You’re wrong. There’s nothing in me that wants it. But I know I have to. You’re all hunting for a reason to keep me home, and I love you for it, but that’s not how Fate works.”
“Excuse me?” Her voice climbs.
“Ma—“
