Rose might’ve imagined that her mother flinched under her touch, a horse twitching off flies, but she slipped her hand off anyway.
“Thank you, Rose.” Clotaire offered a weak smile that faded almost before it began. “Everything I did, I did for you. And for Lily, too.”
Shoshan made a sound halfway between a growl and a scoff, but said nothing. Rose felt much the same way, also managing to hold her tongue pending the reveal of whatever secrets Clotaire had been keeping.
“You and your sister were born at dawn, a most auspicious time,” Clotaire began. “Lily right at the moment the sun crested the horizon and you a few minutes later.”
Rose knew this part, but didn’t interrupt to prod him along. In truth, part of her wanted to stop him, afraid of what she was about to learn about herself.
“It was a long labor. After the babies had been snuggled into their cradles, the midwife, Petra, gave Shosh a light enchantment to help her rest. You were sleeping deeply.” Clotaire moved as if to pat Shoshan’s hand, but she jerked it away. He continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “I came into the nursery that night, just at midnight, unable to sleep. I wanted to see my beautiful infant sorceresses again. But, I found Petra weeping over your cradle, Rose. Because you had died.”
Shoshan made another smaller and inarticulate sound, dropping her face into her hands.
“How did you know it was me?” Rose asked, feeling the strangeness of the question and story in the roots of her soul. If she had a soul.
“You had a birthmark,” Clotaire told her evenly. “The only distinguishing physical mark we’d found between you and yourtwin. A bit of discoloration under your right ear, a reddish purple, shaped a bit like a rose.” He tapped under his own ear in demonstration.
Involuntarily, Rose’s fingers rose to touch the spot. “I don’t have…”
“Not anymore,” he filled in.
“The birthmark,” Shoshan echoed in a ghostly voice. “I’d forgotten. You told me it faded.”
“I lied,” Clotaire replied steadily. “It wasn’t the first or last lie I told to preserve this incredible secret.”
“But Petra…”
“I told Petra to take the corpse away and prepare it for burial and I stood there, grieving, staring at your empty cradle, while Lily wailed inconsolably in hers. And the strangest thing I’ve ever seen happened then. Your infant sister opened a portal to the Dream, right there in your empty cradle, and—”
“Impossible,” Shoshan whispered, her face streaming with tears. “A newborn can’t perform sorcery like that.”
“Not usually, but prodigies happen,” Clotaire replied. “And I was the only one there besides that newborn oneiromancer. I don’t even have a drop of oneiromancy in me, to the despair of my family, as you know.” A bitterness that Rose had never witnessed filled his voice.
“What happened?” Rose asked in a tense whisper. Part of her, somewhere deep inside, almost,almostremembered this…
“She brought you out of the Dream, Rose,” Clotaire said softly. “Thorn brought you back to life, gave you a body made of the Dream. A perfect body, without flaws.” He tapped under his ear again. “No birthmark.”
“The realms of the Dream and Death aren’t the same,” Rose replied, that strange calm encasing her. Did she remember Death or… Maybe she remembered the Dream, the landscape that felt more like home than the waking world.
Clotaire waved that off. “A question for the philosophers. Not that they will ever know because no onecanknow about this. Don’t you see what we have here?”
“What I see is that I have two living daughters,” Shoshan ground out, then slashed a hand when Clotaire opened his mouth. “I don’t care if Rose came from the Dream,ifshe came from the Dream. All I know is I bore twin daughters and you…” She choked on the words. “You gave one of our babies—my child!—toJadato raise.”
Rose watched her father, still caught in that curious sense of distance. It was all true. She’d been made of the Dream by her astonishingly powerful infant sister. That’s why it felt like she had to recompose her body after traveling through the Dream. Shedidhave to. And Master Zoltan… he’d perceived something of that truth and it had shaken him.
Clotaire had trained his even, clear gaze on Shoshan. “It was necessary.”
“Necessary!” Shoshan spat. “How could you… Don’t you dare tell me you sacrificed a life, our daughter’s future, to one of your political schemes.”
He slammed a palm on the table, sparks flying from the contact, making Rose jump, though her mother seemed impervious. “It’s not some scheme, Shosh,” he bit out. “Don’t pretend to be a fool. You have to see how important this is. No one knew that we possessed two living daughters, both of them unprecedented in their own ways. One a prodigy, able to make a living human being from the Dream as an infant, entirely through native intuition, and the other a creaturemadeof the Dream. Not evenyouknew until this moment. It was a priceless opportunity.”
“An opportunity,” Shoshan whispered, staring into the distance. “Petra… she never came to see me again after that day. I thought it was grief over losing a child she’d delivered. I woke up and she had left to deliver another…” Her ice-blue gaze fastened sharply, hard as gems, on Clotaire’s face.
“She returned too soon,” he said with a semblance of a shrug. “And she knew about the birthmark.”
“Tell me Petra wasn’t harmed.”
“She wasn’t harmed,” he answered with such remote woodenness that even Rose knew it for a lie.
