Page 94 of The Reaping Rose

“She doesn’t even want it,” Aurora grits out. “She doesn’t understand.”

“And you do?”

“Your mother⁠—”

“Is dead.” I cut her off, my stomach sinking as I say those words out loud. “The queen is dead, and what she wanted a century ago is not what we need now.”

“She saw something else.” Aurora’s gaze drifts outside. “Your mother understood.”

Two white birds perch on a branch nearby, sitting close. She doesn’t take her eyes off them. Sadness casts shadows in her eyes.

“Do you remember what the queen called me when she first brought me here?” Aurora asks, not taking her eyes off the branch, even as the birds flutter away.

“The caged bird.”

Aurora nods, her eyes finding me.

She’s the picture of composure, but I don’t miss that her fingers clench as she thinks of a darker time. Of the time we found her while on a training excursion in the forests between Andare and Zealeh.

We’d stumbled upon a village overtaken by ravagers. Aurora’s parents commanded them, and they had Aurora locked in a small obsidian cage. Never held. Never seen except for when they’d collect the drips of magic they drained from her.

For her first ninety-seven years, Aurora never saw a hint of light. Never felt the touch of another. Her blood was their faucet, and as her power grew, they fed on her over and over. She was used by those who birthed her.

Tortured.

My mother had Aurora brought to the palace after the fall of her village, and for a few years, Aurora never left her room. She became known as the caged bird by my mother and then our people, but she never liked the term.

“Yes.” Aurora turns to face me. “The caged bird your mother set free after what my parents had done. Only, I traded one cage for another, didn’t I? Although this one is much lovelier.”

“You are not required to stay,” I remind her. “I appreciate what you’ve done⁠—”

“But you don’t need me anymore.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Aurora frowns. “A caged bird is loyal, but not by choice. By necessity. For survival.”

“You’re free now.”

A sad smile crawls her lips. “None of us is free, Wilder. Not even you.”

A knot forms in my throat. “More has changed in the last hundred years than has stayed the same, Aurora. What was true then is not now. We can’t cling to the past.”

“Then what is the future?” Aurora asks, her shoulders pressed back.

I glance out at the darkness, considering her question. At the stars hanging above the trees.

“The future is what we fight for,” I decide. “Here with us. In Solace with Atlas. In the Mortal Realm with Elorie. The future is what we build when this is done.”

I used to be able to see that clearly. Know what was on the horizon for the kingdom. For the realm. Now, there are too many possible outcomes for anything to be certain.

Aurora steps forward, lifting a hand but then thinking twice of it as she relaxes it back at her side. “I hope you’re ready for what that means, Wilder. No matter how hard you’ve been fighting it. I hope you’re ready for our people and for yourself.”

She turns and walks away, a flutter of green disappearing into the darkness like the birds that once perched outside the window, and I know she’s right.

My mother is dead.

The realm has changed.