AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I loved teasing him. He never knew how to handle it, and it was so endearing. I loved how flustered he got. He could face anything on the battlefield and win, but he struggled with normal interaction, even with those of us so close to him.
“I said,” he responded gruffly, “you have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to loving touches. You’re in a closer relationship with your books than any living creature.”
I laughed with glee.
“Maybe you could show me one day.”
“Like hell,” Dex said, frowning deeply, but I was almost sure his cheeks were turning red.
I opened my eyes and blinked at the wads of silk that hung from my four-poster bed. The sun fell through the windows at a strange angle. It was much later than I usually awoke.
I pushed up in bed, feeling groggy. The sun shone outside, but I felt somber, my mood gray as the skies had been when it had rained so much.
I rested my hand on my belly. I was starting to show. It wasn’t a lot—I carried very small—but the bump was there. When I wore my robes, it didn’t show at all, and I could still hide that I was pregnant, but hiding it from the world didn’t change that I knew about it, and that I was terrified of it.
I was going to have a child. Dex’s baby.
The dream I’d had came back to me. That hadn’t been a dream—the details had been too specific, the events and conversation too chronological. That had been a memory.
Did that mean I was remembering? Did it mean the past was coming back to me?
I walked to the bathroom to relieve myself and shower and get ready for the day. I had reading to do, and then I would walk in the gardens with Ellie.
Time was strange these days. It had started almost two months ago when I’d woken up not knowing who I was—that was all I had to work with. I’d lived a whole life, but I had nothing to show for it. All I could remember about who I was and what I’d done amounted to the two months that had passed.
Dex filled my mind while I showered. I’d heard he’d left the palace a while ago, asking to be stationed somewhere else. He’d never left before, apparently, and everyone had been upset he was gone.
I was relieved. I didn’t know how to deal with what was happening to me—the baby I carried, the affection I must have felt for him before, the spark of attraction that had been between us the last time I’d seen him. That was almost a month ago, now.
It was better that he was away so that I could take the time to get used to the fact that I would be a mother, and that I would have to do this without having my past experiences to guide me. I was five hundred years old, Ellie had said, but with the memory of no more than two months.
That was already a lot to deal with without having to face a relationship with a man I didn’t know and raising a baby with—or without—him.
I got dressed and walked to the library so that I could read. Ellie had given me a stack of books to get through. They were all about our history as Fae. She’d told me they were the same books I’d given her to read when she’d needed help knowing who she was and where she’d come from. It was ironic that the tables had turned, and instead of me guiding her, it was the other way around.
Knowing what the history of our kind was helped in some ways—I felt like I understood who I was when it came to magic. It didn’t help me know who I was as a person.
I didn’t have the heart to tell Ellie what she’d hoped would work, hadn’t. She tried so hard, and as long as I had these books to read, I had something to keep me busy, to keep my mind from wandering.
Today, it didn’t work. I struggled to concentrate. My mind wasn’t so much the problem as my heart was. I felt hollowed out and empty, like I’d lost something big, like I’d been shaken to my core, and I didn’t know what it was or why I felt this way.
When Ellie and I walked in the garden, the sun beat down on my face. I closed my eyes and tilted my head up, drinking in the warmth.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in a maze, and I can’t find my way out,” I confided. “And sometimes, there’s this tiny ray of light, guiding me for a moment.”
“A tiny ray of light?” Ellie asked.
“I had a dream,” I said.
“Really?”
I’d told Ellie that I didn’t dream, I didn’t see anything other than what I took in when I was awake. No dreams, no visions, no prophecies.
“I told you it would come. What did you dream about?”
I was worried about her excitement. With excitement often came disappointment.
I told her what I’d dreamed, relaying the conversations we’d had. Ellie listened intently, her eyes wide by the time I was done.
