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Dalyth looked impressed. "We may have something to work with after all. You even showed restraint."
"I saw what to do and I did it," I said, trying to sound indifferent. I didn't want her praise. Didn't want to feel good about pleasing her.
"That was incredible," Jezalyn said. "Just what this place needs, a nice breeze."
Her praise, on the other hand, warmed my omega heart.
The expression on Hycanthe's face was a bucket of ice, bringing me back down to earth.
"Thanks," I muttered. Even as I was enjoying her praise, I wanted to hear those words from Ryze. I wanted to see his usual smug amusement turn to admiration and pride. I needed him to tell me how amazing I was until all I could do was purr in response.
"Wind isn't very useful, is it, though?" Hycanthe said.
It would be if I wanted to knock her on her ass, but I just clasped my hands in my lap. "I guess not."
"Let's see if you can make something grow," Dalyth said to Hycanthe. They moved away to the edge of the atrium, to a pot in the corner.
"If she didn't hate my guts before, she does now," I said softly. I wasn't sure why it mattered. Hycanthe and I survived ten years of not getting along with each other. We could survive a lifetime.
"That's her insecurity talking," Jezalyn whispered. "I'd bet anything she wished she could do that too."
"She can do that better than I can." I nodded over to where Hycanthe was making a tomato plant grow from almost nothing, into a vine.
I stared.
In the back of my mind, a memory awakened. Slowly at first, then in a rush, like the river after the ice wall collapsed.
Not a tomato plant, but corn. My mother had nurtured seedlings in the potting shed. Dozens of them. She and my father had carried them out of the shed and planted them in neat rows in the dirt. I’d helped them, for hours, getting dirtier and dirtier, but loving every moment. After all the seedlings were safely planted in the ground, they told me to go and play.
I'd run off, but rather than playing like they said, something made me stop and hide behind the wagon. I crouched down and peered between the wheels. Watched as my mother knelt in the dirt beside the seedlings.
One by one, she made them grow. In a minute or two, several were a couple of metres tall. Cobs already grew off them, encased in their green sheath.
This was like something out of the stories my grandmother told me while I was sitting on her lap. Tales of magic and Fae. That was all I thought they were. Until that moment.
Then, I couldn't comprehend what I saw.
I snuck out from behind the wagon to get a closer look.
She must have seen my movement, because she turned to me.
I couldn't remember her face, not clearly, but I remembered the way her hair always hung over her ears. I remembered how her face paled. Turned angry.
"Khala, go inside," she snarled.
I'd never seen her so furious. She raised a hand as though she was going to hit me. I let out a squeak, and turned and ran. I scurried into our house and hid under the table.
I stayed there until it was almost dark and my mother came in to start preparing the evening meal. Neither of us ever said a word about what I saw.
I must have pushed it out of my mind until now. What did it mean? My mother was Fae? Was the man I thought of as my father, my father after all?
She used to say her ears were scarred, from an accident, that was why she covered them with her hair. She refused to elaborate. Had I ever seen them? I didn't think so. If I had, I would have remembered seeing them end in a point. I was certain now that they would.
If they didn't, then she or someone else had done something to them. Rounded the tips so she could pass as human, perhaps. Gods, how had I forgotten all of this? What did it mean that I was remembering it now?
"Khala? Are you all right?" Jezalyn asked. "You're white as snow."
I blinked a couple of times, reorienting myself. I was in the atrium, in Garial, in the Summer Court.
