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No, not a stranger.
I hinted a quick curtsy. “Lord… Batana, correct?”
Lorn’s fated mate.
“You can drop the lord for all I care for, Lady Galantia. It’s just Aros,” he said with a scoff and hoisted a saddle over the nearby wooden stall rail. “The prince figured I had better chances to entice my mate to bond if I had lands, a castle, and called myself a lord. If anything, that fucking title made her loathe me even more.”
My mind went back to how Lorn had punched him, how she’d refused him in the forest. “I didn’t know that fate could be quite so stubborn.”
“We call iturdvri,” he said and lifted his hand to the gelding’s head, rubbing beneath its forelock. “When something happened in the past that shouldn’t have happened, usually because one of us fates interfered, trying for a different outcome in the future. It twists everything that should have been, making it a fucking impossibility. Fates may see the future, but the goddess never intended for them to alter it. It only ever ends in chaos.”
“You can see the past?”
“Yeah, that’s just my fucking luck, that I get to see your father’s henchmen rape my mate over, and over, and over again. See her tears, hear her whimpers. And there is nothing I can do because the past is written in stone.”
I didn’t want it to, but a hairline crack slinked across my heart for her. “I’m sorry for the pain my father caused your people.”
“I’m sorry for the pain your father caused you, little white dove,” he said and walked off, but not without stopping and glancing back at me once more. “I cannot see how it fits together, but… the goddess showed me this moment of your life so many times during yourkjaer,it seems relevant enough to mention.I love you so much.”
I arched a brow at him. “Pardon me?”
“Your mother’s words to you shortly after your birth.”
My throat narrowed to the width of a hair. “That doesn’t sound like my mother at all.”
“She said it a dozen times as she gazed down at you, her bright blonde strand clasped between your chunky fingers,” he said and walked off, already having brought several steps of distance between us before he added, “Oh, and she said she’s sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” I called behind him.
He only shrugged.
ChapterThirty-Nine
Sebian
Present Day, Sage Passage
The Sage Passage was as cold as a widow’s heart, gnawing through our down. Beneath us, sleeping trees spread out, bare as bone, arms reaching up to the dreary gray sky. Our eyes cut through the heavy snowfall, sharp and unerring. The wind was a bastard, its icy bite never letting up, forcing us to work our wings harder, driving old pain into marred skin and damaged joints. Where was this damn convoy?
Ahead, the road snaked through untamed land, marked deep by cart and wagon wheels, the muddy grooves slowly drowning beneath a new layer of snow. Then we spotted them, a line of slow-moving figures trudging along the path. Finally!
Beneath us, hidden daggers and chainmail glinted, standing out starkly against the white landscape. Even from this height, we could count at least seventy men, each puffing plumes from heated lungs after a day’s worth of marching alongside those carts. To do what, exactly? Protect turnips and sacks of barley from thieves? In a Raven-controlled area where harvests had been plentiful?
The number of Lord Taradur’s soldiers accompanying those carts and wagons was enough to guard a treasury—not food, no matter the desperation in those villages surrounding Tidestone. Something was more off than a three-legged stool with Malyr’s story. What was he keeping from me? And why?
With a final powerful flap of our wings, we descended upon the rear of the last wagon in the long procession. The cold air whooshed past us as we swooped down, landing with a gentlethudon the worn wooden tailgate. Plumes of shadows engulfed us, allowing me to shift into my human form, the transition greeted by gasps and curses from unsuspecting soldiers.
One of them, a boy barely past his sixteenth summer by the looks of it, jumped back with a yelp, his spear clattering to the frozen ground. His wide eyes flickered between me and the piece of iron he’d dropped.
“By the bloody gods!” he shouted and scrambled for his weapon, scooping it up and leveling it at me with shaking hands.
“Easy now.” I held one hand up, squatting to reach my other hand to the tightly-woven burlap that covered the goods. “Just going to peek under this—”
The blade of his spear clanked against the fastener of my bracer, shoving my arm away. “Get away from the cargo, Raven!”
“Raven?” I asked, not liking how his shout had drawn the attention of too many other soldiers, letting some of them hurry down with their hands on the pommel of their swords. “It’s the Raven prince who keeps you and your family fed, so I suggest you stop throwing around that word as if it’s an insult.”
His brows furrowed, clearly thrown by my words, and he defensively sidestepped while following the wheels’ squeaking turns. “Human or Raven, I am to guard these wagons with my life, and not let anyone near them.”
