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My throat tied up. “Pardon me?”
He exchanged a glance with the other guard, then gave me a sheepish smile. “I’ve never seen shadowcloth before.”
“Neither have I,” the other agreed. “Heard that one touch alone will burn a human’s skin clean off.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake…
Panic rose in my chest like a tide, threatening to drown my composure under its crushing waves. What now? Refuse to open the sack? Such resistance would only heighten their suspicion. Open the sack and attempt to convince them that the ruffled feathers inside were just part of the dress’s elaborate design? Set Marla free and face the consequences?
Gallows on a cliff, with the sea stretched out behind it. A golden-haired woman’s body dangling from a noose, drowning beneath salty waves.
Asker’s vision formed before my mind, turning each noisy beat of my heart into time drumming in seconds between my ears. What if I’d sealed my fate? What if I couldn’t simply shift and would end myself up at the gallows? After all, it had taken me nineteen years to do it for the first—
The sudden blast of a horn echoed through the cold night air. Were they attacking Tidestone? Already? Now? This night?
“I will come for you,”Malyr’s voice whispered between the incessant pounding of my heart.
The guard’s face bleached white under the flickering torchlight before he exchanged a terrorized look with the other. “It’s a call to arms.”
The horn’s call boomed again, louder, more insistent. Both guards turned away, sprinting from the beach and toward Tidestone fast enough the clank of metal against metal followed along.
I stood frozen for a moment, my breath a white puff of treacherous relief in the frigid air. “Malyr might get here sooner than I anticipated.”
Which meant Marla could find safety behind his lines, so I hurried toward the massive wooden hull of the anchored ship. With how tall it stood and the position of the moon, it cast an ever darker shadow over parts of the beach, where I lowered the sack to the ground for the ravens to hop and wiggle out.
Shadows writhed through the night, reshaping into Marla just as she stumbled against one of the wooden posts, clinging to it for balance. “There will not be much time.”
“Enough for you to tell me who I am,” I said. “All of Tidestone’s been called to the inner bailey for now. Please, tell me what you saw!”
Nodding, she turned until her back pressed against the looming post, the light reflecting from the snow behind us putting a faint glimpse into her eyes. “Your mother, yourrealmother, worked at—”
“Tidestone; I know that already,” I said, anxiously shifting from one leg to the other as I tossed the sack into the water and wrapped my cloak tighter around me. “She sold me to Lady Brisden for a purse of coins.”
Marla shook her head, and not even the darkness could hide the disbelief carved into her face in the shape of wrinkles forming across her forehead. “No, child. She didn’t sell you for coins.”
My mouth turned dry. “What? But… Lady Brisden…”
“On the day you were born, the premise of war already loomed over our kingdoms, with Ravens getting cursed out, refused entry to taverns, and even attacked by commoners all over Dranada,” she said. “Lilieth was a fate, much like my beloved Asker, gifted to see glimpses of the future. You were but a day old when the goddess showed her your death.”
My cheeks turned numb. “My death?”
“You were not supposed to live past the age of nine.” A shake of her head. “It is not for us to question fate, let alone interfere. Lilieth ought not to have done it, yet, as a mother, I cannot hold it against her. The goddess knows I would have done the same, had she showed me that one winter night.”
When her daughter had died…
“Asker told me. I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “But I still don’t understand. Why give me away?”
“To keep you safe, Galantia,” she said, her words like a soothing caress that slowly wrapped around my heart. “She saw the war and the devastating outcome, should anybody learn who you are, causing her little girl’s death during the siege of Valtaris.”
But that made no sense. “Why Valtaris?”
“That was where you would have lived, so you may grow and prosper alongside your fated mate,” she said. Whatever did that mean? “She saw him in her visions. Saw the Raven boy you were fated to love, to cherish, to die beside as a child with him not much older. What better place was there to hide her little girl, but right beneath the nose of the man whose catapult was fated to kill her, had your mother not changed the trajectory of fate? She gave you up out of love, because she wanted you to live.”
Love.
That word washed over me, my legs weakening beneath the weight of the revelation. She hadn’t just gotten rid of me; no, my mother had given me away to save my life! My breath hitched as the profound depth of her love consumed me, filling the hollow caverns of my heart that had remained vacant all these years.
Not sold.
