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“You will tell me this instant if you failed once again, putting war at our very doorsteps.”
“Failed?” Because that assumption just lay so much closer to her than the idea that we might have been betrayed. “I will not tell you a thing until I know who I am.”
“Do not be so difficult for nothing,” she snipped. “Your life is as much at stake as ours.”
“Is it? Because, should there be war at our doorsteps, then I have wings to carry me elsewhere.” How to shift, I didn’t know, but it couldn’t be too difficult to somehow… make it happen again, right? “What about you, Mother? How do carriages usually fare against the speed of a black cloud of Ravens chasing after it?”
She stared at me for molar-grinding seconds, then pulled a wooden stool from beside the partition, onto which she lowered herself down while draping my dress over her lap. “I do not know who you are.”
So much for answers…
I lowered myself into the water, my hope for answers right along with it. “Surely you must know how I ended inside a cradle donning the Brisden banners.”
“Very well…” She folded her hands over the shadowcloth, thumbs nervously fumbling with the fabric, her stare losing itself in its black weave. “That spring, I woke thinking my waters had broken overnight. It was blood,” she said with the slightest of trembles in her voice. “Eight hours it took me to birth him, my son. My well-formed, handsome, golden-haired son. He was perfect, and he was… dead.” Her eyes blinked in quick succession. “That was after King Omaniel stole King Barats’ betrothed.”
A lie, but there was no point in mentioning it when I was after my own truth. “Go on.”
“When I was sent to marry my lord husband, I thought a titled woman’s plight was having to bear all his children,” she said. “The true plight was bearing him none. I knew that, should he return home and find yet another small grave, freshly filled-in, after war loomed over humans and ravenkind, he would put me aside or worse. But then I learned of a baby that, only two days prior, had been born to one of the kitchen helpers who tended the gardens. A healthy, red-cheeked thing with creamy-blonde hair, just like her mother.”
My throat narrowed. That would mean that my birth mother had been a white Raven, working—and likely hiding—at the Brisden household. “Me.”
She nodded. “A girl, yes, butalive. And so, I approached the servant, offering her more gold than she would ever see in a lifetime to give you to me. One night, after I’d dismissed everyone from service who’d seen my dead son, your mother came to my chambers in secret. She left with a purse of gold, leaving a child in the cradle.”
I love you so much.
Aros’ voice echoed in the back of my head. The lord of House Batana, Lorn’s fated mate, had told me in the Deepmarsh stables that he’d seen my birth mother speak those words to me as an infant. But how, if she’d given me away? Why was it so easy for everyone to just… get rid of me? How could she have truly loved me, yet exchanged me for a purse of coins as if I was merely a loaf of bread?
“My lord husband was not entirely satisfied with a girl, of course, but it gave him hope for a boy,” Mother—Lady Brisden—said, and the strangest sight curled her lips: a faint smile. “I was happy. After so many years, so many graves, I finally had a baby. I… tried to nurse you from my breast, but my milk had already dried up.” Another blink, followed by a sob that mangled the smile, then she rested her hand on the edge of the tub, as though she feared fainting and falling forward if she didn’t. “Oh, you cried so desperately out of hunger, Galantia, each piercing screech a reminder that you were not my child, and that I… I was not truly a mother. Would never be, no matter how hard I tried. And Itried, Galantia, I did try.For hours, I offered milk-soaked rags, held you, rocked you, sang to you, but you just… wouldn’t stop crying.”
I watched a tear roll over those hairline wrinkles that had started to form beneath her eyes a few years ago. A sight so unexpected, so at odds with her usually emotionless demeanor, it dug a pit into my stomach. I could hear the pain in the echo of her words, the heartbreak over wanting to love that baby—only to be rejected.
My throat narrowed when I lifted my hand, growing tighter when I reached it for Mother’s. All my life, I had lived under the weight of feeling unloved and rejected, when the bitter truth unveiled was that I, as an unknowing babe, had rebuffed her first. Had pierced her heart with the sharp edge of rejection before I could ever blame her for the same. She had wanted to love me, hadn’t she? And maybe, just maybe, she had loved me—if only for a day.
But the moment my hand landed on hers on the edge of the tub, she pulled away in favor of digging her fingers back into the shadowcloth, a final sniffle giving way to another sneer. “And when I hushed you, begged you to stop crying, all this… white down appeared around you. It clung to your cradle, your bonnet, the woolen blanket that wrapped you. You contorted, mouth twisting into something… monstrous. And I knew then what you were.” Her hard gaze lifted, but it was that upper lip, curled in disgust, that squeezed another trickle of blood from my mangled heart. “What youare.”
Her revulsion, so raw and undisguised, turned my stomach, a bitter taste flooding my mouth. “I was a baby, then a girl, then a woman, and all three never craved anything more than a warm look, a kind word, a gentle touch from you. How can you be so heartless?”
She looked up, piercing me with her stare. “Bury your thirteen children, Galantia. Do it, and then see what is left to judge of my heart.”
Thirteen children.
Thirteen.
That number sent a shudder down my spine, making me pull my steaming legs against my torso for warmth. “Where is my Raven mother now?”
“That… treacherous creature left Tidestone the day after she gave you to me. I do not know who your father is.” She rummaged through the fabric of my discarded dress, pulling on the belt until the little satchel Captain Asker had given me came into view. “Your birth had been announced, your health praised by the physicians. With Lord Brisden on his way to Tidestone, eager to see his first child that had not only lived for more than a few hours, but days, I had no other choice but to keep you. Risa was hired and instructed to keep you at her breast at all times.”
“She knew what I was.” Mother’s nod in my periphery wasn’t needed to confirm. The day Risa had found a white feather in my bedding in the tavern at that village? That strange look she’d given me? Yes, she’d known. And she’d loved me anyway, more than either of my mothers ever had. “It’s why you never allowed me to run, to ride, to play.”
To cry.
To live.
“Any pain or emotional overwhelm could have triggered a shift, putting me on the gallows and you into a cage of flames. As it will now, if anybody here finds out what you are.” She rose, turning toward the hearth. “This dress needs burning.”
I only nodded, staring at the ripples on the water’s surface as if I was watching my entire life the way I’d known it distort into something I couldn’t even recognize anymore. Like a thousand broken pieces, and none of them fit together. Why had my birth mother given me away so easily? And who was my father?
A void expanded at my core. With my birth mother disappeared, my father unknown, and no living soul who could provide answers, how could I possibly put myself back together if I had no idea who I truly was? Perhaps a halfblood? But even then…
