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“Come on now, bow,” his mother said with a nod of encouragement and more of her swatting motions. “Just like we practiced at home. Do it.”
The boy lifted his blue eyes to me, gulped, then bowed.
“I surely hope you do not expect that we will take him in,” I said. “Valtaris is not an orphanage for abandoned human children. The goddess knows we have enough children of our own who have lost their parents.”
“No, it’s nothing like that, Your Highness.” The man knelt beside his son, looking up at him with a gentleness I never remembered receiving from mine. That made me envious, too. “Show him, lad. Show the Raven king what you can do.”
A blink of his teary eyes, then the boy lifted his hand, only for white shadows to stream from his fingers. Thousands of hair-thin threads cascaded forward and down, weaning into what barely resembled a blanket.
“Goddess bless us,” Asker said, his mouth momentarily standing open. “A whiteweaver.”
“Well I’ll be fucking damned,” Sebian mumbled.
All warmth left my cheeks and fingers, leaving behind a strange tingle. A white Raven boy. How was this possible?
I rose and slowly descended the stairs. “How did you come by this child?”
“King Malyr…” The woman gave a curtsy, or something that wanted to be one. “We found him when he was maybe two, when we heard a child cry inside a farm near a road. There was nobody there; he was all by himself, soiled up to his neck and gaunt. We took him but we didn’t steal nothing. Twice, my husband went back to look for his parents, but nobody ever came back to that farm.”
“We have no children of our own,” the man continued. “So we took him in. Raised him as our son.”
Pain stabbed into my right temple, announcing a headache at the most inconvenient of times. They had… taken in a Raven boy? Raised him as their own? Protected him?
No. No, what they’d protected had been their own skins when they’d found out what he was. It couldn’t have been any other way.
I squatted before the cloth the boy had woven, and took in those pale strands as nuanced as Galantia’s. “Surely, it must have come as a shock to you when he shifted? Weaved shadows?”
“Shock?” The boy’s mother pressed a palm to her sternum and slowly shook her head. “No, Your Highness. We knew what he was when we found him.”
“There were white feathers everywhere,” his father said. “I’ve never seen no white Raven, only black ones. But when I tried to pick him up, he… his body twisted.”
“He was too hungry to shift,” the woman added. “But we knew.”
Another stab into my temple, as if this information collided with everything I’d known to be true about humans and their never-ending hatred for my kind. “Why did you take him?”
“Well…” The woman exchanged a confused glance with her husband, as though her answer was supposed to be clear to me, where I could barely line my thoughts up straight anymore. “He was a child, abandoned, crying, and hungry. What were we supposed to do?”
Stab him. Cage him. Burn him.
I lifted my hand before the boy, letting the shadows between my fingertips shape a horse close enough it brought a shy little smile to his face. “What is your name?”
He looked at his father and, when it was met with a nod, he looked back at me. “David.”
“He’s not the only one, Your Highness,” the man said, and goddess help me, this was getting worse with each word he spoke. “We never speak of it out of fear if King Barat ever sent soldiers through our farms, but… there are more.”
More Raven children.
Saved. By. Humans.
“Our cart is frozen into the earth,” the man said. “My wife and I will be on our way just as soon as we managed it free, we will. But…” He bit back a sob. “We cannot take David with us, not where we’re going. It’s too dangerous, so we were hoping, Your Highness, that you would—”
The boy threw himself into his father’s embrace. “Don’t leave me here, Father. Please.”
My molars ground together until they ached at the roots, amplifying that headache, cleaving through years and years of my screwed perceptions. Back at Deepmarsh, Galantia had put her prejudice aside, extending us Ravens her kindness. And if I managed to fall in love with what I’d thought to be a human woman, how could I not make an effort and extend kindness in return?
I rose and gestured the man to do the same. “Have you always been a farmer? Or have you learned another trade?”
The man rose and bowed. “I’ve worked fields, mines, and stones.”
