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I wouldn’t put it past him to ally with Az, especially if Az has offered him the protection of his army of Others.
“What does it say?” I ask, infusing my voice with worry, hoping to tug on Az’s sympathies.
He smiles down upon me and plants a wet kiss on my forehead. “You don’t have to worry about it, love.”
I don’t miss the way his hands shake as he caresses my cheeks. Don’t miss the crazed aura in Az’s expression as he pulls away. The twitching that’s returned to his left eyelid.
On the way out of the library, he rips the correspondence to pieces.
I reach for the Fabric one last time, begging it for a gap to slip through.
It doesn’t reach back.
CHAPTER 68
ELLIE
Gentle rays of sunlight waft through the warped glass window—one that I suppose the palace ordered from a competitor before I married into the family, as I don’t see my initials anywhere—whispering that morning has finally come.
Well, finally is probably a generous word.
Truth be told, I don’t exactly want morning to come, not when Cecilia was up screaming all night.
Peck keeps telling me Cecilia’s nocturnal sleep schedule is because I did too much riding while I was pregnant.
“Lulled the baby to sleep during the day. Taught her bad habits from the beginning,” he’s commented, unsolicited, multiple times.
When I complained to Evander about it, he told me that was what I got for teaming up with Peck against my husband so often.
I wasn’t quite in the mood to admit that he was right, so I’d just stuck my tongue out at him wearily.
Either way, Cecilia is not a good sleeper. At all.
Which is fine, because I adore her so much my heart might explode at any moment.
Other parts of me might explode too. For instance, my bladder, which, despite Peck’s potions, has yet to recover from my unfortunately traumatic labor. Then there’s my patience, which I find is always ready to detonate.
It’s been a rough few weeks, that’s for sure.
But then there are moments like these, moments when Cecilia is sleeping, her pretty little face as peaceful as the surface of an abandoned pond, her little pointed ears poking out from underneath her dark ringlets. And I think perhaps I understand why people look back on these days so fondly.
Even if I am convinced part of the reason is that all species would cease to exist if anyone remembered these days accurately. Well, maybe not cease to exist. But there certainly would be a shortage of second siblings.
Still, as I rock Cecilia in the chair Evander made for me (complete with the comfiest pillows he could bribe out of the local seamstress), I have no choice but to feel immense gratitude. It swells in my heart just looking at her. Usually, I glance back and forth between my daughter and husband. When he isn’t training with Orion, Evander is typically fast asleep across the room, exhausted from the several times he’s gotten up to change her in the middle of the night between feedings.
There’s something about these moments I want to keep close. We haven’t officially announced Cecilia’s birth yet. Enough people know about her that she’s not exactly a secret, but with all the chaos surrounding her birth and Az supposedly rallying an army in Naenden, I’m not eager to share her with the world yet.
Cecilia’s screaming isn’t the only reason sleep evades me. Even when she’s quiet, and sleep comes, it’s hardly ever restful.
Nightmares, filled with images of my child’s death, the lack of her screams and the continuation of mine, punctuate any slumber I might have stolen otherwise.
It tortures me when the part of me that keeps control of my mind goes off duty. During my sleeping hours, I’m at the mercy of what could have happened. What life might have been like if Cecilia had not survived.
It’s in those moments that I think of Blaise, and my heart aches for my friend. My friend who’s somehow made herself my enemy, though out of no malice for me.
Before, I couldn’t imagine the pain she’s suffered. Now, I think perhaps I can taste it, in the memories of the moments when I lost hope that Cecilia would survive. When I convinced myself the labor pains had come too early, that there was no reasonable way she could endure outside the womb.
Evander and I are fortunate. I’ve since found a few documents describing various gestations between fae and humans. They all varied, some lasting as long as twelve months, others much shorter. As far as I know, mine with Cecilia is the shortest recorded.
