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“So we do.”
“If you’re ready, then.”
“I am.”
It feels strange to be sitting in this distant haven, under the stained-glass ceiling, while a stoic Elven leader lifts elegant, ring-laden fingers and begins to sign his son’s name to me.
I collect each letter in my mind and assemble them all into a long string, until he places both hands in his lap.
“Can I say it aloud, just once, to be sure I have the pronunciation right?” I ask.
He nods.
After drawing a deep breath, I speak my lover’s true name for the first time.
27
I lived with my mother until I was twelve years old. By then, the human ways of expressing emotion were thoroughly ingrained in me. I could pass as human easily, providing I wore a cap or a hood to hide my pointed ears. My mother and I lived an isolated life in a tiny village where she worked as a seamstress—and sometimes as bedmate to a few men who paid for her company. I didn’t realize why those men came to visit until a few boys at the local school teased me about having a whore for a mother.
I couldn’t risk fighting them outright over it—my cap might be knocked off, and my ears would give me away. But I learned to play tricks on those boys, using the bit of my magic that I could control, plus some human ingenuity.
As I matured, my magic began to ripen as well, and despite the few books my mother had managed to find on the subject, she could not serve as my teacher.
“Why can’t we go to my father?” I would ask her. “He could teach me.”
I longed to meet him, to know him, but she refused to tell me where he lived, how she had met him, or anything else… until she became ill. It was a wasting disease; one of the men she’d bedded had given it to her. She spent every coin she had saved trying to find a cure, and I searched the books desperately for information on healing, but in the end, both of us failed.
One morning, I woke to find that she’d packed us each a bag. From a hollow beneath the hearth, she took an amethyst threaded with gold veins, a relic she had bargained for years ago, she said. The peddler who sold it to her claimed it could lead us to the Sanctuary.
She and I followed the lines of light cast by the charmed gemstone. It did indeed open the barriers of the Riddenwold and guide us to the Sanctuary. But the journey took my mother’s last bit of strength, and she was fading as we approached the edge of the cliffs and looked down upon the houses below.
I thought we had made it just in time. I thought we’d journeyed there so she could get help from the Elves.
I thought they would heal her.
But my mother had made a bargain with my father, years before. She had vowed on her life never to trouble him again.
As we stood atop the cliffs, taking in the sight of the ravine, Elves approached us, and she them to send for Lord Argelos.
When he arrived—the moment he came within sight—the goddess struck my mother down for breaking her vow.
She knew it would happen. She was dying anyway, and her last act was to bring me to my father so he could care for me and train me.
I watched her shriek and thrash in spasms of pain. Watched the light drain from her eyes. My father stood over us both, stone-faced and emotionless, while I clawed at her body and begged her to come back. At last he picked me up, carried me away from her, and sat me down for my first lesson in the control of the spirit.
Later I understood why he did it, why he repressed my emotions so ruthlessly during those early days. He was trying to help me the only way he knew how. But I was too young to view it as anything but cruelty and callousness, and those memories of him soured our connection permanently. He did not love me the way she had loved me, so I could see nothing in him but smooth, impenetrable marble, remote as the moon and cold as ice.
I learned magic from my father. Learned many things from him, in fact, but I struggled to relate to him, and I never quite fit into his world. But by the time I gathered the courage to leave the Sanctuary for good, I didn’t fit into the human world, either.
Doomed to drift forever between the two, I wandered anchorless, purposeless, until her. Until Juliette.
I picture her rich curves, the kissable dents and divots of her flesh, her lovely skin, and her beautiful eyes. I imagine running my hands through the glossy acorn-brown waves of her hair.
She fills my thoughts while I languish in my room and wait to be summoned by the King.
28
I try not to think about him. Which is difficult when he is laced through the cords of my heart, tied there in intricate knots that it would take years to pick apart.
