Chapter 3
Sabine
Ibroke the natural world.
It’s the first thought that comes to me when I’m able to find words. Has it been minutes? Weeks? Time feels like a slippery thing. Flashes of memory come to me in bursts. Falling snow, despite the warm sunshine. Vines thrusting up from the earth.
Slowly, I swim up through my mind’s haziness until I blink my eyes open.
The light around me is dim, orange. Candlelight.
Soft feather pillows hold me upright in a bed carved from a single tree trunk. Warm reindeer pelts drape over my bruised knees.
At the foot of the bed?
It’s the delicious weight of the man I’d recognize through any haze.
“Basten,” I gasp through cracked lips, sitting upright and reaching out for him.
My father stands near my bedroom’s arched window, speaking in a low rumble to Basten, but at the sound of his name, Basten whips toward me with a hunter’s instinct. His eyes spring wide. Before a sob can rise up my throat, he wraps his arms fiercely around me.
“Sabine. Sweetheart. I’ve got you—you’re okay now.”
He smooths his hands over my shoulders, then down the length of my arms. Where my shift’s capped sleeves end, there’s only warm peach skin. No fey lines blister along the length of my arms.
I feel my teeth with my tongue—no sharp incisors press back.
The tight knot in my chest works free, and I collapse against Basten’s chest, burying my face in the solid, sturdy rock of his shoulder.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpse stars winking beyond the bedroom window.
It’s nighttime—and we’re still in Drahallen Hall.
No, no, no, I think weakly, too spent to feel much of anything but Basten’s steady breathing beneath my cheek. We’re supposed to be halfway to the border wall by now.
“How do you feel, Solene?” Vale asks, coarse and clinical.
I flinch as though he’s struck me, and Basten instantly folds me tighter in his protective hold.
“That name…” I start, but choke it off.
Hearing that name stirs a tangle of long-buried memories, emotions, images. Most I don’t even recognize, as though they belong to a stranger. They press behind my ribs, sharp and demanding, like a swallowed fish bone.
“Call her Sabine,” Basten barks. “At least, until she decides for herself how she wants to be called.”
Vale’s nostrils flare with impatience, but he nods. Relenting on this one battle.
“What…happened?” I manage to utter. “I only remember pieces.”
Vale looks out the window at his kingdom rolled out far below.
As though reporting the weather, he explains calmly, “It all comes from a mistranslation, really. In the Book of the Immortals, the ancient scribes wrote that between the First and Second Return, the gods ‘slumbrian o tornn’. That phrase was interpreted to mean “slumbered underground,” when it truly meant “slumbered under skin”. It led to the long-running rumor that fae rest in underground tombs between our Returns. While it’s true that we go dormant, it does not happen in tombs.
Rather, we lose our mortal bodies; only our souls remain.
Our resting places are within godkissed bloodlines, remaining hidden through generation after generation, until something triggers an Awakening. ”
“You.” I press a hand against the base of my raw throat and rasp, “You triggered it this time.”
The hint of a smile touches Vale’s lips as he rests a hand on the window’s latch.
“Yes. The Third Return is now upon us. We have the potential to rise during any generation, but as King of Fae, I am always the first to awaken. You see, S--Sabine,”—he stumbles a little over the name, “For generation after generation, I slumber until one of my human selves is strong enough to Awaken. Then, I search for the other nine gods. I find them one by one. Not in buried tombs. In people. It can take months. Years, even. To follow rumors of godkissed people throughout the kingdoms and determine if they are one of us.”
“Sabine is your biological daughter.” Basten’s hand falls on my knee, holding tight. “Not that hard to find.”
Vale moves to the bedroom dresser, where he digs through the jewelry box until he finds a garnet ring. He cups it in his palm like it means something to him—like the weight is heavy with memories.
“Yes,” he says, voice distant. “It is no coincidence. In every Return, there are patterns. Solene is always intimately connected to me, in the form of a daughter or sister or niece. I believe it is because Solene commands nature, and nature cannot be separated from the core of our power—which resides in me.”
He hesitates as if unsure whether to share more, rubbing his oversized thumb on the small ring, and ultimately lets the jewel fall back into the box. A heavy stretch fills the room, and I can’t shake the niggling itch in the back of my head that there’s more than the version he’s giving me.
I twist my hand in the bedsheet. “You aren’t telling me everything.”
He barks a laugh. “Four thousand years of history can’t be explained in the span of one evening.”
“It’s more than that.” My voice cuts, jagged, and a flare of anger ripples under my skin that feels cold and wrong. “You’re keeping secrets on purpose. What don’t you want me to know?”
At my side, Basten rubs a steadying hand down my back. His head cocks as though he’s using his godkiss to listen to my pulse, my breathing, my scent, my temperature.
“Easy, wildcat,” he murmurs, and I have to wonder if I registered as human to his senses…or something else. “You’re still weak.”
Vale moves back to the window with a grunt that I’m not sure signals approval or scorn. “Your man is right.”
“No, I’m right.” I throw off the sheet, swinging my bare feet off the bed. I marshal my strength to push to my feet, holding onto the bedpost for support. “I’m strong enough. Now, tell me.”
Vale peruses the orange-pink blossoms growing on the vines climbing my bedroom wall, as though searching for something.
Finally, he plucks one.
He spins the blossom in his finger slowly as he explains, “Every fae must undergo a process called the Gloaming upon waking to their true self. It is not easy on any of us. However, after sating their hunger, the other nine gods have always readily embraced their true divine identities. Solene has always been an outlier among us. In both the Beginning, as well as the First and Second Returns, she has…resisted her Awakening.”
He presses his thumb into the flower’s center, splintering the delicate petals.
A dissection. “She’s the Goddess of Nature, and nature is in opposition to divinity.
It’s more akin to the wild, barbaric realm of humanity.
In the previous Returns, her Awakening has proven contentious.
That is why, this time, I decided to attempt a different approach. ”
Strange energy rustles up my spine, kicking my heartbeat up a notch.
I rub my thumb over the bedpost’s natural bark exterior.
In a way, I feel like I’ve been here before, many years ago.
Felt this same rough bark against my skin.
And the flicker of ancient life that’s still buried deep in the wood’s core.
Basten stands up and tugs a velvet dressing gown out of the dresser, draping it over my thin cotton shift. His hands close protectively around my shoulders, tethering me back to the present.
“Maybe you should rest more,” he murmurs.
I shrug off his suggestion, clutching the bedpost harder as I ask my father, “Shouldn’t I remember? The times when I was Solene before?”
Vale folds his fingers over the blossom, crushing it like a mosquito. “Memory is like mist. The more you chase it, the farther away it drifts. All you can do is simply wait for it to come.”
He opens his hand and lets the crushed petals waft to the tufted rug.
Outside, a hawk caws sharply.
I glance out the window. The bird soars past, its course dangerously close to the castle tower. It falters before regaining its flight. As broken and unsteady as my mind.
“This whole ‘different approach’ plan,” Basten asks, his voice laced with poison. “Did it always involve stabbing your daughter in the heart?”
Vale scowls. He lets his heavy boot fall on the plucked petals, grinding them into the floor. “That’s on you, human. For trying to take her away from Volkany.”
Basten laughs darkly as he rakes a hand back through his hair. “Sabine won the Night Hunt, fair and square. The prize was our freedom. Just because that ass, Artain, didn’t come crawling to you for permission first—”
“Raise your voice to me, mortal, and—"
“Stop it!” I throw out my hands between them, my head aching. I glance at my father. “Basten asked a good question.”
Vale prowls over the rug, further tromping the flower petals.
“The truth is, the Serpent Knife is indeed the key to awakening. The human soul must die for the fae inside to arise. But it wasn’t supposed to happen as it did.
There is usually a ceremony. An agreement.
It is meant to be a beautiful, holy process.
Not…” he scowls, hand flexing. “Violence.”
My hand drifts to the place between my breasts, just reachable between the string ties of my shift, where he plunged the Serpent Knife into my heart.
The skin is smooth now. No wound. Not even a scar.
Vale clears his throat. “I had hoped to bring you slowly to awareness of your true self. To first introduce you, in your human form, to the Fae Court. I thought if you met your brothers and sisters, learned our ways, saw our world, then the transition would be more seamless this time. That you would choose to undergo the Gloaming, eagerly, as the others do. Instead of having it forced upon you.” He lets out a long breath, heavy with the trace of myrrh and Wicked Weed.
He mutters almost to himself, “But it seems history has a way of repeating itself.”
I rub my finger over the place where a scar should be, wondering how many times the skin has been torn, ribs broken, by the knife blade.