Chapter One
“And when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night.”
~ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Blake
I was frightened and alone, and so desperately unhappy.
But even in the midst of the utter devastation I was feeling, I realized I was carrying inside me the only piece of Davos left in the universe.
I had gone to the doctors a few days before that awful news had come because of the unrelenting nausea I was feeling, and they had given me the news that I was having a baby.
They’d been the ones who had given me the injections in the first place, and so they suspected what was wrong right away.
It was too much to contemplate, and I had asked them if they could reverse what they’d done and end the pregnancy.
I’m not sure if I could have gone through with it, but I did ask, just so I’d know my options.
They said it was possible, but really dangerous.
I was already about a month along. They also reminded me that I’d be destroying my last link to Davos if I went through with it.
And just the thought of that had nearly killed me. I knew then that I couldn’t do it.
I had gone to the doctors because I’d felt different—odd, like I was coming down with a stomach flu or something.
I’d had terrible nausea that would clear up each day by lunchtime.
I thought at first that it was the awful grief.
One of the servants, Talise, had been the first to notice what it really was.
After helping me to the bathroom when I woke up feeling so desperately ill one morning, he had stayed with me to help me go lie back down afterward.
He was the first of the servants to ask me if I thought I might possibly be pregnant.
I just stared at him. Then I burst into tears. That was humiliating in itself. He’d been even more horrified when I put my head in my hands and began to moan.
“Oh God, what am I going to do?”
He saw how upset I was. He was Jayronian, and it was hard to tell how old he might be.
Jayronians don’t show their age for a long time, so he could have been in his late thirties or in his fifties.
“My spouse had many children,” he told me, and actually patted me on the back and reached for my hand.
“If it’s true, then this child—his child—will be a blessing to you. ”
I was starved for affection I guess, because almost no one had touched me since Davos left to go off to war for that last time. I leaned heavily into him because his words touched me so deeply.
“It was always the same with my wife,” he said. “She had the sickness in the mornings with every child. And she would lament being pregnant and say never again. But in the end, she was always so glad. Your sickness is not too bad—it will go away soon, I think.”
“But what am I going to do?” I started crying again a little then, though I was still embarrassed by it and wiped my tears away angrily.
“I think you need to find a Tygerian husband.”
I looked up at him in shock, thinking he’d lost his mind.
“A husband? Are you crazy? I can’t marry any other man besides Davos.”
“Davos is gone. And you are a human, alone on Tygeria with no one to protect you.”
“I don’t need protection. I can take care of myself.”
“On Earth perhaps. Here on Tygeria? No. You need a protector.”
“Where the hell am I going to find one of those?”
“It won’t be difficult. You’re a handsome man. Many admire you. You must find a way—for the sake of the child.”
He left after a while, leaving me alone with my bitter, hopeless thoughts.
I figured I must have conceived during that last leave when Davos had come home so briefly.
Whenever it happened, it had left me in a bad situation.
I really wanted to join Davos—to kill myself, but only if I could have been sure I’d go wherever he was.
I might have broken my promise to Davos to keep his child safe and already killed myself by that time if I’d had any assurances that I would go to the same place as he was.
But he was Tygerian and I was from Earth.
We had totally different beliefs and religion.
What if we went to different places? An eternity away from him? No. That was unthinkable.
Besides, though I no longer wanted to live, I really couldn’t just end myself or do anything to hurt the last link I had to him. I was having his baby, and he’d made me promise him that I’d never hurt his children. That promise had become sacred to me now that he was gone.
His own father had taken a love slave as his nobyo, and that man had taken care of Davos and his brother, Marrick, who later died in the war when Davos was younger. This nobyo of his father’s was a human male, who hated Tygeria and wanted only to go back home.
It seemed to me that there were two kinds of captive soldiers.
Those who fell in love with their captors and stayed with them to have children, or those like Davos’s father’s nobyo, who hated everything about Tygeria and waited impatiently for their first chance to leave and go back home.
That man was the latter. He hadn’t agreed to be the bearer of the children—his father had used a female surrogate for that.
At any rate, he had raised both Davos and his brother from the time they were little babies, yet he never developed any feelings for them, and he treated them indifferently at best.
Davos had told me that the man wasn’t cruel but simply had no feelings for him and his brother—though perhaps that was a form of cruelty after all.
When his father died, the former Alliance soldier petitioned the government to put him in the next prisoner exchange, and that’s what they did.
He’d left without a backward glance, even though he had been the only parent the boys had left to them.
I had been orphaned at an early age myself.
I wasn’t all that sad about it. In fact, it was almost a relief, because my mother died before I ever knew her at all, and my father was a drunk, who rarely paid any attention to me.
Once he was gone, finally drinking himself to death, I went to live with my grandmother, on my mother’s side, who was, I suppose, an eccentric old lady, but I didn’t know the difference and to me, she was wonderful.
We sometimes ate cake for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice cream for supper, and we lived in her ramshackle little house on the outskirts of a small country town in north Georgia.
I suppose it was a good thing in a way that the authorities finally took me away from her—good for my teeth anyway with all those sweets—but I missed her a lot and used to sneak away from the foster home they put me in to visit her.
During the years I had been lucky enough to live with her, she’d never sent me to school, but taught me herself, out of the books of poetry and fairy tales and legends and romance books that she loved.
I learned about characters like Romeo and Juliet, and Camille, and The Lady of Shalot and even a girl named Scarlett O’Hara.
That girl was from a book called Gone with the Wind, and whenever something bad happened to her, she always thought to herself, “I’ll think about it tomorrow.
” And a lot of the time, the problem would go away on its own, before she ever had to think of it at all.
I thought that was a really good plan and I decided to adopt it as my own.
Another of the good characters was the Lady of Shallot, who willed herself to die for the love of a man named Lancelot. I admired her so much. She was willowy and thin and looked like she’d never even seen a piece of candy or cake. That took real commitment.
So, once Davos died, I had tried to go to bed for about a week, hoping to just stop eating and waste away, like the Lady. I’d die for love and if the servants asked me when I was going to get up, I’d say, “I don’t know. I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
I wasn’t ill exactly, but I was more than a little out of my mind for a while, I think.
To tell the truth, I was simply sick and tired of being anywhere that Davos wasn’t.
I thought this grief might kill me, and if it did, then I could fulfill what I wanted to happen (me dying) without technically betraying Davos (by harming his child).
I used to make bargains like that with the universe.
I longed for the day I would begin to waste away, but it never happened.
I kept getting out of bed late at night to sneak a piece of cake or pie.
I think the servants were making them just to tempt me.
It all made perfect sense to me, though. If the wasting away and dying thing didn’t work out, then I’d just stay in bed until I woke up and maybe I’d discover it had all been some horrible nightmare, and then Davos would come home and make love to me and hold me in his arms and I’d be happy again.
That complete bed rest lasted about two weeks, and it may have actually saved my baby’s life because extreme stress was one of the known dangers of an early miscarriage in a male pregnancy.
And I was asleep in bed most of the time.
But I knew I wasn’t thinking straight—one minute I loved Davos and missed him so much I ached with it.
The next minute I was angry at him and vowed to hate him forever because he’d gone off and died and left me behind.
How could he do that to me? Why hadn’t he taken me with him?
I was furious that he’d taken himself off somewhere that I couldn’t follow him.