Thirty-Nine
CALLISTA STARED AT THIA, HER SILVER EYES SHARP. BENEATH THEM, Oskaren lay sleeping, her leg freshly healed of witch’s storm. “How marvelous to have found love in such perilous times.”
Thia blinked. “Love?”
Callista’s voice was low. “Do you not love her?”
She frowned. “Oskaren? Of course not. I barely know her. But her mother was kind to me. I promised to watch out for her.”
“Sorscha loves her still?” The sorceress’s expression was hungry as she watched the sleeping girl below.
“Do you know her?”
Callista didn’t seem to hear her. “And does she love her mother?”
Thia fingered the hem of her shirt. “You’ve heard…. You know she’s cursed, right?”
Callista’s gaze jumped to Thia’s. “Of course. Forgive me.”
Thia studied her, trying to understand the strange look on the woman’s face that was somehow both achingly sad and relieved. And the hunger that had roosted there, only moments before.
Thia awoke nestled in the crook of Oskaren’s arm, her head on the girl’s chest. Callista’s strange look pressed into the back of her eyelids, like she was a light Thia had been staring at too long.
The same memory had played over and over throughout the night, the Mirror’s message, she supposed.
Though she didn’t know why it had chosen that scene, when she already knew the answer to the sorceress’s question might have changed.
Do you not love her?
I could.
Thia shifted to examine the girl’s sleeping face. She was clearly still in the throes of the Mirror, and by her expression, her vision was not a pleasant one. Her eyes darted furiously under her lids, lovely face twisted in pain.
Thia wondered if she should rouse her.
But then Oskaren startled awake. She screamed, a horrifying, heart-wrenching sound that had Thia clambering to her feet, searching for the source of the girl’s terror.
But it was clearly within, for they were alone, and Oskaren was suddenly on her hands and knees, struggling to breathe as agony curled her spine.
Thia leapt back onto the bed, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Ren, what is it? Where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere,” the girl breathed. She heaved, and a moment later, vomit splattered onto the blanket.
Thia grimaced and started rubbing calming circles on the girl’s back. “Did you eat something—”
But she didn’t finish the sentence, because Oskaren yanked away from her. “Don’t touch me.”
“The curse,” Thia realized. No. “It’s back.”
Oskaren nodded—or tried to, her back arching as another lance of pain shot through her.
“What can I—”
“Leave me,” Oskaren rasped. She let out another cry. “Please.”
Thia had known it was a possibility, known it might not have been forever, but watching Oskaren’s joy ripped away—watching Ren ripped away—it struck her like a blow.
She hovered at the edge of the bed, until Oskaren let out another scream and demanded, “Go.”
She didn’t know what else to do, if she was the source of Oskaren’s pain. So she said, “Okay. Okay,” and scrambled out beyond the vines.
Dess and Thran were on their way over, clearly having heard the screams. Unlike Thia, they were dressed, however.
Dess gave her an incredulous look she didn’t understand, skimming her nightgown and the tent that clearly wasn’t her own.
But Oskaren’s cries sounded again, softer, fragile, he froze. “What’s happening to her?”
“The curse,” Thia said. “It…hurts her sometimes. She’ll be fine; she just needs time.” Everything in her told her to return to Oskaren. She forced herself to stay put.
Dess seemed taken aback. “It hurts her?”
Thia was spared having to answer as Thran put a hand on her shoulder. “You best get dressed, lass. We’ll keep an eye on the girl.”
She nodded gratefully and hastened for her tent.
It was easy work to shed her nightgown for her travel clothes, but less so to swallow the tears that tried to force their way out as she remembered Oskaren’s voice telling her to go.
Shouldering her pack, she returned to the others, who were waiting by the dock under a gray sky.
Oskaren didn’t look at her as she approached. The girl was dressed now and wearing her own pack, her breathing calm. But her face was closed, lips pressed into a tight line.
“Here,” Thran said, shoving what appeared to be flat bread stuffed with various vegetables into Thia’s hands. “It was left for us on the dock this morning.”
Thia took it and scarfed a bite, just to have something to distract herself, mumbling her thanks with a full mouth.
A falcon’s cry signaled Mavrel’s return; he glided down to settle on the ship’s railing. “There you are,” Dess said.
“I wonder what he got up to,” Thia commented, but Dess didn’t ponder it with her as she expected.
Instead, he said, “We’ll probably never know,” and turned his back coolly, leading the way onto the ship. She winced, stung.
In the daylight, Thia had a better view of the vessel.
It was about the size of a large sailboat, and the buds of the flower sail were closed, but as Dess’s feet hit the deck, they began to peel open one by one.
There was no steering wheel, but then, Lythia had said they wouldn’t need one.
The deck was empty except for four oars Thia assumed were for an emergency.
Oskaren went to the prow. Though it went against every instinct, Thia headed for the stern to give her the space she’d requested. Thran and Dess settled in the middle by the mast, and when they were all comfortable, Thia frowned, wondering how they were supposed to begin.
“Ship,” Oskaren said, deciding for them. “Take us to the sea.”
A brief wind picked up, as though summoned by the sail itself, or maybe it was the living branches that cradled them somehow speaking to the water. Whatever the mechanics, the ship creaked into motion, and they were off as the first drop of rain fell.
They put on their cloaks, but soon left lake for the river, which was largely sheltered by the enormous canopy of trees.
Only a few sprinkles made it onto their heads as they sailed mostly in silence.
Thia longed to ask the others what the Mirror had shown them, but—if it was anything like hers—it felt too personal to ask.
Dess, at least, was willing to share. After an hour or so, he crossed the deck to where she sat and hunkered down beside her. “I need to talk to you.” His boyish face was devoid of its usual warmth.
“About what?”
He fingered the hem of his cloak. “I saw your mother.”
Thia’s lips parted in surprise. “You what?”
He inspected the deck. “In the dream last night. It was—I had a memory. A real one, from before I was cursed.” He couldn’t quite keep the awe from his voice, despite his apparent irritation with her.
She didn’t doubt him. If the Losrohiri dance could summon Oskaren out of her curse for a night, surely it could break through Dess’s for a dream. “You knew my mother?”
“I think so,” he said, eyes wide. “I dreamed I was imprisoned within the Lightning Tower. She was there too. She…didn’t say anything. But she looked like you. Older though. And her hair was redder.”
Thia tucked her knees up to her chest. “She didn’t say anything?” How disappointing, to finally have access to a real memory of her mother in Eldris, of what might have been some of her last days, for it to be nothing but an image of her face.
“I’m sorry,” Dess said. “She was humming, though.” He imitated the tune, which Thia recognized immediately.
“‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”
Dess frowned. “What?”
“It’s a song. A children’s rhyme from my world.”
“Oh.”
They sat in silence, listening to the gentle prattle of rain on foliage.
“Why do you think it showed me that?” Dess asked, after a long moment.
To haunt her with a memory of nurture she had never experienced? But she swallowed her bitterness and focused on his young face. “I don’t know. It didn’t show me anything useful either.” Deciding it was worth the invasion, she asked Thran, “What about you? What did you see?”
Thran offered a sad twist of his mouth. “Nothing helpful to us, lass. I saw my family—before everything that happened.”
She nodded sympathetically. “Oskaren?”
Across the ship, the girl cast her a look Thia couldn’t decipher. “Is it really a mystery?” she asked, echoing her words from last night, when Thia had asked for the meaning of Faelyn. And she knew. Oskaren had seen her home.
She didn’t understand why the Mirror had shown the other three something similar, and her different. Each of them held something from their pasts before the king had destroyed them. In contrast, Thia’s was not a comforting memory, and it was the most recent of the four of them.
“Yes, it is,” Dess said in response to Oskaren’s question, unaware it had been for Thia alone.
The girl just gave him a cold glare and said, “Pity for you then,” before focusing on the river ahead.
“Dess,” Thia started, when he winced, stung. But the boy shrugged her off, standing.
“I just thought you should know,” he said, a bit harshly, and returned to the center of the ship, leaving Thia to stare after him.
Was this how their journey would end then? With distance and tension there was no solution for?
Alone at the stern, Thia felt despair creep in. Even if they were successful, if they killed Xercae and returned her head to the king, there could be no real victory, not for all of them. Oskaren would still be cursed. And then what—Thia would just leave?
What alternative was there? If she stayed here, fought with them against his tyranny, became the Storm Crow—
She would never see Riley again, never see her grammy. Never hear her out, never make it right.
The Mirror of Souls had offered no guidance, despite what Lythia implied.
Instead, it taunted her, throwing her feelings in her face and reminding her through Dess that even her own mother, for all that she was a mage, had died here, leaving Thia an entire world waiting with expectation for her to take up the mantle.
The irony wasn’t lost on her: she’d been killing herself to live up to her mother’s false legacy, only to find out she might literally die for the real one.
She wasn’t a hero. She’d never known that mother; she’d been raised by a grammy who’d kept her close and taught her the importance of home.
And that was the problem, the very reason she was crumbling. What did home mean when it was only a reminder of what you’d lost?
She tucked her knees up to her chest and, this time, couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.