Chapter 21
“Excuse me?” Rose asked, her icily polite tone a cover for the lava of dread boiling up in her gut. She very obviously was not dead, and yet somehow the words weren’t as shocking as they should be.
Shoshan glared daggers and disgust. “Clotaire, if you’re trying to make some grotesque joke of—”
“I’m not,” he broke in, but keeping his focus on Rose.
“The room is warded. For this moment, we can speak freely, but I will warn you that, should you ever speak of this to anyone else, we all will pay the price. You, your mother, your sister, Jada, me—we will all be put to death in the most painful method the Arbiters of Sorcery can devise.”
“I understand,” Rose said. Though she understood nothing at all.
At the same moment, her mother talked over her. “It’s not true,” she insisted.
He met her gaze and held it, then sighed, his shoulders sagging. “Shoshan. It is true.”
“What?” Shoshan hissed the question, her magic tightening the air so that it became difficult to breathe in the small room.
“Shoshan. Calm down. I—”
“Don’t you dare tell me that … I can’t bear to repeat any of this nonsense. Of course Rose didn’t die. As to the rest, I can’t … can’t…”
“Mum.” Rose put a reassuring hand on her mother’s shoulder, marveling at how eerily calm she felt.
Maybe that’s because you are dead and Thorn had it right, just backwards.
Maybe that’s why you’ve always been so odd.
Who wants to be around or touch a corpse?
“Let him talk,” she said, her voice sounding like it came from somewhere else. “I want to hear this explanation.”
Rose might’ve imagined that her mother flinched under her touch, a horse twitching off flies, but she slipped her hand off anyway.
“Thank you, Rose.” Clotaire offered a weak smile that faded almost before it began. “Everything I did, I did for you. And for Lily, too.”
Shoshan made a sound halfway between a growl and a scoff, but said nothing. Rose felt much the same way, also managing to hold her tongue pending the reveal of whatever secrets Clotaire had been keeping.
“You and your sister were born at dawn, a most auspicious time,” Clotaire began. “Lily right at the moment the sun crested the horizon and you a few minutes later.”
Rose knew this part, but didn’t interrupt to prod him along. In truth, part of her wanted to stop him, afraid of what she was about to learn about herself.
“It was a long labor. After the babies had been snuggled into their cradles, the midwife, Petra, gave Shosh a light enchantment to help her rest. You were sleeping deeply.” Clotaire moved as if to pat Shoshan’s hand, but she jerked it away.
He continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “I came into the nursery that night, just at midnight, unable to sleep. I wanted to see my beautiful infant sorceresses again. But, I found Petra weeping over your cradle, Rose. Because you had died.”
Shoshan made another smaller and inarticulate sound, dropping her face into her hands.
“How did you know it was me?” Rose asked, feeling the strangeness of the question and story in the roots of her soul. If she had a soul.
“You had a birthmark,” Clotaire told her evenly. “The only distinguishing physical mark we’d found between you and your twin. A bit of discoloration under your right ear, a reddish purple, shaped a bit like a rose.” He tapped under his own ear in demonstration.
Involuntarily, Rose’s fingers rose to touch the spot. “I don’t have…”
“Not anymore,” he filled in.
“The birthmark,” Shoshan echoed in a ghostly voice. “I’d forgotten. You told me it faded.”
“I lied,” Clotaire replied steadily. “It wasn’t the first or last lie I told to preserve this incredible secret.”
“But Petra…”
“I told Petra to take the corpse away and prepare it for burial and I stood there, grieving, staring at your empty cradle, while Lily wailed inconsolably in hers. And the strangest thing I’ve ever seen happened then.
Your infant sister opened a portal to the Dream, right there in your empty cradle, and—”
“Impossible,” Shoshan whispered, her face streaming with tears. “A newborn can’t perform sorcery like that.”
“Not usually, but prodigies happen,” Clotaire replied. “And I was the only one there besides that newborn oneiromancer. I don’t even have a drop of oneiromancy in me, to the despair of my family, as you know.” A bitterness that Rose had never witnessed filled his voice.
“What happened?” Rose asked in a tense whisper. Part of her, somewhere deep inside, almost, almost remembered this …
“She brought you out of the Dream, Rose,” Clotaire said softly. “Thorn brought you back to life, gave you a body made of the Dream. A perfect body, without flaws.” He tapped under his ear again. “No birthmark.”
“The realms of the Dream and Death aren’t the same,” Rose replied, that strange calm encasing her. Did she remember Death or … Maybe she remembered the Dream, the landscape that felt more like home than the waking world.
Clotaire waved that off. “A question for the philosophers. Not that they will ever know because no one can know about this. Don’t you see what we have here?”
“What I see is that I have two living daughters,” Shoshan ground out, then slashed a hand when Clotaire opened his mouth.
“I don’t care if Rose came from the Dream, if she came from the Dream.
All I know is I bore twin daughters and you…
” She choked on the words. “You gave one of our babies—my child!—to Jada to raise.”
Rose watched her father, still caught in that curious sense of distance.
It was all true. She’d been made of the Dream by her astonishingly powerful infant sister.
That’s why it felt like she had to recompose her body after traveling through the Dream.
She did have to. And Master Zoltan … he’d perceived something of that truth and it had shaken him.
Clotaire had trained his even, clear gaze on Shoshan. “It was necessary.”
“Necessary!” Shoshan spat. “How could you … Don’t you dare tell me you sacrificed a life, our daughter’s future, to one of your political schemes.”
He slammed a palm on the table, sparks flying from the contact, making Rose jump, though her mother seemed impervious.
“It’s not some scheme, Shosh,” he bit out.
“Don’t pretend to be a fool. You have to see how important this is.
No one knew that we possessed two living daughters, both of them unprecedented in their own ways.
One a prodigy, able to make a living human being from the Dream as an infant, entirely through native intuition, and the other a creature made of the Dream.
Not even you knew until this moment. It was a priceless opportunity. ”
“An opportunity,” Shoshan whispered, staring into the distance. “Petra … she never came to see me again after that day. I thought it was grief over losing a child she’d delivered. I woke up and she had left to deliver another…” Her ice-blue gaze fastened sharply, hard as gems, on Clotaire’s face.
“She returned too soon,” he said with a semblance of a shrug. “And she knew about the birthmark.”
“Tell me Petra wasn’t harmed.”
“She wasn’t harmed,” he answered with such remote woodenness that even Rose knew it for a lie.
“How could you…” Shoshan whispered in horror, face white as bone. “You had her killed, didn’t you.” Rose’s mother had stopped asking questions, instead framing everything as a statement of agonizing fact.
Clotaire’s jaw ticced slightly before he mastered it.
“I sacrificed raising one of my daughters to this cause, this incredibly, vitally important attempt to save countless magic-workers now and for generations to come. I did what I had to do to preserve that secrecy. Considering the other lengths I went to, do you really think I’d hesitate to silence a midwife, a mundane human, one near the end of her useful life anyway? ”
Shoshan’s face had gelled, or frozen, into a featureless plain, like the far north. Rose could almost hear the howl of the snow-laden winds. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Perhaps not, Shoshan,” he bit out. “But then, you never did, did you? You never wanted to. You’ve been happy enough to live this life, if you want to call it that, this existence of indentured servitude to anyone who can afford the price to attach their own leash to the collars permanently locked around our necks.
Just so long as you had your gowns and jewels and parties, you were willing to sell your soul to the highest bidder. ”
“That’s unfair, Clotaire, and you know it,” Shoshan fired back in a hush of quiet rage.
Rose felt like a spectator in this private war, an icily formal crescendo of a battle in the long conflict of her parents’ marriage.
“I—we—had no choice in giving Rose over to the blood geas. And I’ve done my best to equip her to make good choices, the best possible choices in whatever contract she chooses to accept. ”
Shoshan slid Rose a glance, not quite questioning, but more urgent, a plea in her gaze for Rose not to prove her wrong. She didn’t have to respond or answer because her father spoke immediately.
“There was a choice, Shoshan,” he said, chopping a hand in the air. “That’s my entire point here. What happened that portentous midnight was a miracle, a singular opportunity, and I seized it.”
“You could have talked to me, included me on a decision about my own child.”
“Our child,” he insisted. “And could you have given her up? No,” he answered decisively.
“We had no way to explain how you bore twins and we ended up with one corpse and two living infants.” He bent his stern expression on Rose.
“You wanted to know what you’d find in Lily’s coffin?
Don’t look, for it would be your own mortal infant form, discarded for the wondrous body you wear now.
You have transcended, Rose. You are a miracle. ”
Rose had no words, her mind reeling. Fortunately her mother had plenty to say.