3. Kian #2
She nodded, and her eyes glistened with unshed tears, but she didn't let them fall.
Kian shifted his weight and took her free hand.
"You shouldn't despair just because he didn't know up from down when he first woke up after five thousand years in stasis.
Wonder woke up with nothing. Not a name, not a language, not a country.
She could not speak. She taught herself Arabic from scratch, then English, and then snuck onto a cargo ship using thralling, which she somehow figured out how to do without remembering she could do it.
It took a long time for her memories to return, but they did. "
"Ell-rom's did not," his mother said quietly. "Not every story has a happy ending."
Kian shook his head. "Ell-rom's had a very happy ending even without his memories. Morelle helped him reclaim them. He found his truelove mate, and he found you and a family and a home."
Annani said nothing.
"It's been less than an hour," Kian pressed. "After five thousand years. Give it a month. Give it a year. We have all the time there is."
His mother turned to look at him, and the resigned expression on her face stopped him cold.
"I made a bargain with the Fates," she said. "The four guards were surfacing, and Khiann was not. Bridget said his body was recuperating faster than theirs, but he would not come up. I was afraid, so I made them an offer. His memories of me for his return, whole and healthy in body and mind."
Kian understood perfectly. If Syssi were on that bed and he were praying for her return, he would have sacrificed the things most precious to him to get her back.
He would have offered her memories of him and even his of her.
Truelove mates could not stay apart unless separated by death, and the death of the mind was, for all intents and purposes, death.
The body was just the vessel for the soul, the transmitter, and if it could not channel the spirit, it was not worth much on its own.
He wanted to tell his mother that, but she wasn't finished.
"I said that if the price of that was every memory he carried of me, then they were welcome to it." She looked back at the bed. "The Fates accepted my offer. Two days later, he opened his eyes."
"The Fates are merciful. They might amend your bargain."
She turned her hand over so Khiann's hand rested in her palm, and she looked at it.
"The Fates give, but they do not give freely, nor do they amend their contracts.
I received exactly what I asked for. No more, and no less.
That is not a coincidence. That is a transaction, and it has been completed.
The Fates do not renegotiate a bargain once it is struck. "
Kian nodded because Annani sounded resolute, and when she got like that, there was no changing her mind. "The Fates will not renegotiate the deal you've made with them, but they might show you mercy just because they feel like it."
She smiled. "If they do, I will fall to my knees and thank them for their mercy."
Kian looked past her at the male in the bed.
It was the first time he'd seen Khiann looking like more than a skeleton, but he was far from recovered. The god had deep hollows under his cheekbones, his scalp was nearly hairless except for scattered chestnut fuzz, and he was deathly pale.
But the structure underneath looked disturbingly familiar.
The brow ridge, the set of the eyes, the line of the jaw, the shape of the mouth—those were eerily similar to Kian's own. The lips were fuller than Kian's, and the hair color was darker, but those were the main differences between them.
His mother had told him and his siblings many times that she had chosen males who reminded her of Khiann to father her children.
Kian hadn't thought she had meant it literally. He'd assumed she meant their temperament, their intelligence, their courage, or something along those lines.
She might have meant those things, but she'd also meant physical appearance.
"Fates," Kian said quietly. "He could actually be my father. We look alike."
"Yes." Annani smiled.
"I'm even named after him."
"Yes, you are. But there are differences. You are very different in temperament."
Kian wanted to laugh. Couldn't she have been more specific centuries ago? How difficult could it have been to tell him that he looked a lot like her lost mate but had a different personality?
"In what way?" he asked.
She tilted her head. "Both of you have a good head for business and are givers, but you are more intense. Khiann is mellower, more diplomatic." She cast him a sidelong glance. "He has never used expletives in my presence."
Kian laughed. "Is that why you are always on my case about using swear words?"
She shrugged. "I just think it is beneath you."
"So, it has nothing to do with you wanting me to be Khiann's mirror image?"
Annani frowned. "Do I ask my daughters, my own flesh and blood, to be a mirror image of me?"
"No."
"So, why would I want you to be Khiann's? Each of my children is a unique individual, and I celebrate your differences the same way I celebrate your commonalities, which are mostly the values I instilled in you."
He couldn't argue with that because everything she'd said was true.
Annani had never compared her children to each other, and even though she had told them about their fathers and what incredible humans they had been, she had never drawn comparisons between them.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It was just the shock of seeing how alike we look."
She nodded. "The resemblance is quite striking, but for some reason you did not notice it in the portraits Tim drew of Khiann. I wonder why."
Kian tried to remember those sketches, and when he did, he knew why he hadn't seen the resemblance before. "He had a thick beard in those, and his face was fuller. He didn't look much like me in Tim's renderings."
"Khiann's hair was darker and much thicker," she sighed. "I loved running my fingers through it."
Behind them, Alena cleared her throat. "I suggest you don't dive deeper into those memories, Mother. You are making Kian uncomfortable."
Annani chuckled. "If everything goes as well as I hope, you will see me running my fingers through my beloved's hair instead of just hearing about it. You had better start getting used to the idea that your mother has her true love back."