Chapter 6
Six
The next day, I fought to forget Fieran, and Lidi and I went out picking berries. We ate one for every one that went into the baskets until our fingertips and our mouths were stained. We stuck our tongues out at each other and laughed at the sight.
The berries were sweet and juicy on my tongue.
Despite how many we ate, the basket was heavy on my arm as I carefully pulled myself loose from the thorns, which scratched me even through my pants.
When Lidi noticed that I was a little bit stuck, she smiled up at me.
The next thing I knew, I was free, the thorns bending away from my feet as if they bowed to her.
We’d found such a bounty of berries, more than Tay and I ever found rambling together when we were kids. I wasn’t sure she even realized she was using her magic.
And, of course, I’d heard adults in the village grumbling that she wasted her magic on weeds.
“Look, there’s Mam,” Lidi said happily. She threw up her arm and waved as our mother made her way through the berry thicket toward us.
She carried her own basket, though it wasn’t like my mother ever did much picking.
My stomach felt as if it flattened out, as if I already knew that she was going to find an excuse to send Lidi away and to talk to me about something that I did not want to hear.
“You’re back from the village! Did you get my new dress?” Lidi asked excitedly.
I bit my lower lip, trying to keep my thoughts to myself. She sounded so excited about a new dress.
“I did. And you’ll look pretty as…can be,” my mother finished, a bit uncertainly, but Lidi didn’t notice. I knew she’d been about to say Lidi would be as pretty as a Fae princess. She had stopped herself because of me.
But I knew what that dress meant.
We dressed our children up to sell their magic away, as if it were a holiday. As if it were something to celebrate.
I didn’t know what the point was. We always looked so dingy next to the Fae anyway.
“And you’ve forgotten one of your chores, haven’t you?” our mother asked Lidi with a teasing note.
Lydia’s eyes widened. “Oh no, the chickens! They need their supper.”
She ran off, carrying her basket so carelessly over one arm that a few blackberries and raspberries flew out and scattered in her path.
“The hens always peck you. Aren’t you glad to have a little sister to take over that chore?”
“Even chickens hate me,” I said.
“Oh, chickens hate everyone. You’re not special.” My mother’s voice tried for teasing, but there was a darker note I hadn’t heard when she spoke to Lidi.
I looked up at her, startled. “I wish I wasn’t special. Or at least…you wish I wasn’t, don’t you?”
My mother pulled berries off the bush with a practiced twist and a grim look on her face. She didn’t eat any. “This is about those dragons, isn’t it?”
“I never thought I’d see them except in books.” The mark felt as if it were burning again, just thinking about Fieran.
“We kept your dragon mark a secret to protect you.”
“To protect me from what?” I’d heard all these horror stories as a child, all these tales of dragons shifted and driven dark and how they had to be killed…or how the shifter, who carried that dragon, had to be killed since he was weaker.
But seeing the dragon shifters for the first time, I’d also realized I was protected from being strong and powerful and part of something special.
“You don’t want that life. And you know what it would cost us—our life in the village…” She shook her head. “The man who sired you doesn’t matter. What matters is the man who raised you, who married me knowing I was pregnant with someone else’s child, and who protected you…”
“I love Pa,” I said, unable to avoid using the present tense.
I knew that he was dead and that the past tense might be appropriate, but it always seemed like a betrayal.
He might be dead, but my love was not. “Wanting to know who my real father is—I mean my other father—that doesn’t take away from that. ”
“I didn’t say it did, Cara-cup. But it’s better this way.”
“Why is it better?” I twisted a berry off the bush so savagely that a few thorns scraped along my hand.
I shook it off, blowing on the scratches to ease the pain.
“The dragon mark is part of who I am. My first father would be a part of who I am. Without knowing him, being unclaimed is a part of who I am too.”
She sighed. “Please trust me that it’s better this way.”
“I’ve trusted you with that for a long time. I’m a grown woman. It’s time for you to tell me the truth.”
She shook her head. “He’s a bad person.”
I pulled back as if she’d slapped me. It felt as if she had. As if she’d said that I was a bad person, even though I knew that didn’t make any sense. “Why? You can’t just tell me that and leave it.”
“Actually, I can,” my mother said coolly.
She hadn’t protected my magic, she hadn’t protected me from being alone with my father when he breathed his last breaths, she hadn’t protected me from feeling like a mother to Lidi when I should only have ever been her sister.
The way she’d depended on me made it infuriating when she then turned around and acted as if she were my mother, and that meant she knew best, and I should just trust her.
“If you’d sent me to the Trials, maybe I’d be rich now!” We wouldn’t even have to talk about sacrificing Lidi’s magic to save Tay.
“Do you know how many dragon shifters die in the Trials?” My mother sounded exasperated as she turned to me, her mouth tight with exasperation. “Why would I send you?”
“You’ve never been to the Trials! Why do we even do it if it’s killing dragon shifters? We obviously need them!”
I didn’t give her the chance to respond. It wasn’t like she was going to give me any answers anyway. I made my way back toward the cottage.
“Well, I made the decisions I made,” my mother called behind me, her voice infuriatingly calm. “And it’s too late to undo them.”
I felt so furious that she wouldn’t tell me anything. She’d made these huge decisions for me, hiding my mark.
Could the Trials really be that bad if you face them with your clan? With friends like I’d just seen?
But she was right, and that was why she was so calm. I couldn’t go offer myself up now. I was too old, it was too late to train.
When I set my basket of berries on the table just inside the house to keep them safe from the critters, Tay and Lidi were laughing about something.
They called to me, but I felt a sudden rise of panic at the thought of joining them and smiling when I had no answers. I pretended that I didn’t hear and closed the door behind me.
My feet carried me toward the village as I fretted.
Our mother was going to take Lidi’s magic away.
I would never choose Lidi’s magic over Tay’s life. If it came down to a choice between the two, there was no question. But there had to be another way.
I’d never left our village to go to the cities where the Fae cured mortals. I’d never been to the Night Market, where far more charms were sold than in Orx’s Shop in the village.
If I were a dragon shifter, I would have the proximity of power to cure Tay.
And if I worked for a Fae, if I’d left this little village and gone over the mountains myself like Lidi jumped to do, I might at least know where to find a cure. Where to steal one.
If I returned to the village with a cure after working for the Fae, at least I’d have a story.
Surely the dragon shifters would be able to connect me with work.
If Tay had enough time…that was the fear that haunted me.
His health had faltered and then improved again over and over; my brother was a fighter in his own way.
The dreadful possibility that this was the time he didn’t turn back toward health clung to me like heavy clothes in the lake, dragging me down.
If I had a plan—even though I would leave out the part where I stole from the godlike creatures who could kill us easily—maybe, as long as Tay’s health held and he wasn’t at any risk, my mother would agree to wait a little longer.
If I showed up at Fieran’s lodging, people would notice. People would think that I had a crush on him.
At this point, everyone in this village, regardless of gender and orientation, had a crush on Fieran. I rolled my eyes at the thought of me feeling self-conscious about it. Absolutely no one would be stunned that I wanted Fieran.
But that wasn’t why I was going.
When I knocked on the door of the only lodging house, the door swung open to Auntie Louise’s beautiful round face as she beamed at me in delight. Rarely did anyone in this village offer me such an unrestrained greeting, and I wondered what Fieran had said about me.
“Well, Cara, it’s so nice to see you,” she said, not sounding surprised at all. The delicious scents of freshly baked bread and roasted meat hung in the air. “Why don’t you come in and eat with them?”
I didn’t have to ask who she meant. She didn’t ask why I was there.
I stopped in the doorway of the dining room. It was just the five of them, but still, it felt strangely hard to breathe around them.
“There you are,” Fieran told me. “We were beginning to wonder if you’d be on time.”
Dairen patted an empty seat between him and Fieran, and I felt my jaw unhinge at the realization that there was a sixth setting at the table.
My gaze rose to meet Fieran’s. “A little bit cocky, aren’t you?”
“A little bit here, aren’t you?” Fieran responded.
His point was hard to counter.
“We were just debating whether to linger here to wait for Clan Amber to arrive or to head out searching for the rip in the hopes that we missed them,” Dairen said.