Epilogue
Four weeks later
"I'm nervous," I tell Marton, pacing over the same strip of grass I have already spent the morning wearing a trail into.
"It's going to be alright.
" He says it kindly, but with the air of someone who has already said the same thing a dozen times without being heeded.
He doesn't look up from the porridge he is stirring over our camp fire.
Our time since leaving the palace has been, in a word, pleasant.
We haven't ventured far afield or done much true exploring yet.
We've spent our days flying and surveying the land, picking out new vales and glens to camp in.
Spring has arrived, and the land is awake with new growth in the trees and whole fields of wildflowers sprouting up from nothing.
We've spent our evenings and mornings—and sometimes afternoons—wrapped up in one another.
Talking and laughing and trading kisses and gentle touches, exploring one another in ways we haven't before.
With no one around to interrupt us and no danger or deadlines hanging over our heads, it is the most blessedly free I have ever felt, and I know Marton feels the same way.
Many of the supplies he planned to bring on his journey had to be left behind, including the wagon and both of the guards, but Marton has brought the essentials.
Which means he's brought the books and scrolls and all of the parchment and ink.
He means to make a record of our travels, to have a true compendium of truth chronicling all that we learn about basilisks and the kin and what is really going on in the realm.
He has started by writing about our adventures this past year, beginning from the time he left the Academy until now.
He can be found bent over writing in his book for at least an hour every day while I hunt, and afterwards we come together to eat dinner and talk and plan together.
We have spoken much about where we plan to go first. Which thread to follow.
The first thing we did was fly back to Tombland Lake and officially invite our friends the sirens to take up residence in the capital, as guests of the Queen of Ithyma. They agreed, and Cherry is building them a grotto complete with a secret lake within the palace grounds.
Staying within a few days' flight of the capital and the palace has settled something in me these past few weeks.
It's reminded me that although we are separated, Cherry and I can and will still see each other again.
Marton and I have stopped back at the palace a few times, once to celebrate the spring equinox and another time to deliver a birthday present to a very grumpy manticore.
Turns out, Vakhrin hates to be the center of attention and wasn't at all amused at the surprise party Cherry threw him.
The palace guards, on the other hand, loved it and plan to make it a tradition among their ranks.
Birthday parties for all. The more torturous and cringe-inducing the better.
Cherry has her hands full with that crowd, I know. But she also has friends and loyal protectors.
Things are well in the kingdom.
Before setting out for any foreign adventures, Marton and I had been deciding whether to pay a visit to my sister in the Trove to update her on all that has happened, or travel a bit further south to see my...other family.
I haven't seen my mother in nearly ten years now.
A midnight flyover our old village revealed that she still lives, and that she still resides in the same cottage on the same quiet residential lane where I grew up. Where the neighbor children used to run away screaming when I couldn't control my shift.
I have thought about those times much over the past few days, remembering the pointing and shouting of the children, the wary looks and cautioning of their parents as they corralled their younglings away from me.
I remember my mother telling me I must try and avoid scaring them.
That I should make myself...less noticeable. When all I wanted was to learn to fly.
"What if..." I stop in front of Marton, picking at the edge of my dress with nails that I have already bitten to the quick. "What if she isn't happy to see me? What if she never wanted me back?"
His hand stills on the wooden spoon he is grasping, his attention fixed on the porridge pot. Slowly, his eyes track up to meet mine. "She's your mother."
I shake my head at him. "So?"
"So..." He frowns, thinking it over. "So you've told me stories about her. It sounds like she always did her best by you. That she loved you."
"She gave me away to the king." That is a thought that has been revolving in my mind not for days now, but for far longer than that. Months, I think. Maybe years.
"Knowing what the king could do," Marton speaks carefully, "I suppose she may not have had a choice."
A droplet of cold ripples out from the center of my chest. It numbs my arms and puts a ringing in my ears. "You think he tampered with her mind?"
"There's no way to know that he didn't. If...If we're going to be worried about something, perhaps it should be that."
"You mean, you think her mind might still be tampered with. Like maybe he made her hate me, or forget who I was altogether."
"From what we've seen, the effects of basilisk mind control seem to wear off once the perpetrator is dead." He says it diplomatically, but I think I see a hint of worry in the lines of his face.
"We don't know that. That's the theory we've been operating under.
But we don't know that there haven't been any lasting effects.
Mental blocks or buried compulsions." There haven't been any signs of any untoward remnants of the kings control in the months since his death.
If there had been, I would never have felt safe leaving Cherry.
But still. Perhaps none of the compulsions he performed on his guards were intended to last forever.
Perhaps he did something different to my mother.
"Perhaps we're worried over nothing," says Marton, as if reading my mind and responding directly to my thoughts.
I find my gaze pulled in the direction of my old village, just over the rise and beyond the copse of trees before us. "There's only one way to know for certain."
The conspicuousness I feel walking into my old village in broad daylight, in the middle of the lane crowded with houses and shops and children playing, reminds me of entering that first town in the mountains of Olio with Cherry and Marton.
We were chasing the legend that would soon lead us to Vakhrin, but at the time all I was thinking of was how it was the first place I had been in eight years and that I was terrified the townspeople would take one look at me and cry monster.
I feel something similar now. With every step I take, every casual glance or curious squint in our direction, I expect to be recognized.
Both as a dragon and as Tarah, the girl who they once knew.
I recognize some of the faces and many of the homes and shops that we pass.
There is the blacksmith's where my mother sent me to buy nails with a pailful of old metal scraps in trade.
There is the house that belonged to the Ms. Renee who taught sewing lessons to the young girls in town and made her living mending clothes.
There is the porch in front of the corner store where a dirty-faced boy named Billy once tried to kiss me, and later shouted at me to stay away from him and his family.
I believe he called me a filthy lizard.
But for all that I remember, none of the people we pass seem to remember me.
A few call out hellos, cautious but polite, the way one talks to strangers in a small village like this.
One man who I don't recognize intercepts us to ask where we're headed, and Marton smiles and charms him with a story about visiting an estranged relative.
The man gives us directions that we don't need and sends us on our way.
We turn down the lane to my mother's house, and my heart leaps into my throat. I grasp Marton's elbow tightly in my hands, trying to turn the frantic gesture into something casual when I remember the eyes on us. Marton pats my hands reassuringly with one of his own.
My feet drag, but momentum carries us inexorably forward, and then there is the house where I grew up, with the green shutters that I helped my mother paint and the chimney that she taught me how to clean.
The front door is new wood, and there are flower boxes now growing bright yellow blooms in front of the windows.
It looks cheery and quaint and I cannot swallow. I can barely breathe.
Marton raises his fist to knock three times, a neat rap, rap, rap that I feel echo in my bones.
"Just a minute!" a voice calls, and I choke on the air in my throat, tears springing hot to my eyes.
The door opens without so much as a creak where it used to give a symphony of groans, and there is my mother, with brown hair pulled back in a bun and fair skin sporting lines around her eyes and mouth that are deeper than before.
But her brown eyes are sparkling and her mouth is on the edge of a smile as she dries her hands on a rag and slowly turns her head to face us, in the middle of saying, "My apologies, I was just showing Lilla how to. .."
Her words get lost somewhere, her mouth moving for a moment without making any sound. My words are lost too, but I can tell that Marton is waiting for me to speak. He squeezes my hands where they are still clasped around his arm.
"Tarah," my mother croaks.
And okay, okay. She remembers me. She does.
And she does not look angry or disgusted to see me.
I swallow, and lean into Marton. I take a deep breath of his leather and parchment scent for strength but my voice still breaks when I say, "Mom.
" Because I can smell her too. Sweat and strength and the herb and flower smell of the soap she uses in her laundering business, made by men in the local soap maker's guild two towns over.
In all these years, the recipe has not changed.
And neither has this: the exact way it feels when my mother takes two steps forward and envelops me in a hug, crushing me against her body with every bit of her wiry strength.
She is still taller than me. I have not grown more than a few inches since the last time she did this, on the day the king's men arrived to take me away.
"Where have you been," she nearly growls into my hair.
I feel the damp of her tears on my shoulder.
Not many, just the few that are squeezed out before she masters herself and steps back.
"He said six months." Her fingers bite into my shoulders.
"A year at most. The king said he needed your services for that long and then you would be back.
He said he would bring you back." The ferocity in her eyes gives me pause, but I remember that this is my mother.
Backbone of iron and steel, who would rather fight than cry any day of the week.
"He's dead," I blurt. And then take a step back, out of her hands because I didn't mean to admit it like this, but I can't stop. "We killed him. Cherry and I. Princess Shireen. Queen, now. I don't know if the news has made it this far yet. That he's dead."
"Aye," says my mother, giving me a strange look. "That's been months ago yet." She spits in the dirt. "And good riddance."
The prices of grain and seed have dropped drastically since Cherry took the throne as she scrambles to make the kingdom fair and livable for the poorest of her subjects. This is not the first time I have seen a member of the peasantry spit at the sound of the old king's name.
But I think my mother takes a more personal offense at him.
"Can we come in?" I find myself asking. And then remember to say, "This is Marton. My..." I gesture mutely.
"Fiancé," Marton finishes.