47. Cassiel #2
Neither is Ru—the real one, the one that’s waiting for us and depending on me to bring us all home safely.
The music swells, wrapping around the scene. Evander has just caught my younger self and hauled him back, both of them laughing, breathless, alive. Little me wriggles free of Evander and runs up to his father and Runara.
“Can I—?” he asks, already reaching.
Evander laughs. “You have to sit still first.”
“I am still.”
“You are absolutely not still.”
He sounds so like my Evander, the man, and not the boy, that it makes my chest ache. He steers younger me into a seat and holds him still as my father carefully lowers the baby into his arms.
Little me goes utterly silent, like I was when I first held her.
Is Mother replaying a version of that moment. I don’t blame her, if she is. It’s one of my favourites, too, although my father was never there. He was never there, and he should have been—
Runara makes a soft, uncertain sound, her tiny fingers flexing against the fabric of the blanket. Evander leans in close, peering down at her with open fascination.
“She’s so small,” he says, utterly in awe.
“That’s because she’s a baby,” my younger self replies, with the absolute certainty of a child who knows everything.
Evander snorts. “Careful, Cass. If you drop her—”
“I won’t drop her!”
“You might drop her.”
“I won’t!”
My father says something, and steadies both of us with a hand beneath our arms. My mother watches, smiling in a soft, unguarded way she’s never smiled in real life.
Beside me, Wren has gone very still.
“You’re staring,” I murmur.
“I just have to say…” she breathes, not looking away, “little you? Incredibly cute.”
I smile at the compliment—and then immediately have to bite down the foolish urge that rises with it.
I could give you a child that looks like that.
It’s foolish for many reasons, the least being because I know full well that women give children to men, not the other way around, as my mother made sure I knew and so did all of my teachers. It’s also foolish because Wren’s genes are clearly dominant.
And it’s foolish because that can’t be.
Wren cannot have my child. Not in this world.
Nevertheless, the thought takes root. A child that looks like her—but is mine too.
It would have dark hair, most likely. Would it have her eyes?
Deep brown, tinged with gold? Or forest green like mine?
Would it laugh like her, be bold and reckless and brilliant?
More reserved? Bookish? Artistic? Would it run up to me with finger paintings to show off, books to read, blades to fight with?
Maybe all, maybe none. Maybe it—or they—would be nothing like us at all. But they’d still be ours.
Ours, ours, ours—
No matter how impossible, I can’t shake the idea of it. We’d make beautiful babies, beautiful children, beautiful lives.
The music shifts. Something pulls at the edges of the scene, like a thread being tugged loose.
I blink, and the hall is no longer the hall. The alcove melts into a corridor. The feast stretches and thins behind us, its colours smearing into something softer and less certain.
Ahead of us, a little girl skips along the corridor, tracing the gaps in the stone and the cracks in the plaster, like she’s imaging pictures in the imperfections like I used to do as a child.
Pictures emerge as she moves, the cracks transforming into blooming trees.
Painted birds flit across the paint work.
My eyes stay rooted on the girl. She has dark hair and warm brown skin, and is wearing a blue-green dress embroidered with gold bellflowers.
Wren frowns slightly. “Who’s that?”
I don’t answer, though I’m already sure I know. I just didn’t expect her to look so real.
“Cassiel?” Wren presses, glancing at me. “Who is she? One of your ancestors?”
The girl turns her head just enough for me to catch her face, and my breath catches.
She has green eyes, flecked with gold.
Of course she does.
“I don’t think this is part of my mother’s dream,” I say quietly, throat tight. “I think it’s mine.”
The little girl reaches a door—my door, although it shouldn’t be here, so close to the main hall. She slips inside, the door staying open.
I pull away from Wren to run after her. Laughter emanates from inside the room, a laugh I recognise. It used to fill my darkness.
Wren stands inside my room. Our room. And it truly is ours, now.
The bed has been replaced with something carved from living trees.
The curtains are made of petals. Wren’s belongings are scattered over the desk.
A chess game is in play—two boards merged together, like we played when I was blind, with a set of marble pieces and wooden ones.
Wren stands inside the room, next to the window.
Not the Wren beside me. She’s older, not by much, but enough that it shows in the way she carries herself.
Softer in some places, stronger in others.
There’s a light in her I don’t have a word for.
Her hair is free and unbound, her face creased with laugh lines.
She looks even more beautiful than the one standing beside me.
She sees me in the doorway and her face breaks into something warm and familiar and entirely new all at once.
“You’re back,” she says.
She crosses the room, still beaming, and deposits something in my arms. I take it without thinking, still staring at her and the way her skin glows in the light.
“Your turn,” she says lightly.
I look down. There’s a warm, wriggling baby in my arms, wrapped in a blanket with the Aurelthane crest on it—a white stag on a green field, lit by the sun.
But I don’t pay much attention to the blanket. It’s the baby wrapped inside it who holds my full attention.
I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl, but what does that matter?
It has hair like curls of cinnamon, fine and impossibly soft against my fingers, and dark hazel eyes—not quite green, not quite brown.
It’s paler than Wren, unfortunately, but every bit as perfect.
A tiny hand curls instinctively around mine, grip surprisingly strong.
I feel its touch in my bones. My chest aches with the rightness of this.
Mine. Mine, and hers—
“Cassiel.”
The voice cuts through the warm haze of this moment. Go away, I almost want to tell it. Go away, and let me stay here.
But it’s Wren’s voice, and it’s hard to ignore. Even harder when her hand presses against my arm.
“It’s not real.”
But I want it to be real. I need it to be real.
Wren’s palm slides across my cheek.
“Close your eyes,” she tells me.
“No.” I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
“Please,” she whispers.
When I ignore her yet again, she pulls my face towards hers and slides her mouth against mine.
My eyes fan shut automatically. Strange, I think, that they’ve always done that whenever she kissed me, even though I couldn’t see her, like my body needed to melt in any way it could. The touch of her is starfire. It dissolves everything.
Everything.
The baby in my arms vanishes. The laugh of the other Wren, the little girl, the room, the giggle of another child, just out of reach.
When I open my arms, I’m standing in the half-light of the dream again, my arms empty.
I stare down at them, clutching onto air.
“They were warm,” I whisper. “They felt so real.”
Wren’s eyes are shining. For a moment, neither of us moves.
“I’m real,” she says softly, but she doesn’t sound as sure as she should. I imagine that couldn’t have been easy for her to witness, either. We’re real—but that future isn’t.
We will never see that world. We’ll never get to hold that child again. They were nothing more than a fragment of want, of longing shaped into something almost tangible.
The only hope we have of knowing it—
No.
I cut the thought off before it can finish. I refuse.
Wren steps back slightly, studying me, something searching in her expression. She lifts two fingers to her lips and gives a low, clear whistle.
I’m here.
I answer without thinking. The sound feels different in this place, but it carries just as well without the wind.
I’m here.
The dream shifts. The corridor warps. The music falters, a note stretching too long, then snaps abruptly like a cut string. The light dims and brightens in uneven pulses. Cracks appear in the walls, light pours though—
No, not light. Fire.
The dancers stop, one by one. Their movements stutter, limbs jerking out of rhythm. Heads turn too sharply, like broken marionettes.
Wren stiffens beside me. “Cass…”
I grab her hand. The feast begins to rot, the cheese turning mossy, the pies splitting with insects. The laughter thins, voices overlapping in the wrong places, too loud, too hollow. The figures at the table flicker—solid, then not, then something in between.
The faceless dancers rise from the floor, except now they have faces.
Or pieces of them. Fragments of mouths and noses, torn, blackened expressions, stretched too wide or twisted into something unrecognisable. Eyes burn through the distortion, bright with something sharp and furious.
One steps forward, and his features arrange into a face I know.
The recognition hits like a blow.
“Riverspire,” I breathe.
Wren sucks in a breath. She knows him too, I realise.
She knows him, because she killed him.
He’s wearing the armour he must have been wearing the night he died. The stag on his breastplate is scorched and blackened. He was one of Evander’s closest knights, steady and unshakable.
He doesn’t look steady now.
He looks like a monster.
His form flickers between solid and unraveling, like he’s being pulled apart and forced back together at the same time. His mouth moves, but the sound that comes out is warped, layered, too many voices trying to speak through one throat.
Others emerge behind him. More knights, a servant. A couple of fey warriors. People I’ve seen in passing, some strangers. People who served, who fought, who—
Who should not be here.
This is my mother’s dream, not Wren’s. My mother wouldn’t have brought these monsters here.
But if I summoned those children—