Chapter Twenty-Two Frejara
The fire had guttered low, but the heat lingered – pressed into the seams of stone, thick and heavy.
The dagger lay nestled in my palm, its pearl hilt warming slowly beneath fingers still slick with sweat and blood.
I held it not for comfort, but because it was there – real and solid – when nothing else felt either.
Mathias’s arm remained looped around my shoulders, the coarse wool of his sleeve brushing the curve of my neck with each uneven breath, anchoring me to a moment I hadn’t yet decided to stay in.
I kept my gaze fixed downward, away from him, away from Maeve, tracing the curve of the blade with my thumb, as if its shape alone might unravel the chaos tightening somewhere deep in my chest.
The words of the blood-soaked woman in the dreamlike chamber echoed through me, strange and unwelcome, as if they’d been hurled into my body with too much force, their meaning splintering on impact rather than settling into sense.
“I am her mother.”
The visions twisted as I turned them over, trying to map them onto what I had seen: the woman on the floor, her nightgown torn and soaked with blood, and Mowgara standing over her, her hands stained as if the violence of it belonged to her.
I tried to make the pieces lock into place, but they slid past one another, refusing to hold.
The more I forced them, the more it seemed to scrape against something raw and misaligned, like pressing on a wound before it’s closed.
My pulse hadn’t settled since I woke, but it climbed even higher now, kindled by the first stirrings of anger, rising to guard the hollow where fear took hold.
I shifted the blade in my grip, letting its weight roll between my fingers until the hilt faced upward.
The pearl caught what little light there was – soft, luminous – but it was the mark at its base that held me still: a single letter, carved clean – I.
My breath caught, shallow and jagged. I’d seen these engravings before: once on the dagger I’d carried since I was old enough to understand it was mine, and again on the hilt I’d taken from the black pyre at Irongate.
My fingers tightened, the edge dipping slightly toward my thigh as I turned to Maeve, the question already rising like smoke from a lit fuse.
“Where did you get this?” The words came sharper than I meant them, laced with something that felt too close to accusation.
I felt Mathias shift beside me – not away, but closer, his hand tightening slightly where it rested near my shoulder, a pressure just firm enough to remind me I wasn’t alone in what had just come to pass.
That he, too, had seen what I had seen. That we were standing on the same crumbling ledge, waiting for the pieces to settle.
Maeve’s hands loosened, then withdrew with the same careful precision she brought to salve and stitches, as if even that small retreat demanded it.
She looked to Mathias first, and something passed between them – not loud, not seen, but weighted – the kind of exchange that leaves the air heavier in its wake.
Then her gaze returned to me – still measured, but no longer untouched, something wary flickering just beneath the calm, like a door held half-shut against a rising wind.
“I had to be certain,” she said quietly, the syllables soft but shaped with purpose.
“I wanted to tell you before. But until now, I didn’t know for sure. ”
The heat that had been coiling low in my chest rose all at once, jagged and burning, as if Maeve’s calm alone had been enough to spark it loose.
“You had to be sure?” I said, the words scraping past my teeth.
“You sit beside me for days, tending wounds like you were waiting for something to fall into place.” I felt the dagger shift in my hand, heavier somehow, as if it too was waiting for an explanation.
“You’ve been circling something since the moment we met. Just say it.”
Maeve didn’t bristle, didn’t push back. She only looked at me with that same, unbearable steadiness – but now I could see it, the weight behind it, worn, like fabric thinned by too many winters.
“You’ve every right to be angry,” she said – and this time, the words didn’t sting for what they were, but because she meant them. “There’s much you were never told. And you deserve to know.”
I shifted, breath catching, a retort half-formed, but what came out instead were words I hadn’t meant to say – sudden and biting. “You speak in riddles, old woman. Speak plainly.”
As soon as I heard myself, I froze. I’d said that once before. To Alaric, by the still-burning city of Haedor. Maeve watched the moment land in me like a key turning in a lock.
“No riddles,” she said. “But to understand where we are now, we have to go back to the beginning.”
She turned slightly toward the fire, though her gaze didn’t catch on the flame—fixed instead on something flickering just beyond it.
“It was Drizzna the Deceiver who started it all,” Maeve said then, each word heaving itself out before it could leave her.
“She stole the Dragon Fire and shared it only with her blood-sisters - the first Seven. That was the shape it took from then on. Always seven. Always the same line, passed from mother to daughter – bound not just by blood, but by choice; sisters in lineage and in purpose, each carrying a part of what none should bear alone.”
I let out a sharp breath, bitter and hard.
“I know the tales,” I said, the words edged with heat I didn’t try to hide.
“Mother made me learn them before I could even read. I could recite every verse, every song in my sleep.” I shifted where I sat, the dagger still clenched in my hand.
“So, unless you’re planning to sing them too, get to the part that matters. ”
If Maeve was stung by the bite in my words, she didn’t show it – she only watched me for a long moment, as if weighing not what to say, but how much I was ready to hear. Then, gently, she tilted her head, the firelight drawing long shadows along the line of her jaw.
“You know the tales,” she said, slowly. “And you know the songs. But do you know what became of them?” Her hands rested in her lap, fingers laced, still.
“Seven sisters, always. That was the way of it. Until now.” She paused, not for effect, but because the words that followed came heavier.
“So where are they, child? If the fire runs in the blood… why does Mowgara stand alone?”
I said nothing. Her words had landed softly but hit hard – scattering through my memory like something dropped and shattered.
I hadn’t thought to question it. Not when I was a girl, tracing the tales of the Seven Sisters in countless books with ink-stained fingers, or later, when the songs were no longer lullabies but lessons, endlessly repeated.
I was taught the words as history, as legacy – the shape of what had come before and what I, too, was meant to carry.
Everything I learned pointed toward the moment it would manifest in me, the slow-burning ember flaring at last into full flame.
But the ember never caught. Whatever lived in our blood, it passed me by, silent as breath swallowed in sleep, leaving behind only the rituals and the waiting.
I remembered the first time they tried. I was ten – draped in the heavy ceremonial robes of Irongate, the ones only worn for the oldest of rites, the fabric pooling around my ankles like it meant to anchor me there.
We stood in the sanctum, its walls etched with ancient script, a ring of candles lit in a perfect circle while the Acolytes scurried beyond it frantically like insects.
Mowgara’s hand rested on my shoulder, firm and cold through the cloth, pressed just above the mark that had decorated across my back since I was but a babe.
Her voice filled the chamber, low and strange, speaking words I didn’t understand – words meant to summon my flame.
But nothing came. No flicker of heat, no shift in the air – only the sharp, searing pain where her hand met my skin, as if my own body had turned against me.
I must have screamed. I remember the way the light spun, the way the stone floor seemed to tilt beneath me, and then nothing.
When I woke, I was in my bed, the scent of burnt fabric still lingering, my mother sitting beside me with her expression carefully smoothed into something like regret.
“It didn’t wake,” she’d said, and for once, her voice held no triumph, no cruelty – only the finality of a door quietly closing.
Eventually it became clear that the blood in my veins would stay quiet no matter how fiercely I willed it, and I was given steel in place of flame, sent to the barracks where expectations went to be buried. I learned to bite down on the ache and call it pride.
But Maeve’s question had cracked the surface of something, and now the pieces shifted in ways I couldn’t ignore.
I searched my memory for their faces – the Sisters who should have stood beside her – and found only absence.
I must have known of them; Mowgara had never claimed to be the first. They had been there, surely.
And then they weren’t. No mention in stories, no place in the songs.
Their names slipped away as if even the tales had forgotten how to carry them forward.
If there had always been seven, each bearing part of the weight so that none would collapse beneath it… why had Mowgara carried it alone? Why had it passed to no one else? And if it had not come to me the way it should have – what had broken in the line?
Maeve shifted, her hands unfolding in her lap as if she, too, had carried the weight of waiting too long.
“It began with whispers,” she said. “Far from Dragna’toch, in the deeper provinces, where even the wind carried the old names – names the people of these lands had long since forgotten. The Seers heard them first.”