I stepped into our home and the scent of the boiling cougarin stew made my mouth water. My gaze flicked to my traveling pack leaned up against the wall. It had been cleaned and looked fully stocked and ready to go.
“Mom, you’re scaring me. Why did you pack my bag? I just got back.”
She set my pile of dirty clothes in the washing hamper and then turned to face me with tears in her eyes. “I sent your sister to play with Violet so we have some time to say goodbye privately.”
My eyes nearly fell out of my skull. “Goodbye? Mom, I’m not going anywhere. I just got home from a week on the road.” Not to mention I just got left in the kissing tent and was now mortified. Whoever my world-tilting kisser was, I wanted to avoid him now at all costs. I wanted to go into my room, cry myself to sleep, and then stay in bed for the next two days.
My mom wrung her hands together, shaking her head, which made her dark brown curls fall away from her face. “I’ve kept a dark secret from you your entire life,” she said and I froze.
I reached out and grasped the edge of the chair, not prepared for those words to ever leave my mother’s lips. “What are you talking about?”
My mother stepped closer, picking up my travel bag and handing it to me. “You have to leave before the sniffers find you.”
I took the bag but then let it fall to my feet. Reaching out, I grasped my mother’s shoulders and looked her right in the eyes. “What dark secret?”
It was something you never wanted to hear anyone close to you say. Now I was full-on freaking out. Why did I need to keep the sniffers from finding me? They smelled magic on people and I barely had any. I would be of zero interest to them.
She sighed, and her breath smelled of sage and rosemary, reminding me of my childhood. She loved chewing on the herbs while cooking.
“Your father and I tried for a child for five winters but the healer said there was something wrong with his seed.”
Her words cut right through me, causing chills to break out on my arms. What was she saying?
“You are my child. My daughter,” she growled, reaching out to grasp my forearms as if trying to convince me.
That declaration made me sick. Of course I was her daughter. Why is she telling me I am her daughter?
“But another woman birthed you,” she said, and I dropped my arms, breaking out of her grasp, and collapsed into the chair beneath me. My chest heaved, my breath coming out in ragged gasps.
She fell to her knees in front of me, tears streaming down her face. “I should have told you sooner, but it was never a good time, and I didn’t want you to think that you weren’t mine.”
I sat there in stunned silence for a full minute until she stood again and pulled up the chair before me.
“Who was she? The woman?” I asked, finally able to suck in a full breath and keep my panic at bay.
My mom chewed the inside of her lip. “A traveler passing through. Dressed like a highborn wearing bright colored silk, embroidered with jade. This was when I was still working at the tavern.”
I was a highborn? Was that what she was telling me? Highborns were at least half dragon-folk, maybe more.
“What happened?” I didn’t recognize my own voice. I needed information, and quickly. The hole in my chest was too big now and I needed to fill it with something or I was afraid I would disappear.
My mother swallowed hard. “She came to the tavern alone, heavily pregnant, pale as a ghost and speckled in blood. She looked shaken, like she’d seen a battle. Due to her obvious status, I didn’t ask questions. I just showed her to her room.”
I waited for her to go on. She glanced at my traveling pack and then at the door and leaned forward. “She went into early labor in the middle of the night. The entire tavern was awoken with her screams. Bardic sent me to tend to her and I did.”
Holy Hades!
A woman fleeing a battle was thrust into early labor in Cinder Village? I wondered where she had been traveling to. Cinder Village was at the very tip of Embergate territory, you didn’t come here unless you meant to. But highborns didn’t come here. Some people had been known to hide here. The ash covered life wasn’t desirable, and so not many people came looking. Had she meant to have her baby here? To have me and leave me behind where I wouldn’t be found?
My mom’s hands shook. “I sent for Elodie. She was the most advanced in laboring at the time, but word came back that she was sick with the black lung and couldn’t help.”
Elodie died of the black lung the year I was born, then my mother became the village midwife. This must have been the event that started her career! From tavern barmaid to village midwife. I’d always wondered how she made the leap.
“Go on,” I urged her.
My mom picked up my pack and walked it over to me, tears streaming freely down her face. “We don’t have much time.”
I stood, taking the pack and placing it on my back. “I won’t leave until I know the whole story. Why do I have to go? Did the highborn die in labor?”
In all my life I’d maybe seen my mother cry twice. Once when my father died and once when she delivered Mrs. Hartley’s stillborn. These were far more tears than I’d seen in my eighteen winters.
“It was a full sundown to sun-up labor. In that time we bonded. I told her stories of your father and I to pass the time or distract her. I told her of all the times we tried to get pregnant, where I grew up, anything to keep her from crying out in pain. She told me things too. Scary things.”
“What kind of things?” I gripped the straps of the pack tightly.
My mother stepped closer, lowering her voice. “I didn’t fully understand what she said. A lot of it sounded like a pain-induced ramble, but one thing I got very clear.” She brushed the curls away from her head. “Her entire family was murdered for some type of ongoing feud she had with the dragon king. Her magic was a threat to him she said. She… she said she was a full-blooded dragon-folk.”
My eyebrows drew together in confusion. A full-blooded dragon-folk would make her a royal and that wasn’t possible. The king didn’t have a sister.
My mother went on: “She escaped, but she warned me that if anyone ever detected this magic in her child, that child would be killed.”
Full-body chills rushed down every inch of my skin and I froze. “I’m that child?”
My mother nodded, reaching out to stroke my cheek as her tears intensified. “She died in labor—too much blood loss. But I saved you and took care of you and loved you and made you mine.”
A whimper left my throat as I found it hard to contain my own tears.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. It was selfish but I didn’t want you to ever think that you weren’t wanted or loved.” My mom could barely speak.
It was an awful thing not to tell me, but in that moment I forgave her completely. I understood. When was it a good time to tell your child that they were the offspring of a woman whose family was murdered and on the run?
Never.
“I forgive you.” I rushed forward and our arms went tightly around each other at the same time.
I noticed now that where I was fair she was dark, and we really looked nothing alike. Not like the other girls and their mothers. Not like her and Adaline.
Wait.
I pulled back and faced her. “How did you have Adaline if there was something wrong with Father’s seed? I saw you pregnant, I was there at her birth.”
I was five when Adaline was born but I remembered it. It was one of my first memories. My mother’s screams had scared me.
Shame burned my mother’s cheeks and she stared at the floor. “After you came to live with us, your father wanted a second child so badly. He permitted me to… lie… with another man to see if it really was his seed that was broken.”
I wasn’t prepared for that answer and it must have shown on my face.
“Please do not judge. It is a very much common thing to do, and there was no love or passion between us,” she rushed to say.
I wasn’t judging, I was just… in shock. My father had been a jealous man who once threatened to rip Bardic’s balls off if he looked at my mom’s cleavage in the tavern. I just didn’t see him allowing her to lie with another man.
“He felt guilty he couldn’t give me the children we wanted,” she said finally. “Tell me you understand?”
I needed a drink. I wasn’t normally keen on wine or mead but right now I could drink an entire bottle. I nodded. “I understand.” I also wanted to know what man in the village was Adaline’s birth father but I didn’t dare ask. It wasn’t important.
It made me miss my father even more now. He loved my mother so much and wanted another child with her so badly that he let her crawl into another man’s bed to have one. It was just another testament to his kindness.
“You must go,” my mother urged. “Just say you are going on another hunting trip and return in a week’s time. I packed your bag for two weeks just in case.”
Another week on the road. The dust, the constant vigilance for looters or stalking animals. Sleeping on a bedroll, bathing in the river, the cold nights… I just got back from doing that. I didn’t want to go again, but I knew that I must after what my mother had just told me.
“I’ll go,” I murmured.
She sighed in relief. “This whole thing will blow over in a week’s time. The king doesn’t do a census of Cinder Village, so the sniffers won’t even know they missed you.”
I tightened the straps on my pack and gave her one last hug. “Tell Ada I’ll miss her.”
My mother nodded and smoothed my hair.
I took one last look at the stew simmering on the stove, a stew that I would never taste, and the skinned cougarin drying out on the back porch, and stepped up to the front door.
“Oh wait!” my mother called. “I almost forgot. The highborn woman also said that she’d put a protective spell on your magic but that it would wear off with time as you come of age. If the sniffers do catch you, play dumb. Say you are mostly human with diluted dragon blood.”
“Well, I thought that’s what I was my entire life,” I mumbled. I did have an uncanny sense of balance, I was the fastest runner in my class, and I could track any animal within a mile. I thought it might be the small amount of dragon magic in me from my father.
“Goodbye, Arwen,” my mother said, like she would never see me again, and that was unsettling.
“Goodbye, Mother,” My voice cracked as I swallowed my emotions.
As I slipped out into the bustling village, I wondered just what in the Hades had become of my life.
