Letting out a long breath, Ritha sits at the edge of the cot. “Because you look like your mother. Though in truth, you’ve more of your father in you.”
My fingers turn cold, my heart races, but I approach her and kneel at her feet. “Ritha,” my voice scratches the name, “did you know my parents?”
“I didn’t know your father. Not personally. But your mother, yes.”
The stone might as well crumble beneath my feet. My hands twist a fistful of my skirt. “I don’t look anything like my mother—”
“Your real mother, child.”
She looks at me pointedly, maybe expecting another reaction, but she’s only confirmed what I already believed. That the mother in my household—she didn’t raise me, the nursemaid did—is not my mother. She’s too young. I don’t look like my siblings. And that mother never liked me. Like she knew there was something wrong with me even before I did.
I lick my lips. “What was her name?”
“Artlina.” Ritha’s tone is reverent. “I knew her through her sister.”
“I have an aunt.” My eyes sting.
But Ritha shakes her head. “She died of fever before I ever came here. But your mother. I was supposed to help her escape.”
“Escape?” Gooseflesh sprouts on my arms.
“From your father. She was a servant in his household. Not as pretty as you, my dear, but a woman’s body has always been a temptation for villains like Ottius Thellele.”
My ears ring at the sound of my father’s name.
“She was with child and hid it a long time, not sure what he would do when he found out,” Ritha says.
My thoughts verge on the horrors of how my father would react to such a situation. To having control taken from him, or leverage used against him. It’s a dark, bubbling pit, and I stand at the brink of it, but Ritha’s story pulls me back.
“I knew my cousin would take her in,” she continues. “She was a widow of ten years and lonely. We had the story all worked out, how Artlina was a distant niece, and the drought ate up her farm and took her husband. All we had to do was get her away before Ottius learned the truth.”
I’m trembling, and I grip the cot with one hand to steady myself. “He did,” I guess. My father is not one to be duped.
Ritha nods.
“Tell me,” I press.
She rubs the cuticle on her thumb. “Guessing from how I found her—”
I wince.
“—she took the path we had planned for her, off the main road. She was dead and bloody, but I didn’t see any stab wounds. And her womb was empty.”
The fire eating up the candlewick feels like winter.
“I don’t know if he killed her or if she fell by the way in the pains of labor and passed giving life to you. But she was there and you were not. And you’re the right age, the right look. I knew it from the moment I first saw you.”
I blink back tears. My body shivers, but my face boils, and I press chilled fingers against my cheeks. I can’t help but see it, a woman round with pregnancy, fleeing through the hills, ravaged by pains she can’t control. Falling by the way . . . or did my father push her?
How is it that in a single instance, I’ve both found and lost my mother?
“I told you trolls don’t believe in witchcraft.” Ritha leans close to me. “But I do. And while I don’t think you’re a witch, I do think you’re shifted.”
I search her face for meaning. “Shifted?”
She knits and reknits her hands. “It’s so rare, especially with our people scattered as they are. I’ve only seen it one other time, years ago, before you were born. And only heard about it once besides that.”
I want to both tear the words from her mouth and clamp my hands over my ears.
“There is something different about you, isn’t there, Lark?”
I don’t answer.
“Colson babbled about it after that night.” She’s barely audible. “And for the council to assign you to such a task . . . and the caste tournament. Others may dismiss it, but I know better. I understand fear, Lark.”
I stop breathing.
“I think . . . ,” Ritha says carefully, “that Artlina was terrified in her last moments. As scared as a person can be. And you were born in that fear. You drunk it in and came to life through it. And it lives with you now.”
Abruptly I’m on my feet, a swirl of dizziness beneath my skull. My erratic heartbeat consumes me.
“I was there,” Ritha says. “At the tournament.”
I shake my head. I hadn’t seen any other humans. But neither can I discount her story.
“I saw the look on Grodd’s face. And Etewen . . . he told me his account of that night in the schoolyard, before Perg ever came your way.” Her gaze drops to her hands. “I knew it then. That you were the lost child. That you were Artlina’s. I don’t know how you ended up in Cagmar, but given the choice between the trolls and Ottius Thellele, I would choose the trolls.”
I press a hand to the wall, forcing air into my lungs. It’s alarming and yet relieving to hear my secret spoken aloud. To see it in the hands of another . . . and not be cast out. Ritha has used discretion so far. I have no reason to believe her story false. She knew my mother. My real mother. Tried to help her. And she has helped me. She’s trustworthy.
And yet that does nothing to calm the blood racing through my body, the ache blooming behind my forehead.
“Wh-Who was the other?” I ask. “The other you called . . .”
“Shifted? An old man in Ungo.”
I perk up at the name of the township.
“He passed away some time ago.”
Which means I never could have met him.
“He was very open about it,” Ritha continues. “Anyone who came into his home left feeling light on their feet, good in their heart.” She chuckles to herself. “When I asked, he told me he’d been an only child, born to parents fifty years of age, who had been barren. The joy of his coming passed on to him.”
I stare at her a long time. “Joy?” I repeat, raspy. “He gets blessed with joy, and I’m cursed with fear?”
“You seem to have used it well.”
I turn away. “It’s the reason I had to come here. People don’t cast joy from their homes, their townships.” Their families.
Several heartbeats pass before Ritha says, “I’m sorry.”
“Who was the other?” I meet her gaze. “You said you knew of one other?”
“The other was just a story. A story of a child who could cast fear into the heart of any man, just by looking at him. But”—she pauses—“that child would be a woman now.”
My lips part.
She holds up a hand. “I know nothing more than that.”
I hug myself, trying to process Ritha’s words, trying to piece together the dark history of the mother I never knew and the person I’ve become. So often, I’ve wanted my fear gone from me. I wanted to be normal. Had I been normal, perhaps my father would have seen me as a human instead of a tool. And yet in some sick, disturbing way, this shifting is all I have of my mother.
I think of how frightened I’d been when Grodd had his thick fingers around my neck, dangling my body over the chasm. Was that what Artlina had felt like, running through the dusty dark, while in labor, with my father at her heels? Or had it been worse?
What a terrible, horrible way to die.