That one word cut me to the bone.
“What?” I asked. Stupefied, I knelt beside her with the baby in my arms, instinctively holding him closer to myself.
“I don’t want to touch him,” Ina said. “Get him away from me.”
This couldn’t be happening. She wouldn’t do this.
“You have to. He needs to nurse. He needs his mother!” I pleaded with her to understand, to look at how tiny and helpless he was. How could she not see how much he needed her? How could she deny him the comfort of resting on her chest, of hearing her familiar heartbeat to welcome him to the outside world?
“I’m not his mother.” She turned her head away.
“But—”
“No,” she said firmly. “I cannot be both a mother and a queen. Raise him as your son. You’ll be a far better mother than me.” She closed her eyes. Labor had exhausted her.
After everything we’d been through from Amalska to here, she expected me to keep him.
A wave of anguish hit me. I thought about setting him down on her chest anyway so that she could feel how soft and small he was. So that she could hear his cries and feel compelled to give him some nourishment, some love. How could she refuse him? How could a mother turn her back on her own helpless baby?
But I knew it was possible, because my own mother had done this—turned away from me the moment I was born, leaving me to be raised by someone else, abandoning me to never truly know who I was. I couldn’t let that happen to this little boy.
In the wake of my empathy for the baby, rage swiftly followed.
I hated her.
I looked for Hal, only to realize he was right behind me, peering over my shoulder at the baby. He looked just as horrified and dismayed by Ina’s words as I felt. We exchanged a look of understanding that temporarily bridged everything that was broken between us.
“Can you hold him for a minute while I gather my things?” I asked softly. I trusted him to do that much, at least.
He nodded, and I nestled the baby in his arms.
“He’s so tiny,” Hal said with wonder.
Moments later, he was already walking around having an animated one-sided conversation with the bundle in his arms. “Can you smell the cook fires? I can. But no rabbit for you. You don’t have any teeth yet!”
I slung my satchel over my shoulder. As angry as I was with Ina, she’d get what she wanted. If he couldn’t have his mother, he would at least have me.
As for the next time I saw her, it would be from the opposite side of a battlefield.
“Wait,” Ina said, weakly reaching out a hand.
I paused, wondering if the threat of my departure had finally changed her mind, but all she said was “Call him Iman.”
His name meant “faith.”
She’d chosen to put hers in me after all.
CHAPTER 33
HAL’S NETWORK OF FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES helped us find a wet nurse for Iman, which was how I ended up with a sweet, freckled girl named Zallie sharing my little room at the castle. As cramped as we were with both of us and two babies, she didn’t quite seem to believe the luck of receiving free food and shelter in exchange for her services. The boy who had been courting her had disappeared as soon as he found out she was pregnant, and her parents had thrown her out shortly thereafter.
I hadn’t forgiven Hal, but he kept showing up anyway. His draw to Iman could not be denied, and between me, Zallie, and Hal, Iman never lacked for food or a loving pair of arms. I tried to stay angry with Hal, but it was increasingly difficult. Hal brought me and Zallie food and herbs. He told the babies stories that were so ridiculous it took all my self-control not to laugh until I cried. He shared openly with me what he learned in the city. At night when Iman was safely asleep under Zallie’s watch, he accompanied me on my walks in search of the Fatestone and its elusive thread of magic, even though I never told him about meeting my mother or what we were looking for. I didn’t want to admit it, but his presence helped keep my despair at bay enough so I could stay focused. Now that Iman was here, time was running out. The only thing standing between now and the battle for the crown was the first snow.
On one such excursion, after another futile attempt to locate Atheon, Hal and I climbed the stairs to K’vala Falls—the largest waterfall on the mountain. Though exhaustion weighed on my bones, I thought it might be worth venturing up above the city to see if that provided my Sight with any additional information.
Together we continued up the stone steps that wound their way toward the waterfall. Long before we reached the bridge that passed in front of it, the crash and rush of it soothed me. If we got close enough, the sound would be deafening, perhaps enough to drown out the endless loop of thoughts in my head.
The night air was cold and wet after an evening rain. Winter weather would be coming soon. I recognized the smell of it in the air, and the equinox was only a week away. That meant snow was coming, and not long after, the battle for the crown. Anxiety lanced through me every time I thought of it.
I sighed, feeling the weight of responsibility on my shoulders more heavily than ever. We stopped early on the bridge, away from the part sprayed with continuous mist from the falls. If I couldn’t find the Fatestone, what would my future hold? What would Hal’s?
“What are you going to do after all this is over?” I asked him.
He leaned over the stone railing of the bridge, peering at moonlight reflecting on the ripples of water below. “I don’t know. I suppose it depends on whether we survive.”
“But what would you want if you knew anything was possible?” I asked.
He looked at me with sadness in his eyes. “I’m afraid to let myself dream of that.”
I was too. The future seemed impossible to plan for when I didn’t know what would happen if I found the Fatestone and changed the past. In a different version of our lives, Hal and I certainly wouldn’t have been standing on a bridge in Corovja right now.
“I’m afraid of losing Iman,” Hal added.
A pang of something fierce tightened my throat. “Me too,” I admitted. The thought of it gutted me. And Hal loved Iman as much as I did. I could see it in his eyes every time he held the baby. Maybe in another life, we would have been a family.
Perhaps the time had come to forgive Hal for what he’d done. Did his recent loyalty outweigh one betrayal? Was there even such a thing as anyone who was truly honest?
“Asra . . . I think we should talk about what happened,” Hal began. “I should have told you the truth from the beginning. You have to understand that I grew up here in the city. On the streets you can’t afford to trust strangers. It can get you killed.”
I almost laughed. Trusting strangers—including Hal—had certainly come close to getting me killed every step of the way since leaving home. “Truer words may never have been spoken.”
He nodded. The only acknowledgment of my jab was the flicker of hurt in his eyes, but he soldiered on. “The only person I could trust was my sister, who protected me from the time I was young. She was my hero. She could do no wrong. I didn’t understand until recently that her protectiveness wouldn’t extend to people I cared about. And . . . there was never someone I had feelings for like the ones I have for you.” His expression was so raw, so vulnerable. The wrong reaction from me would surely break him.
Seeing him unbox his heart crumbled the walls I’d tried so hard to maintain. All I wanted now was to cradle his cheek in my hand, lean into his embrace, seek out the familiar planes of his body and find safety there. Most of all, I wanted to take what he was offering me and protect it with all the fierceness I had.
When I didn’t say anything, he kept going. “If I had your gift and could do it without harming others, I would rewrite the history of us. I wish I could give us another beginning, one in which I had told you the truth from the moment we met,” he said, his voice firm.