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.
“Oh, Hal . . . ,” I whispered.
“I wish I could rewrite taking you to Orzai. I wish we could have taken the Moth and flown past there. I wish we could keep going forever. See the world. Us, Iman, and the open sky.”
“I understand that wish.” If it hadn’t been for the sorrow I’d left behind in Amalska, the fear driving me forward, and the knives always at my back, traveling with him might have been the happiest time of my life—until he betrayed me.
“I knew when I heard you sing those vespers that they would change my life. I just never knew how much.” His voice was so tender it broke my heart.
“I knew when I heard you sing ‘The Tavern Lamb’ that you were the most ridiculous person I’d ever met,” I said, teasing.
He smiled, the slightest upturn of his lips.
I missed that mouth. I missed that smile.
“I just . . . I never expected . . . you,” Hal said. “I didn’t expect how special you are.”
I leaned on the railing of the bridge, burying my face in my hands. Heat rose in my cheeks, and I wanted to push it back down. The compliment was so bittersweet.
“Special is why your sister took my blood,” I said. “Special is why the king keeps me close and puts up with me having a girl and two babies in my room. I would give anything to not be special. I would give anything to be just like you or, better yet, to be human. Even one without a manifest. Someone simple. Uncomplicated. Someone who hasn’t been chased across half a kingdom for the power that runs in her veins.” Now that I knew what the world would do with someone like me, I longed to be something, anything, other than myself.
“I didn’t mean anything to do with your abilities. I meant the way you watched over me when I was unconscious in the Tamers’ forest. Mukira said you never left my side. I meant the way you look at Iman like he means the world to you, like he’s your own. I meant the way you’ve kept fighting even when it seems like all is lost. Even now. Most people aren’t like that. That’s what makes you special. Not your blood.”
Hal reached for my left hand, and I jerked it away before he could touch me. Letting him touch the broken part of me was still too intimate, still too much.
“How is your arm?” he asked quietly.
“There are some things magic cannot repair.” I tried to close my hand and was rewarded with the usual stab of pain through my wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it will never be enough, but I am so, so sorry.”
“If it had been my writing hand, perhaps Nismae would have done me a favor,” I said bitterly.
“No. There is no light in which it was a favor,” he said.
“It’s fine. It’s just more damage to someone who was already broken, and a lesson in whom not to trust.” I couldn’t stop lashing out at him. The pain was too much.
“You aren’t broken, Asra.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what I am!” I said.
“You’re right, you don’t, but I wish you could see yourself the way I do. You are all goodness and light. You’re as bright and beautiful as a star—one I feel like I’ve been searching the sky for my whole life. I felt pulled to you from the very first time I heard you singing.” He could have used his compulsion to try to make the words more moving, but he didn’t. They were delivered raw and unpolished, simple as an ugly truth.
“Feelings are a terrible reason to do anything,” I said, but the fight was starting to seep out of me. I tried to cling to the knowledge that feelings were what had started the avalanche of disaster that got me here. It had started the moment I put pen to paper to help Ina find her manifest, and that had been about nothing if not feelings. Selfish, stupid feelings.
“I know I made a mistake,” he continued. “When we met, I didn’t know that you were the kind of person with whom I could have been honest from the very first breath and you still would have helped me. I didn’t know you would stay by me even when I collapsed in the middle of the woods and you could have left me behind. And while I knew you were the one my sister wanted me to find, I didn’t know that your gift was something she would injure you for, and I am so sorry for the suffering that my actions and choices have cost you. But I want to do better. I want to be better. Maybe I don’t deserve that chance, but I’m asking you for it because if I don’t, I know I will regret it for the rest of my life. And I know you now, Asra. I know you. I trust you. Please give me another chance.”
Somewhere in the middle of his speech, I met his eyes, daring him to try to use his compulsion on me, to try to touch me uninvited, to do anything to undermine his own words.
He simply waited for me to say something, his face tight with fear, but his eyes holding the smallest flicker of hope. I couldn’t cling to my anger with him looking at me so humbly. I let the last of it slip away like a bird released into the wild. It would still exist. It would still be part of our past, but it didn’t have to define our future.
In spite of it all, I had to face the truth I’d been denying for moons.
I loved him.
“Sing me that song about the tavern girl and the sheep again and maybe I’ll forgive you,” I said.
A slow grin emerged on his face. “Really?” He stepped closer, still cautious.
I slipped my hand into his and laced our fingers together, unable to help the sigh that escaped when I did. It felt so good to be connected to him again, and though the peace between us was still fragile and new, the rightness of it was undeniable.
“I missed you so much,” he said. “Every day, every hour, every minute—”
“Oh be quiet,” I said. Then I kissed him.
A spark leaped between us as it had the very first time we touched. I let my arms wrap around him, giving in to how good his mouth felt on mine.
When he broke away from me and smiled, this time his smile was my dawn, the sun returning after too much darkness.
He sang me “The Tavern Lamb” on the way back down to the castle. I tried to sing with him but always ended up laughing too hard to go on. And when we crossed the threshold of my room to find Zallie awake and more than ready to hand off Iman, I finally understood what my mother had been telling me when she said, Listen to your heart.
I knew how to find the Fatestone.