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.
THREE
There was such an excitement in town from May Day and the arrival of the Royal Guard that it was easy to sneak through the village unnoticed. All of the ladies in town, whether young or old, dragon-folk or human, it didn’t matter, they all crowded the meeting hall to check in with the sniffers and ogle the males in the Royal Guard. I’d never seen a sniffer before but I knew that they were a magical mix of dragon-folk and fae, with an uncanny knack for smelling magic. The Royal Guard was likely present to make sure things remained orderly. As much as I wanted to walk over and inspect their armor and look at the crest up close, I had to leave.
Cinder Village wasn’t in any way fortified. We had a front gate, but it was more of a formal entrance than something that would keep an army out. So instead of risking seeing someone at the front, especially Nathanial, and have them ask where I was going, I decided to slip out the side and head for the Great River. The giant body of water divided Embergate from our mortal enemy, Nightfall, and the festering queen who ruled there. She was an elitist that believed humans were blessed by the Maker, and anyone with magic was possessed by darkness. If she had it her way, the entirety of the Avalier realm would be purged of every magical creature and her “pure ones” would rule and multiply.