I shouldn’t have read this at all.
My hand flies up and cups my mouth that I can’t seem to shut, my heart growing more laden with each barbed word I swallow. With each soul-crushing, life-changing word that doesn’t belong to me.
But I’m already there. I’m already invested.
Intertwined.
Reaching the final entry, I pull a shuddered breath and force myself to continue.
Every cycle I grow bigger, yet weaker in my bones. Almost too weak to reach into my hiding spot to retrieve my diary and read of happier times that remind me there’s still some good in this world.
The city folk celebrate in the streets each dae, as if my youngling is already here. As if the ashes of my loved ones don’t still taint the very air we breathe.
If Tyroth suspects the babe isn’t his, he hasn’t let on—not that we speak at all. Not that I have anything I want to speak to him about.
I’ve heard from one of his loyal aides—the only folk I’m allowed contact with—that a Bloodlace has arrived on dragonback this rise. If she’s here to test my youngling’s blood once I give birth, the paternal line won’t draw in Tyroth’s direction.
It’ll draw north—to Kaan.
All I’m allowed to do is wither here, bleeding my life force into this youngling, occasionally drawing enough energy to slide off the pallet and garner myself a clear view of Haedeon’s moon. I sing to it, and I swear I can hear it singing back.
Like it’s calling me.
I want to curl up with Slátra—to be with her while I labor—but I struggle to move on my own anymore. All but stuck on this pallet where Mah and Pah died. Where I pretended to conceive a youngling that was already seeded inside me. This pallet that used to be filled with love and song but now reeks of death and pain.
A battle is coming, I can feel it in my bones. Like my body is shoring up the courage to charge into a war I don’t think I’m going to survive. Even if I do, I feel like there’s a scythe hanging over my head, waiting to slice.
Either way, my heart is heavy with a seed of understanding I can’t dislodge. That I will climb back upon the pallet once I whisper goodbye to Haedeon’s moon, and I won’t rise from it again.
Casting my stare up at the sky, I sob through short, sharp breaths that are so far from adequate …
She lied for us. For him.
Kaan.
She lied for the youngling she carried all the way from their love den in Dhomm to this cold, caustic room where she’d lost so much already, all because she believed the words that spat out of my pah’s mouth. And for what?
To die right here.
To not see Kyzari grow.
For Tyroth to raise Kaan’s daughter as his own.
I close the diary, a venomous truth settling in my chest like a serpent poised to strike …
These pages are going to rip the world to shreds.
From deep within the inky clutches of a shadow too dense for the average eye to see within, the Scavenger King studies the young female fae coiled in the corner of her cell, rocking back and forth, hands threaded deep into her pale hair. Eyes squeezed shut, she mumbles a chain of incoherent words perhaps hewn from the crevices of her swelling insanity.
She’s speaking to someone, of that he’s certain. Just as certain as he is that this particular someone only exists within the confines of her peculiar mind.
His head tips sideways as he studies her more deeply: red lips, large eyes mantled with a thick fan of lashes, a shapely elegance the likes of only one he’s encountered before.
His Fire Lark.
She holds such uncanny resemblance, but her eyes are softer, her skin a touch darker. And though his Fire Lark came to him without words, this female … well.
She has plenty. Entire rambling conversations. They just make no sense.
To him.
Yet, on she mumbles, the dark dents beneath her eyes a tribute to the diadem clinging to her brow, its fine silver tendrils seeming to meld with her skin.
Her face twists, a tear slipping down her sallow cheek …
The Scavenger King watches it drip off her chin and seep into her soiled tunic, a crease forming between his brow as he muddles over this other … difference.
His Fire Lark never cried. Not once. She bit into life like some wild animal, snarling around her messy feast.
She did not leave scraps. She simply consumed.
This female, however, exists delicately, with all the decorum of someone raised in a palace with servants to feed her, groom her, teach her.
A loving pah to speak for her.
Stepping free of the shadows, Arkyn clears his throat.