A brief smile ghosted over Raihn’s lips, a little pained, because we both knew that my distaste for Simon was not the only reason why I had saved Raihn. But he didn’t push me.
“I have something for you,” he said, and held out a small, unassuming package, wrapped in plain fabric.
I didn’t take it.
“It’s not going to bite you,” he said. “I’ve owed you a wedding gift for quite some time.”
“And you think this is the time for gifts?”
The corner of his mouth tightened. “I think this is the perfect time for gifts.”
I wasn’t sure why I still hesitated. Like that little twinge in his voice made me think that whatever this was, it was going to hurt.
I took the package, laid it in my lap, and unwrapped it.
A time-stained notebook and a loose pile of parchment fell free.
With a slightly shaky hand, I took the top paper and unfolded it, revealing a scribbled portrait in faded ink—a woman with dark hair, gazing off into the distance, face partially tilted from the viewer. It was old, the ink blotchy, a few drops of water damage blooming on the page. It reminded me of another faded ink drawing—a ruined skyline in a city far away from here.
“What—what is this?” I asked
“I think,” Raihn said softly, “this is your mother.”
A part of me already knew it. And still, the words cracked open my chest, releasing a wave of emotion I wasn’t prepared for.
Vincent had drawn this. It was his hand—I recognized that drawing style.
Vincent had drawn her.
I set aside the portrait gently. Beneath it was a tarnished silver necklace with a little black stone charm. I held up the necklace and placed the stone next to my hand—next to the ring I wore on my little finger. A perfect match.
My chest ached fiercely. I set down the necklace on top of the portrait. The notebook remained in my lap, unopened.
“How?” I choked out.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.
“Slowly, that’s how. The castle held hundreds of years’ worth of records and notes. Vincent wrote a lot down, but not much of it made sense.”
That sounded right. Vincent had liked to write, but was also paranoid about sharing information. Whatever notes he would have left behind would have been intentionally vague, difficult to understand by anyone other than him.
“I took everything that was from around twenty-four years ago,” Raihn went on. “Tackled a little of it every day. Just me. No one else knows.”
Mother, the time that must have taken. Combing through all those hundreds or thousands of notes himself.
My eyes stung.
I picked up another piece of paper. This one was a letter—or an incomplete piece of one. It wasn’t Vincent’s handwriting, which I knew now by heart. This was messier and softer, the letters upright and looping.
“Who—” The word was strangled, so I had to stop and start again. “Who was she?”
“I have more questions than answers, too. I think her name was—”
“Alana.”
My fingers traced the name at the bottom of the letter. And yet, I felt its familiarity in my bones, too, from some time before that. Like I was remembering the echo of it being said in a little clay house, decades ago.
Then my hand drifted to the top of the letter. To Alya, it read. Vartana. Eastern districts.
Goddess help me. A name. A place. Vartana was a small city, east of Sivrinaj. The letter itself meant little to me, something that looked to be about healing spells and rituals from a magic I didn’t understand, but—names.
“From what I gathered,” Raihn said, “she lived in the castle for a while. I don’t know how long. At least a year, based on the time differences here.” He tapped the date at the bottom of the ripped-up letter, then the earlier one on the paper beneath it. That one appeared to be a journal entry of some kind—a list of ingredients. Plants. Some I recognized, some I didn’t.
“I think,” he went on, “she was a magic user. A sorceress.”
My brow furrowed. “Of which god? Nyaxia?”
Even when I asked the question, I knew the answer. My mother was human. Some humans could wield Nyaxia’s magic, but none of them became especially skilled in it, certainly never more than vampires.
Raihn gently pulled apart the pages, leaving us at the final parchment. This one, unlike the others, wasn’t a letter or journal entry. It was a page torn from a book—a diagram of moon phases. At the bottom was a small, silhouetted symbol—a ten-legged spider.