Chapters (32)
Suddenly she didn’t feel grateful for the quiet anymore. She screwed her eyes closed, hoping to stop the threatening tears. Emris had said she was a mage. She’d never considered the possibility—even when they had convicted her—but she couldn’t deny how the strangeness of the past year slotted neatly and simply into the explanation like pieces of a child’s puzzle. And if it was true, she’d never be able to return home.
Home … What was that anyway without Vigo? Vigo had hated magic. If Lena was a mage, would he have hated her too? Pain washed over her as the events of the past day flashed through her mind. Vigo was dead. Vigo was dead. And it was her fault, after all. She had betrayed him.
The carriage was large and unsteady, the road ill-maintained, and Lena found herself rocking wildly from side to side at the slightest disturbance. Her mind fluttered in dazed distress through her memories of Vigo. She settled on the story about the day he had found her. He’d told her in his usual matter-of-fact tone as she lay tucked up on the mattress in the corner of the kitchen, near the warmth of the stove. Lena had been nine years old. She had recently started to sleep out in the kitchen instead of on the small child’s cot in the corner of Vigo’s room, and was trying very hard not to be afraid.
Ten years to the day after my little boy died, I found you at dawn in a wooden crate on the steps down to the cryptling cellars. You were perhaps a day old, wailing like a hungry chick, and wrapped in fine linen cloth. I knew there and then that the Ancestors had sent you to me. I fed you cow’s milk from the kitchens first, and I dug out my son’s empty crib, hidden and dusty in a cupboard. As soon as I laid you down, you slept. I named you Lena after my wife, Elena.
Whenever he’d spoken of Elena, his eyes had grown watery and he’d pretended to be busy or cross and would change the subject. But this time he had smiled.
Elena was beautiful, you know.
But wasn’t she Marked? Lena had asked curiously.
She was. A fire had left one side of her body a mass of scars, and at first, she raged at the Ancestors for sending her to the crypts at ten years old. But she was strong, determined, and fearless, and her eyes … He shook his head at the memory, as if it had overwhelmed his senses. Her beauty shone through, no matter what. As soon as I saw you, Lena, with your face screwed up and your fists balled in anger, I knew you were the same. Like her, you were a fighter.