My eyelids fluttered open and my burning lungs pulled in a breath. I blinked up at Father Garius who hovered over me with the root of a telly weed sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He chewed viciously, a nervous tick that signaled his anxiety.
It was in that moment I remembered. I felt the seedling grow stronger, louder, more purposeful… invincible.
“Home,” I croaked in a voice scraped raw.
Father Garius nodded once. He agreed.
An hour later, I’d bathed and changed into the warmest clothes I had. My fingers shook around the warm cup in my hand. The tea did nothing to banish the chill that had seeped into my bones and forced my toes to curl inside my wool slippers.
Father Garius perched upon the edge of his desk, watching me with gray eyes that saw more than they should.
I watched him back. Father Garius had seen me at my worst. He had dragged me to the Temple of Eternal Light against my will and forced me to stay all these years. He was as stubborn as I was and as determined to keep me alive.
I wasn’t a prisoner. He had saved my life, after all. But I wasn’t exactly free, either. His reasoning made sense and as I watched the political climate of the realm shift and change over my lifetime, I understood.
However, I grew tired of watching from my quaint prison. My bones were restless. My mind eager for responsibilities other than feeding chickens.
And my mouth desperate for conversation.
Besides Oliver.
Something else waited for me, beyond these walls. I felt it now more than ever.
“I need to go home.” I held my mentor’s gray gaze and spoke slowly so that my voice would not waver. The Brotherhood of Silence had done their best to raise me to be the woman they believed I should be. But they were not women. Nor did they possess the manners a noble of my standing should. So when I resolved to make my case today, I did so with the poise of someone I had nearly forgotten. I called upon the earliest memories of my schooling and the image of the woman my mother would have wanted me to be. “I have tarried long enough, Father Garius. And while I am thankful for your shelter, I am needed at home.”
He blinked at me. What is home to you, orphan? When I held my chin steady, one of his bushy eyebrows quirked with another silent question. How do you know?
My breath shook as it left my lungs in one long exhale. Wetting dry lips with the tip of my tongue, I told him the truth. “I’ve had dreams. Of my father.” Father Garius’s placid gray gaze turned as sharp as silver.
The Brotherhood of Silence did not believe in dreams from the dead. The idea was heresy to a man who believed his soul would leave his body and be absorbed into the Great Light in the sky. Most of the realm also believed this. It was my pagan mother who had taught me to whisper prayers to those that had died before me. To look for them in my dreams.
“He tells me to come home,” I finished. “He says that it is time.”
Father Garius glared at me. Was he angry that I had ignored eight years of his teaching? Or was it that I had kept my dreams from him for this long?
He would never explain, so I picked the third option. He was heartbroken that I could leave him after all this time.
It wasn’t my fault I’d left such a strong impression.
I took a sip of scalding hot tea to hide my smile.
Father Garius waved his hand in a circle, indicating that I should tell him more. I continued. “I dream about them nearly every night. But this afternoon was the first time my father spoke to me. And when he spoke, he told me to come home.”
Father Garius stood up and walked the length of his office. When he reached his bookshelf, he trailed his finger over the spines of leather-bound books along the bottom shelves.
When he found what he was looking for, he extracted it with an accompanying click of his tongue. He turned around, his robe billowing out. I felt the press of fear on my chest and an ominous prickling at the back of my neck.
When he set the book on the table in front of me, I recognized the text. An identical book had been hidden away in my mother’s chambers when I was a child. The pagan holy text, now outlawed in the realm and declared heretical by the nine kingdoms in unison.
I followed Father Garius’s finger, all gnarled knuckles and leathered skin. His blunt nail pointed at carefully scrawled black ink on ancient vellum.
A raven spread its wings to two corners. The wings had been scrawled with a heavy hand that dripped ink as if each feather were bleeding. The artist had pressed substantial pressure into each detail, bloating its features, blurring its finer details.
Its dark beak hung open, its head tilted to the side, watching, waiting… seeing. Its sharp feet curled razor sharp talons into the page until the page itself bled. The artist’s wrinkled lines pulled, stretched, and squeezed until there was no doubt that this animal was dangerous.
This animal meant death.
Father Garius tapped the picture impatiently. I glanced around at the words scrawled on the borders and the paragraphs on the adjacent pages. But everything was written in a different language. One I couldn’t understand.
Father Garius tapped again and I lifted my eyes to meet his. He grabbed his throat with his other hand and pretended to choke himself.
“Yes,” I whispered, finally understanding. “Yes, I’ve seen this before. In my dreams.” I swallowed and breathed through my suddenly fluttering heart. “And at the river.”
The old monk’s eyes drooped with defeat. His hands slammed the book shut as if he could trap the raven inside those ancient pages. Alarm crept over my skin.
“What should I do?” I asked a man that couldn’t tell me.
Father Garius looked at me for a long moment. Finally, he moved to the bookshelf again, climbing a sliding ladder that allowed access to the upper rows of texts.
At last, he found the place on the shelf he needed. He moved books out of the way, piling them in a precarious heap on the lip of the shelf. He took two strong fingers and knocked at the back wall. Something gave way and his hand disappeared into a gaping black hole.
It reappeared gripping a leather satchel. He tucked it beneath his arm and reset the wall, the books and scrolls, and carefully made his way down from the ladder. He sat down and stared at me for another long minute.
He nodded, finally conceding to whatever idea had set him into motion. He untied the flap and removed the contents from within.
I sucked in a breath, the sheer force of it slicing through me with a knife’s edge.
The gold caught the late afternoon light sifting into the room like long fingers from the low sun. The ruby in the center of the diadem winked at me, whispering memories and meaning and a kingdom full of dreams and fuller of regret.
I reached for the crown before I’d put two coherent thoughts together. I closed numb fingers around the thin edges and let the gold cut into my palms, let it show me how real it was, let it prove that it was what I thought it was.
“How?” I choked on the word, stuttered on the weight of it. “How do you have this?”
He stared at me with those wise gray eyes and my mind drifted back to a day I dreamt about, but never thought about willingly.
A boy. A girl. A lost monk.
“They’re dead,” the little boy whispered earnestly. “All of them. The entire royal family.” The monk stared at the boy. “Take her. You have to. They’ll kill her if they find her.” The monk shook his head, denying the truth of the young boy’s words. “Take her now,” he pleaded. “Take her and take this.” He shoved the bloodied crown into the monk’s hands. His fingers left sticky fingerprints in the filthy gold. The monk gazed down at the crown, at the headpiece of an ancient kingdom and then at the frightened little girl. The monk finally nodded. Once.