I rolled my eyes. “And bullshit, clearly. Lots of it.”
“Only half the time.”
“Uh-huh. And which half are we dealing with right now?”
He aimed a fond smile at me. “The truthful one, of course.”
My chest fluttered, which I ignored. “Fine. Then if I’m a goddess, you should listen to what I tell you, and I’m saying youneedto marry Amryssa. Now more than ever. Because if the Lady Marche made some kind of promise to give her back, then broke it, I need to get Amryssa as far from here as possible.”
For long moments, he didn’t answer. His chest rose and fell beneath my cheek. “Does that mean you’ll tell her? What she is?”
“I...” Silence welled. I didn’t like that question. “Can we just keep going?”
He didn’t argue. He propped up the book again, and we read on, about how the Lady Marche had faked a pregnancy while Zephyrine carried a true one. Olivian knew, but no one else, and on the day the child was born, the Lady went into the swamp. She emerged not only with her long-awaited baby, but an antler-hilted dagger, gifted from the goddess.
The knife holds a piece of Zephyrine,she wrote.One she cut from her own breast and forged into a weapon. It will help keep my daughter safe until her eighteenth birthday, at which point I’ll return her to the swamp.
Because if I don’t, Zephyrine will fall into a peaceless sleep that will bring ruin to all Oceansgate. And the goddess will never stop looking. Never stop trying to dream her child home.
A cold shimmer rolled down my spine. I flashed back to the night Amryssa had leapt from her window, when the nightmare had helped me.Andthe dagger, both. They’d conspired to save her.
Which made sense, now. A terrible, horrible, sickening kind of sense.
Few entries remained after that. The Lady Marche had apparently taken to motherhood like a muskrat to the reeds, because the intervals between updates grew. Two sketches accompanied the dwindling entries—one of the dagger, another of Amryssa as a toddler.
I try to remember this time is temporary, the Lady wrote after a three-year lull.But Amryssa feels like mine. I don’t know what I would feel for a child born of my own body, but I can’t imagine a greater love than this one. I care for her so much that I fear what I’ll someday do. Or not do, as the case may be.
The next page was blank. And the next.
Ky set the diary aside. Quiet blanketed the room.
“I doubt any of that’s what you wanted to hear,” he said.
“No. It’s really, really not.” My voice cracked. It was obvious which choice the Lady had made, just as it was obvious that ending the nightmares would mean giving Amryssa back.
I couldn’t have one without the other.
Shit.
Ky rolled toward me, leaving his arm in place as my headrest. He toyed with the ribbon adorning my keyhole neckline—not inan attempt to take off my nightgown, I knew. Just playing with the tie, without any motive.
“You have a choice to make,” he said. “A very difficult one.”
I swallowed against a raw throat. “Doom Oceansgate by taking Amryssa to Hightower, or end the nightmares and lose her forever.”
“Yes.”
An icy dark nothingness hardened within me. I waited for Ky to laud my strength, to assure me I could survive the loss of the one person I’d ever truly loved. The only one who hadn’t left me, like everyone else had. Like he soon would.
He didn’t, though, thank goodness. A line formed between his brows. “Did you ever see her, out there? In the swamp?”
“Who, Zephyrine?” I tried to scrub the arid despair from my voice, with little success.
“Mmm-hmm.”
I weighed that, grateful for the subject change. “I caught...glimpses, sometimes. I’d hear laughter on the breeze, or see a woman from the corner of my eye. Or feel something behind me and turn to find flower petals fluttering through the air. And once, in the beginning, when I hadn’t eaten in days and hadn’t figured out how to dig for mussels yet, I found a fish laid out on a stone. Like an offering. It was cold, still. And I assumed it came from Zephyrine. In some weird way, I knew it had.”
“She looked after you,” he said.
