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The first morningI wake to Millie's soft cries instead of her piercing wails feels like a victory. I scoop her from the cradle Joss carved—a delicate thing with thalivern etched along the edges—and cradle her against my chest.
"Good morning, my pretty girl," I whisper as her golden eyes blinking up at me.
Those eyes. So like his it makes my chest ache. When she fixes them on me with that intense, unblinking stare, I see him completely. The same way her tiny fingers curl with surprising strength around mine reminds me of how his hands would grasp mine in those rare moments of tenderness.
"You hungry?" I stroke the downy nubs on her back. They've grown in the three months since her birth—soft silver-tinged down now covering what will someday be proper wings. Not as large as a full-blooded xaphan's would be, but wings nonetheless.
Marda arrives with fresh bread and a pot of broth before I've even finished feeding Millie.
"Don't get up," she commands, bustling in with all the authority of her ample frame. Her silver-streaked dark hair is tied back in a practical knot, and flour still dusts her forearms. "You look like you actually slept last night."
"Almost four hours straight," I confirm, adjusting Millie against my shoulder.
Marda sets down her basket and immediately reaches for my daughter. I hand her over, watching how naturally the older woman cradles her, cooing nonsense that makes Millie's face light up.
"Look at those curls getting wilder by the day." Marda twirls one of Millie's black ringlets around her finger. "Just like her mama's, but darker."
Her father's color, my texture. I swallow hard.
"Has she been moving her wings more?" Marda asks, peering at the tiny protrusions.
"She flexes them when she's excited. It's... cute." The admission feels like a betrayal of my former self—the woman who would have sneered at anything xaphan.
Marda gives me a knowing look over Millie's head. "Children have a way of changing what we think we know."
A knock at the door interrupts my response. Harmony enters, Brooke darting past her legs to reach Millie first.
"Gentle," Harmony reminds her daughter as Brooke leans over Marda's arms to inspect the baby.
"She's bigger," Brooke announces, her silver eyes—so like Adellum's—wide with wonder. "Can I touch her wings?"
"Carefully," I find myself saying, when once I might have snapped at such a request.
Brooke's tiny fingers brush over the silvery down with reverence. "They're softer than Papa's."
"Baby feathers," Harmony explains, setting a basket of fresh vegetables on my table. "Like how your hair was different when you were tiny."
Brooke nods solemnly, accepting this wisdom, then reaches into her pocket. "I made this for Millie." She produces a small clay figure—crude but recognizably a winged baby.
My throat tightens unexpectedly. "It's beautiful, Brooke. Thank you."
"Uncle Joss helped with the wings," she admits, but beams at the praise.
Later, after they've gone, I sit by the window watching Millie sleep. The clay figure rests beside her on the table. Theafternoon sun catches on her curls, turning them almost blue-black. Araton's exact shade.
"She deserves to know you," I whisper, tracing the perfect curve of her cheek. "And you deserve to know her."
The thought terrifies me—imagining Araton's face when he sees her, imagining him wanting to take her away. Would he? The Araton I knew was enigmatic, impossible to read beneath his charm. We never spoke of anything real, anything that mattered. Just bodies moving together, desire without substance.
But these wings on our daughter make it impossible to pretend he doesn't matter. And her eyes… They nearly undo me every time.
"She has your smile," Adellum says one evening, weeks later, when he stops by with a rattle he's carved for Millie. I'm startled—not by his presence, which has become commonplace as Harmony brings him along to check on us—but by his observation.
"You think?" I watch as Millie gurgles up at him, fascinated by his massive gray wings.
"Definitely. That little curl at the corner when she's about to laugh—pure Ronnie." He demonstrates, mimicking what he means, and I'm struck by the easy fondness in this xaphan's expression as he gazes at my half-xaphan child.
"I think she looks like her father," I manage, the words sticking in my throat.