Page 46 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Alashiya woke before dawn. When she blinked, her eyes stung. Her body was faintly sore, as if speaking of her past had taken a true physical toll.

She watched as a tiny sliver of pale light began to take shape on the floor, cast by a gap in her thick curtains, and tried to summon some embarrassment for how she’d fallen apart in front of a stranger-who-wasn’t-a-stranger.

There was none. There wasn’t much of anything, save a sense of peace as soft and new as the little sliver of light.

Taevas’s arm was heavy over her middle and his breath tickled the top of her head with every slow exhale.

They hadn’t moved an inch in the night. Alashiya couldn’t remember a time when she’d slept more deeply.

There were no dreams. She didn’t wake, as was her habit, whenever the old house made one of its favorite noises, thinking that an intruder had come at last.

She slept in the deep-dark, the hidden gap between life and death, and when she woke, it took a long time for her to settle back into her body.

Taevas slept on, no doubt exhausted by his exertion the previous day.

Not wanting to disturb him, Alashiya took her time getting out of bed.

She suspected he was normally a light sleeper, which would’ve made the maneuver more difficult, but when she peeked at his face, she found it relaxed in the deep sleep of the ill.

She rearranged the blankets so they covered him before she tiptoed out of the room.

Her mind remained blissfully blank as she shrugged on her robe. The sun was just kissing the horizon when she stirred her sugar into her coffee, and the sliver of light had taken on a gold hue when she returned to the living room a little while later, mug in hand.

Whispers, always so close and yet so far, filled the silence in her mind.

She took a sip from her coffee as she padded across the room, to the opposite side from the bed and her work area.

Her destination was the little sitting nook, with its antique loom and spinning wheel beside the two ratty loveseats she and her grandfather used to sit in.

Tucked behind one of the chairs, her chair, was a cedar chest the same color as wild honey.

Alashiya quietly set her coffee down on the small, doily-covered table between the chairs, ever-aware of the slumbering dragon across the room.

The chest had always seemed so big to her, so precious, when she was a child.

When she lifted it from its hiding place behind her chair, Alashiya was struck, as she always was, by how very small and fragile it seemed to her now.

She sat in her chair and placed the chest on her lap.

It was an heirloom all on its own. Her grandmother said it was made from wood gifted by Blight’s cedar, the one who held and fed the first nymph.

Alashiya had her doubts about that, but they didn’t matter.

It was a good story, and when she brushed her fingers over the silk-smooth surface of the wood, she felt the generations of her family doing the same.

The latch had been replaced many times, but it was still old enough to squeal a bit when she eased it open.

Alashiya cast a worried look at the bed and was relieved to see that Taevas hadn’t so much as twitched.

Satisfied that his rest hadn’t been disturbed, she peered inside the chest and found all the familiar shapes she expected.

There were old photos from the various places her ancestors had lived.

Dried flowers pressed between yellowed tissue.

Two golden arm bands formed to look like branches, undoubtedly more ancient than the chest and the only gold the grove could never bear to part with.

A coiled ball of purple silk was the unassuming shape of an ancestral gown made of several yards of pleats so small, each fold was only as deep as the tip of a pencil.

And above it all, neatly folded and perpetually unfinished, was Alashiya’s veil.

She extracted it from the chest with the utmost care. The silk was so fine it fell through the gaps between her fingers like flowing water. In the blushing glow of dawn, she could make out her hands through it.

It was a deep, luminous green shot with strands of shimmering gold. Her mother had ordered the fabric for it the day she discovered she was expecting, and when Alashiya was born, the oldest woman of the grove had cleaned her and wrapped her in it before she was presented, as all babies were.

Her parents had sewn the gold around the scalloped edge.

Her grandmother’s skilled hands had added tree branches and wildflowers.

Over the years, when she had scraps from her commissions and the will, Alashiya had added her own designs in silk thread: blue robins, fat honeybees, a proud stag, and so many other creatures that had become her companions over the decades.

Between those beloved creatures were tiny designs in various jewel tones, all of them miniature replicas of work she’d done for the dragon who slumbered in her bed.

It was unfinished by design. It was supposed to remain that way until after she married. The story she’d been told was that an unfinished garment confused the spirits who brought bad luck, and since she would only wear the veil again when she died, then such things wouldn’t matter.

She sometimes wished, as she did then, that the tradition wasn’t to bury the veils with the bodies.

Alashiya thought wistfully of her grandmother’s, and her mother’s, and those of the other women in her grove who’d been given back to Blight.

Each garment was the story of a life, from conception to death, and she would’ve liked to hold them again. Especially now.

It was one thing to feel their spirits in the hyphae, to know their stories with a touch of the invisible web that connected them all, but it was another to run her fingers over the stitches that marked every great and terrible event of their lives, to feel their presence in the warp and weft of the fabric.

Alashiya touched the large empty spot at the end of the veil.

It was framed by the other designs and clearly reserved for a centerpiece that she could never decide on.

The shape of the negative space was a little odd — an upside down triangle, almost. She’d puzzled for years over what ought to go there, or if she should risk making the empty space smaller by adding more designs around the edge, which would change the shape somewhat.

But now her fingers traced the path around the border of that empty space knowingly.

A dragon could go here, she thought, throat tightening with emotion. If I wanted to, I could fit a dragon with its wings spread in this space without any trouble at all.

Violet and crimson threads, a hint of navy here and there… Yes, a dragon would look very fine as the centerpiece. But putting one there could mean many things, not all of them good. If she were to sew Taevas into her veil, would she look at it years later with joy or regret?

The silk was too fine for maybe’s or let’s see’s. Once the needle had passed through it, the delicate fabric was forever altered, making any room for error or second-guessing almost non-existent.

Alashiya gazed at the empty space for a long time, her coffee cooling on the table by her elbow. Would I regret it?

It wouldn’t be such a strange thing to sew him in. No matter what happened, he’d made a mark unlike any other on her life — as Adon, but also as Taevas. Perhaps he’d earned his place there.

But if their relationship, such as it was, ended in heartbreak, would she wish she’d never sewn a dragon? She imagined it could be something of a memorial for hopes gone fallow, or a path she was too cowardly to tread.

He’d sworn to follow her wherever she ran, but that couldn’t possibly be an oath he would fulfill. Their lives were too different. How could he just expect her to pack up and leave with him, to strike out into such a hostile world with just his word on which to cling?

He didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand.

It all made perfect sense to her. She would stay, as she always had, and be the guardian of her grove’s memories, of the first Queen’s legacy.

It was the safe option, and the only one that didn’t make her feel like she was stepping off a cliff just because a handsome man had asked her to.

All things withered, including her proud line.

She’d accepted a very long time ago that she would be the last.

And yet…

And yet she could see the dragon there in the empty space, and when she pressed her fingers against the cool silk, her ghosts’ whispers rose in a great swell of urgency, defying their usual calls for caution. Do it, their echoes seemed to say. Jump, Alashiya. You might just fly.

“What is this?”

Startled, she looked up to find a drowsy dragon frowning down at her, pillow lines creased in his cheek. He knelt before her chair, his hands on the armrests, and peered curiously into the chest. Her veil had spilled out of it in a waterfall of green silk.

“These are my heirlooms,” she explained, gently gathering the veil back into a protective coil. “I was feeling— I wanted to be with my family for a little while.”

Taevas glanced at her through the dense fringe of his lashes. She thought for a moment that he was going to press again, to insist on knowing everything in that infuriating, endearing way of his. Alashiya steeled herself for it, but he didn’t ask.

Instead, he said in his sleep-roughened voice, “It’s good you have these things. I don’t.”

“You don’t have heirlooms?”

“Only one,” he answered. “A tapestry. Almost everything we had, we sold or abandoned when my family fled the Collapse. What little we managed to save was burned when my mother defied Isand Jaak. The only reason the tapestry survived was because my father made me take it when he sent me away.”