Page 53 of King of the Dawn

My sweet Jericho. The simple thought of him, and how he gifted me such closure, made me smile.

I turned to Ryan, and noted the roundness in his belly, and the softness of his physique. Not like my man, who was made of granite and steel.

“What happened to you, Aoibheann?” His face was so distraught, I almost felt bad for him. But I didn’t, because he had had a good life without me. He was happy here. Maybe I would have been happy here, had life been different. But I couldn’t be now. This life was closed, and a distant wish. A wish I was glad I was not granted.

“A lot of things,” I said, with a small sigh. “A lot of terrible things. But…”

I stepped up to him, taking his hand in mine, inspecting his palms.

“I’ve reached my happy end, I think,” I inspected his palm to the love lines. Two kids. One wife. He was living his fate. “And you have had yours.”

I flipped his hand over and looked at the back of them. I saw his long, elegant fingers. The fingers of a man who worked with the delicate tools of books. Not like my husband who worked with the tools of death. How different they were, and how different I had become…

“Thank you for the tea,” I said, letting his hands go. “I’m happy to see you so… ideally placed.”

He sadly chuckled. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”

“For?”

“I don’t know,” he said looking around at his modest cottage home. “I thought that I should have found you, and picked up a gun, or sword, and been your champion and brought you home… but I…”

“That’s not you,” I said for him. “And you would have just been killed.” He looked chastised, so I quickly added, “It doesn’t make you less of a man. If you knew what I knew, you’d understand that.”

I looked around at the house again. The simple wooden furniture was chipped. There were marks at the door, measuring the height of children as they grew, and the ages of the children at each height. I touched the markings for just a moment, feeling an ache in my heart for the thistles that had prevented me from having little ones. I didn’t know if I could have any now, at my age. But I realized that I would very much like them, with Jericho.

“You’re a father, and a good one from what I can see and feel.” I looked at the windows, to the backyard where a small playground of plastic was set up, along with an old, neglected pink play house. Probably forgotten by a girl that was too old to play with dolls now. “You are a good husband.”

I looked back at him, and I felt the sweetness radiating from him. In this house, a man and wife were happy. Children were growing strong.

“That makes you a good man.” I felt a hot tear start to form on my eye, and I blinked it away. “That is the truest mark of a knight.”

He looked embarrassed by my compliment.

“May I look around the bookshop one last time, before I leave?” I asked him, touching the sleeve of his Aran sweater, just for a chance to touch the rough fabric.

“Of course, Aoibheann,” he said with a disbelieving, gentle, huff. “You can take whatever you want. Call it a gift for all the years I failed to find you.”

I touched his cheek, and he smiled. The smooth skin of the boy I knew had been replaced with the wind-worn, salt-dried ragged skin of an adult man. A handsome man.

“Thank you for showing me what I could have had, if things had been different.” I leaned up to place a kiss on his cheek, and he let me. “I’m overjoyed to see you so well.”

I stepped away from him, and walked out the door that separated his family’s living quarters from the bookstore. I walked to the corner, where I knew there’d be a row of books on spirituality, and religion. Mystical things. That was what had drawn me to this bookstore in the first place, nearly two decades ago now.

I touched my fingers along the spine, reading the many titles, and smiling to myself as I recognized many of them. There were new things too, about the Norse Gods, and other Pagans. There were many on the eastern religions as well, which I found fascinating. But there was something drawing my hand further down the stacks until I felt a book tug at me, like we were opposite magnets, attracted to each other, and only settling when my palm snapped to the spine.

I pulled it out, and read the cover.

The Ancient Knowledge of Motherhood: From Conception to Birth.

There was no author. None on the cover at least. Of course there was an author. I wasn’t naive enough to think that this book was created from thin air. But it added to the mystery. And I found that I no longer turned to magic in order to have control over a fate that had never been mine. I was happy with the unknown.

I knew that it could not harm me, because of the King who stood beside me through it all.

I smiled, ready to walk out the old familiar store, a place that had been my happy past, and into the happy future with the man too good for me to have even imagined him in my dreams.

I pushed through the glass door, and heard the bell overhead, feeling like I had wings on my feet.

“Jericho?” I called out into the empty street. I looked one way, then the other. No one was there. “Jericho?”

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