Page 82 of Gift from the Tree

“Little wanderer, what’s wrong?” Fully alert now, I step into the hallway and look around to see what upset her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ll go back to my room,” she says in a small voice that has me reaching out and grabbing her hand before she can step away.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” I order gently.

“It’s stupid and ridiculous. I’m a grown woman and shouldn’t be this upset over a nightmare.” She sniffles and hangs her head.

Tipping her chin up to look at me, I can see she’s really upset by whatever the nightmare had been. “Would you like to lie with me for a little while?” I hold my breath, waiting for her to answer me, hoping she’ll say yes and let me hold her.

“Please,” she whispers so low I almost don’t catch it. Not waiting a second for her to change her mind, I scoop her up and walk back into my room, kicking the door shut behind me.

I lay her in the middle of my bed and crawl in, pulling her to me so her head’s lying on my chest and my hand rests on her hip. I give her a moment to get comfortable before I ask, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really. I just think today brought a lot of awful memories up for me and my mind won’t stop replaying them.”

“I’m so sorry, Willow. I should’ve done more,” I tell her regretfully. I mean, she has no clue what we did tonight, but I wish I had prevented what happened to her in the first place.

“Draken, you did everything you could. I heard what you said to Corentin and Tillman. If you had shifted, you could’ve seriously hurt, if not killed those students, and those who didn’t do anything wrong wouldn’t have deserved that. You did the right thing and you got to me as soon as you could.” She tilts her chin up so she can get a better look at me. I’m supposed to be the one comforting her, not the other way around. And I tell her that as I tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. “You came to me to feel better, not for you to make me feel better, sweetness.”

“We can make each other feel better. This isn’t a one-sided relationship, Draken,” she says with a sweet sigh. She has no clue her words have caused my heart to double in size.

Relationship. We have a relationship.

“I saw your first shift today in my vision,” she whispers softly. Her comment pulls me out of the fantasy I was creating of us in my mind and my heart begins beating faster for a whole other reason.

Fuck, she saw when my gift emerged.

“Oh. I’m sorry you had to see that,” I say in a small voice.

“What happened when you flew back to the farm?”

Shit, so she didn’t see it all and I just told on myself. Looking down at her, I can tell she wants this piece of me, this truth of mine that I’m so afraid will break the small amount of confidence she’s shown that she isn’t scared of my dragon.

I couldn’t care less about what people say about me or my dragon. I know we can go off the deep end sometimes and be a little psycho, but Willow’s opinion matters more than anything in this realm. It’d be like driving a knife through my heart if she ends up fearing us. But I have to know for sure.

“I grew up in a small farm town on the outskirts of the Central. My mother worked at a brothel where she got knocked up with me by one of the men passing through. When I was four, she got a bad batch of whatever illegal tonic she was hooked on at the time and died. They buried her in a field behind the brothel that same day as if it was nothing and put me outside and wouldn’t let me come back in.”

I pause, remembering watching them carry her out wrapped in a thin white sheet, and one of the guardsmen with an earth element opened the ground, placed her in, and filled the hole with dirt and walked away like it was nothing. I sat there and cried on the dirt pile for hours before trying to go back inside and they wouldn’t let me. The only home I’d ever known, and they just kept slamming the door in my small face and telling me to leave.

Willow rubbing my chest brings me back to the present, so I continue.

“I don’t know how long I stayed on the streets, begging for food and scraps, but one day, one of the farmers saw me, still in the raggedy clothes I was wearing the day she died, covered in filth. He told me if I came with him and worked on his farm, he’d let me live there. I’d have food, clothes, and a roof over my head. I was a scared four-year-old, all alone. What he was offering was everything and I thought he’d love me like a child should be loved.

“Everything was fine for the first few years. My responsibilities were small. Collect the eggs, help shovel the stables, pick the vegetables. The responsibilities changed as I got older, and the beatings started when I was around eight. He was a mean drunk and would come back from the field wasted from drinking in the sun all day, not eating, and take out his failures on me.

“When I was ten, he made me move into the barn and sleep in there. Said he couldn’t bring women in the house with a snot-nosed kid sleeping on the couch. One night I was so sick, and it was freezing outside, so I went into the house, and I didn’t know he had company. I threw up all over the rug and the woman left in a hurry. He tied me to a post and gave me five lashes with his whip and left me there all night. It wasn’t until the next morning when he slept off his drunken stupor that he untied me, gave me a healing tonic, and rubbed some healing cream on the gashes.”

I take a break as I feel Willow’s tears soak my chest.

“I can stop there, Willow. I don’t want you crying for me,” I tell her as I wipe the tears from her eyes.

“No, I want to hear this, Draken. I want to hear your story. Please continue. If you want to.” She sniffles out, placing her hand above my heart. Releasing a breath and tightening my grip on her to ground myself, I begin speaking again.

“The beatings and whippings went on for years. No matter what I did, it was never good enough for him. I never left, never ran away, or fought back. I wasn’t strong enough and I was just a kid with nowhere to go. On my fourteenth birthday, I woke up feeling off. It felt like something was trying to come out of me. I tried to shake it off and get to work, but as I was moving hay bales out of the field, my hands burst into flames, and I caught the whole wagon on fire. In a panic, I set off into the woods, knowing he was going to paint my body bloody for destroying that much hay and costing him money.

“Once I was far enough away, I dropped down to my knees and let out a roar so loud, it even hurt my ears. What could’ve been minutes or hours, I don’t know how much time passed, and I was in agonizing pain, trying to fight off whatever was happening. That’s when Corentin, Tillman, and Caspian found me. They had heard my roar from where they were training and practicing their gifts in the woods behind their home and came to check it out.”

I let out a small laugh, thinking about the three of them fucking off and hearing a loud-ass roar and deciding the best course of action was to go investigate. Willow lets out a laugh as well, having the same train of thought as me.

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