Page 70 of The Oracle's Journey

Lhoris

With the build-up to the wedding over with, I could start worrying about my family.

Lobikno had been Emma’s first choice to stand in as her father in the wedding, but he couldn’t do it. He wanted to participate, but he’d relegated himself to working in the kitchens, treating it as some form of penance. As if he’d done something wrong. I knew my brother’s past abuse would make bouncing back from our tower imprisonment difficult for him to process. Lobikno had to be conflicted, and my extremely poor reaction to finding him pressed against Oz hadn’t helped. I’d taken my frustration out on my undeserving brother. Between that and my guilt for hurting Ozanna, I’d worked myself up to feeling like quite a villain. Oz and I had our first real argument because of it.

I returned to our room after helping the healer with the last of the day’s bandage changes and treatments. It was the first evening we hadn’t been busy with wedding preparation, the first evening to just be alone together since being physically healed from our ordeal. I hadn’t been able to give her more than a chaste kiss since “the incident,” as the people of Bergellon started calling it. We held each other and touched each other as often as we could, but the guilt was digging a hole in my chest. It threatened to leave me hollow, but I didn’t know how to alleviate it.

Ozanna’s face lit up when I came into the room, though I couldn’t look her in the eye. She was reclined in the bed, reading by candlelight. It was part of her new evening routine. “Hello, my love!”

I moved to the bed and kissed her forehead. “Hello, love.” Then I went about putting my cloak and satchel away in the wardrobe.

“Please stop skulking around,” Oz said abruptly, her tone pleading. “Talk to me, Lhoris. How can I help you if you don’t talk to me?”

“I have to find a way to make peace with myself for what I did to you, and Lobikno afterwards,” I said with a shrug and shut the wardrobe doors, though I didn’t turn back around.

“You didn’t wrong me.”

There was an edge of impatience to her words. She’d spoken them many times since the incident, so perhaps she had a right to feel impatient, but I couldn’t believe it. It’d been my body I’d used, and I saw how much pain she’d been in afterwards, how she’d asked Emma to heal her in private. None of the other women had needed that much help.

“You were hurt as much as you were because, when de Rais took our good sense ... Lobikno and I are monsters without it, Ozanna.” I absently ran fingers through my now shoulder length hair, needing to do something with my restless hands. When she didn’t say anything, I finally turned to face her.

She was sitting upright now, watching me with her sad doe-eyes. “Neither of you did anything wrong.” She rubbed her forehead as if it pained her. “It is still de Rais’ fault. The three of us didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done willingly—if you both wanted to. I think I ended up hurt because we were so confined, and I was dehydrated.”

My gut reaction was to be surprised that she’d happily bed us both at the same time, but it made sense. She was unfettered when it came to sex, which I would very much appreciate if mating magic hadn’t come into play.

For the first time that day, I looked her in the eye. “I don’t understand how you’re not conflicted.”

“I like sex!” She got to her feet and threw her hands up. “It’s my nature and de Rais didn’t make me deviate from it. Lobikno would never have even tried to touch me, and you … you would never want to hurt me. He pushed you both to do things against your nature.” She paused for a moment then added, “Do you feel that I violated you?”

“No,” I shook my head, though my stomach twisted. Why did that question hurt? “I’m a male; if I get hard, it means I want it on some level.”

She stared at me, her face slowly shifting into a frown, her shoulders slumped. “Lhoris, I don’t know who told you that, but it’s untrue. None of us could say no; consent was taken from us. You’d never find hurting me like that arousing. We were all victims in an extremely technical way, my insatiable nature notwithstanding. The only villain was de Rais. Not you. Not Lobikno. Not me. You either accept that there is nothing I need to forgive you for, or you will end up in the kitchens beating yourself up unnecessarily like Lobikno.” She took my hand and placed it on her cheek, eyes bright with tears. “I love you. Please go talk to your brother and tell him you’re not angry with him. If you need to apologize to anyone, it’s him.”

In that, she was absolutely right. And it was probably a good first step in sorting out my own head. I kissed her gently then said, “I love you, too.”

I embraced her, needing the comfort of her presence. She wrapped her arms around me. I relaxed and my aura reached out brush against hers. Something I hadn’t been able to do since the incident. Perhaps my penance was more subconscious than Lobikno’s.

Oz’s body melted against me. She couldn’t sense our auras, but she certainly reacted to them. I breathed in her scent, the hint of green leaves, jasmine, and fresh rain only ever seemed to get stronger the more she got in touch with her inner elf … but it was different.

“Again?” I asked, simply shocked as I processed what my nose was telling me. “You’re pregnant again?” How is the woman so fucking fertile? The magic of her last pregnancy still tugged at my instincts, not having time to fade after the miscarriage. Had it been a month already?

The color washed out of her cheeks, and she grabbed my shoulders, as if she were trying to steady herself. “I didn’t have the contraceptive herbs in the cell.”

We both sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Fuck,” we whispered, simultaneously.

And then she laughed, a little sharp sounding, then a little rueful, and finally a little resigned.

“Of course, I’m pregnant after that,” she sighed. “That’s how my luck works.”

“It might not be my baby,” I said to myself as much as her. “What if it’s Lobikno’s?”

“Then I’ll love you and raise a child with him.” She shrugged, as though it would be as simple as that. “We could turn around and have another of our own when the first one is old enough.”

“How are you able to accept such difficult things so easily and just move through them?” I asked, nearly exasperated. How could I explain the magic of elven pregnancy? Not that I understood all the nuances of it in the first place. The last pregnancy only lasted a few days, so I didn’t need to explain anything. It seemed like a topic that would be better discussed after everything settled. But if the baby is Lobikno’s, he and I could have a very real problem. A bloody, disastrous problem.

She shrugged. “It’s a gift?”

---