Page 167 of A Reign of Roses
I nodded, though I didn’t understand. A swallow warbled out a soft tune and a fly whizzed past my nose. The gentle wind breathed through the soft cotton of my skirts and the man’s white tunic beside me.
“Your husband…” he said after some time, “is very devoted to you.”
I smiled. “I know.”
“I’m glad for it. He’s been a good king to your lands.”
My brows knit. “My lands?”
“Well, mine.” The man’s low laugh reminded me of wind chimes.
“But King Oberon—”
“If you go back to the very beginning…the rightful heir is the child of true Onyx. You.”
Realization dawned on me. Misted in a deep contentment but realization nonetheless. Words a bright-eyed young seer had uttered to me in another life. “My father…the Fae God.”
The man—my father—said nothing. Just appraised me curiously.
“What do they call you? Those original nine?”
He shrugged and I thought it funny. A great and powerful Fae God, shrugging. “Some have deemed us Elder Gods.”
“And your power…it birthed Onyx?”
“Correct.”
My father. A Fae Elder God. The creators of the sacred Stones, and his, Onyx. The stone of power and strength and darkness. Bequeathed to me, a healer from a farming town. I nodded to myself in deep understanding. “I think it will be wonderful.”
“You take after your mother in that way.”
My mother.
I smiled. “Someone once called it relentless positivity.”
“And who was that?”
The town below me was blurring a bit. Trees and bricks and cobblestones becoming spotty blotches of gray and brown and green. “I…I can’t remember.”
“Ah,” my father said. “Time to get you back.”
He stood with a soft groan and I thought the sound very human. I stood, too, and stretched like a cat under the fading sunlight.
“We won’t meet again, Arwen.”
“I know,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how. “You can go home now, though?”
He smiled, and the light from that beaming grin warmed the hilltop we stood on and all the grass surrounding us. “Yes. And you must do the same.”
My heart thumped once in my chest.
Home.
The embers sizzled across myfeathers.
Molten and liquid—scalding and blistering and scorching each fiber and plume.
And yet it felt like cleansing rain. Soothing every ache, healing every wound, building me back together, piece by piece.
