Page 76 of A Chill in the Flame
“Yes, my love. The fabric of time. You understand. You don’t. You haven’t. You will. And you’ll marry her. I know you will, because you know I love her, and you love me. Loved me. Will love me. I loved her before we were born, and in one thousand years I love her still, though she breaks. Raascot breaks. Has broken. The gods will break it.”
“Raascot?” He looked at her, confused.
“It’s fuzzy, almost as if I’m looking through curtains, or hair, or as if the quilt is still on the loom. Sometimes I see it so clearly, and then it shifts. Sometimes it’s complete. It is complete. I see five generations of broken hearts on Raascot’s throne, then three, then ten. I see pain. I see terror and darkness. I see…” The lines across her forehead deepened.
“Caris? What? Are you safe? Where are you? What’s it like? Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “I’m yesterday, and one hundred years before that. It’s all a ball of yarn that’s been unraveled and put together again by careless hands. In some futures, I see you smile. You can smile again. You can have a child—heshares your wings.”
“That’s impossible.” He shook his head. “If I’m to marry your sister—”
“And you will. You already have.”
Frustration and sorrow collided as they seeped into him. He shook his head. “Caris, we were going to change the world. We were going to break the wheel. The people, the kingdoms…”
“Five generations,” she repeated. “I see it now, the threads, the stitching, the fabric. Things will get so much worse before they get better. An army. A league. A brotherhood. A tragedy. A war.”
“Caris… Are you seeing the future?” He was hurt and confused and nearly frantic as he held her small hands more tightly. He didn’t know how to make sense of any of her words. “What do I do?”
“No.” She shook her head. “It isn’t the future. It’s now. It’s then. It’s maybe. But so much of the maybe is dark. So much is pain. So much is…” She looked around. “Why am I here? Do you have a question for me?”
“What is the afterlife?”
She tilted her head slightly to the side as if she didn’t understand the question. “After?”
He swallowed, deciding it didn’t matter. Maybe this was not something he was meant to know or understand. Maybe that’s why the goddess saw fit to scramble her words, to jumble her meaning. “I don’t dream of you anymore.”
“You never dreamed of me,” she responded.
“I did. Every night. Every—”
“Wings, dreams, and heartache will be your family’s legacy, and blood, talons, and pain will be mine.” The words sounded like a witch’s curse, a horrible prophecy, an unhinged fate. They were said on a mouth so lovely, on a voice like a song. “Will you do something for me?”
Tears filled his eyes as he dug into hers as if prodding her bright, ocean-blue gaze with a shovel, burrowing himselfinto her gaze. “Anything.”
“Don’t call on me again.”
He nearly flinched. “Caris, how could you ask that of me? How could I…?”
“Because some futures have light, and joy, and kindness. That’s the one I see, and the one that changes. You won’t find them if you cling to the past. The one on the loom is dark, Ceneth. Threads of wild and shadow. You won’t be the one to see our dream, my love, my heart, my then, my next. But you can set the wheel in motion. One day the kingdoms can be united by the daughter of Raascot and Farehold—though she is not ours. Not our daughter. It wasn’t our time. It was. It did.”
“Who killed you? Please, goddess, tell me who did this?”
“In some ways, it was the All Mother. Ophir will know—she does and she doesn’t. Help her, and when you help her, you’ll have helped me. Will help me? Had helped me.”
He loved her so much that his hatred for this false representative, this incomplete version of her burned through him. She was almost his Caris. She was nearly his beloved. But it was wrong. It was off. It hurt.
He couldn’t stop staring at her. She was so real, so solid. The slope of her nose, the flower-petal pink of her lips, the cream of her skin were so unbearably vivid. Every breath he took filled him with the devastatingly lovely, delicate scent of springtime rain. And yet, this wasn’t how Caris spoke. She’d always been always so articulate, so clever. Now her words twisted with each new sentence, fading in and out like a wandering mind. She was herself, and she wasn’t.
“I don’t want to let you go.”
She squeezed his hands again. “We shared more love than most people have in a lifetime. Everything we did was real. We’re lucky, Ceneth. And now Ophir needs you. I need you. Raascot needs you. The continent needs you. And when you find her—”
“Ophir?”
“No.” Her voice softened. “When you find your bride, Ineed you to know that I’m happy for you. Your son is beautiful, and strong, and kind. His son and the son after them are children of the sky in your kingdom of wings. And none of it will happen if you don’t help Ophir. If she’s left alone…she’ll unmake the world.”
“Don’t go,” he said quietly, knowing she couldn’t stay. He wanted to say she was wrong. That he’d never have children with Ophir. That everything she said was impossible. But he couldn’t.
