The words became more difficult to read as the paper quivered in her trembling fingers. Vhalla blinked her eyes. Her emotions were too wild to handle this. She curled into a ball, clutching the paper to her chest. Aldrik’s arms were around her shoulders, and she wept into her knees, not caring for the folds or wrinkles it put in the parchment.
This was what he’d been silently enduring for months. Each night he went to sleep, he risked a dream. He risked seeing joy, he risked seeing pain. Vhalla realized it was far worse than seeing his memories. Those were cemented in history. But, for Aldrik, the brightest hope could be torture because it may be a guiding light or a false beacon.
“You say you are a curse, but I’m the one who’s cursed you. To torture you with such visions.” Even before he’d realized his dreams held the future, she knew they would’ve caused him the rainbow of agony to ecstasy, depending on their subject.
“Hush,” he demanded. “Do you know how often I sleep wishing to see something like the paper you hold? It’s been the only thing that’s allowed me to sleep some nights. It’s the only thing that gave me the courage to ask you to be mine.” His long fingers wrapped around the watch at her neck.
“You’re sure?”
“I am.” He coaxed the paper from her hands and began to show her the sets he’d created of his dreams against records of events that had come to pass. His moments of confidence suddenly made more sense. She knew why he had so much faith in getting her to the front as Serien, why he’d easily refused her advances for something more at the last campsite before the North, how he’d known he could accomplish making her a lady. Even if the details were blurry, and the means of it all happening was slightly off, it matched dream to reality.
“Did you know, about—” Vhalla swallowed hard and risked the name, “—Baldair?”
“I didn’t.” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maybe, maybe I saw something. But I only ever see you. Perhaps it’s because I don’t possess general future sight?”
“My death?” The word was like a curse upon her lips.
“I don’t know,” Aldrik groaned. “I haven’t even written it down, I couldn’t manage with—” his voice quivered, and he drew a shaky breath, “—with Baldair.”
His hands were on her again. They ran down her cheeks onto her neck. They were over her shoulders, intertwining his fingers with hers and back again. As though he was assuring himself that she wasn’t some phantom, that it wasn’t one of his dreams.
“I saw you bleeding. You had a gash from your shoulder to your chest.” His forehead fell against hers. “I can’t lose you. I-I lost my brother, I won’t lose you. Baldair is gone, by the Mother, Baldair is gone. If I lost you, Vhalla, I would have no one, nothing.”
Aldrik pulled her back to him, and she realized how his grief was beginning to manifest. It fed off his paranoia, his mistrust of the world. If he wasn’t prepared to do anything to protect her before, he was now.
“You won’t lose me,” she assured him.
“I never thought I’d lose Baldair.” He was crying again, she realized. “Oh, Gods, Baldair. I am cursed: my mother could not escape, Baldair could not escape, and I will damn you, too.”
“Enough of that.” Vhalla struggled to pry herself far enough away from his chest to catch his eyes. “You didn’t damn anyone.”
“My mother did not die in childbirth.”
“What?” Every book she had ever read, everything she had ever heard, had said such to be true.
“She died shortly after. The explanation of death in the birthing bed was easier than the truth.” Aldrik rubbed his eyes tiredly, withdrawing physically. “Isn’t that how it always is, a beautiful simple lie over the ugly truth?”
“I’ve come to prefer the latter.” Vhalla rested a palm on his knee. “Tell me later; this is too much for one day.”
“No.” He was focused on the dancing flames. “I need to tell you. I did not tell Baldair, now I never will. I need to tell you, Vhalla. I need to do things right for once in my miserable life.”
“Aldrik, please,” she begged.
“Listen, Vhalla, let me tell you what I should’ve before you let the Empire’s accursed monster into your bed.”
“THE WEST FELL, and most did not want it to go down gracefully,” Aldrik began.
“The Knights of Jadar?” Vhalla asked tentatively, wondering if she’d finally fill in the curious blanks of the histories she’d been trying to sift through for months.
“Just so.” There was the ghost of appreciation for her haunting his eyes. “They loathed my mother’s family for kneeling before Solaris. Most of all, they loathed my mother for marrying my father.
“My uncle tells me that, in her way, she loved my father for his conquest. When he speaks of her, he tells me she was as beautiful as a rose with thorns twice as sharp. My mother had never been bested in combat before, which made my father enthralling, despite the unusual circumstances under which they met.” Aldrik shook his head. “It wasn’t until I was engaged to the Northern girl I thought about how impossible my parents’ love was.
“After the Knights disowned my family, they used their knowledge of the caverns to prepare a plot to drive out Solaris, to purge the Western court of all those who were no longer loyal to ‘King Jadar’s Ideals.’” Aldrik scowled. “They stole the Sword of Jadar. My mother’s father had told her where he had hidden it, and she discovered it missing within hours of my birth.”
Vhalla remembered her conversation with Ophain; the lord had mentioned the sword had gone missing, but he so carefully left out the truth of the matter.
Aldrik shifted uncomfortably and continued, “My mother left. She never even told my father where she was going. She disappeared into the night on the fastest War-strider and raced without rest to the caves, despite still recovering from the pains and blood loss of labor.”
Vhalla grimaced at the thought.
“She confronted the Knights before they could penetrate into the heart of the caverns.” Aldrik paused, blinking away shining tears. “She was alone, but she used the Knight’s knowledge against them. She was a Western princess and had access to Mhashan’s crimson history. She Bound her will with the crystals; she gave everything to block the Knights with a barrier of her magic. Even when they killed her, the barrier held.”
“How do you know all this?”
“She left a letter,” he answered. “When she went missing, my family went searching through the palace, keeping things hush before a search party was sent. I suppose there were places that she and her sisters would share, secrets with notes. My mother hid a letter in one such place. By the time they knew, it was too late.”
“Why didn’t she let someone else go?” Vhalla frowned. “Why did she run off?” Vhalla omitted what she really wanted to know. Why had Aldrik’s mother left her newborn son?
But he heard it. “Who knows, really? I suppose she was magically the strongest. She knew she would be stopped by anyone she told. Perhaps she knew the route the best. Perhaps she had researched it best. If it had been me, and I had something I desperately wanted to protect, I wouldn’t trust anyone else to do what must be done. The Knights were at all levels of Western society. She could have been assassinated by telling the wrong person while trying to mobilize a force, and then it would be far too late.”
Aldrik paused and looked at her with sudden clarity. Vhalla realized that, for the first time, he understood what his mother had felt. She glanced at the paper she had clutched longingly, a mother, a father, and their child. Aldrik’s eyes betrayed his resolve; he was prepared to do the same for her and a child who may never even come into existence.