As per our last correspondence, the child of the mortal must go into the Origin Spring on the day of the new moon, which, if this letter arrives in time, will be tomorrow.
And if it doesn’t arrive in time, we may all be dead too soon to care.
Leave and return.
Crown Raefiya.”
The world spins. My insides waver, and every ounce of strength I had begins to fall to the floor.
“Easy, Kitten,” Roarke says, grabbing my elbow and trying to steady me.
When that doesn’t work, he sinks to the floor with me.
“Raefiya was your mother?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, nodding slowly.
Most of the room is fuzzy and distant. His face is the only thing even remotely in focus. “Your mother drowned me,” I whisper.
“And she gave Seth the tool to bind us together. She had to have a reason. This was written two hundred and seventy years ago.”
I blink up at him.
“That doesn’t make sense. How many babies did she drown?”
He makes a half-choking, half-laughing noise.
“None. Kitten, this is you,” he says, holding the letter in front of me. “You went into that spring two hundred and seventy years ago.”
“You’re chuckin' nuts,” I tell him. “I know I supposedly drowned or half-drowned or whatever in that spring, but I couldn’t have been under that water for hundreds of years.”
“You could have. It’s a Power Spring for one, and it’s the Origin Spring. Who knows what it can do.”
“Did your mother know?”
He shrugs. “Possibly.”
“Your mother was chuckin’ nuts.”
He shrugs. “No, but ProphecySeeds do tend to do some things that look crazy to everyone else. She was the kind of person to open an umbrella a day before it started to rain.”
I smile at him, my lips pulling a little tight in an effort not to laugh, which paints a smile across his face too.
“I don’t know exactly why she put these pieces into play in this way, and I suppose no one ever will. She was building safe-holds and alternatives, just in case things happened one way or another. But for whatever reason, in the same two decades as she was finding all of us – she found you.”
I swallow hard. Which doesn’t help. So I do it again, and again.
“Kitten,” Roarke’s voice is soft, brushing across my consciousness. “Are you okay?”
I nod, swallowing hard one more time. “No.”
He chuckles, then moves across the room to grab a glass of water and the last of the bread.
“Here, eat something,” he says, handing them to me.
“I knew that woman looked familiar,” I say. Taking a hesitant bite. “Eydis. She was in my memories.”
Roarke nods. “Makes sense. That means she’s the keeper of the Origin Spring – and the spring must be somewhere nearby.”
“I don’t understand why your mother dropped me in the damned spring.” A part of me wants to add ‘instead of raising me in lavish luxury like you four,’ but I can’t.
I’m still a soot-servant. Her decision made me a soot-servant, while her choices with her sons turned them into Elite Saber badass princes. So, yeah, I feel a really good pity-party coming on.
“I don’t either,” Roarke says, running his thumb along my jawline. “But if we’d grown up with you, you’d be our sister.”
I almost blurt out that if we were brother and sister, we wouldn’t be in this tug-of-war of get-close versus keep-our-distance… all of us. But the real question is whether she was trying to keep us away from each other or not. After all, she did send them to find me – eventually. The woman knew stuff, futures-to-come type stuff. Does this mean she was trying to position us for a different kind of relationship? Or does it still mean that my mostly-mortal-ass is destined to die, and being mostly-mortal with these guys two hundred and something years ago would have made me definitely dead by now.
“There’s a chance you wouldn’t have survived living in the Black Castle. Your mother was mortal. Living with us full time might have destroyed your soul long ago. Not to mention Pax tried to kill us more than once before his power accepted us. Did you know Seth once lit fireworks under Killian’s bed? Even if your soul had survived, the rest of you might not have.”
I press my lips together to help bottle down my laughter. “Fireworks?”
“Killian almost put him through the Veil for it too.”
“Kind of removes any possibility that my part in this prophecy was purely as Seth’s puppet at the White Castle. Clearly that note Jada gave me was meant for me.”
Roarke frowns. “Yes, I think it does. Are you going to stay on the floor, Kitten? I have a few things I want to look up.”
I nod, drinking the last of my glass of water. He snaps into super-speed and rushes around the room, pulling down new books and rearranging one of the work benches to accommodate several large glass bowls. He tosses a few ingredients in and begins mixing and inspecting what he’s created.
Thunder claps outside, startling me. The sky finally opens up, and heavy raindrops pelt down against the glass. The sound soothes my racing mind, washing over me and making my worries heavy enough to sink to the bottom of my consciousness.
I don’t know how long I sit listening to the storm and the melody of raindrops on glass. It’s so much nicer than rain dripping on my head through holes in the apple-cellar roof – and the thought makes me think once again of
