Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
His jaw is hard, his eyes steely. “I just do.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Jasalyn
“It’s easy to want the good days,” Fherna says, flipping through the pages of her book. “It’s the others that make the decision so hard. The bad and the painful and the gray and the numb. You can’t just imagine a happy life and decide it’s worth it; you have to choose all of it.”
Wind whips around me, snapping my hair against my tearstained cheeks. “I know.”
“No one can promise you any future. No oracle can see every path; no seer can speak a truth that won’t change with tomorrow’s tide.”
“I know.”
“So you would choose this uncertain, painful existence even if it might be any of these?”
“Any of what?” I ask. I look around and see only darkness. But then I look again and realize I was focusing on the wrong thing. There’s so much more than darkness. There are all these stars—swirling and changing like a kaleidoscope before my eyes.
A million images, sensations, and emotions swamp me all at once. I am in the mind of the person I become in a dozen different turns of fate.
In one, I see my sister holding a baby, and the joy that fills my heart as his chubby fist wraps around her finger makes me feel like I might float off the ground. But in this same fate, I’m keenly aware, as I look into the baby’s silver eyes, that a child is something I will never have. Because I’m alone. Because Kendrick died the night of the battle and I can’t bring myself to make a family with someone else—no matter how much I may want one. The pain is an ache that starts in my heart and lives in my bones. I carry it with me everywhere.
In another, I’m looking into Kendrick’s eyes as someone ties colorful ribbons around our wrists and murmurs a prayer about the Mother blessing our union. I’m so happy in that moment, but time goes too fast and before we’re celebrating our fifth year together, he’s slain when he steps in front of a poisoned blade to save my sister from assassination.
I die too young.
I die too old.
I find love.
I know loneliness with an intimacy no one in my life can understand.
I have children who have Kendrick’s eyes and children who die in my arms.
I have an achingly empty womb, and I have children I orphan when I die too soon.
I know friendship and betrayal. I know the comfort of the magical bond between two faeries.
I know pleasure. I know pain.
I bury my sister and become queen of the shadow court, Kendrick by my side. Then no one by my side.
I move back to Elora and live on a farm with Kendrick.
I move back to Elora and nearly starve on the streets when I can’t find work.
War comes and takes everything that matters. From me. From the people I love.
War comes and change follows. Revolution that feels worthy of the sacrifice it demanded.
I bury my friends. My friends bury me.
Every existence has pain and joy and sacrifice, and I know them all at once.
I can no more pick from these myriad futures than I can pluck a single grain of salt from the sea. I can’t choose. My stars may feel cursed or my fate may feel charmed, but my reality will inevitably be a little of both.
“Do you see?” Fherna asks. She’s behind me and I meet her eyes in the mirror before me.
I touch the scar hooked around my eye and nod. “They’re part of me. They aren’t the pain or the memory. They are simply a sign of where I’ve been.”
“You could let the fire take them, pretend they were never there.”
My heart surges into my throat and I shake my head. “No. They’re mine. I endured.”
She lifts her chin, pride shining in her eyes. “You’re ready,” she says.
“Yes.” My mind and body are ravaged from the grief of the losses in a hundred different fates, but my heart is full of the gifts that came from choosing one more day. “I am.”
She gives me a slow smile that looks nothing like a goblin’s and everything like my mother’s, and when she speaks again, the words are in my head because she’s disappeared.
Then this is the part where you rise.
The ash on my bare skin is gritty and hot. My body feels weak, like I’ve been sleeping for a year, but when I open my eyes, a full moon shines down on me and the stars are spread in a blanket across the sky. They appear closer than ever, like I can make out the edges of each individual one.
I sit up, pushing myself off the ground and out of the ash surrounding me. I’m on the palace lawn, in the same spot where I stepped into the fire and nearly surrendered to escape the agony of the flames. The battle is over now. The pain gone. All that’s left is this ash, the clear night sky, and a collection of stars that feel brand-new.