Page 115 of Starchaser
The party doesn’t start until twilight. If it weren’t for my siblings, I would stay here in my room, angry at my parents, at myself, at the world. But when Margaret sat on the edge of my bed, she didn’t even get a word out before she started sobbing. I knew instantly that Charlie or Lewis or possibly both told her the news about Owen. “Why?” she asked, and I knew she was asking me the same way I asked Father and Mother about keeping Owen’s survival—his involvement with the Guild of Shadows, his part to play in the events that took place at the Reckoning Day ball—a secret. But like Mother and Father must have known, I realize my answer will not satisfy.
Because I didn’t want you to hate him, I think. I wonder if Mother and Father feel the same way. Not even Charlie and Lewis know about Owen’s involvement in Father’s would-be death. That he was the one to compel Father. And maybe it’s because I want to protect him that I don’t want them to know. Not when there’s still a chance he can be saved.
Despite how I feel about attending the party, I am determined not to withdraw from my siblings. Not this time. Not after the months I spent isolated at Bludgrave, unaware that Margaret was struggling with adjusting to our new life just as much as I was. Not after the days I spent at Castle Grim, determined to fix everything on my own. Whatever happens next, we will face it together. All of us.
There’s a soft knock at my door. I consider staying silent,hoping whoever it is will move along, but then I think about Elsie or Albert standing on the other side of the door, and I can’t bring myself to turn them away.
“Come in.”
Father brings a tray of fresh fruit and cheese and sets it on my bedside. Dinah sniffs the air, and Father tosses her a chunk of apple.
“You need your strength,” Father says quietly, leaning against the rugged frame of my window. I expect the colorful bird to fly away, but when Father reaches out to stroke its wings, it doesn’t even startle.
“I don’t see why it matters,” I say, my eyes narrowed on the bough of the tree just outside my window, the sunset illuminating its leaves with a pinkish glow. “You’re not going to let me come with you.”
Father looks out at the ocean. “We should have told you,” he says. “We planned to, we just…” He clenches his jaw. “We couldn’t.”
I want to scream at him. I want to tell him it isn’t fair—that none of it is fair. If they hadn’t kept us away from the Red Island, none of this would have happened. I would never have been bitten. Owen wouldn’t have been turned into a Shifter. I want to tell him that it’s all their fault for lying to us.
“There’s still so much your mother and I want to tell you,” Father says, and I can see him watching me out of the corner of my eye. “About why we left. About…” He sighs. “About everything.”
“But you can’t,” I say. “Because of this…connectionbetween Morana and me?”
He frowns. “I’m afraid so.”
I stand, careful to avoid stepping on Dinah. “I have to get ready.”
He nods slowly, accepting my obvious dismissal. “Of course,” he says, scratching Dinah between the ears as she stretches,preparing to follow me to my bathing chambers. Father turns to leave, but he pauses in my doorway, his back to me. “This was my room, you know.” He pats the weathered frame. “The wood was taken from the wreck of theSunseeker—my father’s ship.”
I know I’m supposed to be angry with him, but I’ve never heard him mention his father—my grandfather—and I can’t help but ask, “What happened?”
His shoulders sag. “My mother’s ship was caught in a tempest near the borders of the Dire. My father came to her aid. She made it home.” He runs his hand over the grooves of the wood. “He didn’t.”
There’s a tight feeling in my chest that I’ve come to know intimately as grief. But in this case, it feels hollow, because how can I grieve for people I’ve never met? People whose names I don’t even know?
“I was only Albert’s age when he died. For so long, I was angry with him for leaving us too soon,” Father says, and I think about him at eleven years old, forced to bear the heavy burden of the crown. “It wasn’t until I met your mother that I understood why he’d done it.”
Many times, my siblings and I asked Mother and Father to tell us the story of how they met. Each time, they’d come up with a fantastical tale—one that almost always included them having been enemies who couldn’t help falling in love. Once, it was that they were locked in battle, fighting for enemy clans, when a sea serpent attacked and they were forced to vanquish the Myth together. Another time, Father claimed Mother stowed away on his ship, and when he woke to her knife at his throat, he blurted out a marriage proposal right then, and Mother laughed so hard she cried.
“It’s tradition, here, that when you propose marriage, you’re to present your bride-to-be with a set of pearls that can be found only near the Red Island,” Father says, glancing over his shoulder to look at me. “When I asked your mother to marry me, I gave her the pearls you wore at the Reckoning Day ball.”
My heart sinks. “I lost them that night.” I swallow around the lump in my throat. “I don’t know how. I was wearing them when Owen attacked me, and when I finally woke up, they were gone. If I had known—”
“I know,” he says, his kind eyes crinkling around the edges as he smiles. “It was the sight of those pearls that night that broke the compulsion, if only for a minute. And I realized what my father must have known when he went after my mother in that storm.”
Tears spring to my eyes, and I want to run to him—to throw myself in his arms and bury my face in his shirt like I might have when I was a little girl and I still believed he could solve any problem I was facing—but I don’t move. “What was that?”
He looks around the room, at the wood that no doubt holds so many memories for him—some painful, some happy, I’m sure. “Love is always worth the risk.”
When Bellaflor arrives to findme languishing in a towel, curled in a fetal position on my bed, I’ve hardly had a moment to register her presence before she pulls me into her embrace, and I begin to cry.
“There, there,” the woman says, rubbing small circles on my back.
I can’t figure out what it is about her that makes me feel this comfortable, but when my sobs have subsided enough for Bellaflor to be heard over my sniffling, she takes my hand in hers and says, “I knew you wouldn’t remember me. So many of your memories were lost after you were bitten.”
“Lost?” I rasp. I thought perhaps Mother used magic to alter my mind, just as Will suppressed Annie’s and Lord Bludgrave’s memories. “Why?”
Bellaflor tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Before theenchantment could protect your heart, the curse had a chance to eat away at your happiest memories.”
