I do hope to have you home with your true family soon.
If you decline our offer, we will understand this to be a declaration of allegiance where it is undeserved. We steal nothing from you—only give.
The choice is yours.
With hope and the sincerest of regards,
Your brother,
Rain’
13
APRIL
Your brother…
Not signed merely ‘Brother’, no. It was very clear in the four times I read that letter before I threw it into the flames of the hearth and watched it burn to ash.
Yourbrother.
This was no accident. This was nothing like Skye calling me ‘Sister’ a couple of times, a way that some litalves might sometimes refer to their favoured friends and guests or allies.
No, Rain attached that one, potent word.Your.
He made it very clear.
I know what I am. A kinta. A broken Halfling—one who was born mostly human, almost entirely (if it weren’t for the need for the light to sustain me). And on top of that, I must have been born of royal litalf blood, since I’m the evate of a dokkalf prince.
That much I knew, but … to have the litalf Prince of War announce so boldly that he is my brother—that changes everything. Sometimes, I did allow myself to wonder what my role would have been in the light lands had I not been thrown away and traded for a healthy human baby fit for servitude in its future.
I always would come up with close relations to the royal family’s core members. A distant cousin, usually was my idea.
Now, I feel like my entire identity has been rattled like a flimsy old tower battered in the gale winds, crumbling down piece by piece. And I can’t tell anyone about it. No one is supposed to know that I’m a royal kinta, a restricted Halfling. And Daein … if he knew what I now know…
I shudder to think of it.
I throw it out of my mind as I toss and turn on our bed, kicking the sheets away from me, suffering under the heavy weight of his arm draped over me.
Suffocated. I feel suffocated all over again.
Daein obviously knows that something’s amiss with me. He doesn’t outright ask, and I suspect that’s because he thinks it’s about what I told him. That I want another baby. Another child of ours.
He thinks it will make me happy. Maybe it will.
But it’s not all that it seems.
You see, he’s agreed—Daein has agreed, even still, that I can go to the Hunt in the light lands. And if I choose to leave this castle on that day, I know that I won’t return. I know that I’ll be leaving this place behind for a promise land of family and the return of light. That’s what the letter said. The light will return—and they need my help, too.
What I can do for them, I don’t know.
But I am getting my affairs in order so that, when the day comes and the carriage awaits me in the courtyard, I have all that I need if I choose to leave.
I need a piece of Daein. Our child. Our second one.
The one I will raise in other lands if I go, and the one who will be better, and love me better.
Only, I can’t seem to commit to a decision just yet.