Aidan blinked slowly and nodded, his jaw tight. He didn’t have to like it, but I had to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. “Understood.”
“Now go, take care of your sister. Get Maria to check on her, too.”
“Yes, sir,” he said grimly, and spun on his heel, jogging back toward the kitchens with chain mail jangling.
Once I was alone, the rage overtook me yet again. I worked the hilt of my dagger around and around in my palm. That useless piece of shit would never get near Anika again. I’d kill him before I let that happen. I’d let the kingdoms go to war. I’d let the world fucking burn. He wasn’t taking her as his wife. No fucking way in hell.
In my mother’s chambers, I dropped to my knees in front of the altar yet again. “Help me,” I whispered to her. “Fucking help me.”
Old Dora was also in the chamber, but she was sound asleep. Or I thought so, anyway. She wasn’t snoring as loud as she did when she was out cold, but I couldn’t fucking tell. And I didn’t give a shit. If she heard me, she fucking heard me. It was my mother’s guidance I needed now. Fuck the rest of the world, including her.
I pressed my clenched fist to my forehead, trying so fucking desperately to get a signal from my mother about what the hell I should do. In everything else, I knew the way. But when it came to this feeling, this deep ache in my heart, I had no idea how to get myself out of it. No fucking idea at all.
A slap jerked me out of my thoughts and I opened my eyes. In front of me, on the stone floor, lay a dusty old book. Dora stood above me, hands on her hips, eyeing it with a raised, gray eyebrow.
“Told you I had something for you, boy.”
The book was leather-bound and maybe two inches thick. The pages had gold-gilded edges, rippling and uneven from long use.
“If it’s a Bible, you can keep it.”
Dora shook her head.
“Bible,” she scoffed. “I can tell you it’s no Bible. But you might find it as powerful as one Don’t be ungrateful before you even know what I’ve given you.” She gave me a half-admonishing, half-loving glare. Her specialty.
Goddamn it. Even as old as I was, even as strong as I was, one disappointed word from Dora made me fucking crumple.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
Dora crossed her arms. “Are you going to open it? Or are you going to make an old lady stand here all day?”
Rising from my knees as I picked up the book, I took a seat on the window bench where my mother often sat—where she nursed me, where she raised me, where I felt her with me most strongly. Opening the cover, I instantly recognized the handwriting without even needing to read the flyleaf. It was my mother’s diary. And on the front page, she’d written the start but no end date. I lifted my eyes to Dora.
She nodded. “It was her book, my boy. Until the last day of her life. I knew she had it somewhere, but it was hidden away with all her other things. Just last week I found it, when I went down to check to make sure the moths hadn’t fussed with her gowns. There it was, waiting. For me. For you.”
What that meant exactly, I wasn’t sure. What I did know for certain was that seeing her words, the clean and smooth round hand in neat, tidy lines, calmed me down in the way that only a mother’s love can.
“You’ll want to go there, to that rose petal between the pages.”
The red rose. It was Anika’s favorite flower. There was such a thing as a coincidence, but there was no way my mother could’ve known Anika’s favorite flower. They’d never met, but fuck how I wish they had.
“How could she…?” I asked, trailing off, waiting for Dora to answer.
“I took it to my chambers to read, and when I laid it on my desk in the window, opening it to the first page, a wind turned the pages to that one and a petal fell upon the words. Your mother didn’t know Anika, more’s the pity. But when I saw the passage that petal had marked, I knew it was her will that I found her diary when I did, and it’s her will that I’m bringing it to you right now. Read that there. Read it carefully. Every word.” Dora couldn’t stifle her smile. “Turns out your mother was a true romantic. Not unlike you, my boy, though you don’t dare admit it. Old ladies that don’t see too well often notice the things that others miss.”
I pressed my finger between the marked pages and opened up the diary. It was an entry dated long before she married my father, years and years before I was born.