Chapter 182: Harbinger

BONNIE

My dreams had never been a place for unfettered imagination. They were restrictive things, more often filled with nightmares than anything good, and even the good ones rarely came to me in a form I could hold on to.

This was one of the good ones.

Or perhaps harbinger of the hell to come was a more accurate description.

The kitchen at Lily of the Valley always smelled of woodsmoke and boiled barley. It was how I knew where I was before I even opened my eyes.

My mother and a few others were on kitchen duty that day, though for some reason, she was the only one there when the dream began.

I was small. The table came up to my chin, and my bare, grimy feet swung a hand’s width above the floorboards as I climbed onto the bench. Sunlight slanted through the window in a thick yellow shaft, illuminating dust motes that drifted lazily through the air.

I had dreamed of this place before. Dozens of times, perhaps more, in the years since I had run. My mind had returned to it often enough, stitching together fragments of a life I could no longer remember properly, filling the gaps with whatever scraps of imagination it could manage.

But this time was different. Everything was sharper, more solid, as though I had stepped into a memory rather than stumbled upon another dream. I could smell the smoke clinging to the rafters, feel the rough grain of the bench beneath my palms, even taste the faint bitterness of the air.

"Mama!"

My voice rang out, high and bright, unmistakably a child’s. I felt my mouth stretch into a grin, and with it came a rush of uncomplicated delight I had not experienced in years.

"Mama, Mama, look what I can do!"

She stood at the hearth with her back to me, stirring a pot. Then she turned, just as she always did.

Except this time, she had a face.

For years, I had known her only as a blur, a pale smudge where her features should have been. I had learned to live with that absence, to accept that no matter how many times I returned to this memory or plenty others, her face would remain beyond my reach.

Seeing her now nearly stole the breath from the grown woman watching from somewhere behind the child’s eyes.

I wondered if I had my so called father to thank for it.

Her hair was the colour of wet sand, pinned up carelessly, with loose strands curling around her temples because of how wet with sweat it was. Her cheekbones were mine. So was the little notch in her chin. Her eyes were a pale, silvery grey, almost luminous where the sunlight caught them.

And they were fixed on me.

For the first time, I could see what had always been there, hidden behind the blur, the expression I had spent years trying to imagine.

It wasn’t the soft, indulgent smile I had given her in my memories. It wasn’t pride or pleasure at whatever trick I was about to show her.

Her lips had thinned until almost no colour remained in them. The wooden spoon trembled in her hand, tapping against the rim of the pot in a faint, uneven rhythm. Her other hand had flown to her throat, her fingers splayed against the skin as though she were struggling to draw breath.

Her eyes were wide, fixed on me with a terror so naked that I felt it before I understood it.

My mother was afraid of me.

The child noticed none of it. She kept grinning, kicking her heels against the bench, her small fingers spread wide before her as though she were about to unveil the greatest marvel the world had ever seen.

"Watch, Mama. Watch!"

"Oh," my mother breathed. The sound was so faint I might have missed it if I hadn’t been watching her. Then she recovered, summoning a brightness that sat awkwardly on her face. "Oh, my darling. That is... that is lovely."

For years, I had remembered those words as praise. I had carried them through the worst of my nights, turning them over in my mind like a coin worn smooth from handling. That is lovely. Proof that once, before the blood and the death, someone had looked at what I could do and found something beautiful in it.

Now I could hear what I had missed.

The catch in her voice. The pause before lovely. The way she swallowed, as though forcing the words past something lodged in her throat. Her gaze kept straying beyond me, toward the window and the narrow lane outside, searching for movement, for witnesses, for anyone who might have heard.

She wasn’t admiring me.

She was making sure no one had seen.

"Mama, you’re not looking," the child complained.

"I am looking, sweetheart." My mother brought her eyes back to mine, and her smile widened by a fraction. "I’m looking right at you."

She was, too. I understood that much as I watched her. She had never looked at anything harder in her life.

The dream had always ended here. I knew its shape as intimately as I knew the small, almost unnoticeable scars around my body. The child showed off, the mother offered her praise, and the sunlight turned everything gold. Then I woke with a little warmth in my chest, only for it to curdle by breakfast into the familiar ache of everything I could no longer remember and no longer have.

I braced myself for it, waiting for the scene to dissolve, for the kitchen to slip away and leave me alone in the dark.

But the dream held.

Something shifted behind the child’s eyes, and for the first time, I felt the grown woman I had become lean forward, looking past the mother’s frightened face to the little girl’s outstretched hands.

My hands.

There was no pale blue light spilling from my palms.