Page 40 of Blood Singer

"I know she and my father were blood singers. Fated mates."

"Fated. Yes, that's the word for it, isn't it." Murdette's mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "She was my dearest friend, Kavan, long before she was your mother. A Drakhoni female who used to laugh so loudly the whole city could hear her. Who could reduce your father to helpless grinning idiocy with a single look across a crowded room. I watched that. I watched it for centuries. It was the finest thing I'd ever seen, two people who fit together so completely that being apart from each other seemed to physically pain them."

I sat with that, letting the image settle over memories I'd only ever half understood as a youngling. Too young then to see my parents as anything but simply my parents.

"And then your father flew east to meet the raiders, and he didn't come home." Murdette's voice had gone soft, the way it did only rarely, only when the weight of centuries pressed down hard enough to flatten even her considerable composure. "I sat with your mother every day after that. I watched her stop eating properly. I watched her stop laughing at all, let alone loudly enough to fill a hallway. She went through the motions for your sake, because you were still a boy, but the light had gone out of her eyes the day the messenger arrived with news of your father, and it never returned. She died eight months later. The healers called it a wasting fever. I called it what it actually was, because I watched it happen with my own eyes. She died of a broken heart, Kavan. Piece by piece, the same way a fire dies once you take away the wood."

The office had gone very quiet. Outside, the wind moved through the purple-leaf trees, and their branches whispered against each other in a language I'd never learned to translate.

"I'm telling you this," Murdette said, "because I want you to understand that I know precisely what it looks like when a person grieves their blood singer. I watched it happen to your mother. I didn't watch it happen to you. Whatever you felt for Marion, and I don't doubt for one moment that it was real, it wasn't that. It didn't carry that particular weight. I think some part of you has always known that, and you've spent seven hundred and fifty years mourning something that wasn't quite what you believed."

"I can smell her on Leila," I said, because it felt like the thing I hadn't said yet, the thing sitting underneath everything else. "Marion. Or I could, when Leila first arrived. It's fading now. It's almost gone entirely, but for those first few days, every time I got near her, I caught traces of Marion's scent layered under her own. I thought it had to be an Alliance trick. How could it happen otherwise? How could Leila carry the scent of a female from so long ago?"

Murdette considered this with the particular stillness. In my experience, that was rare enough to be worth noting. "I don't know," she admitted. "I've seen a great many strange things in my time, but I've never heard of a blood song carrying over between two females born centuries apart. I won't pretend to have an answer for you."

"That's not particularly comforting."

"I didn't say it to comfort you. I said it because it's true, and you'd know if I were lying to make you feel better." She reached over and covered my hand with her own. Her skin was thin and warm and familiar, the same hand that had wiped blood from my knees and grief from my face more times than either of us could count. "But I'll tell you what I do know, Kavan, for whatever it's worth after centuries of watching people love and lose and love again. Whatever is happening with that girl, whatever her scent is doing or not doing, it isn't about Marion. It's about her. About who she is when she argues with you at dinner, or laughs too loudly at Sanyra's terrible jokes, or looks at you like you're something worth looking at rather than something to fear. Marion is the past, but the past is a place you visit, not a place you're meant to live. Whatever this is with Leila, it belongs to now. Maybe it belongs to whatever comes after now, if you don't spend it all hiding in this office pretending your dinner requires three days of contemplation." Her gaze softened and I wondered if she was seeing the boy in me instead of the man. "Maybe you've been looking at this all wrong, Kavan. Instead of Leila being a ghost of your past, perhaps Marion was a promise of your future."

I sat with that for a long moment, turning it over, feeling the shape of it settle into place beside everything else I'd been carrying. The guilt hadn't vanished. I doubted it ever fully would. But something in my chest had loosened, just slightly, enough to let in air that hadn't been there a moment before.

Murdette rose, smoothing her skirts, already back to her usual brisk efficiency like the conversation had cost her nothing. I knew better by now than to believe that. "Eat your dinner next time it's sent up hot," she said. "And for the love of every god still listening, go find that girl before you drive yourself into another seven hundred years of misery deciding whether you're allowed to want her."

She left without waiting for a response. I sat alone in the quiet for several minutes, listening to the wind move through the gardens below.

Her scent arrived on the edge of the wind. Sweet and complex, with that unidentifiable floral note I'd catalogued and failed to name a dozen times. Underneath it, so faint now I had to concentrate to detect it at all, only the barest ghost of anything that wasn't entirely Leila.

I told myself I shouldn't go. Knew the argument by heart at this point. Every time I got close, I lost ground. Every time I touched her, I wanted more, and the guilt that followed cost me something I couldn't afford to keep paying.

But what if Murdette was right?

I was already halfway down the corridor before I consciously registered moving.

The gardens were quiet enough that my footsteps sounded loud on the stone paths. I followed her scent through the silver-leaf trees and around the fountain. I found her standing with her arms wrapped around herself, watching the water cascade down the tiers of white stone. She wore a deep crimson dress, and her hair caught the moonlight in a way that tightened something uncomfortably in my chest.

She didn't startle when I approached. Didn't turn around. Just said, quietly, "I wondered if you'd come."

"I caught your scent," I said. True, and insufficient.

"Of course you did." A short, hollow laugh. "That's the problem, isn't it. My scent."

I moved closer. Close enough to see her hands clenched at her sides, close enough to catch the salt underneath the sweetness. She'd been crying.

"Leila—"

"I know why." She turned then, and the moonlight showed the dried tracks on her cheeks plainly. She didn't try to hide them. "I know why my scent upsets you so. I spoke with Chloe. She found something."

My dragon went still.

"I'm Marion Huntingdon's direct descendant," she said. Her voice was steady, which under the circumstances struck me as remarkable. "Her sons were away at court when you attacked. They survived. They had children, and those children had children, and—" She gestured at herself with something that was almost a smile and not quite. "Eventually, the line led to me."

The ground shifted beneath me.

Marion's descendant.

It explained everything with clean, merciless logic. The scent, the faint echo of blood song, the way something in my memory had tried to file Leila under a category that didn't fit her no matter how many times I forced the comparison.

Murdette was right. Leila wasn't a ghost, she was the fulfillment of a promise made centuries ago.