The Kiss of Deception (The Remnant Chronicles, #1)(87)

I sighed. I couldn’t worry about that now.

I crawled onto the thick mattress and pulled one of Reena’s colorful quilts over me. I turned on my side, looking at Kaden, wondering why he hated royals so. But it was clear he didn’t really hate me, just the idea of who I was, just as I hated the idea of who he was: It made me think how different everything might have been if we had both been born in Terravin.





CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE



I watched Dihara for the better part of an hour from the window before I stepped over the still-sleeping Kaden and left the wagon to approach her. She sat on a stool near the fire in the center of camp brushing her long silver hair and weaving it back into braids. Next she rubbed a yellow balm into her elbows and knuckles. Her movements were slow and methodical, as if she had done this every morning for a thousand years. That was almost how old she looked, but her shoulders weren’t hunched, and she was certainly still strong. She had carried a spinning wheel all the way into the meadow yesterday. A short stalk of grass bounced from the corner of her mouth as she chewed it.

One thing I knew from watching her was that there was something different about her. It was that same different I saw in Rafe and Kaden when they first walked into the tavern. That same different I saw when I looked at the Scholar. Something that couldn’t quite be hidden, whether good or bad. Something that swept into you as light as a feather or maybe sat in your gut like a heavy rock, but you knew it was there either way. There was something unusual enough about Dihara that it made me think she might really know more about the gift.

Her eyes lifted to mine as I approached. “Thank you for the book,” I said. “It was useful.”

She pressed her hands to her knees and stood. It seemed she’d been waiting for me. “Let’s go to the meadow. I’ll teach you what I know.”

We stopped in the middle of a patch of clover. She lifted a strand of my hair, dropped it, then circled around me. She sniffed the air and shook her head. “You’re weak in the gift, but then you’ve had much practice in ignoring it.”

“You know that by sniffing?”

For the first time, she smiled, a puff of air escaping her wrinkled lips almost in a laugh. She took my hand. “Let’s walk.” The meadow spread the length of the valley, and we wound through it heading toward no particular destination. “You’re young, child. I sense you’re quite strong in other gifts, perhaps the ones you were meant to nurture, but it doesn’t mean it’s too late for you to learn something of this one too. It’s good to have many strengths.”

As we walked, she pointed out the thin clouds overhead and their slow march over the mountaintops. She pointed to the gentle shimmer of leggy willows along the bank, and then she had me turn around to look at our footprints on the meadow grass, already springing back as the breeze ruffled like a hand across them.

“This world, it breathes you in, sniffs, it knows you, and then it breathes you out again, shares you. You’re not contained here in this single place alone. The wind, time, it circles, repeats, teaches, reveals, some swaths cutting deeper than others. The universe knows. The universe has a long memory. That is how the gift works. But there are some who are more open to the sharing than others.”

“How can the world breathe you in?”

“There are some mysteries even the world doesn’t reveal. Don’t we all need our secrets? Do we know why two people fall in love? Why a parent would sacrifice a child? Why a young woman would flee on her wedding day?”

I stopped, sucking in a small gasp, but she pulled me along with her. “The truths of the world wish to be known, but they won’t force themselves upon you the way lies will. They’ll court you, whisper to you, play behind your eyelids, slip inside and warm your blood, dance along your spine and caress your neck until your flesh rises in bumps.”

She took my hand and rolled it into a fist, pressing it hard to my middle just below my ribs. “And sometimes it prowls low here, heavy in your gut.” She released my hand and resumed walking. “That is the truth wishing to be known.”

“But I’m a First Daughter, and according to the Holy Text—”

“Do you think the way of truth cares about your birth order or words written on paper?” she asked. If Pauline had been there, she’d have been saying a penance for Dihara’s sacrilege, and the Scholar would have snapped Dihara’s knuckles for even thinking such a thing. The gift she described was not the one I had learned about.

“It’s just supposed to come, isn’t it?”

“Did your reading just come to you? Or did you have to devote effort to it? The seed of the gift may come, but a seedling that isn’t nourished dies quickly.” She turned, leading me down closer to the river. “The gift is a delicate way of knowing. It’s listening without ears, seeing without eyes, perceiving without knowledge. It’s how the few remaining Ancients survived. When they had nothing else, they had to return to the language of knowing buried deep within them. It’s a way as old as the universe itself.”

“What of the gods? Where are they in all this?” I asked.

“Look around you, girl. Which tree of this forest did they not create? They are where you choose to see them.”

We walked down to where the river curved sharply back toward the mountain, and we sat on a thickly pebbled bank. She told me more about the gift and herself. She wasn’t always a vagabond. She was once the daughter of a fletcher in the Lesser Kingdom of Candora, but her circumstances changed when her parents and older sister died of a fever. Rather than live with an uncle she feared, she ran. She was only seven at the time and found herself lost deep in the woods. She probably would have been eaten by wolves if a passing family of vagabonds hadn’t found her.