Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars 0.5)(101)

Even once all our arrangements were made, I found it hard to shake the feeling that I needed to keep moving. At this point, I was used to it, and every time I looked at Hal and felt a burst of affection for him, I remembered what he’d wished for us—that we could take to the road as a family of explorers, not refugees.

But someone would always be hunting me for the power that ran through my veins, and carrying the Fatestone made it doubly likely. I wasn’t fool enough to think that would stop just because Ina had finally gotten the crown she wanted. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be others, either. I kept my shadow cloak close, taking comfort in its warmth and ability to hide me from anyone who might be able to sense magic.

All I had ever wanted was happiness for those I loved and a place to live where I could be an herbalist and help people quietly as I had before. Yet my journey had changed me.

Lying in bed beside Hal a few nights later, I asked him the impossible question.

“What should I do?” I whispered into his shoulder. The difficult thing was that lying beside him with Zallie, Iman, and Nera in a room just on the other side of the door felt so right. I feared what might come chasing me, but if not for that, perhaps I could learn to be happy here with this patchwork family of mine.

“You’re going to change the past, right?” His voice was a little guarded, as it always was when we talked about the past or the future and the ways I could shape them.

“That’s why we did all this—that’s why we got the Fatestone,” I said.

“But?” he asked.

In another version of my past, I might have met Hal anyway. Perhaps Iman could still have his own mother and father if I hadn’t interfered with the fate of his parents. Ina could be a village elder instead of a bloodstained queen. I might have stayed on my mountain and grown old in the slow way that demigods normally do.

But I had to write for my kingdom, not for myself—for the land I had sworn to protect that was now falling apart. The land itself would give up on life, slowly becoming a desert instead of the verdant mountains, valleys, and plains that existed now. There would be nothing for people to eat, no resources from which they could build their homes or pay their tithes to the crown. Without my intervention, people would struggle to survive in the barren landscape Zumorda would become.

I couldn’t let that happen.

“I need to save Zumorda and its people. That is the biggest thing. But I’m afraid if I rewrite the past to change their fate, I’ll make things worse in some unexpected way. And if I’m honest about what I want . . . it’s right here. With you.”

He turned toward me and kissed my collarbone, making warmth blossom in my stomach.

I ran my fingertips down his bare arm, then buried my face in his neck.

“Your nose is cold,” he murmured, a smile in his voice, and then he took my arm and wrapped it around his waist. I kissed his shoulder, and his hum of contentment sent desire racing through me.

“I love you, Asra,” he said.

Our mouths met, his arm wrapping around me to pull me closer. I loved him too. I loved that when he deepened a kiss, he did it like it was a question. When he held me, it was with the care he took with any precious thing, but never with any restriction that would bind me. I loved the way he talked to Iman, as though the baby could understand every story and song and joke he told him.

It would be so difficult to say good-bye to that.

“I love you, too,” I whispered.

“Surely there has to be a way to fix the past that might give us a similar future?” he said, hope and sadness warring in his voice.

“I don’t know. The past is so hard to change. The past we have is what led us here. One tiny change could send everything spiraling in any of a thousand different directions. Every moment is full of possibilities for a different future that would become our present,” I said. I wished I could show him what it looked like in my Sight, all the complicated nuances of time and fate.

“Is the future any easier to shape?” he asked. “At least there is more choice involved in that. The future is something more than fate. It’s filled with choices. It’s a collaboration with those you love. Or that’s what I hope our future would be, anyway.”

My obsession with changing the past had blinded me to the other option—changing the future. Guilt and grief still racked me every time I thought of Amalska and its people, but changing the past might not protect them. Even without my interference, Ina might still have resorted to the blood rite to take her manifest. Bandits might have still attacked. She still might have gone after the king. Could I truly write the past with enough clarity to prevent any of those things from coming to pass?

“What if I changed the future instead?” I asked Hal, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

“In what way?” He propped himself up on an elbow.

“Fix the kingdom from here forward. There are things that wouldn’t be made right—the destruction of Amalska, mostly. That loss and those memories will never stop hurting.”

“It could have happened anyway,” Hal said as he had a hundred times before.

“I know. And that’s what I’m worried about. What if I rewrite the past and it turns into a multi-village massacre? Or those bandits don’t die and instead loot their way across the entire kingdom? I can try to prevent those things from happening, but I can’t possibly think of every disaster scenario. I certainly didn’t realize Ina would take a dragon as her manifest when I first wrote that fate for her.”