Aurelie knew it was a dream. She knew that the forest she was standing in wasn’t real. She knew that the ashes falling over her were not actually in her room, raining over her bed while she lay there in the dark. She knew that Draka wasn’t leaning his shoulder against a tree, picking a leaf apart, and regarding her with a halfcocked grin.

  She looked down the path. She expected there to be a boar. It was a hut with smoke rising from the center. “Where am I? Is this your dream or mine?”

  “Not a dream,” Draka split a section of the leaf along the stem. “A memory. My memory.”

  “How?”

  Draka shrugged and tossed the remaining stem as he straightened. She couldn’t remember seeing him in the cotton shirt and belted trousers he was wearing. They were different, cleaner. Her eyes found his face and she was reassured that it was just a dream. A vivid dream. His cheeks were smooth, his overbite and consequently thick lips were framed by a trimmed goatee, and his hair was held back by a ribbon bow.

  “I am dreaming.”

  “You are.” He stepped toward her. “But this is not a dream. Not your dream. And I’ve given up trying to keep you from it.”

  Aurelie’s attention was pulled to the hut down the path. “What does that mean?”

  He smiled. Perfect straight and white teeth. “I don’t know.” And he stood beside her for a moment, gazing at the hut in the distance, before leaning against a nearby tree to watch his feet instead.

  “Are you…you?”

  He began picking at another leaf he plucked from a branch. Chuckling through a more hesitant smile, “I’m not you, if that’s what you’re asking. And I don’t remember you ever speaking my language before, but here we are.”

  “I’m not…” Her neck tightened with shifting ears. She wasn’t speaking her native tongue. Her hand touched her mouth as she gaped.

  Draka’s golden hazel eyes twinkled below a crooked and amused brow. “Maybe this is just my dream and you’re not actually here. Maybe I can change where this will inevitably,” his eyes trailed from her to the hut, “end.”

  His chest rose and fell as he looked. She could feel his pain wafting from him, she could see the anguish in his expressions, hear the fear in his voice. Not panic, but fear of what is to come. He turned back to her with another emergence of his twinkling grin. “It never changes.”

  “Change what?” Aurelie took a step back from him.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from him. Even as he stood from the tree and put his hands on his belt to look at the hut again, she couldn’t look away. He thought she was just a dream. He thought this was his dream.

  “In that hut, is my wife and son,” he bit the side of his mouth at it. “She had given birth to him during the night. I went out early while she was asleep to hunt. She needed meat to regain her strength and I had postponed my hunt because she began her labor.” He turned to Aurelie with a distant, teary-eyed smile. “She labored for three days to bring him into this world.”

  “They died,” Aurelie touched his arm. Feeling the texture of his hairs on her fingers shot through her like lightning in surprise. Was this a dream?

  “No,” he was distant now. His gaze drawn and held on the hut before him. “They survived the night.”

  When his eyes turned to her, his expression made her breath stick in her throat. He was no longer looking at her, he was looking through her, into her, piercing as sharply as a knife.

  He stepped toward her, she stepped back. He looked across his shoulder at the hut, “When I go in there, she’ll be there. Again. Every night, no matter where I am, she’s there.” His piercing stare returned to her face, “And I kill her…again.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Aurelie stood back from him. His stare didn’t shift to follow. He had never been looking at her.

  “That part never changes,” Draka blinked at nothing. “But you,” this time, he was looking at her, “You are different each time. I don’t remember you this way. You’re thinner, sickly. And you don’t speak my language. He won’t answer when I ask why you keep appearing to me. I saved you from the boar the first time, but it wasn’t you I saved from the boar. I saved Maud.”

  Aurelie stood her ground as he stepped closer to her, towering over her. “You did save me.”

  “Not from the boar,” he was close enough to her that she felt his breath on her nose, heard the beating of his heart. “I failed them. I failed you.”

  She looked up, meeting his piercing gaze, frozen in awe. She felt the tears on her face, but they weren’t falling down her cheek. She felt them trailing to one of her ears. Draka’s hand touched her cheek and his thumb rubbed some of the tears away.

  “If I could only say this to you,” he leaned toward her, brushing his fingers through her hair as if he were memorizing every detail, every movement, every gesture. “I would say that I would gladly have taken their place that day. I would gladly have died for them to live. When I get back, maybe Maud will be good enough at reading to read for me so that I can tell you for real that I loved Balor and Alden as if they were my own family and I miss them. And every night since, this is where I come, to live this moment again and again. Maybe not because of when it is, but because I find you here, now.”

  He pushed her from him and turned to the hut again. “To join me in the other worst moment of my life. Unlike Balor, I actually killed her.”

  “Why did you…?”

  She didn’t need to finish for Draka to answer as if she had. “Because she was possessed by a demon and murdered our son.”

  Aurelie’s mouth gaped.

  “Sophia would have never killed our son. I know she wouldn’t. But I didn’t know how to draw it out of her like I do now. I couldn’t save her either. So,” his body sunk and he trembled, “I killed her.”

  Aurelie woke slowly. She slid the covers down and sat up. Few dreams remain so vivid after waking. She remembered every piece of it, every detail. But it was his expression that remained in her heart. Was it true? Was that what happened to his wife and child? She thought it was during childbirth that he said they died. Was it him who said that or did they just assume that?

  The light bombarded her senses when she cracked the door open just enough to look. Maud was laying across the floor on her elbows with her legs bent upwards, her feet dancing as she read the book that was opened in front of her. From how dark it had been in her room, she had expected it to be nighttime and, if it wasn’t, then that Maud would be at Draka’s.

  The door creaked.

  Maud looked up. Aurelie hesitated.

  Maud leapt to her feet and sprinted. She threw the door open and wrapped Aurelie in the tightest hug. And Aurelie took in all that was her daughter. The way she smelled, the warmth of her embrace, the pulse of her blood rushing through her veins to drum against her. The softness of the cheek pressed to her own.

  “I thought you were with Draka.”

  Maud jerked back from her and looked at her as if she were a stranger and not her mother. “What?”

  “I thought you were with Draka,” Aurelie repeated.

  Maud blinked for a moment. Then shook her head as if she were shaking something from it, “Oh, he’s off to war in Berone. You must be starving! I have bread to hold you over until the veal is roasted. Oh, and I have so much to tell you. I’ve been reading about…”

  “Reading?” Aurelie grinned as Maud led her to the table. She was still squinting against the brightness of the light but she could see Maud’s excitement.

  “I told you, remember? Draka’s having Pierre teach me.”

  “Oh,” Aurelie sat on the chair. Until that moment, she had forgotten that she was still wrapped in her blanket. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Maud smiled at her, “I’m sorry.” She handed her a hunk of bread and asked sheepishly, “Do you want to hear about it?”

  Aurelie pinched a bit off to put in her mouth and nodded.

  “So, at this time,” Maud scooped up her book and rushed to sit in the chair across from her, “Israel doesn’t have a king-king, but has leaders called judges, right? And one of those judges is a woman named Deborah who is a prophet—which Pierre said she was the only Judge to be God’s prophet, too—anyway, she had a vision and went to this guy named Barak to tell him that God told her…”