Redemption of Thieves (Book 4) Read Free

I found myself no longer on the path but approaching the front porch of the cottage. It didn’t seem strange this should happen. Another shift and I was walking in the open door.
    Everything around me was familiar, the room, the furnishings. The big bed in the middle of the room and the crackling fireplace over which something was cooking. I looked for my little bed tucked away in the corner, but it wasn’t there. In its place stood a wooden cradle and in that cradle something moved.
    Approaching cautiously, I peered over the side and saw an infant, only a few months of age, lying amid a pile of thick, soft blankets knitted in a pattern I recognized as one of Mama’s. The pale-skinned baby turned its head, which was covered in tufts of silvery hair, and looked up at me with solemn grey eyes. Somehow I knew I was looking at myself.
    I felt no sense of alarm at what I was vaguely aware should be a startling turn of events. Somehow this, like everything else in this place, felt perfectly natural.
    “Do you think she’ll be safe here? Will any of us ever be safe again?”
    I turned at the female voice.
    I wasn’t alone anymore but stood alongside a couple looking down on the baby. He was tall and dark bearded, she pale and silver haired, her long tresses drawn back to reveal delicately pointed ears. It was startling to see Mama so young. Had she always looked like that? So much like … me?
    Da put his arm around her. “Nothing can touch us here.”
    The sound of his well-remembered voice made my eyes sting.
    “I’ll make sure of that,” he continued. “The villagers are mostly magickers and they’ve accepted us. We’ll be away from prying eyes in this place.”
    “But your family…” she protested.
    “Are far away and they don’t know we have a child. Even if they did, what does it matter? I’m sure his anger has cooled by now—”
    “You don’t really believe that.”
    “If I thought otherwise would I have settled us in the same province?” he asked.
    She shook her head, as if she had heard this argument before. “You know how hot his anger is, how he hates my people, especially now that I’ve stolen you away. He swore to hunt us down after your abandonment and he’ll never rest until he does. Not while he believes you’ve betrayed him.”
    He smiled and kissed her neck gently. “I had to follow the bidding of my heart.”
    “But look what it’s gotten you, at the danger it’s placed us in. Yes and maybe other magickers too. What has our selfish, reckless love done?”
    Tears trickled out the corners of her eyes and he moved to comfort her. Neither seemed aware of me. I was so near they might have reached out and touched me, but instead, they looked through me as though I were a ghost.
    Was I? Had I died in my sleep and wandered into some strange afterworld where I was forced to repeat scenes from my life, reliving each moment from the beginning, watching but never participating? And this was a scene from my life. I had no doubt about that. Somewhere in the distant past, this conversation had happened before.
    For the first time I felt troubled, as if I were witnessing moments I wasn’t meant to see. Not the grown me anyway. The baby in the cradle saw all and looked on, unblinking.
    I backed away, suddenly desiring to be somewhere, anywhere, else. The cottage felt close, the air oppressive. I thought I had come home but I was wrong. This wasn’t my home anymore. I shouldn’t be here.
    I was reminded forcefully of a time I had seen Brig shortly after his death. Had strayed into some grey memory of him where I’d felt briefly comforted before recognizing the wrongness of what was happening and pushing his flickering image away.
    I pushed now and was swept up in a dizzying sensation and the world around me shifted.
    I awoke to find warm sunlight streaming over me and Seephinia cooking breakfast.
     
    * * *
     
    I told Hadrian about my nighttime visit to the home of my childhood.
    “I have heard