The Crown of Gilded Bones (Blood and..

while. But that sleep hadn’t been deep. Not all of it anyway
because I had dreamed. I remembered that now. I had
dreamt of the night my parents died, and those dreams had
been different than the ones before. My mother had pulled
something from her boot—something long, slender, and
black. I couldn’t see it now, no matter how hard I tried to
remember, but someone else had also been there—
someone she’d spoken to, who had sounded nothing like the
voice I’d heard in the past—the one who had spoken with
my father that I now knew belonged to Alastir. This had
been a figure in black. I knew I had dreamed more, but it
kept slipping out of reach within my tired mind. Was
whatever I dreamed old memories that were finally
revealing themselves? Or had they been implanted there,
becoming a part of my imagination because of what Alastir
had claimed about the Dark One?
But what hadn’t felt like a dream, what had felt real,
was the woman I’d seen. The one with the long, silveryblonde
hair, who’d filled my mind when I was in the
Chambers of Nyktos. She had appeared when I was no
longer a body, without substance or thought, floating in the
nothingness. She had looked like me a little. She had more
freckles, her hair was different, and her eyes were odd—a
fractured green and silver, reminding me of how the
wolven’s eyes had looked when they came to me in the
Chambers.
A bloody tear had slid down her cheek. That meant she
had to be a god, but I knew of no female gods who were
depicted with such hair or features. A weary frown pulled at
my lips as I tried to sit up straighter. She had said
something to me, too—something that had been a shock. I
could almost hear her voice in my mind now, but just like
with the dreams of the night at the inn, clarity frustratingly
existed on the fringes of my consciousness.
Casteel shifted me so my head rested more fully against
his chest. “Rest,” he urged in a soft voice. “I’ve got you. You