Snow Fields - Book Two of The Fields of Mendhavai Trilogy

Epilogue

EPILOGUE

The sky was so black here that the stars seemed to sparkle all the brighter. There was no torchlight, or smoke to mar the air, but something good was missing too. I frowned when I realized what it was – the dancing lights. I loved the stars in the north, but even more, I loved the lights; green usually, but sometimes with blue, purple and occasionally red pulses. Most often, they danced across the sky in one direction, but sometimes, very rarely, they seemed to be bursting in through the fabric of night and shooting off in all directions at once. It was a wonder to see.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply of the heavy desert air which was cooling rapidly with the loss of sunlight.

Danu, laying beside me and, holding his head up with a propped elbow, was running his hand through the hair that fanned out around my head on the pack I used as a pillow. With a smile that didn't cover the concern in his eyes, he brushed his thumb over the scar on my cheek, relieving the fierce itch with his gentle touch. 

Now, a month into being husband and wife, queen and king, prince and princess, depending on one's perspective, we didn't have to hide the fact that we were sharing a bed or a pallet. In fact, the party we were traveling with to our wedding reception in Jakhar, had teased us mercilessly over our campfire dinner. Then, they'd taken their sleeping rolls a respectable distance from the thicket of gooseberries we'd claimed as ours, just this side of the portal from Raldia.

"Is everything alright?" he whispered to me. "You seem to be having troubled dreams lately. Have you Seen something?"

Shaking my head, I replied, "No." I chewed my lower lip. I had been having strange dreams since returning from the Sani Isles, but none of them had made any sense. None of them had had the clarity and the surety that it was a predictive Vision. But they were disturbing in a way that I knew there was something off. I swallowed down my pride and asked my husband, "Danu, I'm not sure what it is... Just... keep an eye on me, will you?"

"Of course," he shuffled in the bed roll until he was laying over me, propped on his elbows that dug into the pack on either side of my head. He lowered his head to kiss me and then jerked back.

"Rinda? Are you alright?" he grasped my shoulders and shook them. "Rinda!"

His handsome panicked face washed out with darkness like more and more ink poured into a glass of water, and my heart hurt to see him so afraid for me, even as I faded unwillingly into a deep slumber.