Aurelie knew it was a dream when it first started. When she saw Balor smiling at her, when she put a hand across a bulging stomach, she knew that it wasn’t real. It felt real. The house looked the way she remembered it. Their bedroom wasn’t separated yet. Like Draka’s, the bed was in one end of the house and Balor had barely finished the loft above it for them to store tools and food sacks.

  Wait…Balor’s parents were living in the house, they were in the other one in the village. She shouldn’t be pregnant with Alden. He should be nearly seven years old, and Maud was eleven. This one would be a stillborn, the last thing she ever wanted to relive.

  She didn’t.

  A blink and she was recovering in bed. Her covers were soaked in sweat. She knew she should be feeling the remnants of childbirth between her thighs. Balor had his back turned to her. She knew who he was holding. Not Alden. Maud. She didn’t hurt, felt tired, but didn’t hurt. She tried to reach out to him. But he was too far away, carrying the newborn daughter in his hands.

  She basked in the moment. This moment, this memory, was her favorite. The moment she knew, deep within her heart, that she loved him and that he loved her. He was cooing and rocking the baby in his arms toward the warmth of the hearth. When he glanced over his shoulder at her, he smiled as warmly as she could remember.

  “She looks like her father,” He held up the baby for her to see its squishy face and pert nose. Its little mouth opened and closed, gulping air. The warmth in his handsome face melted her heart. She laughed through teary eyes. She wanted this dream to last forever.

  The smile on his face became a snarl. “You should probably tell him.”

  And he threw the baby into the hearth with a thumping sizzle and plume of sparks.

  The blankets of the bed forced her down when she yearned with all her might to leap out. Her face was pressed into the pillow, her eyes held open to watch as Balor stoked a fire erupting with bone aching screams.

  She cried out. She clawed at the blanket. She tried to look away. He turned to grin at her and all she could do was watch. He was calm. She was frantic.

  “My baby!” She screamed loud enough that her throat went soar and her voice fell silent. And the flames dimmed. Their fuel had burned away.

  Balor lounged in his chair at the head of the table. A mug of beer hung delicately in one hand. His brown eyes looked as loving as before at her. He took a drink. She tried to scream again. With all her might, she tried to scream.

  This is a dream. Balor took a long swig of his mug without looking away from her.

  Just a dream. He stoked the fire. She recognized the tiny skeleton melting away within its flames.

  This is only a dream. He tipped the mug for another drink. The blanket tightened.

  Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

  She blinked.

  Draka caught her shoulders when she stumbled back from him. The forest surrounded them again. The trees were dead and mangled the same as before. Ashes fell like snow between their branches over them. Draka’s hazel eyes pierced into hers. Was it anger? Hate?

  Concern?

  Her gaze fell on the mutilated bodies of Balor and Alden at his feet. Blood stained his hands and clothes. His steel spear jutted from where it had struck the boar that slaughtered them. Their faces, she gaped, were twisted shells covered in gore. Lifeless, as he had found them.

  “Heal them,” she pleaded as tears poured from her. “Please.” But she was silent to him. His hands clasped her shoulders tighter.

  “No,” Draka glared.

  Balor’s twisted face filled where Draka had been. He was over top of her on the bed, hands tightening around her throat. His thumb pressed hard over her jugular, “I gave you all my love, everything I had, and you lay with him like a whore! You treasonous bitch, I should be the one alive!” Blood burst onto her face with each word. She struggled to breathe. Struggled to scream.

  In her head, Aurelie shrieked, “I was faithful to you!” But even a single breath couldn’t escape her lips as her raging husband squeezed.

  “Whore!”

  “This isn’t real, Aurie!” Draka shook her with a roar. She was in the forest again. Ashes had piled on his long hair and broad shoulders. Air filled her lungs. Her arms rounded him and she grabbed onto his shirt. She felt his shirt bunched in her hands. She tasted his breath.

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  “Why?” It was all she could say as his hands clasped her cheeks. She felt heavy, pulled down to her knees, but he was holding her up. If she just lay there, this would stop, wouldn’t it? She couldn’t remember.

  “Look at me,” his forehead touched hers, his nose rubbed hers, and his eyes reached deep into hers with their golds and greens filling her vision. “Wake up, Aurie. Wake up. Wake up.”

  Aurelie opened her eyes. The darkness of the bedroom leapt at her. She sat up, no longer restrained, and turned toward the door. There was only the dim flickering light of the hearth fire beyond it. She lay back down with a long sigh.

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t fall asleep. She didn’t dream. She only lay there, taking breath after breath. And then she was on her feet. She slid the door open slow enough that it didn’t creak louder than a huff. She stepped cautiously through. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light in an instant.

  Maud was snoring from Alden’s bed. The loft above her, where her bed had once been, had returned to being filled with food sacks and tools. They blocked the window enough that not even a hint of moonlight was shown. The hearth was dim, but she knew from a glance that it would last the night properly.

  She didn’t go to look at the fire but to search the mantle over top of it. Just as she suspected, Maud still didn’t put the utensils where they belonged. The ladle was still in the pot and their only knife was set on the mantle beside Balor’s rocks. Her hand paused over one. He called them ‘purple rocks,’ she remembered as her finger slid over its porous angles. They were gray chips from the ancient bridge that had smoothed after hundreds of years of water rushing over them. Like the memories of Balor she swallowed back, they were remnants of something that no longer existed. She grabbed the knife.

  There were torches being carried on the road. She couldn’t see the bearer from the porch after shutting the door silently behind her. The Prince must have guardsmen now. She slid off the side of the porch and went around to the back of the house, to the cover of the trees and the pathway to his house. The pathway to him.

  When she reached his house, she went to the back side. She slid her foot along the wall to remove the leaves as she searched for it. Her fingers tightened around the handle of the knife in anticipation. She found the brick to the crawl space beneath him. Maud’s secret entrance to his home. She pushed the brick and crawled in.

  She imagined that the monster Lilith was down there, waiting for her. She imagined having the knife ripped from her fingers and used to carve out her heart. It was as she remembered it when she and Maud huddled together while a battle raged above them. While the rest of her family was being slaughtered. She remembered the opening through his floor before she reached it. And as she lifted it to stand upright, dust fell over her just as the light of his own hearth should have. But there was no lit hearth. Not even the smell of one that had gone out.

  She raised herself up onto the floor beneath his long table. He was in his bed, his blankets tossed from his bare chest and feet. His breathing was soft, rhythmic. She crawled from under the table and adjusted her grip on the knife. She wanted the blade to be aimed downward.

  Aurelie knew what he could do. She knew that she wouldn’t kill him. Why would she want that? She needed him to take care of Maud, to keep her safe, like he did that day. Each step toward him, each slow tip-toed shift toward his bed, she was emboldened. The day that woman—that actual monster—cut her apart while he hid Maud away. When Lilith attacked her at the river. He left Balor and Alden to die so he could save her and Maud instead. Even had his God heal her. Not her husband, not her son. No, they died.

  He should have saved them instead. He should have let her die and kept both of her children alive. She came close enough that she could reach out and touch his hand. Her hold on the knife shifted as she raised it up above her head. She was over top of him now, ready. Ready to strike.

  Protect Maud. Pay for her. Pay for their deaths. He could have healed them. Why didn’t he heal her baby boy and her loving husband? He should have left her to die that day. She didn’t deserve to live. She didn’t deserve to survive with all that she had done. He saved the wrong one. If only he had saved them instead…

  His hand shot to her wrist and the floor rose up to slam her. She was blinded by stars as the knife was forced from her hand. She didn’t fight back against him. So long as he did what any man would to his would-be assassin, she didn’t care. He could do as he pleased.

  He wrapped her in a blanket and lifted her into his arms. He was unphased as he cradled her against him so that her cheek rested on his chest. His heartbeat was steady. Unerring.

  She looked up to see his face as he carried through the door and out into the night. And she suddenly realized what the difference had always been. Why her husband had been so fond of him, why Maud refused to let him sink away from their family, why she couldn’t hate him no matter how much she deeply wanted to. She knew why he chose to save her and not them. Deep down, she knew. He didn’t know. It would never be enough for her, but it was the truth, and she knew it. She hated him for it.

  It wasn’t that she seemed weightless in his arms, that there was no strain in his muscles or breathing as he carried her down the road, back to her home. Her half empty, desolate, home. It was something else about him. He covered her in his blanket, the blanket that he had kicked off his bed in the night, and picked her up so that he could take her home. She had looked to want to murder him and he merely shrouded her in warmth.

  When he reached the house, he bent to set her feet on the porch, and straightened to look at her. She expected a different expression than what she found on his face.

  He was angry. Furious. She could see it in his eyes, in the stiffening of his squared, whiskered jaw. He was fuming at her. He held up a single finger and wagged it at her in warning.

  Then his other hand flicked its wrist at his side. She heard the rush of air that shifted her hair like a slight breeze before she realized what had happened. Before she realized that the loud thud behind her was the knife she had meant to feign murder with. A turn of her eyes and there it was, sticking out of the wall behind her. Her eyes widened at it.

  She whipped back to find Draka already halfway back to his house. Ashamed, she adjusted his blanket around her and quietly went back to her bed. Now, he hated her and she had to live with that too. Any other man would have taken the knife and skewered her with it. He only reminded her that he could. Part of her was thankful for that.

  Part of her hated him for it.