Believing in Blue

by Maggie Morton

  Her mom, however, would likely take a while longer to get used to all of this, so Wren made sure to give her an extra long hug when Kriss finally put her down at the top of the stairs. They all continued down a long hallway to the left of the stairs, along which sat vases holding sweet-smelling flowers, each placed on delicate white tables between every one of the hallway’s many doors. When they reached the fifth door on their right, Sia stepped forward and turned the knob, and Wren peered around Kriss so she could see. All she could make out in the room’s dim light was a medium-sized canopy bed with some sort of quilt on it.

  “This can be your room, Denise,” Sia told Wren’s mom, who looked rather grateful at the young woman’s words.

  Before she could take in any more of the room that would apparently be Denise’s, her mom hugged her again and whispered, “Good night, sweetheart. Sleep well.”

  Then Denise went inside, and Wren watched as her mom lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and shut her eyes, only managing to pull the quilt halfway over herself before beginning to snore. Wren went into the room and covered her the rest of the way, risking a kiss on her forehead that she hoped wouldn’t disturb her mother’s well-deserved sleep.

  When Wren left her mom’s room, softly shutting the door behind her, she saw that they had almost reached the end of the hallway. Just past her mom’s room was a large door with a sign on it. The sign brought a smile to Wren’s face. Written in elegant, carved cursive were the words Wren’s Room. But it wasn’t what the sign said that made her smile. It was the fact that she recognized the handwriting that her name was written in, handwriting she’d seen on a regular basis during her first eight years of life. She turned the door’s blue-painted knob and opened it, and Sia and Kriss followed her inside, into what was a rather amazing room.

  First, Wren noticed it held a canopy bed, like the one in her mom’s room. But this one was much bigger and covered in pillows, more of them than Wren could ever possibly need. The large, square pillow in front of the rest had a blue raven embroidered on it, and the words Sweet Dreams curved out of its open beak. To the left of the bed was a large sitting room, with a comfy-looking sofa and two large, stuffed-to-the-max armchairs, all of them upholstered in cream-colored cloth covered with pale-blue flowers that looked like forget-me-nots. There were also flowers on the two tables on each side of the bed. After taking all of that in, Wren finally noticed the room’s very best feature: a full wall of books to her left, all of their spines different hues—every possible shade of the rainbow’s various colors. Except, she noticed, not one of them was any shade of red.

  Turning her eyes back to the bed, she saw some very comfortable-looking flannel pajamas lying at its foot. They were covered in clouds, as well as moons in gold instead of silver or white, and the letter “Z” with elegant flourishes on each of its tips. The pajamas and the bed were now calling out to her so loudly she could almost hear their voices, so she turned to Sia with one last question to ask before she would thankfully be able to finally get some rest.

  “Why isn’t my dad here?” It was a question she had been wondering about on and off since she’d landed in Azyr, even with so many other things that could have completely distracted her from his absence. But it was a very important question, especially to her, especially to a daughter who hadn’t seen her father for all those years.

  “He…” Sia said. She cleared her throat, looking a little nervous. “There’s a note from him by the bed, he told me.” That was apparently all Sia was going to say; she fell silent after telling Wren of the note. So she hugged Sia good night, and Kriss and Sia both wished her a good night’s sleep.

  But Wren wanted to look around her room a little more first; she’d noticed a large dresser with two tall doors and three wide drawers beneath them. She walked over to it and lifted the wooden hook that held its doors shut. Upon swinging them both open, Wren gasped.

  Inside, instead of party dresses or skirts, was a metal breastplate with a dark-blue raven inlaid into its center. It looked as though it might have been glaring at her. Next to it was what seemed to be metal pants, made out of chainmail. Above the breastplate hung a helmet, with a thin piece of shining blue stone dangling down the front that appeared like it would rest on her forehead.

  This wasn’t something she would have wished to see right before bed, so she quickly shut the doors and turned her back on the cabinet and its frightening contents. With her eyes already half-closed, she trundled over to her bed and changed into her new pajamas, which were even softer than they’d looked. Feeling somewhat more relaxed now, she decided it was time to be brave and read her dad’s letter. She sat down on the bed and found a blue envelope with his neat cursive script across the front, lying on the pearlescent-blue bedside table. She smiled as she read the words he’d written: “To my dear daughter.” Then she ripped it open and withdrew her second letter from her long-lost dad, and began to read.

  Dearest Wrenny,

  I’m guessing that you expected to see me at my home as soon as you arrived tonight, but a pressing matter took me away from there: a certain someone’s belated Eighteenth Birthday Party (!!!) had some remaining planning to be done. I want to make it the best birthday you’ve ever had, in hopes that it will at least partially make up for all the ones I’ve missed. I also have hopes that you will forgive me, at some point, for leaving you behind all those years ago—too many years ago, if you ask me. I plan to do my best to make it up to you, to make up for all this sadly lost time we could have spent together. I send my love, and I look forward, so very much, to seeing you, finally, again.

  Love,

  Your dad

  P.S. Rysha wanted me to add that she’s very excited about meeting my lovely daughter in person.

  Wren couldn’t really say the same about Rysha, but the letter did manage to reassure her about her dad not being there to greet her. The letter would have to do for now, and she decided that the sooner she went to sleep, the sooner morning would come, and the sooner she would see her dad for the first time in, as he had said, too many years. She got into her bed, its sheets more sumptuous than any she’d ever slept on, and before she had a chance to think a single thought more, she was out cold.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A raven was hammering its giant beak against a giant tree trunk in Wren’s dreams. Wren was fairly sure ravens didn’t usually do this, but it looked real enough. Then the sound of its loud pecking turned into the sound of loud knocking as she quickly came awake. She heard a muffled male voice through her door, one that she thought she recognized. But until whoever it was spoke again, she wasn’t quite sure. “Can I come in, sweetheart? You awake?” the muffled voice said.

  “Yes!” Wren shoved herself up into a seated position, her impatience at an all-time high as she waited to see if the person speaking beyond her bedroom door was who she thought it was. After all, it had been years since she’d heard that voice. But when her bedroom door opened, and her dad’s curl-covered head peeked through, Wren couldn’t hold back her excitement, and all her anger at his disappearance vanished in an instant.

  She yelped in joy and shoved back the covers, running straight to him as he opened her bedroom door wide. “Oh, Dad! It’s you!” Upon reaching Torien, she flung her arms around his solid, robe-covered chest, the robe a rich, sumptuous brown that brought out the flecks of gold in his smiling eyes. He had a few more crow’s feet than the last time she’d seen him, and his almost-black locks held touches of gray at his temples, but it was still obviously him. She hadn’t realized exactly how much she’d missed him until she was finally able to touch him again.

  “This is the best birthday gift I’ve gotten in years,” she murmured against his chest. Wren was struggling to fight back the tears that were threatening to stream down her cheeks, but it turned out there was no need: her father’s voice was also thick with tears when he spoke. “Oh, Wrenny, you have no idea how good it is to see you again. No idea.” He kissed her head and moved a few inches
back, brushing some of her typically unruly waves behind her right ear. “You look just the same, and yet, well, very different. Now, do you think we could let everyone else into the room? And what’s this I hear about Denise joining you on your travels through our portal?”

  “I’m…I’m sorry about that,” Wren said bashfully, “but it was completely necessary. I didn’t have any other choice. And Dad, I’m almost positive you’d understand if I told you everything.”

  “I already did, honey,” said her mom, and a very unhappy-looking Denise was now entering the room. The dark circles under her eyes made it look as though she’d barely slept, or perhaps she was just experiencing one of her more horrific hangovers. Wren guessed that traveling through a portal to another world might not actually qualify as another one of the many hangover cures her mom had tried over the years. Still, it had to beat drinking raw egg yolks; unlike that particular “cure,” it didn’t come with the risk of potential food poisoning.

  “I understand completely, my dear daughter,” her father told her, glancing in her mom’s direction as he spoke. “You did the right thing, Wrenny. Denise made this very clear to me.”

  After her mom and Torien had entered the room, Denise sat down in a chair next to the door, and then Sia entered the room. She was followed by four silver, levitating trays, covered with plates of food and pitchers of orange, pulpy liquid. The fact that the trays were floating didn’t even faze Wren, but her mom looked at them with a somewhat suspicious glare. After the trays had settled onto the table between the chairs and sofa, one last person entered the room and shut the door behind her.

  She happened to be someone Wren didn’t want anywhere near her, or her dad. She almost would have preferred a Winged Red to the woman who stood in front of her. “Welcome to Azyr,” the woman said, her smiling, long-lashed eyes staring in Wren’s direction.

  She seemed to sincerely mean those words, but that didn’t even come close to winning her any space in Wren’s heart. “Hi, Rysha.” Wren had ordered her voice to be completely empty of the pain Rysha’s presence caused her.

  By the time her words had hung in the air for a few seconds, Wren had become pretty certain her tone had held at least a hint of her distress and distrust. But when her father’s current partner—her stepmother’s replacement—spread her arms wide to offer Wren a hug, she decided it would make her look bad if she refused to respond “appropriately” to the woman’s gesture.

  Still, she kept the hug as short as possible and tried to ignore the way Rysha smelled a little like her dad, a scent that she in no way had earned the right to carry.

  After that short-but-still-too-long hug, Rysha joined her father on the wide couch, placing her hand in his. She looked far more relaxed than she had any right to be, Wren thought. “You look so like him, Wren,” Rysha said in her silky-smooth voice, “especially your eyes. Those almost deadly, long-lashed eyes. I practically swooned when I first saw them.”

  “Yep, she always has looked a lot like Torien,” Denise added, and Wren was surprised when she didn’t detect any sign of pain in her mother’s words. Wren had expected a fair amount of hurt in her mom’s eyes when she first saw her ex-partner with her romantic replacement. However, Denise was smiling when she voiced her agreement, and it didn’t look like she was forcing her lips to curve upward.

  Not the way Wren had to whenever Rysha looked her way throughout breakfast. In the end, the delicious food managed to distract her from her animosity. There were waffles covered in blue and green berries and something that tasted like yummier crème fraîche, potatoes flecked with herbs and garlic, and juice that reminded her of orange juice but was much better. Even the coffee was perfect, so she allowed the delicious food to carry her worries away.

  At least for the time being.

  Throughout the meal, her dad dropped teasing hints about her party that night, and these mysterious hints managed to keep most of Wren’s attention off her dad’s girlfriend. She still had to fight to keep the occasional rude jibe from leaving her mouth, each one threatening to escape her lips whenever Rysha touched her dad.

  What she wanted more than anything was to kick Rysha out of her room. And her life. However, she didn’t want to ruin everyone’s good mood, so she kept all of her thoughts about the woman’s many-leveled encroachment to herself.

  Toward the end of the meal, Wren started to wonder how she would have felt if this were her biological mother sitting beside her dad, if it were her hand draped casually across his knee, but she found she didn’t have a clue about how it might make her feel. She didn’t even know if that woman was still alive, or if she’d possibly be glad to see her daughter again, if she were. Maybe she’d even stayed behind here on purpose.

  But that was a ridiculous thought, Wren decided, so she turned and smiled at her dad, allowing her joy at finally seeing him in front of her to wash away every stain of anguish it was able to reach.

  “Now, Wren, we have a gift waiting for you downstairs, the first one for your birthday, and the most important. If you’ll just join us there, you can open it.” Rysha rose from the couch, and Wren followed her out her bedroom door, with her father, Denise, and Sia right behind them.

  Downstairs, after going back into the hallway, they entered a room that contained an incredibly long glass-topped table surrounded by too many chairs to count in one quick glance. It had only been a quick glance because Wren’s eyes had instantly been drawn to the item that lay near the edge of the ornate table. There, a few feet away from Wren, sat a large, long, rectangular box, a velvet ribbon wrapped around its middle. Wren approached it and reached out, tearing off the ribbon and lifting the lid. She’d had no way to tell what the box might have contained, but her gift wasn’t even close to what any of her guesses might have been.

  Within it lay a bow and a quiver of arrows, all of them made of blond wood with delicate threads of blue scattered across their surface. The bow’s string was also blue, thick enough to make it seem like pulling it back would take the abilities of a goddess. The quiver had dark, lapis-like stones running down its front and back, and each of the fifteen arrows Wren counted was tipped with multi-colored feathers that had likely come from the Winged Blue’s raven forms.

  “That’s what’s known as a ‘self bow,’ and the quiver is a ‘back quiver.’” Rysha pointed to the bow and then the quiver as she spoke. Like Wren needed any help telling the difference between a bow and a quiver! “Quiq, Speyd, and Faest will help you learn more about it later, sometime tomorrow, as we want your first day to be relaxing and fun. It wouldn’t be much of a welcome, to start your first day here with training!” Rysha chuckled, but laughter was the last thing on Wren’s mind as she took in the intimidating weapon that lay before her: the weapon that was now hers, to wield and, perhaps, to kill with.

  She didn’t like a single bit of that train of thought, so she mumbled a quick “Thank you” and turned away from her gift.

  “I hope you like it, Wrenny,” her dad said. “One of our most skilled weapon-crafters made it, a good friend of mine named Brynn. And if you don’t truly like it, she can make you another.” Her father looked concerned, and Wren guessed he might have noticed that she wasn’t exactly thrilled with her gift.

  “No, no, it’s totally beautiful,” she assured him. “I’m just…just nervous about learning how to use it. It looks like it might be challenging.” That was only part of the truth, but Torien looked as though her words had smoothed over any doubts he’d had about his gift.

  “Piru, our land’s most skilled seer, is certain you will have amazing ability with the bow. And don’t worry, sweetie. The triplets are great teachers. All three are incredibly skilled with any sort of weapon.”

  As if his words had made the triplets materialize out of thin air, Speyd entered the room, followed by Quiq and Faest. Speyd was carrying a large platter with a silver lid, and Quiq and Faest each held one end of a thick roll of blue-and-gold fabric. They all greeted Wren and then her father, but j
ust as he was about to leave the room with his end of the fabric, Quiq paused at the propped-open doors to the garden. He was silent for a moment, and then he looked in her mom’s direction, and said, “Hello, Denise. I hope you slept well?”

  “Yes, yes, I did, very well. It’s nice to see you again, Quiq.” This time her mom’s grin wasn’t aided by alcohol, and it looked even more genuine than it had the night before. Yep, her mom definitely seemed to have eyes for Quiq, and he didn’t appear all that unhappy to be looking at her, either, a large, off-kilter grin directed toward her mom’s equally goofy-looking face. Wren still wasn’t happy to see her mom flirting, especially with someone who wasn’t her dad. It made her uncomfortable in more ways than she could count, and she sighed as Quiq finally went outside.

  “You okay, Wren?” Denise asked, her brow knitting together as she touched Wren’s cheek. “Didn’t you sleep well?”

  It had obviously been Denise who hadn’t slept well, yet she was looking the most awake she had since she’d entered Wren’s bedroom. “I’m fine, Mom, totally fine.” Wren tried to hide the annoyance she was feeling with her mom, and she must have been convincing, because Denise just smiled wider and kissed her forehead.

  Chapter Twenty

  After breakfast, Sia told Wren the five of them were supposed to go to the open-air market in town. Denise attempted to beg off, but a bit of pleading from Wren and Torien managed to convince her to come along.

  “After all,” Torien said to Denise, “how often do you get the chance to explore an unfamiliar planet on such a lovely day?”

  The weather spoke of summer when they got outside, the air fresh and warm and free of certain human-caused things Wren had barely registered on Earth. Like the smell of car exhaust, and honking, as well as technology’s not-so-subtle markings: no one’s face in the Winged Blue’s city was staring at a screen of some sort. Instead, the people were actually interacting with each other, smiling and greeting and hugging. After all, Wren thought, who would want technology when you could have the ability to fly, and who would need it if everyone in town had their own fantastic magical power?