Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83946 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Selina bears down again and pushes. I hear a breath burst from my mate’s mouth and look down just in time to see my child leave her. Or rather, its head, full of black hair. My mother tells Selina to push one more time and Selina gives all her tired body can to help my mother take the rest of the baby out. She does not pick up the baby, though, or raise him to Selina or me, but instead only turns him on his back so he’s lying on the ground. I watch the land embrace him, the grass curling towards him, flowers leaning closer to …
My thoughts completely stop as I realize I am not looking at a male.
“A female,” I breathe.
“What?” Selina asks weakly. “Did you say … Is she a girl?”
“A stunning girl,” my mother tells her when my shock doesn’t allow me to.
Selina gasps as a light begins to shine from the ground, all around our daughter. I watch it with a relaxation I never knew this moment would bring, to see my daughter become one with Hallalah, to watch the beginning of what will announce her birth to all Hallans. The light envelopes her completely, almost blinding in its brilliance, but I refuse to look away. The light recedes and my daughter is marked, arms and shoulders claiming her as belonging to our family, the black crescent on her forehead proclaiming her royalty. A princess of Hallalah.
Done with the grounding of a newborn, Vabila lifts my daughter—I have a daughter—onto Selina’s chest. With our child off the land, the light encases where our daughter laid and becomes a beam. It widens before it shoots up into the sky. I tilt my head back to watch it rise until it disappears into the clouds. Somewhere, on the other side of the cloud, in another part of Hallalah, it’s coming back down to the ground, claiming my child as a Hallan.
I look at Selina and find her smiling, with the light from the beam shining in her eyes. But then my gaze is solely on the squirming baby with her. Gray skin, black nails, black hair sticking up at all angles. I go around Selina to see our daughter’s face.
“She’s so perfect,” Selina says low.
“She is,” I agree, looking upon this perfection we created.
Like her mother, she has a pink tint to her chubby cheeks, her chest rises and falls with strong, steady breaths, and her little body looks robust and healthy. When her eyes blink open, I find one is green, and the other, of course, is blue. Perfect.
“You did so good, Zawla.”
I kiss her forehead, and whether from exhaustion or just wanting to be closer, maybe both, she leans into my lips. So, I keep them right there as I watch the two people who mean more to me than this planet, this galaxy, and everything it holds within it.
The Mina who told my fate so long ago said that when I found my mate, she would change everything. I thought I knew what that meant my whole life, that she would change everything for me. Then, when I found her and brought her home, I thought it meant she would change everything, not just for me, but for my people as well. Now I know exactly what the Mina meant, that my mate would change everything I thought I knew. What I thought love was and how I thought it would feel. How much a single person could come to mean to someone else. How much a simple smile could fix even the worst of pains and how just one look could turn your entire world on its axis.
The Mina meant my mate would change everything.
Everything.
EPILOGUE
“I wish I could come with you,” I tell Vabila as we exit the dining hall behind Bothaki’s parents to follow Bothaki’s grandmother, Sinad.
“But now you have something important to care for here,” Vabila replies, looking pointedly at the sleeping newborn still latched to my breast. Not even the tickle of her father’s claw along her smiling cheek is enough to get our daughter to rouse from her milk coma.
“I do,” I agree, enraptured the moment my child catches my attention. Just like that, I can’t look away and I’m going through the motions of a very significant day. I am still present as the drums beat louder, carrying us through the garden and main courtyard, and then out of the palace doors where so many Hallans wait.
Their cheers at the sight of the first royal baby in many years lights up the dusky red-pink sky. Their celebrations have continued for the turning of many moons since our daughter first entered the world. Despite the blood still falling from my healing womb, I’ve gone to sleep again and again hearing the hum of a very pleased city full of Hallans celebrating what the birth of our child means to them.