Chapter 166: CLXVI

Isabelll's POV

"Isabellla."

"I don't remember her," I said, and this was the part that was the hardest, the thing that had been sitting at the center of everything since Xavier first spoke.

"I don't remember being her mother. I don't remember holding her or feeding her or any of it.”

“She remembers me and I have nothing. I have a test result and a portrait and a song and she has a whole life of dreams about me and I have nothing to give back to her."

Levi moved and he sat down on the kitchen floor beside me, which for a man of his size and in the clothes he was wearing was not a graceful action but he did it without any apparent concern for either of those things. He put his arm around me and I turned into him and held on.

He held me back and we sat on the kitchen floor for a long time.

The anxiety medication was working by the time the shaking stopped, the chemical evening-out of a system that had been spiking, bringing everything down to a level that was not okay but was manageable.

Manageable enough to work with, Levi got me off the floor eventually, with the practical efficiency that he applied to physical problems, and sat me on the couch with a glass of water and sat beside me.

I drank the water. "What do I do now?" I asked.

"First you finish that water," he said.

I finished the water. "And then?" I said.

"And then Xavier brings Aria here and you take it one hour at a time," he said.

"You don't have to have everything resolved tonight, you just have to be present for the next thing."

"What is the next thing?"

"Xavier arrives in about an hour," he said. "I texted him while you were sitting with me."

I looked at him. "You texted him from the kitchen floor?"

"Multitasking," he said.

I looked at my hands. They were steady now. The test result was still in my email, confirmed and unchanging, and the world had not ended when I read it. It had simply shifted into a configuration that was entirely new.

"She is going to want to know," I said.

"I know that it is confirmed. She already believes it but she's going to want me to know it too."

"Yes," Levi said.

"She will."

"I don't know how to be her mother," I said.

"I don't know how to do that without the memories of being her mother before."

"You've been with her for several days," Levi said.

"Tell me one thing you don't know how to do with her."

I thought about the breakfast cereal and the bathroom routine and sitting on the floor with the blocks. About the dark apartment and the singing and laying her down on the playroom mat.

"Nothing specific," I said quietly.

"Because you already know how," he said.

"The memories aren't there but the person who made them is."

I sat with that.

Xavier arrived at three in the afternoon.

He came to the door with Aria beside him and a bag over one shoulder that contained what I recognized as Aria's things, the organized packing of a father who knew his daughter's requirements well.

Aria saw me and came straight to me, which she did every time, with the instinctive directness of someone for whom the decision to cross a room was made before they were fully through the door.

I crouched down and she hugged me, her arms around my neck, her face pressing briefly into my shoulder.

I held her when she went to find Levi, who she had decided was acceptable and whose apartment she assessed with the same systematic thoroughness she had applied to mine, I stood up and looked at Xavier.

"The test came back," I said.

Xavier held my gaze.

"Positive," I said. "Ninety-nine point nine eight percent maternal match."

Something moved through Xavier's face. Not surprising. Relief, I thought, was the closest word, though it was a specific kind of relief that had complicated things underneath it.

"I know," I said.

"I know you knew I needed to know through a process I controlled."

"I understand," he said.

We went to the sitting room and sat, the three of us, while Aria's voice and Levi's voice drifted from somewhere in the apartment in a conversation that sounded like Aria explaining something at length.

"Tell me about her childhood," I said.

"Everything you are willing to tell me. I need to know what I missed."

Xavier told me.

He spoke for over an hour. He told me about Aria's first word, which was not dada as might have been expected but was the name of a particular bird she had seen from the window and decided needed to be acknowledged.

He told me about her first steps, taken in the kitchen of a different house in a different country, heading toward something on the floor that had caught her attention. He told me about her sleep patterns and her food preferences and the extended period at age four when she would only wear red.

He told me about the dreams starting not immediately, not from birth, but from around eighteen months.

At first just waking with a settled quality that was not typical for toddlers. Then, as language came, descriptions of a woman with dark hair who made breakfast and sang.

"She never seemed distressed by them," Xavier said.

"Other children have nightmares. She had the opposite. She woke up from dreaming of you, calmer than she went to sleep."

I pressed my lips together briefly. "Her abilities," I said.

"You said she has them."

"Yes," Xavier said.

"The dream access is the primary one so far. The ability to reach into someone else's sleeping state, or to project her own dreaming outward.”

“It is an Aldric ability diluted in her because she's half, and she is very young, but it is there."

"Are there others?"

"Probably," Xavier said.

"They will develop as she grows. I have been monitoring and documenting. Nothing that has caused problems yet she is a stable child."

"Because you raised her well," I said.

Xavier looked at me steadily. "I raised her the way you would have wanted her raised," he said.

"That was my reference point for every decision."

I had nothing to say to that.

"The Aldric bloodline," I said, after a moment.

"If Aria has abilities already, what does that mean for me? For this current situation?"

Xavier leaned forward. "This is the part I need you to understand clearly," he said.

"The power that allows the Covenant to be sealed is in you. It is in the bloodline, and you are the primary carrier but in its current state, in this life, it is dormant. You have been living as a human with no access to it."

"How do I activate it?" I asked.

"Training," Xavier said.

"Specific training is not like learning a skill. It's more like waking something up that has been asleep for twenty-seven years.”

“It requires time, controlled practice, and someone who understands the Aldric methods to guide you through it."

"You," I said.

"Me," he confirmed.

"And the memories?" I asked.

"Do they come back through the training?"

Xavier's expression told me the answer before he spoke. "No," he said.

"The training will awaken the power but the memories of your previous life were sealed into the Covenant along with the force you contained.

“They are not recoverable not through training, not through any method I know of."

I absorbed that.

"So I activate a power I don't remember having," I said.

"To seal a Covenant that I apparently sealed once before, but I have no memory of how I did it or what it actually felt like or what I'll be facing."

"Yes," Xavier said.

"That is accurate."

The room was very quiet.

"And the cost this time," I said. "Could it be the same as last time?"

Xavier looked at me directly, with the honesty I had come to understand was his consistent approach to difficult things.

"It is possible," he said.

"It depends on how advanced the Covenant is when we reach the sealing point. And on factors we won't fully understand until we're in it."

From the other room, Aria's laugh came through the wall, clear and unguarded, the laugh of a child who found something genuinely funny.

I looked at the wall then I looked at Xavier.

"When do we start?" I said.