Pearl POV
Six years had a way of softening the hard edges of memory until the worst of it felt like a story told beside the hearth rather than the life that had almost ended me. The palace still bore the scars of war in places, the blackened beam in the old granary, the bent iron gate that had been straightened and reforged but the shadows inside our home were finally chased away by laughter. Four small, fierce shadows in particular.
They were everywhere: a blur of dark hair and bright eyes, sticky fingers and scraped knees, voices that tried to copy their father’s rumble and failed adorably. When Demyan first led them to me, I had thought I knew how to love. He had shown me a different, vaster kind of love, one that multiplied and echoed. He being their father and me being their mother
