A Change of Fortune

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  Bellamy leaned against a wall, trembling after the effort of breaking a very strong, and very old spell. Carefully, tentatively, Bouchra rose from her chair, and walked around the room, waiting for the pain that didn’t come. She thrust back her tears of joy, and only smiled. She could walk again. For the first time since she was seventeen, and Grandmother Riza had pointed her wand. She erected her mask and said calmly, “For a little longer, I’ll work in the background, and not say I’m cured.” She looked at Najia, “I’d get both of these in bed. They’re tired to death.”

  Najia looked at the faces, pale with fatigue, and nodded. “Bed,” and she pointed Bellamy to the room that had been made up for herself the day they arrived. It had not been used. From the first, the girls had shared a room, shared a bed.

  Bouchra returned to her own apartment, back in her wheelchair and not showing that her world had changed.

  Zhor was tired out. It didn’t stop her dreaming again and again of her lost baby, smiling, happy, placid. She finally fully woke in the early hours of the morning with tears on her face. She would never again have a baby to love. It had been such a precious thing, to have a baby to cuddle.

  She didn’t want Bellamy to hear, and she made a silencing shield before allowing herself to cry for her lost baby, and to cry for herself. She had announced that she was condemning the Kobi Family to extinction because it was an evil family, who did evil things. It didn’t stop her being heartbroken at her own sacrifice. In the morning, Zhor would again pretend to be a fierce and ruthless leader. Right now, she and Najia cried together, for the babies they would never have.

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