Chapter 57: New Friends for the Winter
The next time Irene opened her eyes, she woke up with far less confusion than when she woke up after being injured.
The first thing she saw as she turned her head away from the window filtering in light was her father asleep in the armchair at the corner of her room. The girl smiled. He looked so much younger than when she was twenty. Things had weighed heavily on him the older she got, it seemed.
It was nice to see him younger again.
"Dad," she uttered and reached towards him, but his chair was far from the bed and she had to reach.
To her surprise, there was only a dull ache where there was once a searing and persistent pain as she moved her body. Before she went to sleep, she could hardly sit up without much effort and the help of someone else.
She dared sit up all the way and slide the blankets off of her legs.
Arthur was woken up by his daughter squeezing him tightly with a hug. Immediately, he was on alert.
"You should be asleep," he insisted, considering it was still morning which meant she hadn’t been under the sleeping spell for a day like the mage said.
"I feel fine," she argued.
To prove herself, she sat on the edge of her bed and pulled up the cream-colored tunic. Revealed was her body void of bandages and what was once a festering grey wound was a scar with faint veins leaving it. She placed a hand on the soft, fragile flesh of the fresh scar. It was tender but it wasn’t painful.
"I can’t believe it," Arthur muttered. "The mage actually knew what he was doing."