Chapter 30
CHAPTER
“No.”
I tugged myself out of Steeler’s mind to find that we were pressed together in real life, too. The sound of distant crashing waves beyond the lighthouse glass filled my ears once more as I took a few hasty steps back.
“No.” I shook my head. “There’s no way.”
And because my mind had just done so much running without my body, it was like the excess energy exploded beneath my skin.
I took off down the spiral staircase until I hit the beach, sprinting along the pebbled shore while a low-pitched wind came rattling in from the ocean. It was nearing nighttime now, the sky darkening to a bruised purple, the water streaked with the setting sun.
I didn’t know where I was going. I knew it was stupid to run. But my limbs were screaming to move as fast as my brain was, so I didn’t stop until the lighthouse was the size of an upright thumb behind me.
Only when my lungs burned with the smell of salt and seaweed did I slow to a walk and think about what Steeler had just claimed.
If she was your mother…
Well, Dyonisia Reeve couldn’t be my mother.
I’d found my memory of Lord Arad, so I knew the bats’ description matched fairly well—hair dark as shadows but skin that glowed like honey—but they’d called her a lady from the sea, and Dyonisia Reeve wasn’t a lady from the sea.
She was from the top of Bascite Mountain, the cold center of it all.
She wouldn’t have hidden in an abandoned Object Summoning classroom nearly five hundred years into her reign, and she definitely wouldn’t have fallen in love with Fabian.
Somebody would have noticed her pregnancy. Fabian himself would have told me.
Why, then, would Steeler think there was a chance?
My eyes absentmindedly fell upon a nearby seagull, who was hopping toward me with something clamped in its beak. When it was close enough for me to see the yellow rings around its pupils, it dropped its prey at my feet with a shy bow of its head.
“Will you be my mate?”
“Oh.” I glanced at the crushed snail on the rocks, ripping myself out of the flurry of thoughts in my head. “I’m sorry, but no thank you.” I pointed at another seagull picking through the rocks closer to the water. “That one looks like a nice option, though.”
The seagull didn’t even sound surprised to hear that I had talked back. It gave a sad, cawing laugh.
“I’ve already asked her. She said my wingspan isn’t big enough.”
I chewed on my lip, eyeing the seagull’s feathers. “Well, I think your wingspan is just fine.”
“That may be one of the strangest compliments I’ve ever heard,” drawled a familiar voice as Steeler materialized in front of me. The seagull squawked in shock, its wings bursting open on impulse. “But I’ll take whatever I can get from you.”
I glared at him. “I was talking to the bird… which you’ve scared away,” I added as the seagull grabbed the snail with its beak and took off with a flap of gray wings.
Steeler surveyed me, his arms folded, a shadow falling over him as a storm cloud drifted overhead. “Did you blow off enough steam? Or do you need to punch something, too?”
“I don’t know, your face does look pretty appealing right about now.”
In more ways than one, but I wasn’t going to clarify that. Not as Steeler gave me the smallest of smiles and dug into his pants pocket, bringing out a folded piece of parchment that he handed out to me.
“What is this?”
He waited until I’d grabbed it between my fingers before saying, “You know how I told you that Mr. Gleekle has an office filled with the files of all his students? After I heard that bat’s description of your mother, I…
became curious and may or may not have commanded an Object Summoner to lockpick his office door, conjure your file for me, and forget about the entire ordeal immediately afterward. ”
I didn’t even have it in me to glare at him again. My fingers had gone numb against the paper in my hands as I realized what it was.
My file.
“Go ahead,” Steeler said gently. “It’s your right to know.”
Trying not to tremble, I unfolded the piece of parchment and found another, smaller piece of paper inside, which I read first:
To Stanley Gleekle – CONFIDENTIAL
The conquered has insisted he has a right to claim her as his own, and unfortunately, he is right. The oath dictates that I must uphold my end of the bargain in that regard. Therefore, you shall give her his requested power when she arrives.
But, Stanley, I am warning you—no one must know who she is until the time is right. You must call her by her lesser name, and if you so much as look her in the eyes for too long, I will skin you alive and rip the meat off your weak human bones.
Sincerely,
DR
Now my whole body was trembling as I lifted this paper to read the thicker, more formal ink beneath it:
Subject: #580,945
Status: Alive
Birth Year: 482 AF
Home Village: Alderwick
Power TBG: Wild Whispering
Name: Rayna Reeve
“After I found it, I tried to get into Mr. Gleekle’s mind,” Steeler was whispering, “but every bit of information regarding you appeared to be locked up tight by another Mind Manipulator.”
I wasn’t listening. A numb sort of buzzing had started to twist around my bones at the sight of that last name.
It wasn’t possible. I was Rayna Drey. I’d always been Rayna Drey and I always would be. Fabian Drey was my father by blood. He—
My blockade must have slipped, because Steeler said gently, almost cautiously, “In Sorronia, the females pass their surnames down, not the males.”
I curled my fingernails into my palms in an attempt to pierce through the numbness rising to the surface of my skin. There was so much I didn’t know about Sorronia and why Dyonisia had left it.
If only I could strangle the information out of Steeler’s throat, since I obviously didn’t have the ability to navigate his maze yet.
At that thought, Steeler’s eyes flashed with a spark of something darker and grittier than amusement.
“No need to strangle it out of me, little hurricane. I’ll just tell you … after you come inside and eat something for me, that is. You need the nourishment, and Felicity will be pissed if we skip dinner.”
“Felicity’s as bossy as you are,” I muttered before pushing the papers back to him. I didn’t want to touch those words any longer than I had to. They felt like poison leaking onto my fingerprints.
I watched Steeler pocket them carefully again, then turned on a heel to march my way back to the lighthouse.
Back to whatever answers I was finally going to get.
Sure enough, Felicity jumped up from where she appeared to have been pestering Garvis, Terrin, and Dazmine with napkins, trying to tuck them into their shirts like bibs, as soon as Steeler and I made it through the front cottage door.
“Coco! Raynie! What took you so long? The food’s getting cold!”
“Sorry.” I sat down before an immense platter of dumplings in the center of the table, golden brown and perfectly crimped at the edges. I ignored Dazmine’s raised eyebrows, Garvis’s inquisitive glance, and Terrin’s muffled chuckle. “Steeler was about to start telling me a story.”
Just as I’d planned, Felicity clapped her hands together, the irritation on her face widening into a sharp-toothed smile.
“Ooh, I love a good story! Tell Coco to start from the beginning.”
Steeler was lowering himself slowly into a chair opposite of me, every one of his muscles on edge as he realized what trap I’d set for him.
There would be no explanation of Dyonisia’s origins after dinner. There would be an explanation now.
I pinned him with my best expression of fearlessness. “Felicity wants you to start from the beginning.”
And so did I. No more holes. No more gaps or half-truths or missing pieces. If I was going to peer into the monstrous possibility that Dyonisia Reeve might have given life to me—that the knife she’d made a sheath for had been hers from the very beginning… well, I needed to know everything.
When Steeler made the smallest of glances toward Dazmine, who had lowered herself into the seat beside me, I nodded. She was already involved, already formulating plans to get Jenia back from Dyonisia whether any of us liked it or not. No hiding the truth from her, either.
Steeler nodded back and cleared his throat.
“Okay, then. I’ll start with once upon a time, when there were three faerie sisters with powers that marked them as royals.”
Terrin paused with a mouthful of dumpling already in his mouth.
Garvis scrunched his eyebrows. Obviously, the two of them knew where this was headed with just those few words.
My own thoughts flashed back to Steeler’s pendant with the engraving of the Sorronian words and the three female faeries wearing crowns.
“The eldest sister,” Steeler continued, eyes tacked to mine, “could steal anyone else’s faerie magic with a single glance and keep it for herself to wield forevermore.
” His jaw twitched, as if such a thing disgusted him.
“Her name was Mydusia, and she became queen when their mother grew to a weary age and passed her the crown during a symbolic duel.”
“A symbolic duel?” Dazmine tilted her head.
Terrin was the one who answered her, forcing himself to swallow his forkful of dumpling with a thump to his chest.
“According to Sorronian tradition, any female can claim the throne so long as they challenge the existing queen to an official duel—and win, of course.”
Dazmine raised her eyebrows at him. No matter how many weeks had passed since their first encounter in the jungle, she always looked half inclined to eat him alive.
“This Mydusia person is still the queen of your realm?”
“Yes,” Terrin said.
“And in theory, any one of us females in this room could challenge her to a duel and take her place? Even Felicity?”
“Oh, I like that,” Felicity piped up. “I would be a good queen.”