Chapter 30 #2
Terrin boomed out a harsh laugh. “Millenia’s worth of powerful faeries with astounding innate magic have continuously challenged our current queen, and they’ve all ended up in pieces. The monkey wouldn’t come out of it with half a tail left.”
Although Felicity’s face fell, I couldn’t say I was surprised.
If the current queen could actually steal other faerie magic with a single glance and wield it for herself… well, nobody she faced would prove a threat to her. She could render her opponent completely magic-less, then simply use their own power to destroy them.
“What about the other two sisters?” I prodded. “What were their powers?”
“The youngest, Chrysanthia, had the power of Camouflage,” Steeler answered with a more relaxed jaw now.
“Much like her older sister, she could mimic the magics around her… but more as a mirror, a reflection, nothing she could keep forever. She was gentle, aloof, and perhaps a touch mad—but welcomed and loved throughout the queendom despite this.”
The power of Camouflage. I wondered what that would be like, to be able to echo every power around you. To be able to hear the song of the jungle, the cacophony of minds, the pull of objects, the morphing of skin and bone, and the call of the elements all at once.
“What about the middle sister?” I asked, dreading the answer but knowing what it was deep in my coiling gut.
Steeler closed his eyes. Garvis tensed beside him.
“The middle sister, Dyonisia, could suppress other faerie powers with a misty, milky magic I am sure you are all well familiar with.”
Dazmine sucked in a sharp breath and Felicity made a small, “Oh!” while my heart only curled into a tighter ball.
Dyonisia Reeve wasn’t just a faerie. She was a faerie… princess? Or, at least, the younger sister of the queen of Sorronia. A royal.
Steeler opened his eyes again, meeting mine.
“Dyonisia was rebellious and wild-spirited from the day she took her first breath, they say. And yet the three sisters remained close for hundreds of years—until Princess Chrysanthia went missing.”
I blinked. That wasn’t what I had been expecting at all.
“The youngest sister went missing? Why? How?”
Steeler didn’t answer right away. His gaze lowered to my shaking hands, then to my uneaten dinner, the look on his face so pointed and commanding that I didn’t need Mind Manipulating to interpret the words behind the gesture.
No more answers until you take a bite of your food, little hurricane.
My belly clenched as I heeded him despite my every instinct to resist the temptation. I shoveled a bite of food into my mouth, letting the blend of flavors explode across my tongue. Then another, and another, each mouthful as savory as the last.
“This is delicious, Felicity,” I said through a warm, muffled bite.
As if that had popped a bubble over the table, everyone else began eating again, too. Everyone besides Steeler, who merely resumed his story, apparently satisfied that I was getting something down.
“Nobody knows how or why Princess Chrysanthia disappeared despite door-to-door investigations across the queendom. But after she did, Dyonisia began pointing fingers at the queen, claiming their youngest sister’s disappearance was her fault—a treasonous statement, as you can imagine.
” His jaw twitched again. “It got to a point where the queen was about to throw her only remaining sister in prison when Dyonisia challenged her to a duel for the crown.”
Dazmine glanced at me, her confusion echoing mine.
If Dyonisia could smother other faerie magic but her older sister could steal it, who would have had the upper hand in such a fight?
“And?” I asked.
“And Dyonisia lost.” Steeler shrugged. “According to those who were alive to see it, it was over quickly. But the queen didn’t kill her sister, even though she killed every other faerie who dared challenge her—nor did she steal her magic.
With her final death blow hovering right over Dyonisia’s head, Her Majesty withdrew and ordered her sister into exile. ”
Those words painted shivers up and down my neck. Not only because a wild, possessive energy beneath my skin wanted to snap at the way he’d said Her Majesty, but because Dyonisia… she’d already been through the worst thing she inflicted upon her own people.
Exile.
“That bitch.” Dazmine had stiffened next to me, obviously of the same mind. “Obsessed with exiling others all because it happened to her. Except instead of actually kicking her throwaways out to sea, she’s hoarding them.”
Steeler nodded. “Along with the entire council of the queen’s most trusted advisors, all of whom she managed to steal before she fled.
And for this added insult—for kidnapping the queen’s personal Good Council after she spared her life—Her Majesty has ordered her military that if they are to see Dyonisia in the flesh ever again, they are to kill her on sight…
along with any offspring she might have produced in her hundreds of years playing queen on this island. ”
Well, there it was. A segway back to what he’d told me in his mind. The tattooed faeries on that ship are all oath-bound to kill Dyonisia Reeve or anyone who belongs to her by blood.
“Does the queen… expect Dyonisia to have produced offspring?” I asked, chewing each word carefully as I tried to figure out how to phrase it.
For whatever reason, Steeler seemed to be hiding his suspicion from the others—and as much as I hated the sneaking and scheming, this was about me.
Nobody else but me. I didn’t want to share it with anyone else either, not until I understood it completely.
“I mean, why would the queen even fear such a thing?”
Why would she want to have me killed for the misdeeds of a mother I’ve never even known until last year?
Steeler seemed to read the real question in the purse of my lips.
“Faerie children are becoming increasingly rare. So rare, in fact, that our queendom has begun to consider any offspring divine gifts of Fate.” Steeler glanced at Garvis and Terrin.
“And Her Majesty has been unsuccessful at producing a potential heir of her own, a female to one day pass her crown to in a symbolic duel. So if Dyonisia had… involved a human to make a conception more likely, and if that child just so happened to inherit the type of antipower that would mark her as part of the ancient Reeve dynasty…”
I swept away the furious upsurge of revenge that wanted to rise inside me at the thought that Dyonisia might have somehow manipulated Fabian into…
being with her in that way. Sweet, gentle Fabian, who’d only ever been in love with Don, who would have never chosen such a cold, brutal woman to sleep with and meet up with in secret of his own accord.
For now, revenge could wait. Because I’d just realized—
“Dyonisia’s not just playing queen,” I whispered. “She’s creating an army, isn’t she? An army she can perfect over the centuries until she decides it’s the right time to…”
I couldn’t even get out the rest of the words.
“To try to take over the throne she fumbled five hundred years ago,” Steeler finished for me. “To redo the duel with a new race of magic wielders—and an heir of her own—by her side. Yes. That’s what we think, too.”
God of the Cosmos. I couldn’t imagine the villagers of Alderwick forced to face this Majesty figure who could suck out each of their powers like sardines from a jar.
My own innate power hadn’t even developed yet.
To think that the queen could steal it from me before I had the chance to find out what form it might take…
A soft pressure against my blockade had me cracking open for Steeler. Letting him slide inside so that he could hear my thoughts.
It still doesn’t feel right, the idea of Dyonisia being my mother, I said. Why would she have manipulated Fabian, out of all people, into falling in love with her? There’s no way she would have ever actually loved him. They wouldn’t have had any compatibility whatsoever.
At that thought, another one struck me.
Why don’t you Walk us to Alderwick and get the truth directly from Fabian’s mind? He doesn’t even have to know we’re there…
The thought of violating my father’s privacy like that made me feel sick to my stomach, but what if it was the only way?
We already did that, little hurricane. That’s what I was searching for in Alderwick: the truth from your father’s memories.
I stared at him.
You entered Fabian’s mind?
You saw with your own eyes that I didn’t harm him.
I had. Based on how he’d been making cookies with Don, unperturbed, I doubted he’d even known a Mind Manipulator was sneaking into his head at all. I bit back the reprimand I had no right giving him after I’d suggested doing exactly that.
What did you find?
Nothing.
Across the table, Steeler’s face didn’t so much as twitch to indicate that he was currently in my mind, but his consciousness beneath my blockade had settled into a deep frown.
That whole part of your father’s life is gone until the moment he stole you away from the abandoned classroom in the Object Summoner sector.
He knows that he kidnapped you and nicked that knife from your mother, but nothing more.
Nothing before that. Even his knowledge that he was in love with your mother…
it doesn’t have any kind of face or emotion attached to it. It’s just a dry fact.
Someone had erased it from him, then. Fabian hadn’t purposely kept my mother from me, after all—he hadn’t known how I came to be all along.
The realization loosened something vital in my chest. That letter he’d written to me last year must have been his way of sharing the only thing he knew about the incident. That he’d come from that abandoned classroom. That he’d stolen a baby from a female he’d had no recollection of ever seeing.
There’s a way to find out for sure, Steeler said.
Is there? My heart began hammering against my chest.