43
Keltania
I don’t stop running until I’m far from the estate. Bracing my hands against my knees, I greedily suck in air until my heart rate evens and the sweat on the back of my neck begins to cool. The hatred I felt in those final moments at the estate still burns through my veins, but beneath that, there’s horror. Horror over what I did to Suria. To Kopic. Disbelief that I came so close to killing Valen with…
The Dreadshade…
The thorns…
There was terror in his eyes…
I wander through the night, not entirely sure why, but walking with purpose. Each step, though the horizon is unfamiliar, is deliberate. When I reach the mouth of a massive cave and find Aphelian sitting on the ground in front of it, I understand. She led me here.
“I knew you would come.” It’s her this time. Not an apparition or dream. This is Aphelian in the flesh. Levina.
“Tania, please come back.” Valen has been in my head since I fled the estate. He hasn’t given up on me despite the chaos and blood that I spilled.
Despite the fact that I hurt him with a gift he’d given me…
I drop to my knees a few feet from her, bending over and burying my head in my hands. “Kill me,” I beg. I sound pathetic, weak… I was raised to be fearless. To be strong. But this is too much. This isn’t what I’m meant for. I betrayed the person I care about most. That act of treachery is the biggest sin a druid can commit. I’m not sure I can live with it. His begging? I can’t quiet that. “Kill me or make it stop. I can’t listen to his voice anymore. His pleading is too much. I can’t—”
She stands and rests a hand on top of my head. In an instant, Valen’s voice fades and doesn’t return. I’m lighter. Free. My head snaps up.
“Did—did you break the link?” The idea is a cooling balm for the rawness in my chest, yet it also tears me open. Part of me loves Valen more than anything in this world. But the other part, the part that’s absorbed Aphelian’s tear…it hates him. It’s sickened by his voice, by his pleading. It wants to make him bleed, and it hates that I walked away from that.
“When I told you it was impossible for me to break the link, I wasn’t lying,” she says. “The only way to end it would have been back in Ventin, before I…changed you.”
“You mean if I’d killed him.”
“Yes.” She offers a sad smile. “You may not have broken the tear, but when you ingested it, you connected us. That connection allows me to draw on a small bit of the power. With it, I am strong enough to mute him—as you mute yourself to him. But do not push too hard. The wall is precarious.”
I nod, climb to my feet, and venture several steps into the cave. “Why am I here?”
“You came because you know that I’m right. You know that we’re connected and that we share a common goal. We have a purpose .”
The tear might be drawing me to her, but in my gut I still know who she is. What she is. “Has every single word out of your mouth been a lie?”
“On the contrary, everything I said to you was true. Levina is my name—though not my first one. Levina and Aphelian’s lives are the same. They both had daughters, and they both—”
“Your daughter.” I snort. “And what would she say if she could see you like this? What would she say about this bloody revenge you’re so damn insistent on?”
“My daughter would agree with all of it. I lost her because of this! Because of a Fae .” She grabs me by the throat, and my vision blurs…
I’m not in the scene but watching. Floating, weightless, formless. A carriage passes in front of me, making its way up a long, winding hill toward a towering castle. Suddenly, I’m inside. In a room with Aphelian and a hulking Fae.
“I do not love you, Avastad,” she says, turning away. “I will never love you.”
Avastad…Gensted’s father. The former Autumn monarch.
“Then don’t love me.” He grabs her and spins her toward him. “Hate me.”
She growls and kisses him, and the scene fades, brightening to the small interior of what looks like the room of an inn. Aphelian, on the floor, cries out in pain as she delivers her daughter, Lily Rose.
Aphelian’s eyes shine as tears slip down her cheeks. Her grip on my neck loosens. I pull away from her and stumble back. Understanding washes over me. Avastad…
“Your daughter… She was—”
“Half Autumn Fae. And I lost her because of that.” She paces back and forth by the cave entrance. She’s anxious, her control slipping. “You were right. It’s not just the Winter Fae I hate. It’s all of them. They all need to be culled from this world. It was Avastad’s Fae who destroyed Harabin, not Servis’s. He found out about Lily Rose, that I’d hid her there. He destroyed the town to purge her from this world. Because he viewed her as an abomination.”
My stomach twists. I don’t want to feel anything for her, but I do. “He’s long dead,” I say. “They all are.”
She stops pacing and pins me with a deadly glare. “You still defend them?”
“You’re going to kill thousands of innocent Fae. The damage you’ve done—”
“ None of them are innocent. He’s been lying to you this entire time.”
“He hasn’t—”
“Ask him,” she insists. She stalks closer to me. A tear slips down her cheek, glistening in the dim light of the cave. “Ask him to tell you the truth about my daughter.”
“What truth?”
In all my life, I’d never seen Levina cry. The fury that I feel for her cools. She’s broken. Bitter and twisted and lost. She reaches for my hand, and I let her take it…
A cloaked woman carrying an infant steals through the night. She comes to a cave—this cave—and ducks inside.
“We will meet again someday, my love. And when that day comes, we will make them all pay for this.” She kisses the child and places it in a small basket. Stepping back, she whispers something, and thick vegetation springs from the ground, engulfing the infant.
Time passes. Days. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries. The seasons change at dizzying speed, and the horizon rots, but the inside of the cave, the plants surrounding the child, all remain lush and intact until…
Levina, as I’d known her, walks into the cave. With a stony expression, she holds a hand out, and the thick overgrowth shrinks back to reveal the baby, untouched by time or decay. Picking the child up, she smiles. “I will train you, and I will teach you, and when you are strong enough, we will topple the Fae together as we were meant to.”
Another dizzying rush, and I’m in the fields of Lunal. In the distance, I see Levina overseeing a sparring match. My cousin, Alainya—and me. I can’t be more than nine or ten in this memory. The pride I see in Levina’s eyes turns my stomach.
I drop her hand—
“No!” Back to the present, to reality, I shove her hard enough to throw myself off balance. “You’re fucking with my head. Trying to twist me into a weapon the same way you say that Valen is.”
“I brought you to Lunal and used a sigil to make everyone think your mother left you with us. I renamed you Keltania—after my mother—and raised you as the fiercest warrior I’ve ever known.”
“It’s impossible… I am not your—” My heart hammers erratically, and I swallow, but the air has turned solid, wedged in my throat.
“No human can survive Fae magic, Keltania. I only had you link yourself to Valen because I knew you would survive it—”
“But I almost didn’t—”
“—because you are half Fae. Avastad, the Autumn Lord, was your father.”
“No…” I shake my head, unable to process it all. “It’s not possible…”
“When you were a child, I locked your Fae side to keep you hidden from him. In Ventin, to allow you to survive the power, I released it. Now here you are…my daughter…in love with a filthy Fae. Repeating my mistakes…”
I slide down the far wall and settle on the ground. “It’s impossible,” I say again. Because there’s no way. This is another one of her tricks. “That would make me almost a thousand years old.”
She sighs, regarding me with pity. The look makes me nearly vomit. “You are nineteen,” she says. “When I brought you into this cave, I used a sigil that placed you in stasis. You were born on the fall equinox, the same as that bastard’s son.”
That bastard’s son… Gensted. In an instant, it’s all so clear. The connection I’ve felt with him since we met. “Gen is my brother.”
“He’s your half brother,” she clarifies. She touches my forehead, then nods as if confirming something. “Your precious Fae knows about Lily Rose. He knows and kept it from you. He was afraid if you found out about my daughter, you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Valen wouldn’t have kept that from me.”
“Ask him. Use your bond and ask him if he knew my daughter survived the massacre of Harabin.”
The moment I focus on the bond, Aphelian drops the wall, and Valen’s voice bursts through. “—sleep or eat. Please. Tania, answer me. I just need to know that you’re all right.”
Valen.
“Tania! Gods, are you hurt? Where are you?”
Did you know? Did you keep it from me?
“Did I keep what from you?”
Did you know Aphelian’s daughter, Lily Rose, didn’t die in Harabin?
Several moments of silence pass before Valen says, “I can explain.”