Chapter 28 #2
He scoffed but accepted it. “Always encouraging violence. This is what comes from being raised by me.”
Because their father, Prince Dryx, had been murdered. What about Una’s mother, though? Had she not been around?
I’d never heard her talked about, I realized. Never seen her at court, either, as far as I knew, just as I’d never seen or heard of Kallen and Hector’s mother. If Dryx had been the type to raise his fists…Shards, were either of them still alive?
Hector closed his eyes. “Sit down so I can finish this.”
Una patted his sleeve, then returned to sit on the couch.
Hector leaned against the bookcase, crossing his arms and tapping the paperweight against his bicep.
“You may be able to guess what happened,” he told me.
“We were careful for fifty years, but nothing is foolproof, and she fell pregnant. We were terrified, but also…excited. We’d been saving other people’s children for a long time, and this wasn’t the first baby who was half-Underfae.
” He shook his head. “And somehow she’d taught me to believe that good things could and did happen. ”
A child born of a Noble Fae from Void House and an asrai from Illusion House.
I tried to imagine it. Asrai were slim, tall, and graceful, with elongated fingers and narrow faces, and they always showed an elemental affinity.
Alodie’s blue hair constantly shifted like she was underwater, Fire asrai crackled with electricity…
and rainbows had followed Eluna wherever she went.
“What were you going to do?” I asked. “The child presumably wouldn’t have looked purely Noble Fae or purely Underfae.”
“There you’re wrong,” he said. “In unions like that, the child usually takes strongly after one parent or the other. We worked out a plan: if she took after me and could pass as Noble Fae, the child would join Void House. If the babe took after Eluna, she would be raised in Illusion House.”
She. Hector had had a daughter.
He sighed, looking down at the paperweight.
“She was born on a summer night, screaming like she was going to tear the entire city down.” He smiled, and it was the first break in the mask of pain he’d been wearing since we’d arrived.
“She looked like Eluna, but her proportions were Noble Fae, and as soon as I felt the magic in her, I knew. She was going to be a Void faerie, like me.”
I was entranced by the story despite the creeping horror that lay beneath it. There had clearly been no happy ending for Hector, Eluna, and their baby.
“It was hard for Eluna,” he continued, “not being able to raise our daughter in her own chambers. Hard for me, too. But she often came to visit us here. And one day as she was leaving, I walked her out—and a servant saw us.”
Una wiped fresh tears away. Hector glanced at her, and his eyes began to glisten, too. “The servant told my father I appeared to be enamored with an Illusion Underfae. And so Dryx roused from his drink and decided I needed to learn a lesson.”
“What lesson?” I whispered, dreading the answer.
“That trying to change the world always ends in failure.” He squeezed the paperweight, then tossed it from hand to hand.
“After the rebellion, after he lost his first consort and all of his children, Dryx decided he didn’t believe in love or dreams anymore.
” His voice grew quieter but no less cutting.
“So he wrapped his hands around anything that might tempt him to care again, and he choked the life out of it. Starting with his next consort, my mother, and ending…”
He caught the paperweight, stared at it, then flung it with a sudden, violent motion. It crashed through the bottles lining the desk, and I flinched as glass shards and broken thistle stems scattered everywhere.
“He told me to kill her,” Hector said, looking like he was barely restraining himself from picking up every object in the room and dashing it to pieces. “When I refused, he had me chained with iron…and then he strangled her in front of me with his bare hands.”
Horror swelled, clinging to my insides like tar. What sick, relentless evil. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
Hector’s eyes glittered with grief and a hatred so virulent, I didn’t think I’d ever seen its like.
“Dryx didn’t want anything to pollute the house’s purity.
Not even Eluna’s body buried beneath our soil or sent to the void.
He ordered the same servant who had betrayed her to toss her to the Nasties so they could destroy the evidence.
But they were noticed along the way, and when word made it to the king that Void House was disposing of the corpse of an Illusion Underfae, Dryx was summoned to court to explain. ”
My hands were clasped to my mouth now. This was one of the worst things I’d ever heard, and somehow it still wasn’t done.
“He took me with him,” Hector said. He looked like he was in another time, another place, feeling the agony of a newly inflicted wound.
“He told me it was better to be a monster than to love—one was strength, the other weakness. And if I couldn’t manage to kill the part of me that felt love, then the second-best outcome was for everyone else to believe it was dead. ”
Kallen had said something like that, too. It’s better for our enemies to believe us monsters than to know what we truly care for. I wondered if Kallen, too, had had that lesson forced on him.
The past was always sinking its claws into the present, eager to draw blood. How many of the words we spoke today were echoes of words from centuries ago?
“Osric was angry,” Hector said. “Not about Eluna herself, but because it was an insult to his house. So Dryx told Osric something he knew the king would understand.” He took a deep breath.
“That I’d seen something pretty and decided to take it, but had accidentally destroyed her in the process.
And to make up for the error, we would gift the king with one of our own servants to destroy in exchange. ”
“No,” I said, voice breaking. My heart broke for him, too, just as it broke for Eluna and the baby and the servant Dryx had sacrificed to Osric. For the brutal end of a love story that should have spanned centuries.
“The king laughed,” Hector said, still seeming like his mind was far from this room. “He laughed and laughed, and then he accepted Dryx’s generous offer, and the scales were even between our houses once more.”
The scales could never be even, though. Not between Void and Illusion, not between Hector and his father, and not between any of us and the evil that poisoned our lives and twisted our hearts until they could no longer love properly.
“Hector,” Una said softly.
Her voice seemed to wake him from a trance. He shook his head, then looked at me again. “That’s when a rumor started among the house heads that I liked to seize my pleasures by force—a rumor that hasn’t spread beyond them, as far as I know, though clearly Drustan told you.”
I nodded, sick at both the lie and the atrocities it had covered.
Hector sneered. “He’s never bothered to ask me the truth.”
“Would you have told him if he had?”
Hector was quiet for a few moments. “Not back then. If the king found out I actually loved Eluna, he would have started digging, trying to find out when the affair started and why, and there was more than my reputation at stake.”
The children of two houses. This secret, safe place where those children could learn to control their magic until they found a place to belong.
“And now?” I asked. “I think he hates you for that.”
“Does he?” Hector raised his brows. “I assumed it fell low on his priority list. He’s perfectly willing to ally with me—so long as I know my place eventually.”
“He also allies with Dallaida,” Una pointed out, wiping away the last of her tears. “I don’t anticipate that lasting long.”
“True. But I don’t think Drustan deserves to know this.” His jaw clenched. “Or rather, I don’t know if I can bear to give it to him.”
I looked at Hector then, really looked. The perpetual sneer, the eyes filled with darkness, the restlessness that kept him pacing as if he saw the bars of his cage and was desperate to claw his way out…
He wasn’t just the arrogant, volatile Prince of Void.
He was a faerie who had suffered deeply and would never escape the misery inflicted by his own father.
His father, who had been gutted in his bed. Yet another rumor had claimed Hector was responsible, and I was now certain that one was true. “This is why you killed Dryx. It wasn’t just to seize power.”
“Yes.” He said it with relish, and his lips curved in something that wasn’t a smile. “I didn’t do it right away, though. He would have been wary of that, and there were schemes Kallen and I needed to put in motion first. So I let him believe me broken beneath his boot.”
I imagined Kallen and Hector, heads bent together at the edge of a room as they often were, quietly discussing patricide. “I don’t know if I would have been strong enough to wait,” I admitted. “I don’t know how you were able to pretend.”
“Yes, well, that was mostly Kallen. I was ready to crush our father’s skull that very night, but Kallen likes to play longer games.” He eyed me. “That’s why I’m trusting you with this, you understand? Not just because I need you to think well of me.”
“Because Kallen told you to?”
Hector nodded. “He sees something in you. And for all he’s done for me—for us—over the years, I am going to honor that.”
It was a breathtaking, terrifying amount of trust. There were still children here learning to hone and hide their magic, and until Mistei’s laws changed, they didn’t have anywhere safe to go.
My lips parted. There was one place they could go. My house, where they would be as welcome as every other outcast. I could make acceptance of changelings a condition for anyone to join Blood House. And later, once the war was won, our alliance could force the rest of Mistei to follow.
But the groundwork had to be laid and power secured first—and Hector had brought me here anyway. Right to the heart of Void House’s secret.
I wasn’t sure if I should ask the next question. “And…your baby?”
To my surprise, Hector smiled. “I waited three months before killing my father. During that time, Kallen planted rumors that Dryx had impregnated one of the minor ladies of the house and a new heir was imminent. Dryx was drunk most of the time and volatile the rest of it—no one would dream of asking him for details. We even celebrated the night of the supposed birth, though my father wasn’t invited.
” His smile grew. “That night, I ripped his guts out before strangling him to death. And once that was done—and it took a very long time, I promise you—Kallen framed the servant who had betrayed Eluna for the murder, and I declared that I would honor my father’s memory by raising his daughter in his stead. ”
It took a moment for my brain to catch up. Then I gasped, snapping my head to look at Una.
She smiled, too, though her eyes were still reddened from crying. “That would be me.”
Hector’s daughter, not his sister. A beauty like a winter’s night, who had inherited Hector’s magic and could pass for Noble Fae. She’d passed the trials, too, gaining immortality and the full strength of her Void magic.
“So now you know,” Una said. “Who I am and who Hector is.”
“And what we plan to do next,” he said, not looking away from me.
“I’m not going to rest until we’re allowed to love who we please.
Until this world can be made safe for everyone—not just the ones like Una, who are lucky enough to hide their true natures.
” His mouth twisted. “I’m not going to pretend I’m a noble person or even a particularly good one.
I’m not going to pretend you will like all of my policies or that all of them will be wise.
But I swear to you, Kenna—I am in this for the right reasons. The rest can be sorted out.”
And looking at him, at Una, in this place he and Kallen had created to shelter the vulnerable…I believed him.