Chapter 21
Twenty-One
Cara
Lightbringer. It made no sense, and then it made too much sense.
I knew it. It lodged in my chest, my dragon’s name, the name Fear had said with particular weight the first time, the name that carried the feeling of someone else’s recognition. Lightbringer. The ancient, furious, beautiful thing currently sulking in the back of my mind.
He was tall. Broader than Fear, built differently, the kind of build that came from work heavier than any training yard.
Unruly blond hair. His face I cataloged looking for threat—there was no anger there—and then again, looking for something I recognized in the jaw, the line of his nose, the set of his mouth.
His eyes were blue, surrounded by laugh lines. Which was not special, but my mother and Tay and Lidi all had gorgeous, wide brown eyes, and I had asked my mother once where mine came from.
“Your first father,” she had said. And then, before I could chase that information with another question, “Don’t, Cara. Some things are better left alone.”
I had asked twice more over the years, in different forms, and the answer was always some version of the same thing—dangerous, gone, monster, don’t—and she had never given me a name.
He was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen before. It was grief, but grief wasn’t all of it.
My mother had called him a monster.
He had not raised a hand toward me when I attacked him, and I had come dangerously close to putting a blade through his stomach.
Fear looked a bit uncertain, which was a rarity; he overcame it quickly. He wiped his bloody mouth with the back of his hand.
“Cara, I’d like you to meet Corbyn. He’s a dragon shifter who used to serve the queen but came to his senses. Corbyn, this is Cara. A most extraordinary mortal.”
“Fuck off, Fear,” Corbyn said, exactly the way I often wanted to.
And that sealed it for me.
“You’re my father.” The words came out blunt, harsh. I couldn’t manage them any other way.
“Yes.” His voice had gone rough. “Your mother was my Maris.”
My Maris. She didn’t see herself that way.
I took a breath, hoping that the world would resolve into something that made sense. I used that breath to carefully, finally, sheathe my knives.
“She remarried after you. Or married again?” I knew nothing. It was alarming.
“Good.” He said it too quickly. “Is she happy?”
Memories of my mother flashed through my head. “Not particularly.”
His face shifted.
“I’m not Lightbringer.” My voice was filled with scorn.
“No, of course not,” he agreed, his gaze still filled with wonder. “I’m sorry.”
The immediate apology felt unsatisfying when I was still bristling.
He glanced at Fear—a distinctly murderous look that I wondered if I had inherited—before he added, “Fear should have told you about me.”
“He did.” The words came short and harsh. “I’m not ready to know you.”
Corbyn looked stunned. “He told you?”
“I am in the midst of many things.” I waved my hand to encompass all of this—the Trials, the Fae, Lightbringer. “I don’t have time for angst about my first father. I did that already. For twenty years. I am done.”
His lips parted; this man who looked as if he had never doubted himself in his life gaped at me. “You can’t mean that.”
“She does.” Fear’s fingers slipped against mine, and I grabbed his hand as if it was an anchor. “There will be time, Corbyn. But the right time is not today.”
I looked up at Fear, and he gave me an encouraging squeeze of his fingers. There was no judgment in his face.
Some of the tension I was choking on relaxed.
“We could sit down for a few minutes. I would like to hear the story of what happened with you and…Maris.” It felt strange to call my mother by her given name. “But I don’t want anything else. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” he said, as if that meant something to him. He nodded. “I’ll tell you about Maris.”
We moved to a garden nearby. Corbyn looked at Fear as if he wished he would go away, but Fear only looked at me, and I was not ready to be alone with Corbyn.
It felt to me as if I could barely absorb any of it. The words washed over me.
“I fell in love with Maris in the castle. She was one of the many servants who attempted to take care of Fieran. He was unruly then too.” He glanced at Fear.
“She worked in the castle?” She had never told me. I wasn’t sure she even knew. “She knew Fear? She looked right at him and didn’t recognize him.”
Had that been because she was so worried for Tay and me and Lidi in that moment with the burrowers when she came face-to-face with Fear?
“She doesn’t remember everything exactly,” Corbyn said, and I had the sudden feeling I was being managed exactly the way Fear did sometimes, and I suddenly was furious.
“What did you do to her?” I demanded, and his face told me I had hit the right question.
“She chose this,” he told me. “Let me explain.”
“Please do.”
“Maris cared deeply for Fear.” Corbyn seemed frustrated by my lack of understanding. “She wanted to rescue him from the queen.”
I glanced over at Fear, who had a composed face. “He seems to have rescued himself.”
Corbyn’s jaw hardened. “Maris and I lived on the shifter settlement on the island. She was mortal, but she was happy with us. She had served in the castle until she was cast out, without having the chance to say goodbye to Fear.”
He seemed genuinely distressed by the memory. The thought of a connection between Fear and me that dated back to when I was born was unsettling.
“Can you tell me something that will make me believe this is true?”
He glanced at Fear. I thought he was going to claim that Fear would know, but instead he said, “Fear had a stuffed raven toy that he was obsessed with when he was a little boy. One of the servants ruined it. Maris and I took it to the Night Market and had it mended. The enchantment from the Night Market should still be upon it.”
I remembered finding the raven hidden along with the Amber Dragon Compendium in Fear’s closet.
Fear, to his credit, inclined his head without a trace of shame. “I do still have it.”
Corbyn nodded and continued. “Maris and I were hoping to launch a rebellion against the queen and rescue Fear.”
It did not appear that rebellions tended to be very successful against the queen. Something disquieting grew in my chest. “And then what happened?”
Even though we were talking about the past, what was on my mind was what we intended to do: saving Tay and freeing mortals and shifters alike. What he said seemed less like history and more like prophecy.
“Maris and I learned the story of Lightbringer. She was the first of the dragon shifters, and she carries immense power that has not been seen in our world since she abandoned it.”
It might’ve been my imagination, but I could have sworn a sweep of indignation rose through me.
“Maris and I had dreamed of having a child,” he said. “We came to dream of having a hero.”
“A rather long time frame on rescuing Fear,” I said dryly. I turned to him. “I hope you don’t feel disappointed with your hero.”
He offered me a small smile. “I do not.”
I had been joking but said it with what seemed like dreadful sincerity. Only the thought that it was yet another of Fear’s tender deceits eased my discomfort.
Especially when I was failing rather epically at enticing Lightbringer into heroics, or even acknowledging my existence.
“Our plan was not to leave Fear to rot in the castle.” Corbyn’s tone was hot.
He seemed as irritated by me as my mother so often was, so perhaps that was another slash in the column under proof of parentage.
“Our plan was not to wait until you came of age. But one night, the queen’s Nightwalkers attacked the shifter settlement on the island. ”
I thought of the now overgrown island where we, as dragon shifters, went to celebrate, far from the capital. The abandoned cottages there. I could not imagine my mother living in one of them when they were bright and warm.
I glanced to Fear to fill in the gaps. “That was when Ander’s family was killed?”
“Yes.”
“It was a terrible day.” Corbyn looked a little older, worn and exhausted, just recalling it.
“Please explain to me how my mother came to think that you are a monster.”
His gaze flared with hurt, but the emotion subsided—or he pressed it down.
Then he looked more tired still. “I had to get Maris out and keep you both safe. I brought her to the mainland, as far from the capital as I could get that night. Then I watched her walk off into the night, after having set an enchantment on her. The cost of your safety would be that I would not know for a long time where you were or who you were until you brought back Lightbringer.”
I stared at him in horror. “I was created for Lightbringer.”
Long before Fear had manipulated me—long before I had even been able to walk or speak or understand—I had been created to be Lightbringer’s vessel.
There was a difference in knowing how old this plot was and coming face-to-face with the man who had kissed my mother tenderly and made me as a trap for a dragon decades to come.
“You were created to be a hero.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Being Lightbringer’s vessel is what I was created for. That’s why you said Lightbringer when you saw me. That’s what you thought of when you thought of me all those years, if you thought of me at all.”
“I did. I do.” He raked a hand through his hair, and it stood up wildly from his head. “I am glad that Lightbringer has returned, and I am glad to know you, Cara.”
“Just to go over this one more time,” I said, “you lifted the enchantment so that you could get my mother pregnant with me, and then you enchanted her to ruin her memory and to twist what she did remember so that she thought you were a monster, and then you sent her walking off into the night to make whatever kind of life she could. Is that correct?”
His lips thinned as if he were holding himself in. Carefully, he said, “I had faith in Maris. She’s a strong woman.”
“You haven’t seen her in two decades. You don’t get to say what kind of a woman she is.” I rose from the table. “Thank you for telling me your half of the story. It filled in many holes in my understanding.”
I felt furious beyond all reason. I needed to get away from them both and process it.
My father had used my mother for a greater strategy, and she had suffered for it.
It felt like an awfully familiar thread that had not yet unspooled to its logical end.
“Cara.” My father had risen to his feet too. “I know it must be a lot to take in.” He cast an angry glance at Fear, perhaps because he could not bear to be angry with me. “I hope you’ll meet with me again.”
“I’m sure we will meet again. Given my relevance to the rebellion. Given my role as Fear’s hero.” I could not make that last word sound anything but ridiculous on my tongue. But then, I wouldn’t have tried anyway.
He looked as if he were trying to find words.
I turned my back on him and walked away, feeling as if I were still reeling. Fear, with a stack of books on his arm and a bundle in his hand, walked at my side. He wisely did not touch me or speak to me all the way back to the academy.
“I’m going to find Kiegan and Sera,” I told him.
He nodded. I could feel his gaze on me, his careful reading. I wasn’t sure what he found.
For now, I could not bear to be near him.