Chapter 19 #2
I wanted to ask her about that as I lifted my head to look at her, but she turned the question on me.
“Have you ever been in love?” She shook her head. “Of course not. You’ve only just matured. Unless you loved your fated one.”
“Not a drop of real love there.” My voice had never sounded so cold, or so bitter. An echo of the feeling that filled me as I thought about Lucas, but one that gave way to warmth and light as my mind drifted to another male. “But I know love. I know how it feels.”
That warmth succumbed to a wretched sort of misery as I glanced at my moon ring, hoping I would see him again. Afraid of being without the connection of the bond that had made me feel as if he was here with me.
I ached to know how he was, because I swore that the too-bright sky here in the Summer Court had grown a little dimmer—a little darker—when the bond between us had broken.
“I’ve never been in love.” Danica spared me any questions from Meiryn. “I haven’t found my fated mate either. Maybe one day.”
Meiryn echoed, “Maybe one day.”
I frowned at the page and flipped back one, reading it again.
“Did you find something?” Danica twisted and put her feet down, pushed to them and came to me, sitting on the edge of the mattress.
Meiryn followed her, stopping at the foot of the bed and resting one hand on the post there.
“Maybe.” I scanned the page again. “There’s a record of Sylas making trips to fae towns around the world.”
“That’s unusual. Most seelie don’t leave the faerie realm. Why would we when we live in a place like this, far from persecution?” Meiryn looked off to her left, to the open glass doors and the world beyond the terrace.
I had to agree with her there. Mortals who knew about the existence of supernatural beings had a tendency to group up and hunt us down.
Wolf packs in Canada had been subjected to their brutality in the past, and many wolves and other shifters had gone missing in the last few decades.
Once upon a time, I had believed the hunting parties of Archangel, the largest immortal-hunting organisation in the world, were the reason my parents hadn’t wanted me to leave the pack lands.
Now I knew it was because a darker sort of being had been hunting me.
“It mentions Canada here.” I pressed my finger to the page, just below the word the translator spell had kindly revealed to me, and if I had needed a sign that Kaeleron was fine, it was the fact I could still read this book.
Although, I wasn’t sure how long the spell would last without him renewing it.
I shook that dreadful thought away, focusing on the book on my lap to banish my fears.
“Western Canada too. This is the fae town Morden used when he came to rescue me from the Shadow Court. Near Whistler.”
“Whistler is a long way from the pack.” Danica leaned over, peering at the page, and wrinkled her nose. “How do you even read that? It’s all scribbles and scrawls.”
I chuckled. “A spell. Without it, these would all be scribbles and scrawls to me too.”
Maybe they wouldn’t be. The spell usually took a second to kick in to rearrange the fae writing to English for me, so there was a chance I had been accidentally learning to read it, coming to associate the shapes of the fae words with their English equivalent.
The spell was quicker with spoken words though, translating them the moment they left someone’s lips so I never heard the fae tongue spoken.
I wondered if it sounded as lyrical as it looked.
Ancient fae did.
“And Whistler isn’t too far. Just a day’s drive. It’s the nearest fae town to us. There’s a mention of witches here. I think he was seeking them out.” I turned the page, reading on. “No mention of why he was looking for them though.”
Meiryn crossed the room to the glass doors, the breeze that curled through the room playing with her platinum hair. “My mother said something once… that Sylas lost his heir. That his son was murdered along with his queen.”
Gods, that was awful.
My brows lowered. “So maybe he was making heirs in secret?”
It seemed ridiculous, but the look Meiryn gave me said it had crossed her mind too.
“When he died, Sylvan was dispatched to find the heirs. The whole court was talking about it… how Sylvan hadn’t known about the heirs.
” Her golden dress caught the light as she turned towards me, her blue eyes narrowed as she frowned at the book on my lap.
“Maybe he was producing heirs in secret… hoping they wouldn’t be killed like his son and wife were. ”
“That tracks. He might have felt they would be targeted if anyone knew about them. But why visit fae towns? I’m not getting it.
” I stared at the recorded dates that had been hastily scribbled on a page with letters beside them.
If I translated them into dates I was more used to, then several of them were only a few months to a year before I was born.
“What better place to hide heirs than somewhere far beyond the borders of his court?” Meiryn came to me and sat beside me, resting her back against my pillows, and took the book.
“That makes sense. Hiding heirs in a realm another court wouldn’t even think of looking in for targets to harm and weaken him.” I sank back against the headboard. “So why did he need help from a witch?”
A witch was the only reason I could imagine him going to fae towns, unless he had been seducing his way through them.
No, I refused to believe my mother had willingly slept with him. She loved my father so much and my heart said she would never do that to him, not even to have a child.
I stilled. “What if witches were helping him impregnate females?”
Danica pulled a face.
“Not like that.” I shook my head, sure I knew the path her mind had taken, picturing a witch, a seelie king, and a random female sharing an intimate moment. “More like… what if the witch specialised in fertility and my parents… hadn’t been able to conceive.”
I felt my way through that idea, forming it as I went, letting it all fall into place for me.
“It’s the only reason my mother could have ended up pregnant by another male.
It’s possible witches might know fertility spells or rites, and could help people conceive.
My parents might have gone to one for help, like a spell might have been able to help them with whatever problem they were having…
or it might have been a situation where they needed a donor, and they might have thought they were getting wolf…
sperm… from the witch.” I managed not to cringe at that word, like some blushing innocent.
A blushing not-so-innocent.
I cleared my throat, trying to banish the thought of Kaeleron inside me, filling me with his seed just as I had begged him to do.
“I need to find that witch.” I closed the book and reached for the other. “Witches are long-lived like wolves. She could still be alive and I might get answers. I highly doubt she would forget meeting a seelie king.”
I paused as I opened the first page, a beautiful family tree greeting me.
One that had Sylas on the side of a female line.
“What is it?” Meiryn peered over my shoulder. “Oh. You didn’t know he was the son of our great grandfather’s daughter?”
I shook my head as I traced the lines, noticing a pattern. “How did Sylas come to be king when the crown should have passed to his mother’s brother?”
All the way back beyond the great grandfather, the male line had been the ruling line. But when the family tree reached him, it branched to the daughter’s side.
A female had succeeded him. Not the male.
“The same reason you’re now heir presumptive.” Meiryn pointed to our great grandfather. “He changed the laws of succession. Here.”
It hadn’t even struck me as strange that I had been announced heir, that I had usurped Lorien.
Now it did.
“Everyone in the Summer Court knows he changed the laws of succession,” she said.
Everyone but me, apparently.
I waited as Meiryn flipped through the pages, and when she pointed to an entry, I read it.
She was right. He had changed the laws of succession when he had failed to produce a son and was concerned he would never have another child. He had altered them so his daughter could rule and become queen, keeping the crown and throne in his bloodline.
“I can only imagine how well the seelie had taken this. Fae seem a lot like wolves to me, with males having all the power.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading, even when I was living proof that he had changed the laws.
“You can imagine how Lorien would love to change that law back though.” Meiryn shuffled from the bed.
Gods, could I. Too easily.
I flicked for a few pages, reading snippets about the birth of our father, and then his marriage. Nothing really stood out to me, beside the part where it recorded his queen’s death.
She had been travelling south-east, to her home town near the mountains of the Black Pass, when their carriage had been attacked and she and her son had been killed.
It wasn’t that which gave me pause though.
It was the fact the report said it was members of the Shadow Court who had killed her.
The loss of his queen and heir devastated Sylas, and he mourned them for many centuries. Everyone believed he would not marry again nor produce another heir.
Boy, had they been wrong about that. Sylas seemed to have been busy producing heirs, at least a dozen of us. He had sired more children than anyone else in the family tree, but none of us were recorded there. Below Sylas, there was only the son who had died.
I read one passage three times, needing to be sure I understood it correctly, that I wasn’t reading into things or the spell wasn’t being fuzzy and misinterpreting them, because if it was true, then I had my first clue as to what happened and what had prompted the attack in Belkarthen.
Sylas’s advisors had suggested retaliation against the Shadow Court, and Sylvan had been tasked with arranging everything and carrying out Sylas’s order to infiltrate the Shadow Court and murder their queen and heir.