Chapter 26 #2
Father eyed him uncertainly. “You gave me the opening I needed. I’ll admit, it was a relief to know that you had not betrayed her trust.”
“We wouldn’t have survived without you,” I said to Father.
The words should have been shaking with gratitude and tears, but instead, they spilled out hollowly.
A simple matter of fact. “Now, please. Tell me what happened to you.” With the way Hazel straightened, prepared to hang on every word, I realized even she didn’t know all the details.
I turned to Mother, stinging with betrayal. “Why did you lie to us?”
Mother covered her mouth with a hand and avoided my stare, but Father met me head-on, wearing a look of unfathomable pain and love.
“I must start with why,” he said softly.
“Please, try to understand. Even before you were born, I was growing unsettled by how closed off the world was to our kind. The villages I would lodge in while traveling were beginning to run low on resources. Territories were shrinking due to human influence. Glamour boundaries were becoming tighter. The wards were always meant to keep everyone safe, yes, but there was a time when there were miles upon miles of safe wilderness beyond it, untouched by humanity. Several villages were truly confined to nothing beyond the barriers.”
His sentiments were nothing new. After all, he had been the first to instill these observations in me.
“You always said we were living like little more than prisoners,” I murmured. “So you decided to become a human. To leave us?”
Father’s eyes widened. “No. Some things went according to plan, and others didn’t. But please believe me when I say that I never intended to leave you.”
“What did you intend, then?”
“You recall the legends I told you about using gem magic to shapeshift?”
I nodded, biting my tongue to keep from blurting that lately, those legends were all I thought about.
“They are more than simple legends and fanciful tales,” Father said.
“Processes and incantations were scattered to the winds over many centuries, made even more difficult to acquire as our communities became more isolated. But I knew such magic existed. If it were possible to temporarily shift into the form of a beast, why couldn’t the same be true for a human form? ”
The sudden fervor lighting up his eyes was all too familiar, making my spine lock up uncertainly.
I had always looked upon the memories of his zeal as a simple thirst for power, but perhaps I had been mistaken.
I knew firsthand how exhilarating the rush of a gem’s power was, but I also knew how that paired with the immeasurable hope that it could give you everything you wanted.
“Success would mean freedom,” I said quietly. “Safer access to resources. Perhaps even being able to stop humans from taking more of the lands surrounding the village.”
“Yes,” Father said with a buoyant tremble to his voice as though he always knew I’d understand.
But I dropped my gaze and held Hazel tighter. “The Council found out what you were doing?”
He sighed. “I kept the main goal of my studies a secret, of course. I allowed them access to my other projects to keep them satisfied that I was still under their control. But they were suspicious all the same, and I… As I’m sure you can recall, I was particularly vocal about the tightening boundaries. ”
Mother scoffed. “Vocal is one thing. I can scarcely remember a council gathering that didn’t end with half the chamber walls covered in frost.”
“I never attacked anyone, if you’ll recall, darling,” Father said with a wince.
“Any magical instability was pure collateral damage from working with gems. All the same, the council grew worried that I intended to jeopardize the safety of Elysia with my travels and high-powered magic. They had no proof, of course, but they grew paranoid of, well, everything. Most of all, they feared that I would grow too powerful to be stopped if I did decide to do something they didn’t agree with.
With that, they outlawed gem magic—both its scavenging and its use. ”
“But you didn’t stop,” I said.
“Obviously not.” Mother cut a narrow-eyed glance at Father.
I remembered that look she’d given him so often growing up.
But back then, Father had been able to soften her anger by wrapping her in a hug from behind that nearly peeled her off her feet—kissing her until she could not keep a straight face any longer.
Now, Father looked too weighed down by shame to even think of touching her.
“He continued the gem studies in secret,” Mother went on. “He made use of a hideout we’d tunneled for ourselves when we were young, branching right out to the edge of the glamour barrier.”
Frivolous protests bubbled at the back of my mind, eyes burning with indignation at her.
All those years of reprimanding me for breaching the curfew to visit Dottage mansion, yet she had been practically doing the same thing.
Hazel and I exchanged a brief, flat smile that told me she was thinking the same thing.
Father exhaled heavily, dragging a hand down his jaw, fingers scraping against the silver-flecked scruff there. It was a harsh adjustment from the regal, clean-shaven look he’d always donned in Elysia.
“I grew careless in my eagerness. I was so certain I’d crafted the spell properly.
I reviewed it over a dozen times, but…” His slate-blue eyes dimmed.
“Well, naturally, there was no one else besides myself I could test it on. I’d crafted it to be temporary, and then…
Something went wrong. I lost my wings. What little magic remained in me wasn’t enough to power another transformation.
The raw fae magic in the stones wasn’t compatible with what I was any longer. What I am.”
Jon caught my gaze probingly. This was… complicated. Father’s existence before us confirmed that the impossible dream I’ve been chasing was very much within reach, but this devastating revelation was not the joyous way either of us expected to find solace in our search.
I refocused on Mother incredulously. “Father was missing for days. You said you found him three nights later, said he was dead! And Ayden… Stars, Ayden said he saw the body. I remember! He said you both burned him.”
Lies. So many lies had woven the fabric of half my life.
“That part was half true, at least. Your mother did come searching for me. She was diligent, barely sleeping. Poor thing had circles under her eyes like she’d been punched by the time our paths crossed.
” His gaze softened with immeasurable tenderness.
He reached a hand toward her, brushing her side gently.
Mother’s wings snipped shut sharply at once, and she pulled her leg away.
“Tristan,” she said under her breath.
Father jerked his hand back to his lap, clearing his throat. “Sorry.”
He looked back at Hazel and me. “The night I found her like this, your mother was rightfully startled out of her mind. She burned me in retaliation.” Father angled his head, putting the faint scarring on the left side into the glow of the firelight.
“By the time she realized who I was, what I’d done…
It was too late. Our not-so-peaceful reunion had garnered the attention of our least favorite Entry Watch asshole. ”
“For star’s sake, Tristan, language,” Mother said, jutting her chin at Hazel, whose eyes had gone wide.
She continued, “Ayden was never quite my equal in our cohort of fire affinities, but we reached a stalemate all the same. I wouldn’t let him kill your father, but I couldn’t just let him drop this truth to the council, either.
If he revealed your father became a human…
” She sighed, face pinching at the notion.
“The three of us struck an oath. Your father would be allowed to leave peacefully, so long as he never crossed the Elysian glamour barrier. Ayden would never share the truth of what he saw, and neither would I. If I did, I would never be allowed back through the barrier to our home.”
“But…you’re sharing it now,” I pointed out. “Does that mean you can’t go back?”
Mother raised a hand to pacify the panicked charge to my voice.
“We have no reason to return now, anyway. We’re lucky that’s the only demand Ayden made of me with that oath, that he was too scared out of his wits that night to put any more danger on our family’s name than there already was.
He was a loyalist to the end, simply satisfied to keep your father away for good and swear me to secrecy. All in the name of protecting Elysia.”
All the times Ayden had compared me to my father now sat differently in my memory; he had fussed over me and disciplined me harder than the other children in Elysia. Had the bitterness concealed a genuine concern that I might fall into Father’s footsteps and endanger the village and myself?
“Wasn’t there any way you could have gotten around your oath?” I blurted. “You both let me grieve for a decade. I wept for you.” I steadied my glare on Father. “How did you even find each other again, if you were banished from returning?”
Father cleared his throat as though I might not like the answer.
“Like she said, Ayden missed a few crucial stipulations in an ironclad oath. He could have demanded I never contact her again—not that she particularly wanted to hear from me—but I’d salvaged a few things.
A charmed bit of parchment that we’d once used to pass notes when we were first courting. ”
“How long?” I demanded quietly.
Mother and Father exchanged a look at length, equally uncomfortable.
“The whole time?” Oath or not, I was struck by the realization that Mother had never truly lost him the same way Hazel and I had. “I was sobbing for weeks, and you were writing him letters behind our backs!”