Chapter 35
Moonstone
DELILAH
We arrived back at the castle late. After the lantern show, Titus and I had gotten a little frisky on the hillside after Cercies and Calpurnia left for his estate in Dragon’s Maw.
Rexius had requested a transfer there because of the loss of his mother, so Cercies had to meet him early to get settled before our training at the castle.
Which meant Cal was staying the night with him at his place for the first time—and I couldn’t wait to hear all about it.
Sore was an understatement for how I felt. After spending hours working out with Cercies and then several more riding dragons, I ached in muscles I didn’t know I had. Riding Titus at the end of the night could also be a factor.
I was out of elixirs, and my mate mark could use cleaning and bandaging.
I told Titus I’d catch up—that I was going to stop by Gleeda’s room to see if she was still awake.
He kissed me goodbye and told me to sleep in his bed with him tonight.
Sounds like Cal wasn’t the only one getting different sleeping arrangements.
The castle was quiet and dark, but I knew my way around… somewhat. I slipped through the halls; my mate mark still tender beneath my make-shift bandage.
Gleeda’s double doors were slightly ajar. A thin column of firelight spilled into the corridor from her hearth, painting the stone in gold.
I hesitated, unsure if she had already fallen asleep. “Come in,
child,” she called softly, like she’d been expecting me.
Heat touched my cheeks. I pushed the door open the rest of the way. “Sorry. I wasn’t spying. I just didn’t want to disturb you if you were asleep.”
Her chuckle was warm and low. “Oh, I rarely sleep. Come in. Sit. Let me have a look at you.”
I crossed the room and sat on her small bed, the plain white linens stark against the dark stone. The moment I lowered myself, my muscles protested so sharply I couldn’t stop the wince.
Gleeda’s gaze sharpened with knowing. “I made another batch of elixir today. Take one. It will lessen the soreness, and you will sleep better.”
I obeyed, swallowing the bitterness, then watched as she gathered her things with practiced hands. There was something about her, something gentle and steady—motherly perhaps.
“Now,” she said, sitting close, “how’s that burn healing?”
“It seemed better,” I admitted. “But it started bleeding while riding today.”
“Oh, the skies must have been rough,” she murmured, and her tone shifted into that healer’s calm that somehow made pain bearable. “You weren’t the only one injured on dragon-back. I just mended a shattered wrist.”
My stomach tightened. I didn’t ask whose. I already knew.
Gleeda dabbed salve onto the edge of the wound, and I hissed between my teeth. “Why can’t you sleep?” I asked, curiously.
For a moment, her hands went still, and something flickered behind her eyes—loneliness, maybe, or grief so old it had become part of her bones. She looked away like she couldn’t stand to be seen with
it.
“It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with,” she said, too smoothly.
Before I could press, there was a knock at the door. Both of us turned.
A tall Fae male stood in the doorway with two guards behind him, his robe white, his deep brown skin adorned with raw gemstones that caught the firelight.
The gems were familiar in a way because I’d worn something like that in my Earth Fae glamour.
Titus had mentioned the High Lord of Land would be here sometime this week. This had to be Lord Folliade.
“Pardon the interruption,” he said, then glanced at me and seemed to realize how indecently vulnerable I looked, half-bandaged and wincing on a bed. “It’s been an exceedingly long day, and this will only take a moment. I was told I could find a healer named Gleeda here.”
I nodded, gesturing toward her. He turned to Gleeda with the kind of politeness that came from authority, not kindness.
“Lady healer,” he began, voice careful, “I was told you have been employed here the longest. I am searching for my mother—the missing Lady of Land. I wondered if you have ever seen or heard anything in all your years here that could help me.”
Gleeda didn’t answer.
At first I thought she hadn’t heard him, but her gaze had locked onto him so completely it was as if she had stopped breathing. Her face went blank in a way that wasn’t emptiness. It was shock held so tightly it looked like stillness.
The High Lord’s brows drew together. He glanced at me, uneasy, as if asking whether this was part of some game.
“Gleeda?” I asked gently. “Are you alright?”
She nodded, but it was slow, delayed, like her body was remembering how to move again. Then she lifted one hand and extinguished the flames in her fireplace with a twist of magic so casual it should have been ordinary, except it made the room feel colder, and smaller, and tense.
She rose, crossing to her workbench. Her fingers trembled as she rummaged through a box, and the sound of glass and metal clinking together seemed far too loud in the hush that had fallen.
The High Lord stepped forward impatiently. “Healer—” Gleeda turned back with something small in her palm.
She hobbled toward him, hand outstretched.
Whatever it was, it mattered, because the moment he saw it, the arrogance fell off his face like a mask ripped away. His eyes widened, and something like fear—real fear—flashed through him.
Gleeda’s voice was quiet when she spoke, and it didn’t sound like a warning so much as a truth that had been waiting a very long time to be released.
“Things aren’t always what they seem.”
His breath caught. He stared at his palm. “A moonstone,” he said, the words scraping out of him. “You’re the one who sent it to me.” His voice rose with each syllable until the air itself seemed to vibrate. “I demand you tell me what you know—at once.”
The crystals hanging in Gleeda’s window began to clank together, rattling softly as the ground trembled under the weight of his power.
Still, Gleeda didn’t speak. Her eyes glistened, and there was that same aching longing in her expression, as if she had a lifetime of words caught behind her teeth and no permission to let them out.
The High Lord’s patience snapped. “Who are you?” he hissed, stepping in close. “Are you wearing a glamour?”
He grabbed her wrist.
I surged to my feet so fast my muscles screamed. “Stop!
Don’t hurt her!”
He didn’t even look at me. His voice turned brutal, full of threat and grief tangled together. “She knows something. I know she does. Green magical energy began to swirl from his gemstone embedded forearms down to his fingertips. Tell me, or your remaining days will be spent as stone.”
Tears streamed down Gleeda’s face, but she didn’t flinch from him. She held his stare with an expression so heartbreakingly tender it made my chest ache.
He squeezed harder.
I didn’t think—I moved, acting on pure, instinctive impulse. Gleeda looked like she had something to say, but for some reason she couldn’t. And there was only one thing I knew that could drag the truth out of you, whether you wanted it to or not.
My fingers dug into my pocket and closed around the truth stone Titus had told me to keep, and I pressed it into Gleeda’s palm like I was fitting a key into a lock.
The magic worked immediately.
Gleeda sucked in a deep breath like she’d been drowning for years, and the sound she made when she spoke was not the frail
healer’s voice at all. It was younger, and broken, and overflowing with love.
“My Folli-Pollie!”
The High Lord went utterly still.
The pressure in the room shifted, as if the castle itself had leaned in to listen.
His hand fell away from her wrist like his fingers no longer knew what to do. His face drained of color so fast it frightened me, and when he spoke, his voice cracked in a way that didn’t belong to someone so powerful.
“That’s… that’s what my mother used to call me.”
His knees hit the stone as if he couldn’t handle the weight of it all.
Gleeda’s hand flexed around the truth stone, and the air around her began to swirl. Magic rippled across her skin—not the soft, silvery mist of a simple glamour, but something strained and viscous. Thick. Gelatinous. It clung to her like tar, pulsing with something dark and forbidden.
Then it broke.
The healer’s stoop straightened. The wrinkles smoothed.
Her golden Fire Fae complexion turned into a deep brown.
The silver hair brightened into pure white, and her body stretched into a tall, regal figure as galaxies of gemstones rose on her skin up to her elbows, catching the light like buried stars.
Emeralds traced her forehead like a crown that had never truly left her, with one larger stone resting at the center.
She looked like a queen that had been trapped in the wrong life.
“M-mother?” he whispered, the word barely sound at all.
“Yes,” she sobbed, and the sound was joy and grief braided together so tightly it hurt to hear. “My son. It’s me. You are so smart, my Folli-Pollie. You figured it out!”
He stumbled forward and wrapped his arms around her neck like a child afraid she might vanish if he let go. She held him as if she’d been holding that embrace in her bones for years.
“But how?” he managed, his voice muffled against her shoulder.
“Lord Nerot kidnapped me,” she said, just hearing the name tasted like poison on my tongue. “He brought me here. He spellbound me with dark magic to conceal my identity and imprisoned me in the castle. The spell ensured I could never speak—or write—what had been done to me.”
Her hands shook as she cupped his face. “I tried to find ways to let you know I was still here, but they all failed—until a fire sprite came to me in desperate need of healing. He felt indebted, so I asked him to bring you a moonstone on my birthday hoping you would figure it out and It worked!”