Chapter 26
Iannis insisted on holding Zuric in the Palace dungeon rather than taking him to the Enforcer’s Guild, intending to interrogate the spy himself.
Since Warin Danrian, the bank manager who’d been running the Shifter Royale, had been assassinated in his cell, it seemed better not to send high-risk prisoners there.
Iannis and I didn’t have another lesson scheduled until dinner, and Fenris had cancelled our Loranian lesson for today. So, with some free time on my hands, I rushed over to the library to see if Janta had made any progress with her investigation into my family tree.
“Are you nervous about finding out who your father is?” Rylan asked as he lengthened his stride to keep up with me. I’d hurriedly filled him in on the basic details via mindspeak, so no one would overhear, and he looked intrigued. “And what will you do once you know his identity?”
“Yes, and I don’t know,” I replied as we stopped outside the tall, wooden doors that closed the library off from the rest of the Palace. “I probably won’t be able to make any kind of decision until I do know who he is, and why he abandoned me.”
“Makes sense,” Rylan said as he pushed open the door, going ahead to make sure there were no assassins lurking on the other side.
Despite my suggestion that he do so, Iannis wouldn’t dismiss Rylan as my bodyguard even though we’d captured the spy.
He claimed we couldn’t be certain there weren’t more like him skulking about inside the Palace walls, and he wanted Rylan to stick close to me for now.
I asked the young librarian at the reception desk for Janta, and was told she was meeting with someone but would be available soon.
Rylan and I settled down at one of the tables to wait, me with my spellbook primer and Rylan with a history text he’d snagged from one of the shelves.
It didn’t take very long at all for Janta to show up.
“Good afternoon, Miss Baine,” Janta said, giving me a small, but friendly smile. She wore lavender robes today, her silver hair rolled up into a high bun, and a smile lit her eyes. “Thank you for the box of chocolates. They were a most welcome surprise.”
“Oh, it was the least I could do after all you’ve done to help me. And please, call me Sunaya,” I added with a smile. “Anyway, I was hoping you had some news for me?”
“Of course. Please come back to my office, ah, Sunaya.” She cleared her throat. “You may also use my first name, if you like.”
She led us between the shelves and to the back, to her administrative office.
It was a comfortable space, with powder-blue curtains, cityscape paintings hanging from the walls, and, of course, book-laden shelves.
The shelves were made of birch wood, as were her desk and chairs. She gestured for me to have a seat.
“Are you certain you wish to have your guard present?” Janta said as she pulled a file from one of her desk drawers. “This is a private matter, after all.”
“I can wait outside,” Rylan said, bowing to us both. “So long as I can trust you with Miss Baine’s life.”
“You can,” Janta said, smiling. “We will only be a half hour or so.”
Rylan disappeared back into the library, shutting the door behind him.
I wondered if he would tune out our conversation, or if he would listen in beyond the wall—his shifter hearing would be able to pick up our conversation easily.
If I knew him, he would listen in. It didn’t matter either way—we were family, and I trusted him not to use this information to hurt me.
“So,” I said, settling back into my chair, “what have you found out?”
Janta opened the file in front of her, revealing a photograph of Coman ar’Daghir, the dark-haired Legal Secretary from Rhodea who shared my hair and eye coloring, and who I’d suspected was related to me in some way.
“I started by tracing back the lineage of your friend here,” she said, tapping the facsimile of Coman’s slightly hooked nose.
“His dark hair and green eyes, which you share, come from his mother’s side of the family, which is far more distinguished than the ar’Darghirs.
Something of a misalliance, in fact. His mother is a scion of the noble ar’Rhea family in Castalis. ”
“I see.” Excitement shot through me at the mention of an actual name—we were getting somewhere!
Castalis, I dimly remembered from school, was a peninsula at the southwestern edge of the Central Continent.
“So this family is well known?” If they were, it might explain why Iannis had suspected my lineage from the get-go.
“Very,” Janta confirmed. “They are particularly notable for their green eyes, strong magic, and the fact that their lineage boasts a direct descent from the First Mage, Resinah.”
“Wow.” My eyes widened. “Does that make them more noble than other families? I have to admit I don’t really understand how classes amongst the mages work.”
“All mages who have the prefix ‘ar’ in their surnames are direct descendants of one of Resinah’s twelve original disciples,” Janta explained, clasping her hands together as she rested them atop the desk.
“These are the nobility in our society. There was a time when only mages of noble birth could hold influential positions, but that is not the case today. Our current director of the Mages Guild, Lalia Chen, is a good example of this, as was her predecessor.”
“Right.” I nodded, recalling that neither Chen nor Chartis had the “ar” in their last names, nor did Minister Graning. “So how is it that the ar’Rhea family is directly descended from Resinah?”
“Two of Resinah’s children, her son and daughter, were disciples of hers.
Her daughter, Miyanta, is the ancestor of the ar’Rhea family.
” Janta’s nose twitched ever so slightly in disapproval.
“According to history, Miyanta was as gracious and noble as her mother, but the same cannot be said of all her descendants. The families descended from Resinah consider themselves to be superior to all the other noble mages, and the ar’Rhea family is particularly snobbish.
The purity of their blood means everything to them. ”
“Great.” I rolled my eyes, trying not to show Janta that, inside, my heart was sinking.
If my father was an ar’Rhea, it was no wonder he’d chosen to abandon me.
As a shifter-mage hybrid, I had to be even more of an abomination to him than I was to ordinary mages.
And considering how I’d been treated when I arrived at Solantha Palace, that was really saying something.
“Since the ar’Rhea family is so ancient and proud of their heritage, there is plenty of information about them in the historical and contemporary records.
” Janta flipped the photo of Coman to the side, revealing a page filled with elegant handwriting—research notes, from what I could read upside down.
“I checked the Foreign Mages’ Log to see if anyone from the ar’Rhea family had visited Solantha in the year before your birth. ”
“That’s smart,” I said—I would have done it myself, if I’d known which name to look for.
Any foreign mage visiting a Federation state for longer than a month was required to go to the local Mages Guild and fill out a form.
My heart rate jumped up a notch, and I had to restrain myself from squirming in my seat like a little kid. “So what name did you find?”
Janta smiled a little, amused at my enthusiasm.
“For some reason, the relevant page was missing, but, fortunately, we keep a duplicate that was still intact. A mage by the name of Haman ar’Rhea filled out the form about a year before your birth.
He came from Castalis to Solantha to study for some months with Jonias Ballos, an eccentric old mage who is well known for his mastery of divination and binding magic.
According to the form, Haman ar’Rhea lived in Ballos’s house the entire time.
That would have been the only way to learn from him, because Ballos has not left his home in several decades.
” Her nose twitched again. “He seems to be something of a hermit.”
“Well, I guess Haman probably didn’t stay in Ballos’s house the whole time,” I said dryly, “or he never would have met my mother.”
“No, I imagine not,” Janta agreed with a sigh.
She pushed her spectacles up her nose, then flipped over several notes of research until she came upon a photograph of a man who resembled Coman.
He had thick, curling dark hair that brushed his broad shoulders, and his handsome, aristocratic features shared the shape of my eyes and my full mouth.
He wore some kind of ceremonial robe with a thick chain across his chest, and looked as though everything he surveyed belonged to him.
Smug bastard. So this was supposed to be my father?
I wanted to deny it, but the resemblance was unmistakable.
Janta did not notice my reaction. “Ballos cannot have been very stimulating company for a comparatively young mage, used to exclusive parties and entertainments. And perhaps Haman enjoyed the anonymity of a foreign place where nobody knew his ancestry, where he thought he could let his hair down safely.”
Yeah, I could imagine that.
“I surmise that your father visited Rowanville during his stay here, as many tourists do. The experience must have been especially exotic for him, as there are no shifters in Castalis.”
That shocked me. “What—none at all?”
“There never were all that many, and one of Haman’s ancestors, the High Mage of that time, drove them from the country about two hundred years ago. They were given one week to leave, taking only what they could carry. It is in all the Castalian history books.”
“No wonder none wanted to go back,” I muttered. Already, I hated the whole fucking ar’Rhea family.
“It is said the edict was issued in anger at an affair of his daughter with a shifter. The daughter was also exiled.”