“Arwen, wake up.” Kane’s voice was a gentle caress. “Briar has news about Mari.”
My eyes flew open, and I peered past Kane to see Briar standing in the cherrywood doorway, her face solemn. The pale, evening light cast shadows on her near-translucent skin.
I shot up, nearly colliding with Kane’s head. “What is it? Is she—”
“She’s going to be all right.”
Relief and concern warred within me. If Mari was going to be fine, why did Briar look so worried?
I launched myself out of bed, scrambling for the silk robe Cori had hung beside a birdcage stuffed with wrinkled, flaking books. Kane and Briar were already moving down the dark, carpeted hallway, and I rushed after them.
Had I slept until evening?
In the last bedroom, Mari lay unconscious under white quilted bedding. An impressive sunset flirted through the window, casting a warm glow across Willowridge’s cityscape. Cori placed a damp cloth on Mari’s forehead, took her pulse, and jotted something in a worn journal on the bedside table.
I crossed the room to Mari and took her cool palm in my hand. The lack of warmth sent a ripple of power through my fingertips, but there was still nothing to heal—a deeply unsettling sensation, like trying to see out of a blinded eye.
I almost missed Griffin, who was leaning forward in a leather chair in the corner of the room, elbows pressed to his knees, palms tightly clasped, his eyes ringed with lack of sleep.
“Has she woken at all?” I asked.
“No.” His voice was hoarse.
“She will, she just needs rest,” Briar said behind me.
I turned. “What happened to her?”
“She’s been poisoned,” Briar replied, folding her arms elegantly and leaning back against the windowsill. Purple shafts of sunset highlighted little floating specks of dust in the room’s still atmosphere and painted Briar’s angular face in warm contours.
“Cori and I checked for injuries, ailments, curses, hexes, charms . . .” She furrowed her brow at the memory. “The amulet she wore . . . I fashioned that amulet many, many years ago for my closest friend, Queen Valeria Ravenwood.”
I had never heard Kane’s mother’s name before, but I swore I could feel the air in the room deplete as Kane sucked in a sharp breath.
“It held a simple spell. To protect her from death at the hands of the Fae king in the months leading up to our plot against him.” Briar shot a sidelong glance at Kane. “He wasn’t such a doting husband even before then, if you recall.”
“How come my mother never suffered the same fate as the witch?”
“Valeria was not of my coven. She could never have drawn from my lineage when she wore it. The amulet only served its intended purpose around her neck. However, Mari here seems to have found a way to use the power I forged the amulet with to bolster her own.”
Mari had been right. The amulet had been boosting her power. All this time . . .
“You say she was doing magic far beyond her skill level?” Kane nodded at Briar, his mind turning alongside my own. “And she wore it day and night?”
“She never parted with it,” Griffin said from his corner.
“Once the amulet came off, the debt demanded to be paid. Months and months of bolstered magic . . . The overindulgence led to withdrawal. Her body is making up for lost time.”
“So, if she rests, she’ll wake up eventually? Fully recovered?”
“We hope.”
“And Mari’s mother . . . she must have been part of your coven, right? Mari knew the amulet was helping her reach her ancestors.”
Briar’s mouth twisted as she glared at me. “No. As I told you, your friend must have found a way to steal my magic against the wishes of nature. My coven has been extinct for centuries.”
“She would have told me if that were the case.” Mari would have been thrilled if she had discovered such a loophole. She would have shouted it from the Shadowhold rooftops.
“Perhaps she was delusional,” Briar said, her eyes chilling. “Believed her own lies.”
Something about Briar’s callousness felt false. Like she was the one putting her faith in made-up stories. “If that’s really what you think,” I pressed, “why do you look so afraid?”
I only registered Cori’s sharp intake of breath as Briar stepped forward, and despite my better judgment, I flinched. But she merely walked past me and toward Kane.
“Your castle healer is too bold,” she said, her lips lifting upward. “I’m tired of her voice. If anyone is keeping secrets, it’s you, Prince Ravenwood.”
There was something so sinister about referring to Kane as a prince rather than the rightful king of Onyx. It reminded him, and everyone else in the room, who he used to be—who he came from. My mouth twisted with distaste.
Kane’s face hardened. “None that I can recall.”
“You’ve spent the past fifty years looking for the last full-blooded Fae. Now you’ve been traveling with a witch pilfering my magic, the prince of a kingdom that despises you, and a healer who has been rumored to have obliterated an army just a month ago in a combustion of light and flame . . .”
Kane’s crushing silver eyes only flickered. But his lack of response was enough to stoke the tempest within Briar.
“How could you not have told me? I sacrificed everything for you. My life back in Lumera, my power, Perry. And still, I welcomed you into my home, healed your ailing witch, and you planned to leave and never tell me that you found her? After all this time? After all we lost? How dare you?” The glass window behind Briar shattered with her rage and sent a gust of cold air through the room. I jumped at the sound and Cori shuffled out through the door like a well-trained dog.
“Briar, darling,” Kane’s words were coy, but his eyes flashed. “Control yourself.”
“I will do what I please,” she said, with a deadlier calm than I had ever heard someone speak around Kane. “I have half a mind to show you exactly why you were wise to stay away all those years—”
“You’re right,” I said, the words spilling from my lips before I could catch them. “I’m the full-blooded Fae. He didn’t tell you because I begged him not to. Too many people are after me . . . Kane told me how much he trusted you. I was foolish not to listen.”
I could hear Kane’s frustrated sigh, but I kept my eyes on Briar. I expected wrath, or violence, but when she turned back to face me, it was satisfaction that pursed her lips. Some kind of . . . acceptance.
“Right,” she said evenly. “I figured as much.” And with that, she drifted out of the room as if on a wisp of smoke, leaving the rest of us in silence.
Knowing Mari would wake soon, and that, at least for the time being, Briar would not kick her out of her home, we decided to leave for Crag’s Hollow in the morning. Griffin, still glued to Mari’s bedside like a barnacle on a sunken ship, brushed off the call to supper, choosing to eat in his leather chair that surely held the distinct imprint of his backside by now.
But I was starving.
Now that I didn’t fear Mari’s impending death, air flowed through my lungs more easily, my tight limbs loosened, and my appetite returned . . .
Along with a flood of emotions that must have been kept at bay by all my worry.
Memories of Kane and me, shouting at each other in the wet, muggy jungle. Accusing and admitting in equal measure things I was sure we both wished we hadn’t said.
And Fedrik, urging me to abandon Kane for my own safety.
And Kane, still believing Fedrik had kissed me. Which he had, but— Believing it had meant something entirely different than it had.
After bathing and dressing, I descended the stairs to find Kane and Fedrik in the dining room, and Briar, dressed in a fine navy gown and decadent fur shawl. “I have a dinner engagement of my own tonight, but Cori’s roast is scrumptious,” she said to Kane, as if she hadn’t just threatened his life mere hours ago. Then she closed the front door primly, leaving me with two beleaguered men and one glistening, savory roast.
The three of us sat down in silence and began to eat, the sound of metal on porcelain a conflicting accompaniment to the harp that played itself in the next room. I brought my fork to my mouth and tried to appreciate the rich flavors, but each bite curdled on my tongue as I thought of all the pain I had brought the three of us.
I tried to cram those thoughts into some cluttered corner in my mind, but the recesses of my psyche were becoming too crowded—each painful thought I shoved in forced an even less pleasant one out.
More cutlery grated on porcelain. More haunting harp music, the strings in the next room plucking themselves. More insufferable silence.
I could think of nothing at all to say to Kane, so I turned to Fedrik. “Have you been to Willowridge before?”
“Yes, a few times, actually.” He finished his bite and looked from Kane to me before continuing, if a little hesitantly. “When I was younger, my father would take me to the city every autumn for the Festival of Dreams. It was all terribly exciting—the food, the gifts, the . . . variety of company.”
I nodded. I had heard of the Festival of Dreams; although, like so many other things, my memories of my life before I met Kane were beginning to . . . warp. Like trying to peer at my life through a grimy spyglass.
Before Kane, I had wanted to see the festival. Wanted to experience it like Fedrik had. Maybe if we didn’t have to leave Willowridge in the morning, Kane would take me this time.
I felt a pang of homesickness. Homesick for a life I’d never had.
“Would you like to go with me this year?”
I blinked. Fedrik’s eyes shone with sincerity. My throat tightened as I glanced at Kane, who made no indication of having heard Fedrik’s invitation. Of course he hadn’t; he was no more a part of this conversation than the harp. And somehow, in a way, I was glad for that.
“I’d love to.”
Fedrik smiled softly and returned to his meal. But I kept my gaze on him a while longer.
It wasn’t until much later, long after we’d eaten supper and I was lying in bed trying to empty my crowded mind, that I thought of something else Briar had said.
She had called Kane’s mother Valeria Ravenwood. But wasn’t she . . . Valeria Darian?
The Fae King’s wife?
Was Briar trying to say that she and Kane’s mother . . . had conspired against the Fae King? And that she’d never told Kane?
