I leapt up and crossed to his bookshelves. He rested his wrist on one curled knee, watching me with an utterly relaxed expression.
“There is no compendium that will mention a mortal,” he told me. “Ifit ever happened, it would have been stricken from history.”
“Half the kingdom believesyoucan make mortals into dragon shifters.” I might believe it too. There were so many stories about why Fear had brought me into the Trials.
“People believe what they wish. For instance, you believe you can unravel my secrets without wearing my ring. But that would be dangerous for us both.”
I shoved his books back into the bookcase. Sometimes Iwastempted to marry the bastard. “I’ve read enough fairy tales to know marrying a Fae is always a trick.”
“I cannot tell you what I’m plotting, Cara.” His voice, for once, sounded genuine, and when I turned to face him, he looked serious. “But I promise you that my manipulations serve your desires.”
I was sure by some complicated logic, he believed that was true.
“Tell me something else, then.” I challenged him, moving back to the window seat. “Tell me what happened between you and Ander.”
I had Ander’s version of the story. I was curious what Fieran would admit.
“Talking about Ander? How dull.” He gave me a long, surly look. I gave him one right back until he nodded once. “All right.”
I sat opposite him, pulling my feet up onto the window seat to mirror his posture—though I kept a death grip on the edge of the seat. The wind seemed to tug at me, as if it were determined to rip me out of his room, but then it died down. His tousled dark hair fell back into place.
For a few long beats, there was silence between us. A muscle in his cheek jumped.
Fieran had never before lookedwaryto me. As if he were afraid of being hurt.
“My mother has never told me who my father is.” He spoke the words suddenly, swiftly. A decision made and executed with his usual casual violence. “She knows how much that matters to me, and that would be reason enough to keep her secrets, but perhaps there are other reasons. Perhaps she killed him after breeding, as do some monsters.
“At any rate, I wonder how it is that she came to be pregnant by a shifter, because my mark came as a surprise to her. She fantasized about drowning me, but the magic protects heirs and their royal parents from violence against each other.”
“How did you know that she wanted you dead?” I pictured some horrible servant telling the tiny prince that he was never wanted.
“She told me.” His words were calm, his face carved from stone. There was a roil of emotion beneath that façade. I was sure of it. “Since she could not kill me, she raised me in neglect. A prince in name only, unable to read, dressed in filth and ignorance. She did not send me to the academy. She did not allow me tutors or training.”
He glanced out the window, as if looking toward the academy just down the sharp line of the coast. “I stole or lied or charmed the servants for what I needed, so in that way, she allowed me my most necessary education. And then, one day, she brought home Ander.”
His voice twisted. “She killed his parents. I’m sure of it. But he adored her then. Not enough, though, to obey her. He used to be strong and fierce and determined to do what was right.”
“You were friends.”
“We were brothers. There is no one I have loved more until—” He interrupted himself. “I would like to pretend otherwise, but I was a child. I was desperate for connection. Ander had spent his life being cared for by his parents, by his fathers’ shifters. He was well trained and full of honorable ideals. My mother tried to convince him I was an evil, depraved little thing.”
His face was shadowed, lost in the past. “But Ander pitied me. He shared everything good the queen gave him, and he shared my punishments by throwing himself onto my side. He trained me. Everything I am today, I owe to Ander.”
I searched his face, looking for the glib words that would undercut that truth. But he didn’t say anything. “What went wrong between you?”
His lips twisted. “I tried to take the throne. He was at my side, as always, until he betrayed me.”
The words slid into my gut like a blade. Then, slowly, skepticism won over. “Would he tell me the same version?”
“He would tell you I failed him,” he told me. “The queen rooted out everyone who served my plot and murdered them. The remnants of his family. The knights who had trained him. The woman he loved.”
He raked his hand through his hair. For a second, I thought he wasn’t going to speak, and then he confessed, “I had been so unloved, and he let me into his family as if we really were brothers—as if they hadbeen mine all along and we were both coming home. I needed them, and so they fought with me.Forme.”
I flinched at the pain in his voice. I wanted to reach out and touch him, and I didn’t dare, and then after a second, I did. I laid my hand on his knee, and he looked up at me with a grim smile touching his lips to acknowledge the touch.
“He tried to save them. It was too late. He has been the queen’s lapdog ever since.”
There had to be someone else he was still trying to save, or…
