“You’re back from the village! Did you get my new dress?” Lidi asked excitedly.
I bit my lower lip, trying to keep my thoughts to myself. She sounded so excited about a new dress.
“I did. And you’ll look pretty as…can be,” my mother finished, a bit uncertainly, but Lidi didn’t notice. I knew she’d been about to say Lidi would be as pretty as a Fae princess. She had stopped herself because of me.
But I knew what that dress meant.
We dressed our children up to sell their magic away, as if it were a holiday. As if it were something to celebrate.
I didn’t know what the point was. We always looked so dingy next to the Fae anyway.
“And you’ve forgotten one of your chores, haven’t you?” our mother asked Lidi with a teasing note.
Lydia’s eyes widened. “Oh no, the chickens! They need their supper.”
She ran off, carrying her basket so carelessly over one arm that a few blackberries and raspberries flew out and scattered in her path.
“The hens always peck you. Aren’t you glad to have a little sister to take over that chore?”
“Even chickens hate me,” I said.
“Oh, chickens hate everyone. You’re not special.” My mother’s voice tried for teasing, but there was a darker note I hadn’t heard when she spoke to Lidi.
I looked up at her, startled. “I wish I wasn’t special. Or at least…you wish I wasn’t, don’t you?”
My mother pulled berries off the bush with a practiced twist and a grim look on her face. She didn’t eat any. “This is about those dragons, isn’t it?”
“I never thought I’d see them except in books.” The mark felt as if it were burning again, just thinking about Fieran.
“We kept your dragon mark a secret to protect you.”
“To protect me from what?” I’d heard all these horror stories as achild, all these tales of dragons shifted and driven dark and how they had to be killed…or how the shifter, who carried that dragon, had to be killed since he was weaker.
But seeing the dragon shifters for the first time, I’d also realized I was protected from being strong and powerful and part of something special.
“You don’t want that life. And you know what it would cost us—our life in the village…” She shook her head. “The man who sired you doesn’t matter. What matters is the man who raised you, who married me knowing I was pregnant with someone else’s child, and who protected you…”
“I love Pa,” I said, unable to avoid using the present tense. I knew that he was dead and that the past tense might be appropriate, but it always seemed like a betrayal. He might be dead, but my love was not. “Wanting to know who my real father is—I mean my other father—that doesn’t take away from that.”
“I didn’t say it did, Cara-cup. But it’s better this way.”
“Why is it better?” I twisted a berry off the bush so savagely that a few thorns scraped along my hand. I shook it off, blowing on the scratches to ease the pain. “The dragon mark is part of who I am. My first father would be a part of who I am. Without knowing him, being unclaimed is a part of who I am too.”
She sighed. “Please trust me that it’s better this way.”
“I’ve trusted you with that for a long time. I’m a grown woman. It’s time for you to tell me the truth.”
She shook her head. “He’s a bad person.”
I pulled back as if she’d slapped me. It felt as if she had. As if she’d said thatIwas a bad person, even though I knew that didn’t make any sense. “Why? You can’t just tell me that and leave it.”
“Actually, I can,” my mother said coolly.
She hadn’t protected my magic, she hadn’t protected me from being alone with my father when he breathed his last breaths, she hadn’t protected me from feeling like a mother to Lidi when I should only have ever been her sister.
The way she’d depended on me made it infuriating when she thenturned around and acted as if she were my mother, and that meant she knew best, and I should just trust her.
“If you’d sent me to the Trials, maybe I’d be rich now!” We wouldn’t even have to talk about sacrificing Lidi’s magic to save Tay.
