I bit back a curse, knowing she wasn’t wrong. If I lost control while Draven was fighting, we would both die. Draven, to his credit, did not emanate any smugness, just the same unyielding resolution he always had.
Still…
“We can’t just leave the villagers to be… slaughtered,” I stopped just short of saying eaten, but a shadow crossed my sister’s features all the same.
She clenched her fists around her mug of tea, drawing in a steadying breath. “It won’t be any better for them if we take out their only hope of getting rid of the beasts one day,” she said quietly.
“And I had no intention of leaving them to die,” Draven added, a hint of offense edging his sardonic tone. “The estatesalready have warnings. They know the frostbeasts are hunting during the day now. They’ve been instructed to raise their walls and take in any villagers willing to seek refuge. Others have been offered sanctuary here.”
My eyes widened. Had he always planned to offer them safety, or had the idea only taken root after I’d done the same once before while he was still out fighting monsters?
He nodded, as if reading the question on my face. It was a small consolation. One quiet thing I’d managed to do right.
I wondered, then, if my father had received the warning as well. If it had reached him at all, or if it had been swallowed up with the others—lost among the unanswered letters my sister had sent, each one vanishing into silence. Should we try again? Or would that letter disappear too?
This wasn’t a solution. We all knew that.
But it was better than nothing. Marginally.
Now I needed to focus on what the hells we were up against.
On my mana. On whatever other ancient horrors might be stirring. On untangling every strand of this shards-forsaken mess before it finished unraveling us all.
The constant strain of keeping my mana at bay was so exhausting that the endless words and pictures blurred together in all the books I was trying to research, but I couldn’t stop trying.
Most days, I fell asleep with a book in my hand.
Days passed with the same routine—breakfast with Wynnie, visiting Nevara, burying myself in books, all around unpredictable bursts of mana.
Wynnie spent her afternoons overseeing the villagers who arrived since I still wasn’t risking the Court seeing my accidental mana, and, as she put it, she “had five years of experience running an estate before it got eaten.”
She reached out to her dead husband’s family and anyone who might know where my father was. Notably, his many favored whorehouses.
He had been a high ranking soldier before he retired after the death of Wynnie’s mother, but I doubted he was sober enough to use those skills most days.
It shouldn’t have mattered. I barely knew the male, aside from a few scattered drunken conversations over the years, and those provided nothing of note. But still… he was my father, and Wynnie’s, too. We had to at least try.
I, of course, was still unable to leave my rooms, so I spent most of my time researching—studying the palace tomes and comparing them to my compendium with an endless frenzy that bordered on mania.
All of it was putting me on edge, driving me to the brink of a stir-crazy meltdown. There was a time I had become accustomed to being isolated, alone with my books, but that person felt so far removed from who I was now.
Just when I’d forced a very restless Batty outside to fly and was seriously considering bringing the palace walls down on purpose rather than in another burst of unruly mana, Draven ice-walked us to a secluded valley tucked between two sheer cliffs
“Where are we?” I asked, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings.
“You need to try releasing your mana with some degree of intentionality. See if you can burn off the excess.”
I raised my eyebrows curiously. “Is that what you had to do?”
Draven had more power than any fae in known history. Had he been forced to burn it off to protect himself, too? The thought made me feel a little less alone, a little less hopeless.
Until he shook his head. “No. I was always able to channel it.”
“Right.” Because Draven was many things, but he had never been… defective, like I still managed to be.
It made sense. From everything I had read or been told, mana was instinctual, a natural extension of your thoughts. It wasn’t like learning to walk or read, it was like breathing.
Or at least, it was supposed to be. I would have assumed that getting an enormous boost of power changed things, but as usual, it was only me who struggled with a basic part of being fae.
