I am their daughter.
Their child.
The weight of my existence settled on my shoulders like a heavy mantle. Suddenly, everything made sense—and yet, nothing made sense at all. This union between two powerful beings had birthed me: a girl who had never truly known her birth parents and now felt confusion bubbling up within her. The truth of my lineage both liberated and imprisoned me in the same moment.
And what of the people I'd called mother and father?
I shook my head violently, as if I could dislodge the vision; beneath my sorrow, something darker stirred.
Anger. Hot. Sharp. Undeniable.
How could Merlin—my father—have looked me in the eyes and never told me the truth? How many times had the truth trembled on the edge of his lips, only to be swallowed back for the sake of… what? Some greater plan? Or was he ashamed of me? Is that the reason he'd never formally claimed me? Did he consider me his bastard daughter? As far as I knew, Merlin had never fathered children. Well, other than me.
He'd prepared me for Camelot, trained me for the danger I would face. But he had never given me the one thing I'd craved my entire life: the truth.
And what of the fact that my mother—the Lady of the Lake—had bound my magic until my twentieth year? I felt the phantom echo of those bindings unraveling even now—the way my powers had surged in recent years, chaotic and wild. It all suddenlymade terrifying sense. My magic hadn’t just been growing—it had been waking up.
I could feel the truth in my bones, in the blood that ran through my veins—the Lady's binding spell was a mother’s shield. Not a cage, but a sanctuary, crafted from a love so fierce it made my chest ache.
My mother had hidden me to protect me.
My father had trained me to survive.
But neither had ever told me why.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
-ARTHUR-
The Riddle of Blood Trial
Watching Lioran face the Riddle of Blood, I wasn’t certain what to think.
My fingers tightened as I studied his every movement with more scrutiny than I had afforded any other candidate.
When he cut his palm, his blood spilled into the silver channels of the altar, just as every other candidate before him had done.
Then he began the incantation—words I had heard recited numerous times during this trial already—and yet, when they came from him, they carried a strange resonance. A pull. I leaned forward unconsciously, breath caught halfway in my chest, hoping—needing—to understand who he truly was—the nature of his beginnings. Where he had come from. How he possessed such power and yet seemed to have emerged from obscurity. And, most importantly, I needed to understand if he was related in any way at all to the white-haired witch who continued to plague my every moment.
But the magic was cloudy, confused.
Unlike every candidate before him, whose magical echoes burst forth in luminous clarity, Lioran’s lineage emerged clouded. Blurred. As if seen through fogged glass or the refracted veil of water in motion. I blinked, and the images shifted—almost too quickly, as though trying to read a dream slipping from memory upon waking.
I caught glimpses—faint suggestions of elemental water users in his line. Rural folk, perhaps, modest magicians with weak, sanctioned abilities. The kind I had long tolerated in the northern borderlands. Harmless. Beneath concern.
And yet…
The power I'd witnessed from Lioran during the previous trials—the control, the raw force—was far beyond the feeble echoes now playing before me. The strength the Riddle of Blood indicated and what I had witnessed firsthand could not exist within the same individual. Or could it?
Where others' lineages flared like beacons—clear and unmistakable—his bloodline flickered like a flame starved of air. The manifestations danced at the edge of comprehension: half-formed faces, locations that started to delineate before they melted into one another, ancestral figures who refused to resolve into focus. Even the altar seemed uncertain, its glow faltering as it attempted to read him.
And that unsettled me.
I shifted beneath the weight of my ceremonial mantle, my eyes never leaving the haze of images playing out in front of me. What I saw—or rather,what I failed tosee—was a truth in itself. Perhaps Lioran's beginnings were as humble as he had claimed—a simple story of rural parentage and unremarkable blood. The thought should have brought relief, yet it settled uneasily in my mind like armor that didn't quite fit. Certainly, commoners and peasants would not waste precious coin or effort following theirancestral trees through generations of toil and obscurity. They had neither the resources nor the leisure to trace their lineage back through centuries of forgotten names.
But the trial would trace that heritage back,I argued with myself.
Perhaps it had. The more I considered it, the more sense it made that no celebrated lords or ladies would emerge from such modest origins: no sprawling family castles crowned with ancient banners, no deep roots extending into the fertile soil of noble houses. The bloodline reading had shown me exactly what it should show for a knight of common birth.
