Chapter thirty-five
A Daughter's Last Stand
Larkwouldbefurious.I should make sure I tell him that this was all my idea and not hers at all. I heard it all from Gemini the next morning when I awoke in a warm inn somewhere I didn’t recognize.
“It’s not that I’m afraid of my nephew,” she was clarifying while fussing over her unwieldy hair at a nearby vanity table, “but, well, maybe I am just a little.”
She whirled around to face me.
“Are you even listening?” she snapped.
“Where are we?” I asked, rising slowly from the bed and padding over to the window to peer down on rich, fertile farmland as far as the eye could see.
It was early morning, if the workers in the field were any indication. All of them weathered from a life spent in manual labor, straw hats atop their heads and soft shirts beneath their long brown jumpers. Brown.
A lump settled itself in my throat and I turned, slowly, back to face Gemini.
“Where are we?” I repeated myself, my tone firmer than it had been before.
“You said you wanted to speak to your mother,” Gemini answered with a shrug. “I couldn’t tell if you were serious or delirious. So I brought you here. It’s an inn right on the border of your mother’s court. If you truly wish to see her, you can simply step outside and be on your way and how would I stop you? If you’ve changed your mind, we can have a nice breakfast and head back to that infernal apartment. The choice is yours.”
She shrugged again, as if the matter truly were of no consequence to her. I stared at her for a moment, trying to sense the trick.
“That’s it?” I asked. “But Lark—”
“Lark will rage for centuries if something happens to you and likely, it will start a war rather than prevent one, but, as we seem to be on the path to war already…”
She trailed off with another shrug that showed her belief that I truly couldn’t possibly make things any worse than they already were.
“Out of curiosity,” she spoke into the silence that fell when I lost myself in thought, “what happened back there?”
I blinked at her.
“One moment, a portal to the mortal realm rips open in the center of a busy market. The next, it’s closed and you’re muttering some nonsense about your mother before collapsing,” she said.
“I—I closed it. I don’t know how but—”
“That’s powerful magic, girl. Two days ago, you couldn’t craft a simple shield to defend yourself,” she reminded me and I winced. “Tell me what you were feeling.”
“What I was feeling?”
“When you closed it, what emotions?”
“Hate,” I spat, remembering. “Rage, Fear.”
“Powerful emotions, indeed. Did you feel him?”
My gaze shot up to hers.
“Your power is greater when he is around,” she told me. “His is weaker when you’re not.”
“It is?”
“Infinitesimally. Lark is a very powerful Fae who chooses to use that power sparingly and cleverly so any reduction of his power isn’t all that noticeable if you don’t know where to look.”
My lips parted and I turned away in thought.
“If you tell him I called him powerful, I’ll call you a liar,” she added.
