“Well…no.” Kaji swirled the ice in his glass. “He chose to remain in his home-city Vivvre. And your mother was rarely here either. The queen is not required to rule from Evov, you know. Most queens only reside in the palace during times of war. Rishiana spent most of her early years reigning from the countryside. She often traveled between cities.”
“And left my father in Vivvre.”
“It was his decision to stay behind.” Kaji squinted one eye at her, then let out a sigh. “I do not wish to speak ill of your father. He had a right to his choices. And you know how bondmating goes.”
Ellina thought of the scars—white, crisscrossed—visible through the sheer fabric of her dress. She thought of Raffan, who had put them there.
Yes, she knew how bondmating could go.
“It caused problems between your mother and aunt,” Kaji said abruptly. “Ara had her own ideas about queendom and bondmating. I think she wanted your mother to spend more time with your father. It created a rift between them that…worsened, over time.”
“Their fight.” It was well known that around the time of Queen Rishiana’s first pregnancy, she and her sister Ara had a terrible fight that drove Ara to leave the court for good. No one seemed to know what that fight had been about…or so Ellina had thought. “Their argument was about my father?”
“I cannot say for certain,” the elder elf admitted, “but I believe so. Most queens begin producing heirs immediately after their initiation, but Rishiana wanted to wait. For a decade she waited. And this was right around the time of the hundred childless years, so you must understand, things were already tense. Ara did not like the way your mother was handling the situation—not with her own heirs or with the future of our country. It was Ara who pushed Rishiana to create the border.”
Ellina nearly choked on her water. “The border wasAra’sidea?”
“The laws, the border. All of it.”
The room seemed to lean. Or maybe Ellina’s mind did—everything was spinning.
Elven children had always been rare. Elves did not marry as humans did, nor did they form lifetime bonds with one another. Since producing a child waslikea marriage, elves rarely did that either. Elves and humans, however, cannot bear children together, and for a time it became more common for elves to take human partners than elven ones.
Then came the hundred childless years, and it seemed as though elves might have stopped producing offspring for good. Queen Rishiana—worried about their diminished population and the future of their race—decided tomakeelves have children. She forced bonded pairs, arranged births. She decreed new laws that prohibited elves from killing other elves even during times of war. And she drew the border, which outlawed elven-human relationships and separated their two races for good.
For a century, the laws worked. With the help of arranged bondings, their population was bolstered. Meanwhile, elves and humans grew apart. Old friendships faded, alliances crumbled. Separated by a border, fear and distrust flourished between them.
These were the laws that had, in so many ways, shaped Ellina’s life. So how was it that she had never known it was her aunt, and not her mother, who had contrived them? Was this what had begun the rift that eventually estranged Queen Rishiana from her sister? Had Rishiana evenwantedthe border?
Ellina exhaled. She knew this feeling: the fish-quick dart of her thoughts, the flash of their silvery scales. The way her mind began offering up questions, locked doors to which she did not have a key.
She said to Kaji, slowly, “My mother hated humans.”
There was something in the elder elf’s eye, gone so fast that Ellina might have imagined it. But she did not imagine the way Kaji broke her gaze as he replied, “Of course she did.”
Ellina studied the glass in her hand. She had other questions. She wanted to know why Ara—so apparently desperate for her sister to produce heirs—had chosen to leave once Rishiana was finally pregnant. She wanted to know why her mother never liked to speak of her father, not even his name, not even years later.
Ellina wanted to know if she resembled him. Did her father, too, have dark hair? Did he share her love of weapons or her skill for deception? What would her father have thought if he knew how Ellina conspired against her own sister, or that she did it in part for a human? Would he punish Ellina as easily as Raffan once had, or worse, or not at all?
In the end, though, none of this was easy to ask. She set down her glass. “I should go.”
“Irishi.” Kaji’s voice stopped her at the door. The word he used was an old one, an elven term of endearment. “Your father was robbed of the chance to know you, but had he lived to see you grown, I think he would have been proud.”
These words were meant as a comfort, but Ellina was not comforted—she felt only the gap of that loss. Her father had died in the way elves fear most: by drowning. It had been an accident. A mudslide near his country home had swept him into a river. His body had washed ashore days later.
Ellina dropped her gaze, staring at the plush rug until its patterns began to swim. She glanced up to find Kaji watching her, concerned.
Her vision cleared. Ellina did not want Kaji’s concern—or rather, she did not want him to believe her in need of it.
“Thank you, Kaji,” she said coolly, “but the opinion of an elf I never knew hardly matters to me. If you will excuse me, I have a long night ahead.”
EIGHTEEN
Ellina emerged from Kaji’s room. The guards must have grown bored waiting, or else had been called to some other task. The hall was empty.
She started for the north tower. She strode through echoing halls and empty chambers, trailed her hand along grey walls that melded seamlessly into grey floors. Ellina passed a few others as she went, courtiers and servants, the occasional senator. The hem of Ellina’s gown hissed against the stone, a sound that went against years of legion training: do not allow others to hear you before you hear them. She tried to take the fabric up in her hands, but the folds of the dress were many, and slipped from her fingers.
Not that it truly mattered. This was no battlefield. And anyway, most of these elves were eager to ignore her. The palace servants were afraid of Ellina, thinking that she and the queen were of a mind. The courtiers sensed that the two sisters werenotof a mind, but this created fear of a different kind; they did not want to be seen associating with the princess in case it somehow attracted Farah’s displeasure.
