“Smithers…yes, I remember him.” Dad stroked his chin. “He was very odd, and for a coven of witches, that’s saying something.”
My stomach flipped.He just said the ‘w’ word right in front of us. Who is this person and what has he done with my Dad?“Odd how?”
“Most of the time he was a normal artist – charming, charismatic, in love with the sound of his own voice. The women in the coven were utterly infatuated with him, including your mother, although he had eyes only for Aline.” Dad smiled wistfully. “When he came to live at Briarwood, we saw a different side of him. We had to call him Herbert in front of the castle staff or whenever we were in public, which wasn’t often – he hated leaving Briarwood. He had the room at the top of the tower as his studio, and he’d lock himself inside for days at a time without food or water, only emerging when he’d created a new piece. He sketched frequently, but I never saw him touch paint to canvas outside that room, and he didn’t allow anyone to watch him work. He talked to himself – whole conversations where he argued back and forth for hours. He would sometimes walk into a room and stand there stupefied. Halfway through a conversation, he’d suddenly forget what he was talking about.”
“What about his magic?” Maeve asked.
“He was a water user, so when he got confused and frustrated he’d flood the castle. I remember a beautiful Georgian end table that had to be tossed after it sustained heavy water damage during a particularly heated argument he had with himself. Most of us grew afraid of him, but Aline was High Priestess, and he was her magister. She was fiercely protective of their magical bond.”
Maeve’s head whipped up. “Hang on, you mean they were lovers?”
“Oh yes. Aline never told us who your father was, but we always suspected Robert. But when you were born, you didn’t exhibit as a water user, so we had to discount that. Your mother had some other lovers, and I’m not sure she knew your paternity.”
Maeve glanced at me, her eyes wide. I knew she was wondering if we should tell him that we knew who her father was. I gave my head a tiny shake.
“Do you know any of those other men?” she asked. “My mother’s lovers?”
Dad shook his head. “Many of them came and went with the night. Others she met outside the castle walls. You have to understand that Aline was a force of nature, a wild woman in the true sense of the word. She could not help but collect men like trophies.”
I watched Dad as he spoke to Maeve. His shoulders relaxed. He leaned forward, his eyes dancing the way they did when he talked about Beedle the Bard. He’d barely said five words to me since I’d decided to remain at Briarwood. When I came back for Christmas he would only address me through Mum.
Maeve’s presence had opened him up.
Maeve folded her arms across the stack of letters strewn in front of her. “Okay, Andrew. I’m going to say something here, and I’m not sure how it’s going to go. But it’s kind of eating me up inside.”
My stomach clenched. I knew exactly what Maeve was going to ask.
“We spoke to Isadora in London. She said that on the night of the ritual…the night my mother died…she stabbed me. And I just?—”
Dad’s eyes widened, his jaw tightening. He gripped the side of the table as it was the only thing keeping him upright.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to.”
“No.” When Dad spoke, his eyes fixed on mine. “We’ve been silent about this for too long. Maeve, you deserve to know your history. After all, history is what defines us.”
“I’m listening.”
He took a deep breath. “Aline took Bree – that’s Corbin’s mother – and I aside a few days before the ritual. At that point, she hadn’t revealed any details of the magic she’d be performing, only that she had a way to beat the fae. All we knew was that to combat them, Aline would need to do something reprehensible. She had a vision several days earlier and it had made her reserved, melancholy. We’d offered to help her plan the ritual, but she said she needed to do that on her own.” He gave a short laugh. “That was Aline, always needing to figure things out on her own, to do things her way.”
“Sounds like someone else I know,” I grinned at Maeve.
“Hello pot, have you met kettle?” she shot back.
Dad smiled. “On the night in question, Aline locked the door of the library and revealed to us what she had seen in her vision – that her daughter would be born the night of the ritual, and that she would carry her newborn child into the centre of the circle and plunge a knife into its chest.”
Maeve’s face paled. I reached across and took her hand, squeezing her fingers.
“I expected Aline to be upset, but she seemed determined, focused, oddly detached from her words. She said she’d finally figured out what the vision meant. And then she told us the second part of the vision, the part where she died.”
“We didn’t want to hear it. We tried to talk her out of the ritual. I swore we could find another way, that there would be something buried in the library’s books that would help us. Aline shook her head, that haughty expression on her face. ‘You’ve already read every book in this library,’ she said. ‘If there was an answer, you would have found it already. No, I will die that night. I am resigned to it and I don’t want to talk about it a moment longer. We have too much to do.’ And she handed me a sealed letter and gave us both specific instructions on what we had to do on the night of the ritual.”
“That night, the witches gathered around the sidhe. The High Priestesses made up the inner circle, along with me, Bree, and Robert. All the other witches crowded around the outer circle, lending their power. Aline called on the elements and the old gods. We raised our power – a great cone of energy, more powerful and volatile than anything I’d ever conjured in my life. When the ritual was at its height, Aline took a knife, and she held it above your chest. She screamed and a blinding flash of light struck the centre of the circle. I reached beneath her and grabbed you, and as fae warriors swarmed from the sidhe and the circle broke into chaos, I fled with you in my arms.”
Dad reached across the table and clasped Maeve’s hands in his. His gaze flicked to me as he said, his voice solemn. “Your mother didn’t try to kill you, Maeve. She did everything in her power to keep you safe. But she wanted everyone else tobelieveyou had died.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MAEVE
