Her heart sank.
“Afterward, he left your people alone for the most part, so long as they comply. For now, finding you holds his attention. They are combing the kingdom. Last I heard, they sent an envoy to the Midlands, and they will eventually come to the mountain.” The hint of a smile rose to Caelum’s face. “But Eldrik now has the curse to contend with. It’s beginning to affect his men.”
At least that was something.
“May it keep him occupied,” Alora said. She turned to the window, staring toward Argyle, though all she could see where the clouds. “Did my father know the truth?” she murmured. “About me?”
“I suspect he did.”
Her eyes burned. “That’s why he sent me away, isn’t it?”
“He sent you away because his new queen convinced him to.”
Alora spun. “Convinced him of what?”
Caelum drew a breath. “That you are the source of the Sleeping Curse.”
The room tilted.
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. The words didn’t make sense, not at first, as if the air had grown too thick to swallow.
Alora tried to deny it, instinct screaming no. But there was one absolute truth about the fae.
They cannot lie.
Her knees buckled.
Caelum lurched forward and caught her before she hit the floor, easing her down until she sat on the stone, trembling. He knelt beside her.
Her mother had been the first to fall to the sleeping sickness. The healers claimed it was madness that took her, sickness drawn from living among mortals and iron.
But it had begun with her.
Alora’s vision blurred as she stared at the glowing marks on her hands. “Am I the source?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Did I kill my mother?”
Caelum hesitated. “The fae speak the truths they accept… even if their beliefs are wrong.”
A thin reassurance, but it let her draw breath again.
The relief was hollow and fleeting, because even if she hadn’t killed her mother, her father had still abandoned her.
Once, during a yearly visit to the Thornbearer, Alora had found a report from her father detailing a death toll. She hadn’t understood it then.
She did now.
The blight spreads. A soul lost every other year, now a score more. The exodus failed. This is a plague beyond our ability to impede.
Laurent must have believed Delphi’s claim.
For a heartbeat she was a child again, trapped in a carriage, staring back at a home that did not want her, powerless to stop a storm she hadn’t meant to summon.
“You said I was sent away to keep me hidden,” she whispered. “Hidden from what?”
Caelum’s brow furrowed. “I wish I knew.”
If her power was so dire… why summon her back to Argyle after fifteen years? It certainly wasn’t to make her heir. Her father could have sired more children.
The day Laurent died, the look in his eyes had held too many unspoken things.
