“The tapestry,” I gasp. “Your brother.”
“What else?”
My genius spasms, the creature surrounded by a stony façade. But there is something else in the façade, something I discovered that day in the training hall, when our magics collided, something so small, only a moth could fit into it.A crack.
“Avery,” he seethes, shaking me until my teeth rattle. “What. Else?”
Does he know that we know?
No, Lila would be dead, then, favorite or not.
“I don’t know.” My voice cracks with fear, something in me giving way. I almost wet myself.
“You must understand,” he whispers, pressing his forehead to mine. Blackness edges out his beautiful irises. Has he taken more of that black substance? “You have to understand the position I’m in. I must do this. To keep the kingdom safe. It’s the only way to keep the kingdom safe. You must tell me. Who are my parents?”
My genius flies in erratic circles, its legs brushing against the walls of that stony closet, sensing the vibrations beneath the surface: wrath and shame and disgust and fear and sorrow.
These emotions are not mine, I realize with a shock. As if in entering my mind, the king left the door to his propped open, a crack small enough only for faerie genius.
“The late King Gregor the Great and Queen Elise—”
“You’re lying.” He twitches, pulling his face from me though we still kneel, knee to knee.
Lila whines in pain.
“I am not a killer like my father. But you force me to do this,” he says. “You force me to keep her here, like this, for days on end until there is nothing left but a shriveled, blue shell of a creature. Then I will send her to the mines with four limbs of debt andspecial instructions—stamped with the royal crest—for the halflings to keep her alive at all costs. As the ash fills her lungs, as the dark and cold weaken her body, as her hands and arms tingle with the pain of a pick against rock over and over and over, even in her sleep, she will live. She will keep living for hundreds of years more and she will know it was you who sent her there. All because you wouldn’t tell me who my parents are.”
“I don’t know who they are,” I cry.
Maxian pulls back, cocking his head. He tsks, then looks at me. “You aren’t lying this time. Just like Lila.”
Because I don’t truly know, not really. I don’t know the name of the faerie who birthed him.
I sob, my stomach splitting with pain. “Please.”
“Did I say I was done?” He pinches my chin, and I open my eyes. “There you are, golden faerie.”
Yet his eyes fade in and out of focus. He is fighting to keep his attention split, just like me—between the magical plane and the earthly one. I think of the niche in Lila’s wall, the slow carving out of the thickest stones in the palace. I don’t need to take down the mountain before me. I just need to put pressure in the right place.
“Stop that,” he spits. “What are you doing?”
It started without warning. My genius wedges into the crevice in his magic, picks up a speck of rock, a shaving of mineral, then drops it to the floor below. It does this over and over, scraping away dustings of the rock, removing it on the most minuscule level, deepening the crack ever so slightly. It has become automatic, like breathing, and I do not give it all my concentration to remain undetected. In the dark well, I give my genius what it wants: permission.
Do it,I think.Do what you must.
Because what can a moth do to a mountain? It can erode it.
He shakes his head, coming back to me once more. “You haven’t heard the most important part.”
“What’s the most important part?” I gasp, giving my genius more time to work.
“Do you know which stable the silver mare is kept in? Yes, that one. From the coronation. You see, the mare may be Illusion’s, but the babe is mine. So, in a way, mother and child are both mine. Now, where is the silver mare kept?”
“Reign?”
“Come on now, you’re cleverer than this.” He pulls me forward by my face, and I fall off balance, into his arms. Maxian tucks me in close, rearranges our bodies so that I sit on his lap like a child. Cradling my head, my cheek pressed to his chest, he leans down, whispers in my ear. “The silver mare is in a very special stable to me. Yes, it’s an Illusion stable, but do you know why it’s special?”
He yanks on my hair, tilting my head up. My throat dries. “Why is it special?”
