In fact, just a few months before sending me on this diplomatic trip, King Magnus had awarded her a Medal of Honor from thecity for her extraordinary acts of service, including overseeing the midwifing of the baby boom that followed the Norwegian exchange brides the village had been granted a couple of years after “Bloody February,” as both the Scots and Irish now called the battle that had taken so many lives on both sides.
But before I’d left, Granni had only said, “Please let my daughter know I’ve spent the rest of my lifedeserving it.”
I’d passed that message on to Queen Sadie not long after our first meeting. Her eyes had teared up—but then, just as quickly, she’d shifted the subject to my twin cousin Scottish princes.
“Has it been decided which of them will inherit the throne?” she’d asked, as if the males she’d never met interested her far more than the mother she’d lived with for 23 years.
As I’d learned through my own years with my grieving mother, there wasn’t anything I could do about that pain. So instead, I’d asked the one question I knew Granni Claudine would want answered.
“Did you ever get the name Granni sent you—of your father? Through the Shadow King? She wasn’t sure, since she never heard back.”
“I did,” Sadie confirmed. “And he’s still alive and kicking, just like your Granni. Next month, we’re actually scheduled to visit him—and my half brother, half sister, and all their nieces and nephews. I never could have imagined, growing up in that small village, that my family would eventually become so big.”
She smiled, and I could tell her memories of that parent were far fonder than the ones of her mother.
“Are they, ah… like Irish Bears?” I asked awkwardly, wishing I’d done literally anything to prepare myself for diplomacy before I was unexpectedly assigned the role of brokering this once-in-a-lifetime chance at peace the Irish Bears offered us out of the blue, as long as Magnus and Tara sent me, and only me.
“If you mean, do they mate in multiples—the answer is yes,” Sadie replied with a teasing smile. “They call their setupsmauls. But can you believe the male maul bears also give each other bond bites? Declan and Tadhg were completely aghast. I don’t think they could fathom being in each other’s heads the way they’re both in mine. Andespeciallynot the Shadow King’s.”
She laughed, and I tried to smile along, though I’d never met her mysterious third husband and wasn’t sure what part of being in his head was supposed to be funny.
I was about to ask a follow-up question, but then something caught my eye in the distance.
A shining city. Like something out of a sci-fi novel, it had a skyline of pointed buildings that glinted in the sun, each one appearing to be made of green crystal.
And as if that weren’t alarming enough, there were people standing on the rolling hills in front of the sparkling green city.
Rows upon rows of people. All dressed in the same green robes. And staring straight at us.
“Um, what is that, then?” I asked Sadie, a thrum of alarm going off in my chest as I watched them watching us.
“Oh, that’s a… ah—I guess you could call it a hybrid third Secret Kingdom? Of bear and wolf shifters, but also a few other kinds from around the world.”
I scrunched my brow. “There are other kinds of shifters?”
“There are,” Sadie answered in the careful tone of someone standing on shaky knowledge ground. “My Shadow King calls themoriginal experiments. It’s kind of a long story.”
One I sensed I needed to hear. But first…
“Can I ask why what feels like the entirety of this third Secret Kingdom is out here, staring at us?”
“I mean, youcouldask,” Sadie said as we zipped past the unblinking, staring horde. “But I’m not quite sure I could give you a satisfying answer.”
Then, just like that, she pivoted back. “Anyway, I’m still wondering about your Twin Cousin Kings. So you’re saying the law is whichever one of them mates first becomes the future King of the Scottish Wolves? Do you have opinions about who’s going to be mated first?”
I did, actually. And even though I sensed the subject had been changed, I easily fell into one of Faoiltiarn’s favorite topics.
“It even has a pool that’s up to over six million pounds now! The town’s taken to calling it theTwin Kings Lotto.”
We stuck to more pleasant subjects for the rest of the trip. However, I was surprised when we didn’t stop at the smaller, but no less quaint, village of thatched-roof houses and a single castle that Sadie identified as the Irish Wolves’ Secret Kingdom.
Instead, Sadie passed by the village altogether and pulled the floating cart to a stop beside a tower in the middle of a sheep pasture.
It looked just like the kind that had taken me from the mansion that the Irish Bears called Wicklow Gate to their Secret Kingdom beneath Ireland.
“Tara asked to meet at a neutral location in The Above,” Sadie explained, hauling the duffel I’d brought with me out of the cart’s back seat. “We’ll have to get out and hike for a bit. I hope you don’t mind.”
I didn’t mind. After we popped out back in The Above as the bears called it, into a stone circle on an open seaside cliff, Sadie revealed that she had inherited Granni’s resonant singing voice with a slow, rambling rendition of that bittersweet Mary J. Blige and U2 song that King Tadhg had put on when he got in a slow dancing mood after my big welcome dinner.
