As I finally enter my parent’s suite after them, I wet my throat. “Dádhi, can you ask Shoshair if she’s all right?”
“Her illness was a ruse to keep you in Luce,” he mutters, clapping the heavy wooden door shut. “But you already know that.”
I roll a lock of hair around my unsteady fingers. “I do but…but I sort of made her truly ill with a fungi elixir. Long story short, she had an adverse reaction to the tonic, and I panicked and brought her to Shabbe. Behati healed her and promised to take care of her, but…” Shame has my eyes darting to the floorboards, which are the same deep-gray as the walls. “Please check on her, Dádhi?”
After a tremendously long beat, he says, “She’s fully recovered.”
I bat my lids. “Is she very cross with me?”
He sighs. “No.”
“…What about the two of you?”
“We’re not angry; we’re—” He looks toward my mother for help finishing that sentence, but my mother is adrift in some contemplation that’s bent her brows and glazed her eyes. “Fallon?”
She snaps out of her daze. “Was it Behati?” she asks. “Was she the one who mentioned a mate?”
“Obviously, since Meriam’s here,” he grumbles as though Behati and my great-grandmother were accomplices in a grand plot to torment him.
“Why would Behati lie about this?” I ask.
“Because if she’d told you the true reason your mother and I wanted to keep you in Luce, you wouldn’t have made the trip.”
Goosebumps riddle my skin. “What is the true reason?”
My father strolls deeper into the room, toward an emerald velour armchair in the corner, and drops onto its tufted arm. After stretching his legs out in front of him and hooking his ankles together, he finally replies, “A prophecy.”
“From how worried Mádhi looks, I’m guessing the prophecy has nothing to do with me finding a mate?”
“No.”
“Well, rip off the bandage already.” When neither speaks, I ask the question sprinting through my mind. “Do I perish?”
“Of course not.” My father’s voice snaps like lightning.
I glance at the swatch of blue beyond the skylight, expecting it to deepen, at any moment, to gray and marble with one of his temper-made storms. Sure enough, the sky is acquiring a steely luster, but is it my father’s doing, or is this the weather Konstantin mentioned earlier to deter me from leaving?
“Well, that’s a relief,” I finally breathe out.
“You kill someone,” he says. “A Glacin royal.”
Although the thought of hurting Konstantin did graze my mind earlier, I wouldn’t actually have gone through with murder.
Holy Cauldron, what if my Crow magic hadn’t been stifled, and my iron talons had come out, and I’d inadvertently dug them into the king’s throat?
My complexion must be bleak because my mother takes ahold of my shoulders and gives them a gentle squeeze. “The prophecy could be irrelevant, since the person you were foreseen killing is already dead.”
“Yet Daya says the prophecy endures, Fallon.”
My mother’s face pivots in my father’s direction. “We saw the sword go through her ribs.”
In spite of the ringing in my ears, I latch on to the pronoun my mother has just used:hernothis. I don’t murder Konstantin—somewhat of a relief. Nevertheless, I murder someone close to him who’s already dead? I run through the female side of his family tree until I come up with two candidates: his mother and sister.
I clutch my elbows, wincing when the sharp bones rub against my scorched palms. I let them fall back along my sides, but not before my perceptive mother spots the blisters and sets about healing them with a sigil.
As the bubbled skin smooths, I ask, “Who does the Cauldron see me offing? Konstantina or Alyona?”
“Alyona.” My father’s answer intensifies the thudding at my temples.
