I didn’t know how I felt about that. About any of it. My head felt like it might explode, but the way my heart was beating, I might have a heart attack first.
“How come we’ve never heard any of this?” Ace asked. “Sure, we’ve lost our history, but how could our society seemingly forget that our own queen is phaanon?”
Phaan. I didn’t even make that connection. Of course, Titania would be phaanon, not galeon, if her own twin sister was the phaanon queen.
Avani smirked and doodled along the surface of the water with her fingertip. “Because Oberon ensured Mab’s name was erased.”
“Sounds like a scorned lover,” I said.
Avani’s lips curled up into a cruel smile. “That was one of the other theories to the war—that Oberon enacted a cruel and deadly war on Mab because she spurned him and the rejection enraged him.”
“If he couldn’t have her…” I whispered.
“No one could,” Ace finished for me.
A few raindrops struck my head and fell. More rain.
“How do you know all this?” I asked. Although naiads had longer lifespans than humans, they didn’t live that long.
“Water always remembers,” Avani said. “The memories remain in the molecules no matter the state, no matter the opinions of humankind.”
Okay…
I guess that explained her earlier comment about seeing a memory of my mother.
My mother…
“What happened to Mab?”
“No one knows. Not even the water. There are no memories of her after the war. There are whispers of a promise, though. A promise to protect her unborn children.”
Unborn children—me and Paul.
Large raindrops splattered the surface of the river. They fell hard and fast.
I glanced at the angry storm clouds above. We’d run out of time. The weather had caught up to us, and we needed to find shelter.
“What do you know about killing galeons?” I asked the naiad.
She chuckled and shook her head. “You’ll have to look within for that.”
Look within?
As in look at my own blood.
So, she knew my blood could kill galeons, too. The information wasn’t as secret as I originally thought and certainly not as secret as the king hoped. He had been in place since the defeat of the phaanons, after all. It was his orders that led to the destruction of all things phaanon.
“But you knew that.” Avani tilted her head. “What you don’t know is who’s responsible.”
Well, my brother was neck deep in this. But I didn’t know who he worked with or why he would resort to such drastic measures.
“Can my aunt be trusted?”
“Can anyone be trusted?” Avani asked. “You need to cut off all the heads of the snake if you want to be safe.”
“All the heads?”
She nodded. “Of the three headed snake.”
