A bright light filled the room, almost blinding me, then eased to the form of a woman I had not seen since I was much younger.
My mother.
She looked younger than I’d remembered, but my memory wasn’t reliable. Dark hair, not silver like mine—mine had come from somewhere else. Her eyes were the same as mine, gray, and she was wearing something practical, something that said she had come here to do something and had dressed for it.
She was looking directly at me, though that had to be an illusion, too.
“I don’t have long,” she said. “Memory spells aren’t designed for speeches. So listen.”
I couldn’t speak. I pressed my hand against my sternum and stood in the small stone room and listened.
“I built this tower,” she said. “Not your father. He claims it. He’s told you things about it and you that aren’t true. I can’t know exactly what he’s said, but I know him well enough to know that whatever it was served his purposes rather thanyours. I built it as a sanctuary. A place designed to hold you safe until the tower itself could confirm that the people who came for you were the people meant for you.”
I thought about the wards. The thorn barrier. The way it had opened for Malric and Thane and the way Malric had said it had sealed behind them.
“The tower would let through your true mates and only them,” my mother said. “That was the design. It would recognize them. It would keep everyone else out until they arrived.” She paused. “I knew your father would try to use this place. I knew he would see what you were—what you could do—and he would try to use you. He had already started to change. To think about power in ways that frightened me. I knew he would try to bind you to himself. To find a way to make himself your anchor, your source of safety, so your power would orient to him permanently. Not a mate bond. A trap. He was already working out the mechanics of it when I started building these protections.”
The disc was warm in my hand.
“I got in his way,” she said simply. “I found what he was planning. I destroyed what I could, and I interfered with what I couldn’t. I made my choice to protect you knowing the cost and I would do it again.” Her voice didn’t waver on it. “I am sorry I left you. I am sorry I left you with him. I believed the tower would protect you. I believed it would hold until someone worthy came through.”
My knees hit the floor.
I didn’t decide to kneel—my legs simply stopped functioning. I pressed my hand to my mouth to stifle the scream coming from me. My vision blurred as tears began to fall.
“I don’t know what he has told you, but you are not what he made you. You are not what he told you. You are mine, and I built a tower around you, and the tower has been waiting all thistime to do exactly what it was designed to do. It will protect you until you are ready to reclaim yourself. Until your mates come.”
I pressed both hands to my face and breathed in pieces for a moment.
“I love you. I loved you from the moment I understood what you were going to be. Everything I built, I built for you.”
The image began to dim.
“Mama,” I said, which was not a word I had said in years and came out wrecked.
The image disappeared.
I was on the floor of the small stone room with the disc in my hand and the shelf above me and the sound of my own breathing in the silence. The room was just a room again, small and still and patient, the single shelf with its book and the space where the disc had been.
I stayed on the floor for a while.
The cold of the stone came through my shift and I didn’t move. I pressed my forehead to the floor and let myself cry, which was something I had never been permitted to do. Years of a lie dissolving and the truth underneath it breaking through the reality and remaking what I had believed for so long.
She had built this. She had built this for me and she had died making sure it would hold, and the tower had been keeping faith with her ever since.
I was not what I had been told I was.
I pressed the disc against my chest and breathed, and let the room be quiet around me, and stayed there until I could stand.
Malric
My feeling of lightness was a welcome change from recent days.
That was the only way to describe it. The pressure that had been an ever-present burden for more years than I could remember had finally been lifted. The conversation with Thane in the dining room had cost me everything and given something back in equal measure, the way honest conversations with him always did. Now I was climbing these stairs with every intention of going into that nest and saying the one true thing directly to Aveline, instead of hiding behind duty and what I think I should be doing.
I was done hiding.
Thane was behind me, close, his hand solidly at my shoulder as we reached the landing. A small thing, but I had spent three years being grateful for that quality in him without saying so, and I was adding it to the list of things I intended to correct.
