Maeve didn’t blink. Didn’t look away.
“You know who that child is, Frejara,” she said.
The words hung between us, impossible and yet immovable, and for a breathless moment, I wasn’t sure whether the room would tilt or I would. Mathias’ fingers curled around mine – gentle, warm, and certain – where my grip had gone white-knuckled around the dagger, the pearl hilt still biting into my palm.
“That child is you. You are the daughter of Eleonora, the last True Sister, and Alaric, the first Speaker of the Old Gods.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Frejara
The air did not move. Not in the chamber, not in my lungs. It hung thick, clotted with the weight of Maeve’s words, as though the very stone of the temple itself had swallowed them and now held them tight in its walls. I sat frozen, my breath caught somewhere in my chest, the kind of breath you take before a wound is revealed. The dagger lay in my lap, my hands trembling around it, fingers white on the pearl hilt as if it might tether me to something real.
But nothing felt real anymore. Not the floor beneath me. Not the blood in my veins. Not the names and titles I had worn like armour for as long as I could remember. Frejara. General. The Heir Apparent. Daughter of the Sorcerer Queen. A blade forged in her fire. But if Maeve’s words were true – and somewhere deep inside me, in that dark, locked place where I keep the things I daren’t touch, I already knew they were – then I was never hers to begin with. I had not been born of fire. I had been stolen from it.
The breath that finally settled in my throat tasted of iron and oldsmoke, and with it came the slow, merciless ordering of memory. I recalled the day she consigned me to the barracks – eight winters past naming day – her hand on my shoulder only long enough to push me forward, her voice colder than the steel she told me to master. There was no heir’s welcome: only a curt command to earn what she claimed my blood had denied me. Victories brought no praise, injuries no glance; when I stood before her after a brawl, armour dented and hair singed, she dismissed me with a single sweep of her eyes, as though tallying losses before a ledger. I had long called the indifference strategy, a cruelty meant to harden her heir – but strategy falters when weighed against the possibility that she felt nothing because I was never more than a convenient claim.
Once I let the tide of memory rise, more surfaced like wreckage beneath retreating waves: her raven-dark hair against my straw-gold, her ember-lit gaze meeting the midnight blue of mine, the absence of any elder who might have traced a shared lineage in the shape of my cheek or the set of my jaw. I had tried to bury these inconsistencies in the grind of drill and march, yet they lingered at the edges of sleepless nights, coaxing a half-formed hope that the monster who forged empires in flame could not be the woman who birthed me.
Maeve’s revelation fit those lingering pieces with unnerving precision: the neglect, the secrecy, the long silence of my magic. I couldn’t be certain – how could anyone, in the wake of a life unmade – but the reason in her words coiled tight around my ribs. If certainty was a blade, its edge was already against my skin, the pressure growing with every breath.
My fingers loosened around the dagger, just slightly, just enough for the tremble to ease into ache, as if my body were only now catching up to what the rest of me already knew. I didn’t look at Maeve – I could feel the weight of her gaze without meeting it – but the words rose through the thrum in my chest all the same.
“You speak of what was done behind sealed walls and burning gates, of things buried and broken before I drew breath.” I turned then, and only then, to face her—slowly, carefully, as if some part of me feared the answer might tear through the last of what I still held together. “So how do you know? How can you possibly know all of this?”
Maeve didn’t answer right away. Her gaze lowered to her hands, the fingers curled loosely now in her lap, as if memory had drawn them back to an older grief. When she finally spoke, her voice was low – not fragile, but careful, like each word had to be eased into the light.
“Because the woman who marked you was someone I loved.” She didn’t press the words—only set them down, patient and heavy, as if they’d been waiting for the moment she would finally speak them. “She was a Mother of Dragna’toch, like I was. And when the end came for all of us, she stayed behind. For the child. For you.”
Maeve’s gaze dropped then, not in shame but in something more brittle – the kind of sorrow that time wears thin at the seams but never truly softens. For a long moment, she said nothing at all. Just sat there, her hands folded neatly in her lap, as if she feared they might betray the tremor building in her chest. And when she did speak, the words came slow, almost reverent, as if each one carried the weight of a life never lived.
“She should have come with me,” Maeve said at last. “I begged her to. But she wouldn’t leave Eleonora – not with the Queen’s shadow already on the walls and the child barely born.” She drew a breath that did not steady her. “She stayed, and I ran – not for lack of courage, but because she made me promise I would. And I did, with the few Mothers who remained. We ran before the sky turned red.”
The grief of those words sat on her like a second skin, worn thin – not fresh, not bleeding, but sunk too deep to ever wash clean. Her eyes turned inward, not to me, not even to the firelight on the stone, but to some other time entirely. I watched her fingers twist, then still, as ifremembering required restraint – as if letting it move too freely might unmake her.
“She knew where I’d go,” Maeve continued, her voice trailing off, like a memory worn smooth with use. “Said it with a touch to my hand and a look I’ve never managed to forget. ‘Run to your sister,’ she told me. ‘To the edge of the world, if you must.’ So I did.”
The fire cast soft shapes across her features, and for a moment she looked years older, carved in shadow and recollection. “Tirn’Vahl was the end of the world, or near enough. I thought if I placed enough salt and silence between myself and Dragna’toch, the Queen might never find me. But the dread followed me like a shadow with teeth. Every knock on the door set my heart to flight. Every traveller’s arrival sent me searching their faces for her sigil, her wrath. For years I lived like that. Fear in my heart and grief in my gut. I kept a candle lit every night for the one I left behind, though I never knew whether it was for Signe or for myself.”
Beside me, Mathias stirred – not enough to speak, but enough to remind me of his presence, his breath warming my shoulder. I glanced at him, just for a moment. His eyes were lowered, lashes catching the firelight, and something in his stillness felt like respect, or reverence, or maybe recognition. But there was a tension in him now, a faint tightening in his jaw, a flicker at the corner of his eye, as if he’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow. Whatever he saw behind that lowered gaze didn’t belong to this space; it lingered just out of reach, like a half-remembered thing that refused to settle. As if he, too, understood what it was to live with a shadow that never left your door.
“There were good days,” she said, after a while. “When the sea stayed calm and the winter held off, and the patients at my door were few and kind. I tended to small wounds, brought stubborn herbs in from the cliffs, and told myself it was enough. That I had built a lifewith what was left.”
She shifted, smoothing her palms against the fabric of her skirt, gaze flicking – just once – to the figure next to me, his arms still holding me steady. It occurred to me, but only for a moment, how accustomed I had become to their weight.
“Then Mathias came. My sister’s boy. Eight years old, shaking from the visions, cast out like a cursed thing. His parents feared him. Thought the Sight would rot him from the inside out. Said they’d rather lose a son than house a Seer.”
Her hands stilled, folding tight. “I didn’t hesitate for one second. I took him in. Fed him. Sat by his bed every time the Sight came and tormented him. I called him mine when no one else would. And for a long time, he was the only joy I allowed myself. And the only reason I stayed sane. Without him, I think I might have walked into the sea and let it take me.”
Beside me, I felt Mathias’ weight shift – not much, just enough to draw the thread of tension taut between us. His chest tightened as if holding a breath he couldn’t risk releasing. I leaned into him without thinking, unsure for a moment whether I was anchoring myself to him or if he needed anchoring just as much.
“Still, part of me feared that every time the Sight took hold, she would taste it. That the Queen would catch the scent of something old and stirring, something she long worked to burn out of the world – and come for it. But she never did.”
She fell quiet for a span, the fire cracking in the stone like old wood under frost. “The seasons turned,” she went on at last, “and I almost believed we’d slipped her net. Then a raven found my lintel – black as pitch, a strip of red cloth tied to its back. Inside the cloth was this dagger and a scrap of parchment.” Her gaze flicked to the blade resting between my hands. “The writing was Signe’s. I’d know her hand anywhere, though the letters were uneven, as if pain hurried them.”
Her voice thinned, the words steeped in memory. “She’d waited aslong as she dared. The Queen had spared her only because you were an infant, and she had no desire to tend to a wailing child or dirty her own hands with a cradle. Signe fed you, clothed you, kept you warm – and for that, Mowgara made sure she would never speak a word of it. She cut out her tongue. Said nothing more was needed of her voice.”
A shiver slid down my spine, slow and cold. I’d seen war wounds split skin from bone, heard men scream with their lungs half-crushed – but this felt crueller than any battlefield reckoning. Vicious, somehow. Not vengeance, not even warning. Just control, deliberate and absolute. A price paid to live – and the cost was the one thing that should never belong to anyone else: her voice.
And I didn’t even remember her.
