“What?” he asked innocently. Not like it was his fault. Leucious Thorn had a way of getting on pretty much everyone’s kill list. And he’d once been at the very top of Devyl’s.
Some days he still was.
Letting out an irritated breath, Thorn shook his head and continued their conversation. “So it was Queen Bron who gutted him, then. I’m shocked she’d kill her own child.”
Devyl laughed bitterly. “His mother isn’t the bitchington what gutted him.”
It took Thorn a moment to catch on to what Devyl meant by that. When he did, he gaped. “What?”
“Aye, you heard me. Bron was the Myrcian queen and Daven’s wife, but she didn’t birth Kalder. She only raised him at his father’s behest and led the boy to believe she was his mother. Kalder never knew any differently—per his father’s dictates. After his father died, and so long as I lived, I was the threat that stayed her handfrom the boy. She didn’t dare harm him for fear of what I might do to her.”
Tragically, when Vine killed Devyl, she’d left Kalder without a protector. The boy hadn’t lasted a year before Bron had found a way to legally murder him. There’d been many a day when Devyl had wondered if Bron had placed her own son in harm’s way just for the excuse of slaughtering Kalder with impunity. He wouldn’t put it past her.
Women were treacherous that way, and none more so than Daven’s chosen queen.
She and Vine had had much in common that way.
“If Bron wasn’t his mother, then who was?”
That was the real rub of it all. And the true source of Kalder’s powers.
And Bron’s true fears.
“Melusine.”
Thorn choked again at a name Devyl knew he wasn’t expecting. “As in the river goddess?”
“Aye. One and the same.”
“And Kalder has no idea?”
Devyl shook his head. “None whatsoever.”
“Does Vine know?”
Crossing his arms over his chest, he shrugged. “That would be the question of the day, wouldn’t it?”
Aye, it would. Because if she knew… “Why would she let him go if she had knowledge of his real birth mother?”
“Indeed.” Devyl paused to give him time to consider the gravity of it all. “Whoever has possession of Kalder has a direct line toone of the oldest and deadliest of ancient powers. A power that Vine could use to destroy not only you, but me as well, and the entire world as we know it.”
Thorn cursed. “If Kalder has no idea what a critical piece he is in this game, then we need to assume that Vinedoesknow and that his brother is her lure to get him back to her side of the veil.”
“I’ll do you one better.”
Thorn scowled. “What’s that?”
“That his brother’s here to get our Miss Jack to their side so that she can deliver Kalder over to them with a bow around his neck.”
Thorn let out a low growl of agreement at the insidiousness of such a plan. “Double jeopardy.”
Devyl nodded. “Vine’s specialty. Either way, she wins and Kalder loses.”
5
“So she’s a doll made entirely of straw?”
Kalder scoffed at Muerig’s oversimplification of Valynda Moore’s inhuman state and bitter plight. A conclusion too easy to draw whenever one first met the woman and saw her poppet-like appearance. “Not exactly. She was a lady bespelled by a man who was in love with her and wanted to force her to love him. Because he didn’t understand the magick he invoked, her soul was accidentally pulled from her body, and her body destroyed before she could reclaim it. Fornow, to keep her from dying, her soul was placed in this current straw form to hold it safe and secure, but if she redeems herself, she’ll be returned to a flesh state so that she may live out her life as a living woman again.”
