I stared at him, hard.
He breathed out. “I was sent ahead of the trials.”
“To do what?”
He dropped fully to a seat. “To root out changelings.”
“Changelings? There are more?”
“Yes.” His eyes lowered. “But you were the only one we found that night.”
That night, he’d held a sword at my back. He’d told me to pray to my gods. He’d been ready to skewer me. “You weren’t going to root me out.” I paused. “You were going to kill me.”
“I…”
“Don’t lie, Dorian. I could feel it.”
His eyes lifted to me. His lips pressed together. I saw it then, a certain deep truth. A truth based in winding, brambled history. Saw it in the way his lips went white. Saw it in the drawing together of his brows.
“I was sent to bring you back.” He kept his voice even. “And I did that.”
I leaned back, straightening. Fear touched my chest, but curiosity even more. There it was, the history I’d seen on his face. But he wouldn’t delve into it.
For my part, I hadn’t just wanted to kill him. I hadtriedto.
That was before I’d known him.
Then wasn’t now.
“You did that,” I echoed. My gaze dropped to the journal in my lap. “You taught me one history of Sylvanwild. Now I need to know the rest.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
We satin Dorian’s study. Me, dirty as hell, in the armchair across from him. He with a tome laid out on the desk, thick old pages split wide to dense, tight lettering.
He stabbed a finger at the page. “Carys was the first changeling. Well, the first one that mattered.”
Queen Carys, the originator of the trials. My chin lowered, gaze tight on him. “She was raised in the human kingdom?”
“Out of desperation.” He blew out a breath. “We fae were weak, Eury. The humans had total domain over us with their sunlit fucking iron.”
I sat forward. “Sunlit iron is real, then.”
“Wasreal. The formula was lost four hundred years ago and hasn’t been seen since. Carys saw to that.”
“What happened? She was raised in our kingdom, and then…”
“Taken back to Feyreign, once she was old enough,” he said. “Not in a show like you saw in the southern district that night. It was quiet. Carys resisted Sylvanwild, at first, but she loved power. Once she understood her own power, her magic, she came around.”
I sat back. I couldn’t blame her for that. “A changeling placed out of desperation, you said.” There was only one good reason the faewould place a fae baby inside the human kingdom. “The court traded her out for a human baby with the intent to make her into a spy, once she was grown.”
“It worked,” he said. “Her knowledge of the kingdom was deeper than any of us would ever possess.”
It made sense. I knew the southern district, knew the culture of my kingdom, knew the gods, the loyalties, certain secrets.
“And the human baby?”
He winced, said nothing.
