Nanny Bess ushered us onto a ferry, and we scampered around her, all giddy with excitement. The ride across to the mage lands was filled with laughter, all four of us boys spending the hour-long ferry ride racing up and down the deck and playing hide and seek. As we pulled into the dock, we ran to Nanny Bess and clung to her thick purple skirt. An indentured servant, who probably should’ve hated us, Nanny Bess treated us with warmth and kindness.
After we disembarked, I stared at the mages as unease twisted my insides. They intimidated me with their strange mage marks and scowling eyes.
But Nanny Bess was bigger and stronger, and she moved with quiet confidence. Soon enough, I forgot all about the smaller-built mages and their scary magic; my attention became riveted on the food. Nanny Bess bought us each a sticky sweet roll, which we ate on our way to the stall where magical artifacts were sold.
In my uncle’s office, I shook my head, remembering my own infatuation with the stunning dark mage who’d sold us the memory glass.
Surlama.
As we waited for the ferry back home, a group of bear shifters approached us, and the big male embraced Nanny Bess. One of them, a young girl a few years older than us, broke away from the others and confronted me and my brothers.
“When will your father let my mom go?” she asked, tears in her eyes. “It’s not fair to keep her—”
“Hush, Marji,” Nanny Bess said, stepping between us and the girl. With her back to us, our nanny kissed the girl’s head as the ferry pulled up to the dock. As Justice, Noble, Honor, and I all stared at one another in confusion, our nanny waved at the group of shifters and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Just as it had then, my stomach opened to a dark, fathomless pit.
‘Those people are her family,’ Honor said.
We all knew it.
‘Why is she with us and not them?’ Justice asked.
I shrugged, just as perplexed as my siblings. We were still young enough that we didn’t really understand that Nanny Bess was a hostage and our uncle was her captor.
‘You should ask,’ Justice said to me, his green eyes wide with worry. ‘You’re the one with courage.’
So I did—as soon as we were on the boat, I asked Nanny Bess.
“Before you were born, when your father was alpha king, all the shifters lived on the island together,” Nanny Bess said.
I stared at her in awe. “All of them?”
She nodded. “But after your father was killed—”
“By those Crescent scum,” I snarled, repeating what we’d heard from Declan, so eager to fill in this fact and show my brothers and my nanny that I was smart and on top of things.
Instead of nodding, Nanny Bess pursed her lips and then took a deep breath. “King Declan said the other shifters were inferior to the wolves and were taking up too much of his territory. We needed to leave. When we protested being kicked off the island, the wolves came into our territory and removed us by force.”
Her declaration had shocked me and my brothers, and we stared at her, slack-jawed.
“Now, I owe a ten-year penance to the alpha king.”
Her statement gutted me then.
‘That’s not right,’ Justice said.
“We’ll make Uncle Declan let you go,” Honor told her, hugging her waist. “You should be with your family.”
I agreed…
But Declan didn’t.
Later that night, when I’d asked him to let Nanny Bess go, he’d slapped me across the face and called me stupid and naïve.
He’d said my brothers and I had let ourselves be manipulated. We were too soft, too loving. Too gullible. We’d trusted a traitor—
And then, when Honor yelled at him to let Nanny Bess go as well…
