Epilogue
“She’ll do fine.” Auraelie whispered, giving Sebin’s arm a squeeze. “It’s not like you are abandoning her, anyway.”
He tore his gaze from his niece, Nikina, to smile at his wife. “Have you been scanning her future?”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need to scan her future to know she will be a spectacular queen. You’ve made sure the kingdom is in good shape.”
“I still can’t believe she’s come of age already. It seems like only yesterday we were holding her in our arms.”
“Papa, don’t start in about when we were babies again. Especially not now, when Niki is about to give her speech. It’s going to be magnificent.”
Sebin glanced over at his daughter. She didn’t have the raven black hair he had once imagined, her tresses instead a deep mahogany. But she had her mother’s emerald eyes. And her mother’s power.
“Did you scan her future, Maerie?”
“I’m not a child anymore either, Papa. I know how to be careful. I only scanned a single day into her future. Niki was nervous and wanted to know how everything went today.”
Auraelie squeezed his arm again, and Sebin sighed. It was hard seeing his little girl as a grown woman, too. He’d always worry about her. Her power wasn’t as debilitating as her mother’s, but she, too, risked convulsions if she scanned distant futures.
“You haven’t reached your majority yet,” he said instead of repeating the warnings she knew by heart about her magic.
“I’m less than a year away.”
“Shh,” Auraelie interrupted. “Nikina is starting.”
Below them, Nikina stepped up to the podium in the center of the room.
Sebin knew his niece was ready. She had grown up to be a compassionate, considerate young woman, just like Maerie. Nikina understood politics and the duties of a monarch. More importantly, she understood what duties a wise monarch must cede to the people. It was still hard to step back and watch her make her first official address to the joint session of the Council of Nobles and Assembly of Commons and know that his regency was at an end.
He didn’t care about the power. Sebin had spent most of the years since he convinced his father’s Council to grant him regency powers divesting the throne of most of its authority. In a way, Duirden had made it easier for him. In the months after Aster’s death, before Sebin made it home, the king had ignored all advice from his Council. He suffered manic episodes. Then he began making comments that Princess Chasa was not carrying the true heir to the throne and threatened to kill the child—possibly before she was even born—and the Council finally declared him unfit to rule.
Sebin’s regency over his father had transferred neatly into a regency over his seven-year-old niece once Duirden died. No one even considered appointing Chasa regent instead. But Sebin had never tried to cling to that power. He was happy to step back and let Nikina rule. He simply couldn’t believe she was already eighteen.
She was as much his daughter as Maerie, in Sebin’s mind. He knew Auraelie felt the same. Even with all they had to do—Sebin governing the kingdom, and Auraelie working to improve human-magical race relations and using her power to protect the kingdom—they had always made time for both children. He knew his niece had never felt unloved or unwanted, even with her father dead and her mother disinclined to make an effort.
Nikina looked up at that moment and her eyes met his. She smiled at him, then turned back to the men and women in front of her and finished her speech.
Sebin clapped with everyone else. She would be a queen Moial would never forget. He looked over at his daughter and knew that she, too, would be a formidable woman who made a place for herself in history.
The future he and Auraelie had worked toward every day had come, and it was even better than he had ever envisioned. Better than his wife had described from her visions.
***
