He smiled. “Are you afraid of me?”
My eyes flicked down to the crown in his hand. “Only of the power you hold. But ofyou?No.”
General Hyton’s eyes gleamed. “Good.” He released my chin and stepped back. “What can you do, sorceress?”
I chewed on my tongue and glanced around. No one would hear me unless the rose bushes suddenly grew ears. “I…I can heal. See memories. Set water ablaze.” I swallowed, hoping I could quell the truth of the last trick I had learned, but my white fire forced it out. “A-and…control men…but only if they let me.”
As soon as I thought I had doomed myself, he chuckled in his throat and smiled. “You do not need sorcery to control men.” He turned. “Come. I owe you three answers and I wager that you would want to ask them in private.”
Reluctantly, I picked up my skirt and followed him through the garden. He had every motive to make a death threat—I was a powerful sorceress, committing high treason, and my life was no longer bonded to his son’s. What did he want with me?
He led us to the side of the palace and pressed on a brick. A low click filled the air and a stack of bricks creaked open—a door to the inner walls.
Right where General Hyton had just said someone could be waiting with a knife.
He chuckled at my incredulous look. “Between the General of the Lycaster army and a sorceress, nothing could hurt us in here.”
I held onto my suspicions but stepped into the darkness. Maybe Daigen would be lurking around in case General Hyton tried to pull anything nefarious.
Or the General couldreallyfind out what the sorceress was capable of.
He sealed the passage behind us and held the crown as he walked in front of me in the narrow hallway.
The paranoid General left his back exposed to a sorceress?
My first question was the only one that burned at the front of my mind. “Why have you not executed me yet?”
“I am not a wasteful man.” His voice was nearly as soft as his footsteps. “You are a powerful being in a world that is crumbling. My skills can only…do so much. The House of Hyton needs someone like you to keep it secure in these fragile times.”
He knew Fraleigh was weak. After Baron Elvar’s tirade about our failing economy in a war-hungry world, General Hyton needed a pillar to prop up Derrick’s new reign.
A sorceress like me was just what he needed if the surrounding nations decided to invade…but I had no collar binding me into their service.
I did not need to appease the General,heneeded to appeaseme.
I had already suspected the answer to my next question, but I wanted confirmation. “How do you know so much about sorcery?”
General Hyton suddenly turned a corner and I nearly tripped over my ankles to keep up. “My mother grew up in a manor on the base of Nordingaard. She told me tales of those who wish in wells and pray for the Man of the Mountain’s gift. She was fascinated by the mysticism of it all—the agelessness, the inability to lie, the magic tears.”
His voice hitched and he cleared his throat. “Forgive me, I cannot remember the last time I was able to talk about her.”
Was the General actually getting emotional? Maybe I could use that to my advantage and get more information out of him.
I smiled. “Your secret is safe with me.”
He looked over his shoulder and I briefly saw a glimpse of the boy who was once his mother’s “Little Diamond.”
“I miss her,” he said. The crown shifted in his hands. “I wish I could have done more for her.”
The pain beneath his quiet words made my heart ache. Despite looking almost identical to him, General Hyton had never been more like Riyan until that moment.
He was just a boy who missed his mother.
I could have had a dozen questions that could have been better than the one I had chosen as my final one. I could have asked him anything about Ilsa, or why he had been so cruel to Riyan at the military academy, but only one question felt right.
“Why did you never go back for Astrid?”
His eyes widened only slightly before he swallowed. “I went back right after my son was born, but the Bloodstone Fortress gates never opened for a Hyton again.”
