His gaze flared with hurt, but the emotion subsided—or he pressed it down. Then he looked more tired still. “I had to get Maris out and keep you both safe. I brought her to the mainland, as far from the capital as I could get that night. Then I watched her walk off into the night, after having set an enchantment on her. The cost of your safety would be that I would not know for a long time where you were or who you were until you brought back Lightbringer.”
I stared at him in horror. “I was created for Lightbringer.”
Long before Fear had manipulated me—long before I had even been able to walk or speak or understand—I had beencreated to be Lightbringer’s vessel. There was a difference in knowing how old this plot was and coming face-to-face with the man who had kissed my mother tenderly and made me as a trap for a dragon decades to come.
“You were created to be a hero.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Being Lightbringer’s vessel is what I was created for. That’s why you said Lightbringer when you saw me. That’s what you thought of when you thought of me all those years, if you thought of me at all.”
“I did. I do.” He raked a hand through his hair, and it stood up wildly from his head. “I am glad that Lightbringer has returned, and I am glad to know you, Cara.”
“Just to go over this one more time,” I said, “you lifted the enchantment so that you could get my mother pregnant with me, and then you enchanted her to ruin her memory and to twist what shedidremember so that she thought you were a monster, and then you sent her walking off into the night to make whatever kind of life she could. Is that correct?”
His lips thinned as if he were holding himself in. Carefully, he said, “I had faith in Maris. She’s a strong woman.”
“You haven’t seen her in two decades. You don’t get to say what kind of a woman she is.” I rose from the table. “Thank you for telling me your half of the story. It filled in many holes in my understanding.”
I felt furious beyond all reason. I needed to get away from them both and process it.
My father had used my mother for a greater strategy, and she had suffered for it.
It felt like an awfully familiar thread that had not yet unspooled to its logical end.
“Cara.” My father had risen to his feet too. “I know it must be a lot to take in.” He cast an angry glance at Fear, perhapsbecause he could not bear to be angry with me. “I hope you’ll meet with me again.”
“I’m sure we will meet again. Given my relevance to the rebellion. Given my role as Fear’s hero.” I could not make that last word sound anything but ridiculous on my tongue. But then, I wouldn’t have tried anyway.
He looked as if he were trying to find words.
I turned my back on him and walked away, feeling as if I were still reeling. Fear, with a stack of books on his arm and a bundle in his hand, walked at my side. He wisely did not touch me or speak to me all the way back to the academy.
“I’m going to find Kiegan and Sera,” I told him.
He nodded. I could feel his gaze on me, his careful reading. I wasn’t sure what he found.
For now, I could not bear to be near him.
Twenty-Two
Fear
Ireluctantly let Cara go to spar with Kiegan and Sera. I’d prefer to keep her under my watch. But she needed to burn of some of her rage.
The meeting with Corbyn haunted me. I’d seen his face shift as he went from moral certainty and his expectation of a meaningful reunion to faltering in the face of Cara’s fear as he desperately tried to hang onto the version of events where he was the heroic father who had launched her to safety, like a boat on the sea.
He had seen sending her and Maris away as his own sacrifice. He saw nothing wrong in the way he created her to serve the kingdom.
Cara’s gaze had flickered to mine, hot and angry, and I had known some of that fury was for me, not for Corbyn.
“You should not deceive your mate,”Shadowbane growled.
“You should not force your mate back into a world she’s chosen to avoid for centuries, either,” I told him aloud. “But here we are. We’ve made sacrifices for our cause, and so have they.”
“They have not sacrificed when they have not consented. They have been used.”Shadowbane was so irritatingly committed to accuracy.“We did what we must, but do not soften it, clever thing.”
Shadowbane never meant it when he called me clever.
There were two things I had not told her: that I had caused her nightmares to keep her here in the Trials and that the bond between us could not be broken.
