For a moment, I could not make the letters make sense. They seemed impossible.
Then the full weight of it hit me.
“No,” I gasped.
Rev went very still beside me.
Aldric did not look away.
“She was meant to be bound to Lord Ashford,” he said.
“Caspian’s father.”
“Yes.”
The archive seemed to lose air.
My mother had refused Magnus Ashford.
And now his son had been placed in front of me like an attempt to rewrite history.
“She refused.”
“Yes.”
The word was gentle. I hated him a little for that.
“And they failed her.”
Aldric looked suddenly tired of the answer he had been carrying.
“Your mother did not fail because she refused.”
My throat tightened.
“Then why did everyone write her like a warning?”
He turned the page.
Beneath the report was a witness sketch of a basin.
Three lines came out of the water.
One pale.
One dark.
One bright enough that the old ink had been traced twice.
Suddenly, I felt dizzy.
Rev said my name and moved closer, but the sketch held me where I sat.
“She had three too.”
“Three answers beginning,” Aldric said. “The Council called it instability.”
“What did you call it?”
