The Emperor’s offer had brought it blazing back to life.
She tried to ignore it, breathed in the bitter-scented steam of the bubbling potion, the result of crushed leaves of dienswort.
The plant was named after Dienses the Jester, God of Merriment. Also a God of trickery, whose mythology was full of stories of altered appearances causing mischief among humans and Fae.
Dienses was one of the many,manyGods in Ethyrios’s long history of deities. The Jester dated back tens of thousands of years, a Lesser God of the ancient humans and one who ruled before the two species had discovered each other and the reign of the Fallen Goddess, Adelphinae, had supplanted them.
Dienses had, as always, gotten the last laugh when the Empire had suppressed the Fallen Goddess’s influence and re-instated the Fae High Gods and human Lesser Gods to worship.
High Gods, Lesser Gods, Fallen Goddesses. While Mireille grasped the concept of divinity, she wasn’t sure she believed any of them actually existed.
There’d certainly been no talk of Gods in anything more than an intellectual capacity during her ascetic childhood in the Oread Woods, a vast sprawl of evergreens and birches that lined the border between Cernodas and the Northern Territories.
The onlyGodswho’d been worshiped in the tiny cabin that Mireille shared with her mother Vivienne were practicality, industriousness, and ruthless efficiency.
She could almost hear her mother’s voice as she stirred the potion.
Gently, Mireille. You mustn’t get excited and ruin it. And donotovermix it. Be deliberate in your motions.
Her mother had taught her how to make many potions, poultices, tinctures, and extracts from the veritable bounty of nature that had grown around their cabin.
Mireille had learned at a very young age that the best way to win her mother’s affections—so infrequently given—was to complete her chores and tasks on time and without error. Any mistakes were met with swift reprisals and often meant being sent to bed without dinner.
And though her childhood had been calm, it was entirely devoid of emotion. No laughter. Certainly no crying. Mireille had a vivid memory of falling in their small kitchen as a toddler and banging her knee against a chair. She’d burst into tears and something else had awakened within her, her wolf attempting to come out. Her mother had smacked her so hard that her tears instantly dried and her wolf retreated with a frightened whine.
Vivienne had an irrational fear about Mireille shifting. As if she wasn’t sure what such an act would reveal. She hadn’t even taught her daughter how to do it; Mireille had learned on her own. Though Vivienne herself did go out in wolf-form to hunt every few weeks.
Mireille had spent the majority of her childhood learning to master her feelings, lest she suffer her mother’s harsh punishments.
There were only two instances when her mother had ever strayed from her own principles. When reason and practicality had abandoned Vivienne Valois and the choices she’d made were entirely based on emotions.
The first was anger.
One night, when Mireille was five, a visitor had arrived at the cabin. Vivienne had taken one look out the window and her face had drained of color. She’d hustled Mireille into her bedroom and locked the door.
Ear pressed against the wood, Mireille had heard her mother shouting at the stranger.
Mireille had never met another Fae, so the sound of the male’s voice, raised to meet her mother’s, shocked and excited her. She wanted to meet him too, didn’t understand why her mother wouldn’t let her.
Mireille had barely been able to make out what they were saying, though a few choice snippets stuck with her, even after all these years.
…needs to understand who she is…
…no idea how hard this had been for us…
…I’m sorry, Vivi. Truly I am…
After the voices had faded, Vivienne, eyes red and swollen, came to let Mireille out of her bedroom. Mireille had never seen her mother look like that before, and she was frightened.
“Who was that?”
“No one important.” Vivienne’s cool countenance returned. “Just an old friend. Someone I knew from Before.”
Before. To Mireille’s five-year-old mind, the word held the weight of a physical place. The name of a town, perhaps? The one where Vivienne had lived with her pack before she’d fled, pregnant and alone?
“You are never to ask me about him again. It’s for your own protection, Mireille,” Vivienne had pronounced before fleeing to her own bedroom.
The next day, Mireille had gone out to forage behind their cabin and noticed something gleaming through the needles at the base of a pine tree.
