“The court is empty,” Kestra says. Not a question.
“Sent them away.” Another drink. “Didn’t see the point.”
“Of what?”
“Any of it.” He sets the bottle down. Picks it up again. Sets it down. His hands can’t decide what to do with themselves, and that’s more terrifying than anything he’s ever done to me, because my father’s hands have never been uncertain about anything. “The Seelie Court is ash. Did you know? Amarantha burned it herself. Her own court. Her own people. Because a stone she stole turned out to be a fake and she couldn’t bear the humiliation.”
“We know,” I say from the doorway.
“The Balance is broken.” He says it like a diagnosis. Like a doctor naming the disease that’s already killed the patient. “Not strained. Not threatened.Broken. I’ve spent three hundred years holding it together and it took one woman with a grudge and a match to end it in an afternoon.”
“You didn’t hold it together.” Kestra’s voice is steady and cold. Her anger valid. “You held it hostage.”
Moros looks at his daughter. Really looks. And something shifts behind his eyes that I’ve never witnessed before.
He agrees with her.
“Yes,” he says. “I did.”
The silence that follows fills the room the way water fills a closed space—slowly, completely, until there’s no air left that isn’t saturated with it.
“Whispen sees the shadow king uncrowned,” Whispen murmurs from somewhere near the ceiling, his light shifting to a deep blue I haven’t seen before. “Truths told too late. Truth on truth now found.”
Moros doesn’t even glance at the wisp. A year ago he would have killed anything that spoke to him uninvited.
“Your mother,” he says, and my spine goes rigid because he does not talk about her—not ever. “Your mother understood the Balance better than I did. She said it couldn’t be controlled. Thatit had to be...” He searches for the word in the bottom of his bottle. “Trusted.”
“So you killed her,” Kestra voice remains flat, unbothered. But I know her and she isn’t unbothered. She’s likely feeling the same anger and uncertainty I am.
Or not.
“She was going to dismantle the court structure. Open the borders. Let the Wild Court remnants return and the old gods to awaken.” He drinks. “I couldn’t allow it.”
“You mean you were afraid of it.”
His jaw works. For a moment he’s going to deny it, going to retreat into the cold, calculating king I’ve known my entire life, going to remind us that fear is a weakness and weakness is death and every other poisonous lesson he carved into our bones.
“Yes,” he says instead. “I was afraid.”
I don’t know what to do with that. The man before me isn’t the man that raised us. This one gave up.
I want to destroy him. My shadows lunge before I can stop them, three feet toward his chair before I drag them back. The Spear burns behind my ribs like it’s offering. I want to weep. My throat closes around something I will not give him. Not here, not in this court, not in front of the chair where he sat when he ordered my mother’s death.
I do neither. I stand in the doorway and breathe.
“The Wild Court queen entered the Academy an hour ago.” Moros stares at the dead fireplace. “I felt it. The foundations of Faerie shifted. The oldest magic in existence recognized her and the entire realm tilted on its axis.” He laughs, and it’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard from him. “Three hundred years of control. And one girl with thorns under her skin undoes it by walking through a door.”
“She’s not a girl,” I remind him, my ire growing stronger. I feel frozen as I imagine his death in my head again and again. “She’s a queen.”
“She’s the end of everything I built.” He looks at me. His limp hair stringy and his cheeks flushed from the mead. “And you love her.”
I do.
“Good,” he states, no hesitation. It feels odd coming from him. “She’ll need someone who knows how to survive a throne.”
Kestra crosses the room. His nostrils flare, she’s done. With the act, with the posturing with the balance and just simplyhim.
“Give me the throne,” she says.
