Well. That’s that, then.
I drink her lemonade and say nothing, because some things you don’t narrate at your sister. You just sit on the wall and witness, and start planning what to wear to the eventual wedding.
The cravingthat night is steak. Not blood. Steak, seared, and the twins apparently came with opinions about doneness, because the want is specific down to the temperature, medium-rare, and I make the mistake of saying it out loud.
Maximus has never cooked anything in his life. He has commanded the people who commanded the people who ran kitchens. He takes the information that his pregnant wife wants a medium-rare steak and treats it as a target, with research and preparation and a gravity wildly out of proportion to the task.
I find him an hour later in the compound kitchen with a cut of beef, the cast-iron pan Simone abandoned, and the expression he usually saves for tactical maps. There is smoke. There is a great deal of smoke. The first steak does not make it. The second is charred on one side and raw on the other, and he presents it to me with the wary pride of a man offering a device he isn’t certain he disarmed.
“It is medium-rare through the middle third,” he says. “I can account for the rest on the next attempt.”
I eat the middle third. It is terrible. I tell him it is perfect. He looks at me a beat too long and lets the lie stand, and under the smoke detector he tore out of the ceiling so it would stop interrupting his work, the most dangerous man on the continent is learning to cook a steak for a woman who hadn’t eaten in over a year until two passengers overruled her, and I have never loved him more than I do over a ruined cut of beef in a kitchen that smells like a small fire.
Chapter
Thirty
Mira comes to my study at dusk.
I’ve been expecting her. Not tonight specifically, but soon. She’s been circling the study for weeks, the slow orbit of a person around a conversation they know will change something they’re not ready to change. I’ve seen her in the corridor twice, once at midnight and once at dawn, pausing outside the door, her hand halfway to the wood, and then walking on. The walking-on had no fear in it that I could read. Mira doesn’t approach anything until the approach is right, and the rightness is measured against criteria she alone can see.
She comes in with the look on her face that says she’s ready, and the readiness has been building for weeks, and she’s done circling.
“The stone,” she says.
She takes it from her jacket pocket. Bone-colored. Small enough to fit in a closed hand. Warm from riding against her heart, where it has ridden since I set it in her palm after Thessivane and she told me she would look when she chose. She carriedit through a war and never looked. Tonight she has carried it into my study, because Lanthar put it in my keeping first, and the opening she is finally ready for, she is ready for in front of the man who brought it across an ocean for her.
What Lanthar asked me to carry, I carried. What happens next belongs to Mira.
She sits in the chair across from my desk. Her bandaged hands have healed in the weeks since the estate, the skin new and pink where the ward work burned it, and her fingers close around it with the care of someone who knows it could change everything and chooses to anyway.
“You don’t have to do this now,” I say.
“I know.” She looks at it. “I’ve been circling since Esme’s contracts showed me what inherited magic looks like when someone weaves themselves into it. The estate made me ready.” She turns it over. “Lanthar is woven into my mother’s line. That’s why the stone answers to me. But the love inside it was never hers. It was my grandmother’s. Isolde. A witch he met in the Black Forest, and loved, and left while she slept to keep her alive, and she died believing he was a wanderer who’d walked out on her without a word. My mother was raised on that same story. The father who never came back. The man who abandoned them both.” She turns the stone over again. “Neither of them ever got the truth. He put it in here instead.”
“Seraphina has him back now, though.”
“She has the man. She found him at the end of a war and made her peace with the father she has. What she doesn’t have is the truth about the one her mother lost. Why he left Isolde. What it cost him to let the woman he loved die believing she’d been thrown away. He never gave my mother that, because it’s the kind of grief a king keeps alone.” Mira’s jaw sets. “I don’t want her living on half a story. Not anymore.”
She opens the stone.
I don’t see what she sees. The stone’s magic is Fae. I can feel it from across the desk, a frequency that doesn’t belong in this compound, a resonance that comes from a different realm and brings the atmospheric signature of Thessivane, the old-forest weight, the silver-light shimmer, the sense of standing inside something larger than the building around you. The frequency intensifies as Mira holds the stone, the bloodline connection activating, the magic recognizing its own, and the recognition hums in my bones as ward-magic hums in my teeth, a sensation that says power operating, power responding, power delivering.
Keyed to Lanthar’s bloodline, and what’s inside it is for Mira alone. But I see what happens to her face when the contents reach her.
She goes still. The kind of stillness that isn’t empty but full, every capacity aimed at the thing flooding in, and her eyes move across the surface of the stone, tracking things I can’t see, images or memories or whatever Fae mechanism Lanthar used to store the truth of why he left.
It takes four minutes. The stone’s surface shifts color in her hands, the bone-white warming to amber, then to a deep gold, the Fae magic inside it responding to the bloodline contact. The room smells like ozone and old forests, a scent I recognize from Thessivane, the atmospheric signature of Fae magic operating in a space not designed for it.
I count the minutes. Counting is what I do when I cannot help and will not intrude. It has never once helped. I do it anyway.
At the end of the fourth minute, her hands relax. The stone dims. She looks up at me, and her face is wet, and Mira doesn’t cry, Mira has never cried in front of me in the months she’s been at this compound, and the tears are not grief.
“He loved her,” she says. “Isolde. He loved her the whole time,every year since. He left her while she slept and let her believe he was a wanderer who walked away, because the people who wanted to use a king against his own heart couldn’t use a woman he had abandoned. He chose her life over her knowing she was loved. And then she died without ever knowing, and he lived with that, and decades later the Veil brought him a whisper that they’d had a daughter, and he watched my mother grow up from across it and never let her see him, for the same reason and at the same cost. The leaving was the love. Both times.”
She wipes her face with the back of her hand. The gesture is young and unguarded and looks nothing like the controlled, precise woman who held wards at the estate and nearly died doing it.
“Seven hundred years.” Her voice catches on the number. “He lived with it that whole time. And the love survived all of it.”
