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I go still. “What about Angie?” I murmur, trying to think of the last time I saw her on the farm.

He looks at me then, and his eyes are so honest it hurts. “She’s Crawly’s daughter.” His face wrinkles as he says it. “We don’t have the same father.” His gaze moves to the wall. “Yet both our fathers are monsters.” My brows furrow.

“I don’t understand?” I admit. Arlo glances at me.

“My father didn’t live and grow up on the farm; neither did my mother,” he says bitterly. “My mother was sent to Purgatory for killing him,” he admits.

“She murdered your father?” I ask. Trying to picture sweet Marian hurting anyone seems impossible.

Arlo nods slowly. “He raped her. I am the bastard child of a rapist.” He laughs, but the sound is haunted.

My breath catches. “Arlo—”

“I know she was just trying to protect us from the truth. To protect Angie.” His jaw tightens. “I used to hate her for never speaking about my father when I would ask. I assumed it was grief. Now I just feel guilty for constantly bringing up something so painful for her. Then finding out about Mr. Crawly.”

I reach for his hand without thinking. His fingers close around mine, warm and calloused, the grip of a boy who hauled crates and pulled weeds and fought for every breath of his life.

“I couldn’t imagine having to tell a child he came from violence. But it shows she holds no blame toward you. She loves you, Arlo. Just as she loves Angie.”

“Mom always said we were the best thing that happened to her. She just left out the part that we were also the worst thing that happened to her as well,” he murmurs, staring off vacantly.

I look toward the fire and feel the familiar pull of my own ghosts.

“Some secrets need to be kept, Arlo, for the protection of the ones we love,” I say.

“I see that now. Some secrets destroy everything we thought we knew.”

His words make me wonder if he is just referring to his mother.

“Is that why you kept yours? Were you worried they would come for you if I knew?” he asks, not with accusation, but with a kind of weary wonder.

“I promised my mother.”

I hesitate, the bond in my chest thrumming with a warning I don’t fully understand.

“But that’s not why I couldn’t tell you, Arlo. I watched dozens of guards slaughter half a town after the Arcanum was burned. The sky was still filled with clouds of black smoke, and they said anyone who hid the mages was a traitor. Just because they thought the mages were dead doesn’t mean I wasn’t still a fugitive. Anyone who hid or protected me knowingly could have been executed.”

“I’m so sorry you had to carry that alone,” he says, his hand finding my knee and squeezing. “Eagan has been telling me bits and pieces. About the mages, the curse they left behind. It’s pretty messed up.”

“It is, and I think the curse and my magic are tangled together. That what broke the world also broke something in the people who survived it.”

“You think you can break the curse?”

If only he could understand I’m part of the curse. That it’s not just Kylian’s life at stake.

“I’ve thought about the day my mother died a lot, and I know with certainty the real reason she wanted us to remain hidden. The mages knew the world was corrupt, and that the only way to fix it was by getting rid of those that threatened humanity’s existence. So they sacrificed their lives to remove the kings that were destroying the world and to give their daughters the power to make things right again.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility for anyone.”

“The remaining mages are all that can free the new kings of their curses. King Xavian knew. He said the surviving kingdoms are here because their mage’s bloodline still lives.”

He nods slowly, accepting this without demanding more. “So there are more of you. It isn’t just you and your sister?”

I nod quietly, my mind running over memories of children I grew up near. “There were so few of us, and outside of the full-moon gatherings, we were never allowed to play with the other girls. Sable and I really only ever had each other.”

“When we go back,” he says, and the words make my stomach sink, “I want to rebuild the farm. Not Crawly’s farm. Ours. Plant something that doesn’t belong to anyone but us. Maybe back in the woods you grew up in. We’ll find Sable and bring her home, and my mom would be there, far away from Crawly, and . . . Angie maybe.” His voice breaks on her name. “There would be a place for all of us.”

When we go back.