Page 22 of A War of Three Kings

I pull him back up to his feet and wrap my arms around him. He presses his head into the crook of my neck.

“I am sorry. So sorry for what they have done to you,” I whisper back. We tremble in each other’s arms. Tears spill down my face. It is not enough to fix the hurt and betrayal between us, but it is a momentary truce. A beginning.

“Don’t you dare touch my daughter!” my father yells with murder in his voice. My mother grips him as though she can physically hold him back. “Get your hands off her!”

I put myself between my family and Aldrin. “You tortured him! You tortured his people! After you knew what they meant to me,” I spit at my father and grandmother. “How could you inflict such harm on anyone, let alone people I care for?”

My mother turns frantic eyes on my father. “No, Edmund—this isn’t true, is it?”

“It is true,” Aldrin says from behind me, his hands on my shoulders.

“I have seen the evidence of at least one of his men being tortured in this manner,” I say. My father says nothing; he can hardly hold my eye. “Am I just another piece in the game you are playing with these fae? Another way to break them? This is mylifeyou are toying with.”

I find myself leaning over his desk, snarling in his face. My mother glares at him with open hostility. Our family is a damned mess.

My grandmother enters the fray, taking my arm and gently trying to tug me away from Aldrin. “This was a necessary evil,” she hisses. “You will see that with time. This fae has tried to steal you away from us before, and he kept it a secret from you for a reason.”

A jolt rushes through me at those words. Aldrin drags in a harsh breath, drawing his hands swiftly away from my shoulders.

I have been told this story again and again in the last few days. A fae monster arriving to take their child, their baby, away from them.

“How old was I, exactly? When he tried to steal me away?” I don’t give them a chance to reply. “Because I was little more than a child when I was promised to Prince Finan. Or is it different because he is ahumanroyal?”

My mother shatters the room with a whisper. “It was before you were born, Keira.”

“Do not trust him.” A thick vein pulses in my grandmother’s forehead and the tendons stick out in her taut neck. “Do not let him put a wedge between our family. He would have snatched you as a child, as soon as you were born, if he could, and he will take others from us.”

“Take her as a child?” Aldrin roars, stepping around me. “Take her as a child! We thought she was a woman grown when I asked after her! Youknowthat. My sister saw in her vision the Lord Protector’s second daughter in her prime years. Lorrella usually had premonitions mere months before events played out, never decades in advance. I didn’t know you had no children at the time. I suggested a proposal for marriage. One that she could agree to or dismiss. Had you not reacted with an act of war, you would have known I was not trying to steal your women.”

I feel like the rug has been pulled out from under my feet.

Like the entire world realigns, because this changes everything. Doesn’t it?

“Besides, you are one to speak about stealing children, aren’t you, Naomi?” Aldrin snarls. I reach out a hand to stop him, but he has moved too far away from me. “Isn’t that what you andother pilgrims do? Steal fae babies? Don’t you come toourrealm to become pregnant toourmen, then return to this land before the father has a chance to know what he has lost? Don’t you call it a miracle conception and pull the wool over your people’s eyes?”

“What is he talking about?” Father growls at his mother, his face flushed entirely red.

I try to speak, but my throat has seized up.

“You’re half fae, Edmund,” Aldrin laughs bitterly. “You are what you hate so much.”

“Nonsense.” My father turns back to my grandmother, who has tears forming at the edges of her eyes. I have never seen her cry before.

“Let me show you,” Aldrin says conversationally, but there is a vicious smile on his face. “Your kind usually has an instinctual glamour to fit in.”

Another wave of bright magic bursts from Aldrin, searing as it cascades over the entire room. I squeeze my eyes shut under the sheer onslaught. I fight to drag breaths in.

It feels like my soul is being stripped away and remade. Icy fingers run over my body, thousands of them, turning into fine needle pricks. My scalp burns and my ears ache.

Gasps and screams fill the room, and my eyes fly open. Everyone pulls away from my father, including Aldrin, who pushes me behind him.

My father is the same man with his glamour stripped, but so utterly different.

His chin-length hair and beard are no longer flame-red; they are woven strands of actual fire, whipcords moving and cracking, giving off embers that sizzle in the air. I have never seen anything like it. No wonder it never sat neat or flat.

His skin has turned a deep shade of red, and each of his many freckles and large birthmarks glow like tiny infernos. Hisgreen gaze has been replaced entirely by orbs of flames, wide and staring at me with horror, and his ears are peaked like those of a fae.

Aldrin stares at my father, then at me, mouth hanging open, all his rage forgotten.

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