Page 26 of A War of Three Kings

How can she blame Aldrin for traveling across realms to be with me when she did the same?

My grandmother suddenly turns on my parents, leaning forward in her seat and scowling at them. “Now, don’t you judge me for what comes next. Everything I did was for Ronan. All. Of. It.”

I can’t help letting out a laugh. My mother already looks scandalized, but my father is trying to hide his amusement. “Nothing shocks me with you, Mother,” he says.

Aldrin shifts uncomfortably in his seat, eyebrows pinched. “I already know I am going to hate this.”

“I took the pilgrimage with one goal in mind,” my grandmother says. “I planned to attend every forest party and nymph grove in the Autumn Court until I fell pregnant, but at the first one, I foundhim. Nissien. He gravitated toward me like a predator to prey. With hair of raging fire and eyes to match, red skin that glowed like embers and chains of golden oak leaves adorning his clothes. I was immediately in awe of him, and terrified of the imposing figure he cut. Power like I have never felt since radiatedfrom his being. Even the other fae feared him, but somehow, I came to forget that first impression.”

Aldrin nods to himself at her description, but I cannot drag my eyes away from my grandmother to question him. The knuckles of my fingers are white where they grip my skirts into bunches.

She lets out a long breath. “Nissien changed into high fae form when he became intent on pursuing me. He had such a gravity of personality that nothing else existed when he wasaround. It was thrilling, and I fell in love with him. I can’t explain it, but the love of two men burned bright in my heart. Then I fell pregnant.

“When a pilgrim is with child, she must run for her life. For her freedom. I knew this. They had drilled it into me, but I came to trust Nissien. He loved me, protected me—then he became my greatest villain.”

She pauses, and for a horrible moment, her lip wobbles.

“Nissien lost control when he scented the hormonal change within me. It drove him insane. He became crazed and locked me within a prison of his creation. I couldn’t go outside and feel the sun on my skin. He wouldn’t allow me to speak to another living soul. For any eyes to be cast on me. Nissien broke my heart. He shattered it into a million pieces, and it has never been right since. It is my fault. I shouldn’t have given it to a creature of that realm to begin with.

“I was imprisoned for days and days, but my magic increased tenfold as his baby grew within me.” She stops to give a weak smile to my father. “And it was because of you, Edmund, that I could break out of my prison. I ran and ran, following the pull of my moonstone bracelet and timing my escape for when Nissien was away. I thought it was leading me toward a portal, but I was wrong. Ronan had come to the Otherworld with his best warriors. He had gone against our king’s law and committed the greatest sacrilege against the temple of the Mothers of Magic in a mad search to rescue me before the portals closed, as no man can make the crossing. I hated myself so much in the moment we found each other, because I had lain with another man before him.”

A shiver runs through me. I sit on the edge of my chair, staring at her tightly coiled form and picturing the young, willful woman she once was. I think of my grandfather and the way healways looked at her with adoration and love brimming in his eyes.

Their passion never dimmed, not even when they grew old and gray.

I want to know that love that spans a lifetime. I want it with the man sitting beside me, but I don’t know if he still wants me. He couldn’t possibly. Not now.

“Ronan risked everything for me,” my grandmother says wistfully. “Nissien found us—I don’t know how, but he would have followed me to the ends of both realms to recapture me. I was his property. His slave. Hisconsort. And he became savage when he found me sharing a horse with another man.”

I half expect her gaze to shoot daggers at Aldrin, but she is too caught up in her story.

“Nissien reverted to his primal form of fire and fury. He whipped up a firestorm, shattering the trees to splinters and burning a wall of flames around us as tall as this castle. Nissien’s only weakness was that he didn’t want to harm a single hair on my body. He loved me, and in his own toxic way, he thought he was protecting me from the world.

“Ronan and his warriors were humans fighting this monstrosity. I had to make a choice. To decide which man would live and which would die, when I desperately loved them both. When Nissien pulled me away from Ronan and thought he was shielding me with his body, I stabbed him in the chest. I pulled as much power out of the baby as I could and used it to rip a bolt of lightning out of that storm, thrusting it into Nissien’s heart, stopping it forever.”

My grandmother doubles over in her seat and holds her face in her hands, struggling to breathe as sobs escape her. I have never seen her so overcome by emotion.

The overwhelming urge fills me to say something,dosomething, to take away her pain, but I am frozen to the spot, horror running cold through me.

I didn’t know she loved the man who sired my father. I never guessed that she killed him with her own hand. Even Aldrin looks devastated.

“I didn’t kill Nissien for selfish reasons alone.” Her voice is muffled by her hands. “Not just because I loved Ronan more. I didn’t want you to grow up in that world, Edmund, to be raised by a man who thought it would be okay to lock up his woman.”

My mother embraces my grandmother from behind and offers her a cloth to wipe her eyes. My grandmother saved her from her own family when she was young. I don’t know the full story, but there has always been a strong bond between them.

“In a way, Edmund, it was you who saved my life that day.” Her eyes slide to her son. “But without Ronan, I would never have had the courage to do what was needed. We returned to our realm and married as soon as we could.”

My mind whirls around and around, trying to comprehend the gravity of all that trauma. It doesn’t justify my grandmother’s actions, but it does explain them.

She thought a fae had come here to do the exact same thing to me.

“Why have I spent my entire life up until this morning looking human?” My father runs a hand through his hair, pausing mid-gesture and quickly tearing it away as though he has just remembered the flaming whipcords that were there minutes ago.

“How did I not even know I had another form?” My voice is shrill.

My grandmother’s usual strength locks back into place, making her back ramrod straight. “Edmund, you were born with peaked ears, red skin and flaming hair. That’s why all magicalpregnancies are birthed at a priestesses’ sanctuary. Within the first year, a half-fae child comes to realize that they don’t look like everyone around them, and they instinctively glamour themselves bit by bit to look human. That is when the mother and babe return to their lives.” My grandmother looks at me with regret. “The disguise becomes so deeply ingrained that their offspring are born glamoured. It works its way through the generations. The babies who drop their glamour are accused of being changelings by their parents, swapped by the fae. Some Mothers of Magic dedicate their lives to finding and raising those babies, but too many slip through the cracks and are abandoned to the elements and die.”

Aldrin cuts through the tension of the room. “Naomi, the man you have described is no fae.”

---