Page 36 of Cursed Shadows 2

Eamon frowns on it.

It was Aleana who brought her to mind. All this talk of friends we should meet, and I think it sad Aleana won’t ever meet Bell.

But at Eamon’s persistent frown, perhaps a bit of annoyance that I interrupted his reading of love and too much war, I add, “I was always with her at the High Court? She had that lovely purple hair.”

He tilts his head. “When we found each other?”

“Before,” I dismiss it with a shake of the hand and turn back to Aleana. “Anyway, Bell was my only friend when I was a child. A lordsdaughter—”

This strikes him. “Lord Lukah’s halfling child,” Eamon says with a nod. “Wasn’t she banished to the Grott?”

I bite down on my bottom lip. My nod is slow and grim.

Aleana asks, “Why?”

“With child,” I answer with a whooshing breath. “The child of a woodland fae. He vanished around the same time she was sent away.”

I let the implications hang in the air. It’s not an uncommon rumour that the woodland male was killed by the lord, but maybe he just ran off…

Eamon’s face is grim. “That’ll do it.”

The Grott isn’t a sentence to be taken lightly. Not all banishments are harsh enough to be sent there. It’s a brutal fate. So few who are sent to the Grott return.

What that place truly is, I only know from fleeting and curt references in scrolls I borrowed from libraries, or the rumours forever circulating the High Court, but it’s not enough—not enough to even let myself imagine what that place is. Do they have cabins, houses, castles, or just live in caves like the keenest rumour says?

The Grott is one certain thing. A punishment. The place of exile, for the banished, and difficult to survive.

I hear from the gossipy vines at the court that it’s a connecting maze of cave tunnels, forever damp, packed full of wicked, desperate and violent fae; that each has to fight for their own food, water, clothing, or even fire warmth. And that if one isn’t in a protected group of allies, then they best just jump from the highest point of the caves, because they will die brutally otherwise.

The Grott is a horror story, the kind that used to wake me up in the night with silent screams and sheets soaked in sweat.

Thatis where Belladonna was sent.

As for what became of her, “All I know is I never got a letter from her, and she hasn’t been seen around the Queen’s Court since—or any court.”

Aleana wears her shock like a tautness pulled over her face. The judgement in her eyes gleams as she whispers, “How awful to do that to one’s own daughter.”

The scrape of wood on the floorboards interrupts the moment.

Rune stands to push his chair closer to the hearth, then drops back into it. The grey of his t-shirt is dark with the rainfall he’s still wet with. He leans close to the fire as he tugs out the ribbon from his long, buttery hair.

“That’s the litalves,” Rune says with a sigh, and it’s a rough sound, like the only water he’s had all phase is the rain that soaks him to the bone, even an hour after he sought refuge in the Hall. “They claim to love their children more than our kind ever could, but the moment those children make any sort of mistake,” he scoffs, a half-hearted grin perched crooked on his pink mouth, “or decide to live their own lives or fall in love with the wrong one—” His sharp eyes cut to me for a heartbeat, but before I can react, he’s thrown his hair like a whip over his back, then snatched up a bottle of tavarak. “—then those litalf parents will destroy their own children.”

Keeping his thumb tucked between the pages, Eamon closes over the book. “It’s about control, but fuelled by a sense of honour, too. That part is often forgotten in favour of respect, when it truly boils down to image.”

“You agree?” I turn my slack face on my brother for all intents and purpose, and I eye him like he sprouted a second head. “You think our litalf parents don’t love us?”

Eamon leans his head back on the tall spine of the armchair he sinks into, an armchair so large and cushioned that it could easily swallow up anyone who sits on it, the one Aleana and I sometimes tuck up together on. But we’re on the couch, her legs stretched out, her stocking-clad feet rested on my lap.

Sometimes, it really does feel like we’re sisters, or we were meant to be. We slipped so easily, so effortlessly into these calm and comfortable moments.

“I think,” Eamon starts, “that their love comes withconditions that are less flexible than the conditions of a dokkalf parent.”

I frown at the thought of his mother loving him better than his father.

I only know father’s love—and as I think on it, I realize how afraid I’ve been to tell him about Taroh, because I fear the answer.

How much do you love me, father?

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