Page 106 of Crown of Darkness
She cocks her head. “And what will you give me if I answer?”
No. “I’m not making any more bargains with you.”
“Then I have no reason to answer.”
This time it’s my turn to smile as I stalk up the hillside toward her. “Something just occurred to me—you were waiting for me to reach out for you, weren’t you? You’ve been sitting here like a spider in the dark, waiting for me to turn toward the Hallow so you have a chance to reach me.” I pause at the foot of the throne. “You cannot force me to free you and your kind. But you can persuade me to consider your argument. Well, this is your chance. Persuade me. Convince me you’re not a monster.”
“Oh, but I am, sweet child.” Curling her fingers over the arms of her throne, she leans forward, and it feels as though she grows. The shadow of her throne lengthens, sweeping across the island behind her. A vicious chill seems to settle. “I am the monster in the dark that my people prayed to. I am the cold, merciless vengeance they needed when their enemies stalked them. I am the beast that protected them when the bright and shining fae came with their wars and their armor. I am the Queen of the Whispering Dark, and I am the reason the fae feared the night.”
A little pit of terror curdles in my veins as she catches my gaze.
And then she leans back, and she’s merely a hooded woman with dangerously red lips and a smile that knows the fate of the world.
“We are all capable of becoming monsters for the ones we love, little queen. Even you.”
“I am no monster.”
“If you want to destroy your mother, then you must become the thing she fears,” she says in a merciless voice.
I rub my hands over my arms. “My mother fears nothing.”
“Your mother fears many things. Think, Iskvien.”
I open my mouth to say my husband’s name, but it’s not fear she feels for him so much as hatred.
So I think of everything my mother has ever done. The books she has burned, the border lords she has crushed, the way she stole the children of all those who opposed her and “raised” them safely within her court.
“She fears the power of men,” I whisper. “She fears the past.”
A slight nod.
But it’s not enough.
I am not my mother’s past, I am….
It strikes me then, what my mother is most afraid of.
Her future.
Her downfall.
Her ruin.
“She fears… herself,” I whisper. “A young, ambitious princess with the power to overthrow her.” The shock of it lances through me. The way my mother loved me once. The way her heart grew colder with every passing year, until she was favoring my sister over me and pitting us against each other….
She loved me and then she didn’t anymore, and I never knew why.
I never knew what I had done to displease her so.
And it all began in my eleventh year, when my magic first came in.
“Your mother fears a younger, more powerful queen,” the Mother of Night says with knowing eyes.
“But I wasn’t powerful! My fae magic is weak, and—”
“You made yourself weak,” she says coldly, “to appease a woman who would never love you. And while she may not have known what sort of changeling was placed in her womb, she knew enough to fear you. Power stirs within you, little queen. The kind of power that can make the ground tremble beneath your feet and the oceans writhe. And every time your mother looks at you, she sees a hint of it, although she doesn’t quite know why you make her uneasy or why she should fear you.”
It’s one revelation after another.
