Page 151 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
He fingered his glass as a look of memory clouded over his face. I kept my blockade firmly locked up—to let him tell it at his own pace.
“I told you about my own mother,” he said finally. “That she died before I could remember her.”
“Yes,” I said somberly.
“Well…” His jaw twitched, his whole face hardening. “She died because the queen of Sorronia murdered her. I’m almost sure of it.”
“What?”
My hand clenched in my lap. I’d always sensed some deeper animal rear its head inside me whenever he mentioned this so-called faerie queen. My biological aunt, apparently. But if I was going to be honest with myself, I’d always feared it was jealousy at the way he said her name. How he served her. How I had to share him with this faceless ruler across the sea.
Now, the animal in me understood what it really was. The way Steeler’s whole body had just tensed up, hatred pouring from him in waves…
I wanted toprotecthim from the queen. I wanted to shield him away from whatever she had done to him in a fierce, desperate kind of way I’d never even felt regarding Dyonisia or Lexington.
“How do you know she killed your mother?” I put my hand on his knee again. Whether we were friends or enemies or something in between, he obviously needed the pressure of a touch to keep him grounded.
Steeler’s body softened ever so slightly. He turned toward me.
“For the most part, Sorronia is a glamorous realm. The queen’s palace is a glittering spread of spires surrounded by gardens, and the inner cities are just as breathtaking. But the outer cities… they’re crammed with faeries who get by in squalor. Faeries with lower powers or who never matured and don’t have any powers at all.”
He rested his spare hand over mine, and his heat sunk through my skin. Or maybe that was just the heat of the flames in the fireplace that licked the air, the logs crackling and the sparks popping.
“I was just a bastard born of a homeless whore, they told me,” Steeler breathed out. “And the queen so generously swept me off the streets and took me in when some disease claimed her. The only thing I got to keep of my real mother was that pendant.”
His eyes shifted briefly to the back of my neck.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
My heart was sinking for him, even as new thoughts and revelations rocked this way and that in my mind. I wanted to tell him to never think of himself as a bastard or his mother as a whore, but I knew my voice wouldn’t stand a chance against the many voices who had told him this in his past.
So instead, I opted to ask him a question that would propel him forward.
“Did she raise you, then? The queen?”
Steeler gave a half-laugh. “Not for long. I’d been living at the palace for a couple years when I caught on to the whispers that always seemed to follow me around and learned the truth.”
“The truth?”
“The truth.” He nodded, then took his deepest breath yet. “Which was that twenty years ago, Her Majesty’s esteemed General of War retired at the ripe old age of 875. Rumor had it that she couldn’t decide whether to replace him with Lieutenant General Magees or Admiral Fennelly, so she went to pay a visit to Fate in one of Sorronia’s most notorious temples.” When my brows pinched together, he added, “Not to request a mating bond, but to ask Fate which of the two candidates was destined to acquire more soldiers, kill more enemies, win more wars.”
“And did Fate give her an answer?”
I couldn’t for the life of me see where this story was headed. I couldn’t even imagine what a visit like this mightlooklike. Was Fate a solid, flesh-and-blood woman? A spirit? A voice or a vision?
Steeler had lowered his head.
“Fate did indeed give the queen an answer. But that answer was neither Magees or Fennelly: it was a two-year-old bastard born of a homeless whore on the streets of one of the outer cities.”
I blinked at him in a sudden flare of shock.
“You?”
Steeler let out a dry laugh and took a swallow of wine. “Me.”
“But you were ababy. You couldn’t be a general ofwar.”
“Exactly why my mother probably wouldn’t have agreed to it. And why I think the queen murdered her so that she could have access to me without a pesky little faerie whining in her ear about it. Besides…” He shrugged, but his voice sunk into a deep bitterness. “Her Majesty has lived so long that a couple decades to let me grow up…. it was nothing to her. Not in the face of the armies I have been fated to conquer.”
