“I want to ask you a question,” I say. My voice doesn’t hide the gloomy direction of my mood. I feel her tense slightly, but she answers cordially enough.
“Alright.”
“Who lived with you at the manor, beside the guards?”
“My nursemaid, Etusca. She’s a dryad.”
The one who brewed her potion no doubt, keeping her drugged and helpless. I wait for her to go on, but she seems to have finished speaking.
“That’s it?”
“There was a cook and her daughter who would come each day, but they didn’t live at the manor.” I catch the wistful note in her voice. “Their family ran the inn.”
Hence her familiarity with the serving boy. Except she wasn’t meant to be there at the tavern. I got the impression she wasn’t supposed to leave the manor at all, so how would she and the boy have known each other so well?
“And your parents?” I don’t want to bring them up but still find myself asking. Surely, they hadsomeregular role in her life. Surely, she didn’t grow up in complete isolation from her family.
“Why do you want to know?” she says, her voice harder than it was a moment ago.
“I was wondering how often they visited you.”
“I saw them once,” she says, so quickly I almost miss it.
Once. In twenty or so years. I say nothing, unable to find a tactful or honest way to respond.
“At least now we know why,” she says, a tinge of bitterness in her tone. “All this time, I thought the problem was that I was too weak to interest them. I never would have guessed that the problem was that I had power…but it happened to be the wrong kind.”
Even being the daughter of a king and queen couldn’t protect her from the Temple’s authority.
The royals might control most of Trova officially, but when the peace treaty was struck after the war, the Temple was given its own territory to appease its followers. It basically runs its own sovereign state from its base in the holy city while also reaching its tentacles out into the rest of the nation, courtesy of its clerics sowing the Temple’s beliefs and building its influence, inch by inch. The end result is that the Temple is equal to the monarchy: the two sides to Trova’s seat of power.
Maybe the Angevires were looking for a way around that—a long-term plan for Ana. They could have been searching for a way to remove her celestial power altogether so they could finally reveal her as their heir without any risk of her accidentally showing her hand and condemning herself to death. But it would be a fool’s quest. Removing someone’s magic—rather than just suppressing it—always kills them. The body can’t live without the gods’ power; it’s the spark that keeps us alive.
“You met them, didn’t you?” Ana asks. I’m so deep in thought I don’t immediately know who she means until she prompts me. “My parents?”
“I did. Briefly,” I say.
“What were they like?”
“I couldn’t tell you much. Like I said, it was a very short meeting.”
I pray she’ll drop it. She wants a pretty portrait painted of her mother and father, but I’m not the man for the job.
“Nothing at all?” she asks, frustrated.
“Nothing,” I say with such finality she falls silent.
It’s for the best. I don’t want to lie to her like all the people in her life have already, but I cannot give her an honest answer to this.
She wouldn’t like it at all if I did.
Chapter16
Morgana
Something has put the Nightmare Prince in a foul mood.
Every question or comment I make is met with a few distant words or total silence. Even Alastor can’t coax a full sentence out of him. He gets the message quicker than I do, however, and stops trying to make conversation. It tells me he’s used to Leon’s surly behavior.
