Elyria looked from the dwarf to the elder and back again. “Fuck me if I don’t want to hear the story of how the two of you became friends, but if someone doesn’t actually give a real answer to Cedric’s questions we are both going to combust.Why?”
“By the Five, yes,please.” Cedric’s chest felt tight, his flame sparking to life in his veins. “Will somebody just tell me why? What does any of this have to do with me? Why would you go through the trouble?”
“Because I wanted you to survive,” said the elder.
“Fourfuckinghells. Spit it out!” Elyria seethed, her hand seekingCedric’s as though she needed him to ground her, to keep herself from lashing out again. If she noticed how every surrounding person tracked the motion, she didn’t seem to care, and that made something settle in Cedric’s chest—something like contentment, or maybe pride.
Elder Larkess, too, watched the two of them link their fingers together, then waved her arm in the air as though to dismiss the watching crowd. Without a word, they dispersed, leaving only the elder and Zephyr still standing with the group.
“Why?” Cedric repeated.
Larkess’ voice cracked with emotion when she said, “Because I loved your mother, and your father,and you, you stupid, wonderful boy. Because you are the hope of this entire realm, Cedric.”
He was suddenly very glad to have Elyria holding his hand for the way the ground seemed to shift under Cedric’s very feet.
“I failed them both when it mattered most,” Larkess continued. “And I swore to the roots of this world I would not fail you too.”
Cedric swallowed, tightening his hold on Elyria’s hand. She squeezed right back, a pulse of warmth shimmering down the thread—support, sympathy.
“Who were they? My parents? Who were they that you were with us all that time?”
“I think you know.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
Silence stretched across the clearing. Even the birds had fallen quiet.
“Your mother was Selenae Orielle Vienna, the First and Only Daughter of House Nero, the Sunfyre Heir.” Larkess drew a breath. “Princess of Luminaria.”
Elyria gasped.
Cedric felt as though the world itself had cracked open beneath him.
“That can’t—It’s not . . . That’s not possible,” he managed to eke out.
Elyria drew closer, wrapping both her hands around his one, as though she cradled something fragile. Something close to breaking.
Just acknowledging that he might be mixedborn had been hard enough. But this? Cedric’s mind was already flooded—a full lifetime of memories and dreams and unanswered questions piling up, one on top of another on top of another.
“What’s gotten into you, my little phoenix?”
The happy, secluded life they’d led. The dagger his mother always wore at her hip. The nightmarish way it had all ended—in fire, in blood. The cultists who attacked them that night, who murdered Lysander Thorne in cold blood, who carved the scar into Cedric’s face... they had been searching for something. Or had it been forsomeone?
Was it possible that Lennie Thorne was, in fact, the lost princess Cedric himself had been searching for?
“Keep it secret, little phoenix. And when the time comes, burn it all down.”
His mother’s final words—spoken as she stood in a blazing cottage, dark magic crawling up her body—echoed in his ears. It had taken more than twenty years for him to remember them at all. Took him sitting alone in a moonlit alcove, his head in his hands, going over and over and over the truths revealed during the Trial of Spirit.
Cedric’s power swelled, that furnace deep in his chest lighting up. Magic scorched through his veins, ignited by the sudden barrage of truth.
For a moment, he felt that loss of control, that unbidden build of power, just like before he combusted for the first time. When the only thing that had been able to quell his fire had been Elyria.
Not fire.
“Not a flamecaller,”he thought, the next word already formed in his mind before Elyria sent it beaming down the bond.
“Sunbringer.”
