She sighed. “I want you and your friends to be right. But I don’t believe you will be.”
Perian smiled softly at her. “That’s all right. We’ll believe enough for you, too.”
She shook her head, but she looked more bemused than censorious at this point. “I won’t stay here.”
“If you’d like to visit occasionally, I’d like that very much,” Perian said earnestly. “Or if we could write occasionally, that would be nice.”
She sighed. “I make no promises.”
“Understood.”
Trill was pretty sure that if she intended no contact, she’d have said so from the start.
Brannal’s stomach rumbled, and this made Perian laugh and spring to his feet.
“I think that means it’s breakfast time!”
In the dining room, they found Molun, Arvus, Cormal, and the Prince already seated.
“I thought I was going to have to send out a search party after you!” Molun exclaimed, looking anxiously at Trill. “Is everything all right?”
Trill headed over to the chair that they’d saved for him and leaned in to kiss Molun on the temple. He did the same with Arvus, who gave him a soft smile.
“Everything is fine. I told you I needed to talk to Yannoma. I’ve done that now.”
Molun looked at him for an assessing moment, and then he said, “Does this mean we can monopolize you now?”
Trill smiled at him. “Absolutely. I always want to spend time with you.”
They had an enjoyable enough meal, Molun making sure to ask how they’d slept with an open invitation to everyone to tellall the ways in which theyhadn’tslept. Brannal and Cormal rolled their eyes, the Prince flushed, and no one offered as many details as Molun wanted.
Perian volunteered that he had absolutely no complaints to make about the times he hadn’t been sleeping, thank you very much.
Molun gazed at Perian with a sort of rapt expression. “It’s really just the two of you on this estate and you can have sex whenever you want? All the time? Anytime?”
“Pretty much,” Perian agreed.
Eyes huge, Molun turned to Arvus and Trill and asked hopefully, “We can get a sex estate, right?”
Laughter erupted around the table. Trill had never been happier.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Cormal
Cormal hadn’t really known what would happen when he showed up to ask Brannal and Perian for forgiveness, but he could say without hesitation that he hadn’t expectedany of this. There had been so many surprise revelations that his brain was still reeling—and yet it also made a lot of sense, like an image that had been slightly out of focus was suddenly sharply visible.
He really wished they’d come up with a definite plan for Kinan, though. If Yannoma didn’t know more, he feared that no other carnalion would have a better idea. But it still felt as though they’d learned a lot.
As Cormal got dressed, he marveled, “Life Magic.”
The Prince was nodding. “It feels like a fairy tale.”
“I think a lot of work must have gone into suppressing it,” Cormal agreed.
Even with all the evidence staring him in the face, he still hadn’t figured out that Perian and Trill were Life Mages until Yannoma had explicitly said it. It was their most revered type of magic, lamented and lost for centuries, and it existed only because of people who were half-human and half-demon.
The Great Betrayal, Yannoma had called it. He wondered just how many people were silenced to ensure the secret died there.
