“Do you know what triggered it? You’ve touched Ronin and I plenty of times before and it’s never happened, right?”
“Right,” Cassandra admitted. “I don’t know. Both times, I was feeling out of control and overwhelmed.”
“Do you think you could do it again?”
“Not really capable of feeling anything at the moment.” Cassandra lifted her shoulder, non-committal.
“What did you see? In my memories?”
“I saw myself.”
Mireille’s poker face betrayed her with a slow blink.
“And my father,” Cassandra continued. “He was glowing. So was the man standing next to you. When you looked at him, I… I think I jumped into his mind. Hispresentmind. I could tell it wasn’t a memory. He was…in a cabin somewhere. Maybe on the continent? It… I don’t know how to explain it, but it didn’t feel real.”
Mireille cocked her head, considering, then laid her hands upon the table, and speared Cassandra with an important look. “That wasmyfather. In the Halfway. His name was Gareth Fortin.”
A bolt of icy hot adrenaline tingled through Cassandra’s limbs, and a multi-faceted voice stole through her mind. The one she’d heard during that vision she’d had when she’d been trying to un-obliviate her mother.
Find her.
At the time, Cassandra had thought the voice was telling her to find Adelphinae, the Fallen Goddess. Perhaps the voice meant a very differenther.
Mireille continued. “I never knew him in life. Our first meeting was when he showed me that vision of you as a child with your own father. He said I was destined to cross paths with you. That the Goddess had called upon me to help you.”
Cassandra’s feathers shivered. “Help me what?”
“Live,” Mireille said with a finality that echoed through worlds. “He told me that you are our only hope for salvation.”
Cassandra swallowed, her stew a lump in her stomach. If she had thought she couldn’t bear the weight of her burdens before…
But getting out of Mireille’s shop and into the fresh air, moving her body more than a few inches, even getting some food into her system… It had all helped. A bit. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that she feltbetter, but she did at least feel…not worse. Even with the terrible importance of what Mireille had just shared.
“If your father was a Fortin,” Cassandra began, “that means?—”
“I’m half-human.” Mireille said theatrically, and the entire tavern came to a screeching halt, utensils dropped, chairs turning.
Mireille smiled, summoning the closest group, who joined Cassandra’s table, mugs in hand.
And Cassandra spent the rest of the afternoon learning the sad history of Tartarus’s mixed heritage prisoners.
“Most of uswere locked up during or just after the war,” said Silas, the handsome, ochre-skinned Windrider Cassandra recognized from Harvest Night. “But I’d been fortunate enough to evade that fate for centuries. Penelope and I were well-hidden, I thought. Well past the danger.”
He ran a finger through the foam trailing down his mug as a sad smile ghosted over his lips.
“We weren’t, of course. A squadron of Imperial soldiers arrived at our farm, and I thank the Creator every day that my wife wasn’t there to see them haul me away.” He took a sip of his beer. “She’d gone to visit her Fae parents—she was full-blooded—and I was supposed to join her the next day to share the good news. We’d just found out she was pregnant with our first.” A tear plunked onto the tabletop. “And only.”
Cassandra blinked back her own tears as Mireille shifted in her seat.
The Other Place was nearly empty now, the flaming sconces the only source of light since dusk had fallen.
Silas was the last patron Mireille had conscripted to…what, exactly? Talk some sense into Cassandra? Prove that everyone had their own trauma to work through? Appeal to her martyr complex?
Damn the sly, copper-haired she-wolf, it was working.
Silas tipped his moss-green eyes up to Cassandra’s. “Eighty years and it never gets any easier. People might say ‘well, this prison isn’t so bad. There’s no manual labor. There’s access to resources.’ But the Koenig and his pure-blooded Brethren keep the best of Vestan’s gifts for themselves. And Wormwood guarantees that only we mixed-species Fae ever get selected as Harvest Night sacrifices. It’s the same fucking system of power perpetuating itself, whether on the Ethyrian continent or trapped beyond the Tartaran mists. What’s the point of authority if there’s no one to rule?” He raked a hand across his stubbled chin. “I’ve survivedallthat, made my peace with it even, and still the worst pain is never having known my child.”
He drained the last of his ale and leaned back in his chair.
