I recognised that look. I had seen it for years, lived through physicians dismissing it as fragile nerves. And I wondered if he had truly understood that my sister had been fighting a quiet battle inside her own body, trying to rein in the force of the flux without knowing what was happening. Judging by the way she clutched the gemstone pendant in a white-knuckled grip, it was not an easy task.
With every silent moment he allowed to stretch, the truth began to feel like something neither of us would want to hear.
“Dove, come here so I can explain,” Father said softly.
My own anxiety spiked, my leg bouncing despite my effort to still it. I drew a slow breath while he kept his gaze fixed away from me.
Her voice was hard yet thick with unshed tears. “You’re going to explain why you lied? Go on. Feed us more lies. Explain why you left us wondering why Jane barely sleeps. Why I—”
Her voice failed her.
“What does it have to do—” He paused, then looked to me. “I won’t lie. Can you tell me why we’re here?”
I told him about Mountheim Hall, about Malory’s suspicions after she believed a human had trespassed, and why I was required to stay.
His face slackened, concern carving deep lines into his features. “The ruler’s residence?”
Recognition seemed to strike him all at once. His head dropped, eyes fixed on his lap. Joy moved to sit beside me, a surge of mana rolling off her, brushing my skin in a soft vibration.
“Yes. Reagan’s residence,” I said, turning back to Father. “I’m bound to him until they can clarify how I trespassed.”
For now, I kept to myself that the sentence had already morphed into something else.
Father straightened, glancing around the room with a frown. “Are you bound to Thomas Reagan?”
Shock flared in my chest. “Caedmon Reagan. His son. Did you know his father?”
He leaned back into the pillows, his focus settling on me. “I never met him. He and his wife ruled this land when I met your mother. I remember his name from the times she mentioned it. Why would they bind you to him?”
“Why don’t you answer our questions first,” I said calmly, though unease had begun to root itself under my skin.
“Right,” he breathed, looking between us. A measured smile tugged at his mouth. “You girls are my life, and your mother’s. We would have done anything for you. You remember how I met her at the Groove men’s show. She asked me for a light, and I asked her to dance. That part is true. She told me she lived in Diligen and worked as a singer there. Or that’s what she wanted me to believe.”
He paused, shoulders rising in a bracing breath. We had heard the story before, how they met in that dim bar in Erhfurt. She’d come with friends from a neighbouring town.
“It wasn’t until she became pregnant that she came to see me and told me what she was. She said she wasn’t supposed to tell me, but she was frightened. Her family would suffer ifthey found out. She could do things I thought were impossible.” His eyes grew distant, drifting between Joy and me, as though he were seeing both the past and the daughters who had once trusted him without question. “Everything was a surprise to me. She brought me to where she actually lived. A place called Mountheim. We had to keep it secret. No one could know I was there. Here. And we realised that if we wanted to keep you, Jan, we needed to hide.”
My breathing had gone tight, but I couldn’t move. The hurt slipped into my voice. “Our mother was mageborn, and you knew.”
“I knew,” he admitted. “It was easier to live in Erhfurt, in our house. So your mother gave up everything to have you. She changed her name and hid who she was, so she would never stand out outside our home.”
“That’s why she died,” Joy said, her voice cold. “Isn’t it?”
His eyes shuttered. I saw the grief in every line in his face. “Yes. We were hidden for years. We had a normal life. And then we had you, dove.” He looked at Joy, who struggled to keep still. She was shaking. “You were a force of nature. There was a snowstorm the night you were born. Jane was still a babe.”
He gave us a pained smile. “But something went wrong with your mother’s family. Someone discovered our secret. A friend who knew where we lived warned her. We were preparing to leave the country, but we made a mistake—she came back here, to say goodbye to her family. But she never returned.”
No words came, but a knot of emotion lodged in my throat.
Everything was a lie. It wasn’t an accident that took her.
Eventually, Father went on. “It was a friend of hers who told me. She did it at enormous personal risk. She hid us and told us to stay where we were, or we would reveal ourselves and you would be taken from me.” His voice trembled. “That same friendstayed in touch for a few years, until the dust settled. After that, I kept us away from this place.”
My mind whirled with questions, acid coating my tongue. I needed more, needed to understand the truth behind Mother’s death.
If someone had uncovered her secret, it couldn’t have been a court official. They might have punished her and invoked their laws, but they wouldn’t have killed her. And more than that, Father wouldn’t have remembered any of it.
No. It had been someone else. Someone who might have been offended by a mageborn living beside a human.
