“I only know my father, and I don’t think he had anything like this. He still lives in Viterra.”
Elenya dipped her chin. “Autumn said as much. I find myself curious how a pixie obtained such magic. It is exceedingly rare.”
“I wish I knew.”
“Do you remember anything about your mother?”
Anna shook her head.
The older woman crossed her legs, an elegant, almost regal gesture. “I’ll admit I looked into things when I learned of your predicament. The children of Morgan are scarce in most races, but we do pop up now again in old bloodlines. Your mother’s identity could tell us a lot.”
“Oh,” Anna said faintly. “I have no idea who she is.”
“Then we will start looking, love,” Elenya murmured. “We may never find your mother, but I would like to help you search.”
Anna tried to quell her smile, but it grew and brightened until her cheeks ached. “Thank you.”
Elenya’s green gaze dipped down Anna’s body, cataloguing, scrutinizing. “How did you travel here?”
Anna thought back on that day five years ago. “I don’t know. I was in the moors, but I don’t remember how I got there, and there was a pain in my chest pulling me forward. It wanted me to find the mist. I—I can’t explain it, and things happened so fast once I arrived that I just…didn’t really think about it.”
David’s attention sliced into her, and heat crept up her neck.
Elenya studied him. “Lady Autumn says something similar happened to you?”
Wait, it had?
David didn’t reply, but his gaze on Anna remained sharp, a subtle confusion marring his brow.
“You never told me that,” Anna said to him.
“I wasn’t keen to relive it.”
He said it so begrudgingly that Anna narrowed her eyes at him, thinking of his refusal to fight the way Cathaire wanted, his insistence that she teach him about Morgan, his single-minded focus in the library. The man was stubborn to his core, wasn’t he?
“You fought it, didn’t you? The pain?”
He remained silent. As she released a small laugh, the edge of his mouth tipped up. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he finally said.
And yet that was his entire life.
Gazing into his eyes, a darker green around the edges than in the center, she felt her heart pinch again.
Something swooped low in her belly.
Almost like…a fall. Like she’d missed a step and no one was near to catch her.
Mere seconds passed, but a shift echoed through the chambers of her emotional core, rearranging them to make room for something new.
What was this?
What was happening?
“As I’m sure you’ve realized,” Elenya said, cutting into Anna’s spiral, “this magic is quite notorious. The empathic abilities and foresight are benign, though you may learn to alter emotions at some point. It’s the coercion that people distrust. Coercion is the crux of this magic. It’s the part you must master. You must resist the temptation to thread the magic into your words. As you grow more powerful, the magic becomes a part of you. You can’t let it take control.”
Anna stared at her lap. Hadn’t David said the same thing?It’s better to control it than let it control you.
She had never been good at impulse control. The impetuous, daredevil pixie traits were strong in her. Subduing that would take a lot of practice.
