Page 213 of The Crown’s Temptation

She had not noticed it before. She noticed it now.

A small infant sweater, pale and carefully folded. A matching hat beside it, no larger than her fist.

Her hands began to tremble.

"Who is that for?" Her voice came out quiet.

He said nothing.

"Who is it for, Iavis?"

The ground beneath them shook. Just slightly. The thorns in the garden rattled against each other in the dark.

He made eye contact with her.

"My wife just gave birth to our second child," he said.

Fiersa looked at her brother as though she could not believe he had said it. As though she would have found a different way, any other way.

"I have moved on," he said. "And you should too."

“How could I move on when I thought they killed you? How could I move on when my other half lost her own child? How could I move on when I thought you had rotted somewhere without a proper burial?”

The ground beneath them began to shake.

"Why?" Dali screamed.

The glass in his hand shattered, every piece of it, the ale hitting the stone and the sound of it swallowed immediately by whatever came out of her next, a sound that did not belong to anything human, tearing up through the garden and into the dark above them.

Fiersa grabbed her brother's arm. A flash of wings and they shot upward together, into the sky, and were gone before the sound finished leaving her throat.

She looked up at the sky and laughed, her eyes wild.

An Ivakar. He had never told her that is what he was.

A wife and two children.

Dali stood alone in the garden.

She could not stop laughing despite the tears streaming down her face. She had not known she could do either. She looked down at her own face reflected in a shard of broken glass at her feet and did not recognize what she saw and did not look for long.

She brushed the tears from her face with the back of her hand.

"It doesn't change what we lost," she heard Maridale whisper in her mind. "All the groveling, all the serving I did. All the pretending. All of it still matters. We can still get what we want, and we still are owed revenge. All this did was add another to our list.”

She stood in the dark for a moment longer.

Then she turned and walked back into the castle.

Whatever came next would come next.

No Disappointment

TEORIN

He was in good spirits.

He had not been in good spirits in some time and he noticed it. Something had lifted. He moved through his chambers and did not feel like he was fighting himself to do it.