Page 166 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

“You asked for it,” I pressed on. “They were going to keep draining you until there was nothing left, Berian.”

He said nothing for a long moment. Then his voice took on the flatness I knew well. “Your mother made you worse. Mine was human.”

I could scarcely believe he was reducing this to a childhood squabble, arguing about whose mother was superior.

I’d never met his mother, but from a handful of unguarded comments over the years, I’d been able to piece the story together. She and our father had been a purely political match that both resented. The court hadn’t loved or even liked his mother before she died in a horseback riding accident.

I bit back all of it. None of that information would help. All it would do was make this worse.

“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked instead, not at all surprised by how tired I sounded. “I’ve done everything you asked. Everything. Since I was eight years old.”

“Hate you?” Berian let out a short, weak laugh. “You’ve been a drain on this kingdom since the day your magic came in,” he said. “Do you not remember attacking me? My guards?”

A memory surfaced, unbidden.

I was nine, still reeling from the worst grief of my life, still unable to sleep without waking up crying. Too young to understand what was happening inside me as my magic manifested too early from the stress of it all.

That day, the doors to the great hall were open. People were waiting. I’d gone to wish Berian good luck before his first public audience as king. All I’d wanted was a smile, even a nod from my brother on his big day.

But he’d ignored me. In my fragile state, the crushing disappointment was too much. I hadn’t understood what I was doing until it was done. In a flash, my magic had erupted, flooding the corridor with an overwhelming wave of darkness.

It hadn’t attacked, or really even moved. But Berian had scrambled backward into his guards and fallen, hard, onto his backside in view of all in attendance. One of the guards had dropped his sword with a clatter, and the other had made a sound that was not, technically, a scream but its closest cousin.

He started locking me in my room after that.

“That was an accident,” I said tightly. “I didn’t understand what I was.”

“You were a danger,” he snapped. “Still are.”

I stood abruptly. “I was a child.”

“Now a man with even less control,” he shot back.

Something in me snapped taut. I was tired of the road he kept laying out in front of me and the way my feet had always found it so easily. I needed to make my own, different path.

I stood up and turned toward the door.

“Owain, how is my Fae healer?”

Mine. I turned back around slowly, trying to steady my breathing before I reacted to what I feared was coming.

Berian watched me from the pillows, his gaze sharp and cunning despite his exhaustion. “The whole keep is talking,” he said. “A healer of impossible power.” The faint almost-smile again. “She’s the opposite of your mother. Not Shadow Fae. Full of light.”

My gut churned with a growing dread. Still, I argued. “We’re Nocthel. Not ‘Shadow Fae.’”

“And now the kingdom has a story it will adore,” he continued, not caring that I’d shared something meaningful with him because it was about me. “The tale of our love will only grow with time.”

Everything inside me went deadly still.

“She’ll do as a bride,” he said, as if selecting a new horse. “I’ll have the marriage papers drafted tonight. Thank you for bringing her to me.”

The room tilted. I heard each word with perfect clarity, and yet my mind kept trying to reject them, to rearrange them into something that meant something else.

Berian didn’t notice. “I’ve heard she’s been in your bed,” he went on, pausing to see my reaction.

I gave him none.

This confirmed that our message had landed precisely where we hoped. But the rules that governed other men didn’t apply to Berian. To him, a woman’s refusal wasn’t a boundary. My interest in her wasn’t even an obstacle, only another thing he believed his crown entitled him to take.