Page 49 of Fallen Court

“Tell me everything.” I watched Lach as we walked, the night fading away around us.

“When I was a kid, my mother’s penumbra was always around. We called her Aunt Stacia.” A boyish grin lit up his face at the memory, giving me a glimpse of who he’d been long before he’d risen to his own throne. My heart clenched at the vulnerability in that single smile. “We couldn’t say her full name.”

“What was it?” I asked softly.

“Anastacia.” The smile faded as his eyes grew distant, lost to some other place and time. “And then, one day, she disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

He nodded, eyes meeting mine for only a moment. “My parents wouldn’t talk about it. Whenever I asked about her—whenever any of us asked—my mother would start to cry, so we…stopped asking.”

Children always learned about heartbreak in the margins. I’d seen it a thousand times at the hospital. The child tucked in the corner while parents whispered or wailed, too lost in their own problems to notice. Experiencing loss without the benefit of understanding and growing older in the process, thinking we didn’t understand. Or maybe they thought it made us wiser.

Maybe it just made us into the broken adults we all became.

“That must have been hard.”

He took a deep breath. “It was like having my family ripped apart,” he admitted. “In a lot of ways, Stacia was my mother, too. You would have thought they were sisters. They completed each other.” He laughed, scratching the back of his neck. “Whenever Roark and I were fighting, my father would say, ‘Be like your mother and Stacia. A penumbra is a gift.’”

“What about your father’s penumbra? You mentioned they dismissed both their penumbras.” It was the reason he thought his parents might have been mates. I looked at his hand, realizing for the first time that his own signet was gone.

“I never met him. He was gone before I was born. I guess that’s why my father was always riding me about Roark, about how not everyone was so lucky about the companions chosen for them.

“My mother understood, though. She knew what it was like to be linked to someone your whole life, how they could be your best friend and your worst enemy. She had a lot more patience when the two of us acted out. She would tell stories about the trouble she and Stacia got into when they were kids, how Stacia always covered for her. The stories stopped when Stacia left.”

That was how memories worked. In the beginning, when they were too painful to bear, it was easier to ignore them, and then gradually, they slipped away and became the past we didn’t share. I understood why she couldn’t bear it. Some memories were too painful to relive.

“But why do you think this is your mother’s ring?” I asked, fiddling with its band.

“I remember it, and there’s obviously magic in it,” he said quietly.

The witches had told me as much. The fact that I couldn’t take it off confirmed it. That was reason enough to be suspicious, but it didn’t mean the ring was hers. I needed more proof than the memory of a child, especially since Lach hadn’t been a child for quite some time.

“Even after Stacia was gone, my mother wore that ring every day of her life. I have no doubt she was wearing it on the day she died.”

“And you never found it?” It was a careful question. I knew the basics of how his parents had died—killed fighting in a war to protect the court they had abandoned—but he hadn’t told me much about what happened after.

“No trace of the court remains. I went once, when I was feeling particularly self-destructive, but I couldn’t find a single scrap of it left. It was like it never existed, like the earth just swallowed it whole.”

My stomach dropped, beginning to churn. I clutched my middle, trying to ward away the queasy sensation.

“Maybe someone else found her ring,” I said quietly. “And somehow, my parents got it. Bought it in a shop or something.” I was grasping at straws. I knew next to nothing about my parents. They were just names on my birth certificate. There was no family to take me in, no possessions left behind.

“I suppose it could have found its way from Warsaw.” He tilted his head and studied me for a moment. “Or maybe it’s Stacia’s ring. They’re identical. That’s why the magic works. The stones are cut from the same jewel, fashioned and forged to be perfectly matched.”

My throat constricted.

“The first news I had of Stacia came after the Terra Court fell,” he continued. “I returned home to an empty throne and a letter my father had left me.”

Part of me longed to close the distance between us, to hold his hand, but I continued forward, not wanting to interrupt.

“In the letter, he confessed a secret they had kept from all of us, one they had hidden since the day they married. My father took the throne during a turbulent period in our history,” Lach said. “Every throne but that of the Hallow Court had passed to a new heir in the last decade. When the Nether Court passed to him, he was young and unmarried and wanted to establish his court in the New World. He saw it as protection from the bloody politics of the courts in Europe.”

“Bloody?” I repeated.

“Thrones are rarely given up. For several decades, violence befell the courts. It was blamed on humans and other creatures. But the truth of what happened was guarded carefully, and I’ve long suspected that many of the fae royals who fell during that time did so at the hands of their own people.”

“But the Wild Hunt,” I pointed out.