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I decided I didn’t want to hear whatever he had to say about it. He had told me the reason already, anyway. He had said it this morning at his house. I loved her, he had said.

I changed the subject. “The crazy thing is why she doesn’t talk about the Easlings when she’s thinking about aborting.” Or maybe she did. Maybe I’d skimmed over that part.

“She knew,” said Damian. “Didn’t tell me about it, but she’d had a prenatal test done to find out if he was a carrier and he wasn’t.”

“And this is because you’re the cyning,” I said.

“We think so,” said Damian. “But it’s confusing, because her father was the cyning, and it didn’t work for her.”

Oh, wow, I hadn’t thought of that. I blinked, shaking my head. “But this is the whole reason she did it. So that her children would live.” But I thought about it, and she hadn’t said anything about that in the manuscript. Vincent had said that.

“Her mother actually didn’t get diagnosed until she was too far gone for any real treatment,” said Damian. “Her father didn’t want Opal to even get the test to find out if she had it. She thought he didn’t want her mother to know, probably because her mother would have thought that, as a cyning, his blood should have wiped it out in their offspring, and it hadn’t done that. Apparently, Hank wanted her to keep it a secret from everyone. And we did, really, until after he was dead.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

Damian leaned in, lowering his voice. “She and I talked about it. We think there may have been some pressure put on the shaman to keep calling cynings in the Hardesty line. He was never really the cyning. He was just named the cyning.”

“Well, obviously, but then, this whole cyning thing is myth and nonsense,” I said. “You weren’t called. No one is called. The ancestors aren’t actually looking down on us.”

He sat back. “You’ve been in the city too long.”

I sighed. “You don’t really think that, all along, the shaman has been naming the wrong cynings, but when it comes to you, he actually read the markings right and you’re the chosen one with the magical power to wash clean the disease in your children’s blood?”

He eyed me, picking up his beer glass. “Well, you clearly don’t think that.” He took a sip. “You resented it, anyway, the way my duties as the cyning took me away from you.”

I rolled my eyes.

“She did, too,” he said. “I guess anyone would. It’s like having a full-time job, except you don’t get paid for it, so you have to have a real full-time job and then you also have a wife and a family, and it’s… a lot.”

“She said you try to make all of your responsibilities equal,” I said. “That most people would prioritize their loved ones, and you don’t.”

“I don’t have the luxury of doing that. A cyning has to be a father figure to all the members of the pack—”

“You really think highly of yourself there.” I shook my head. But I guess I’d known this about him. This was the part of him that made him so serious and careful, this part. The part that thought he mattered, and that his actions mattered. It was part of the package with Damian.

“If you become my cwen, you’ll have to serve the pack as well,” he said. “Even in the moments you don’t think highly of yourself. It doesn’t matter. The duty is always there no matter if you feel you can rise to it or not.”

I decided to let that go. I supposed he knew better than me what it was to be the cyning of a pack, and—by all reports—he was good at it. Maybe I didn’t have to poke holes in the one thing he seemed to have succeeded at.

He did not seem to have succeeded in the mate category, or in the father category, or in anything else. He was a bit of a mess, my Damian.

Maybe I could sort him out.

No, I definitely could. The question was only if I actually wanted to.

“So, we don’t know why your sons don’t have Easlings,” I said.

“We do, and it’s because I’m the cyning,” said Damian. “Her father was not the cyning. He was always Hank Hardesty, out for himself, out to take advantage. I’m not saying he actively harmed the pack, you understand? He wasn’t a bad man. But he was a selfish one.”

“That can’t make any difference to a disease,” I said, but I was gentle about it. “It’s got to be something genetic, maybe. Something in you canceled something in her out.”

He sighed.

I went back to the manuscript, looking around for something from her about it.

Oh. There.

I hadn’t gotten the test for Edgkinson’s yet, but I knew the chances were really low that I’d have a healthy child. I didn’t believe any of that bullshit about a cyning’s blood being able to cure it for his children. If that had been true, after all, it would have happened for me.