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My chest burns. “Angry? You have no idea.”

I want to hurt her. Her face shows no change, no reaction. She runs her fingers through that long golden hair and stares down at the flower.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” I bite out. “Everyone pretended you died, but I knew. Father knew. You left. I watched it kill him.”

It isn’t fair. Not entirely. He was killed at war, at the hands of Van Asten. But he was of too high a rank to have been in that kind of danger. I know some part of him likely sought it, even if he couldn’t admit as much to himself. He looked for danger, never wanting to live without her. And then the question I should not be asking, the one I don’t have time to ask, didn’t come here to ask, have always been afraid to ask, rips from the very depths of my broken heart. “Why? Why did you leave us?”

And then something strange happens. All this dark night, and in truth for many years, I have been heartless. I have not shed a single tear. But now the dam breaks.

It’s not pretty. It’s not the elegant tears of a fairy-tale maiden. My dress is torn and covered in filth and blood, only half of which is mine. I’m ripped open with dozens of scars. I collapse, falling to my knees and sobbing into my hands, my body shaking with years of unshed sorrow.

There is no sound, only the pleasant burble of the river, so I don’t hear her approach. She touches my arm, and I flinch away. She pulls her hand back warily.

She tilts her head, like she can’t quite understand my struggle. She is ethereal and otherworldly and oblivious. “I didn’t want to leave you,” she says. “But I had to.”

She kneels on the grass, folding her hands in her lap. She’s as perfect as the stone angel guarding her false grave—not a single blemish, no wrinkle or imperfection. She seems to almost glow from within.

“All your life, daughter mine, you have been locked in a garden of secrets. They have grown up like a noxious flower . . .” She caresses a poppy springing from the ground beside her. “And they have befuddled your mind with their fumes. You have been kept in the dark, and that is the price of your safety. But now, clearly, you are no longer safe.”

Her eyes meet mine, and it strikes me what a strange color they are—apple green so bright they seem to glow. I’d thought I’d made it up as a child, mythologized the woman I missed so much.

“I am aware of what you have endured this night—the trials of the Ridding,” she says. “You have been so brave. I also know that you have been visited by two of my Sisters—Saint Nona the Spinner and Saint Decima the Ender.” She inclines her head sympathetically. “I am the third and final Sister. I am Morta the Inevitable. And I decide how you will die.”

My breath catches in my throat. Morta the Inevitable. I have stared up into the faces of the three Sisters a hundred times in the school chapel, never imagining that the third was my own mother. I see it now, in the face I’d nearly forgotten—the flaxen hair and bright green eyes.

“How is that possible?”

“I fell in love. Your father was a kind, noble man. He understood life and death in a way other mortals do not.”

I can’t wrap my mind around this. “But . . . you’re hundreds of years old.”

Any meiga can earn sainthood, earning immortality through great deeds of magic during their mortal lives. Before tonight, I thought they were just stories, a way to honor the deeds of our forebearers. But I have been visited by three Saints in the course of twelve hours.

“I am,” she says, and gives no further explanation.

But then a terrible, terrible thought occurs to me. I look up at her. “You decided. For father, you decided how he died.” In war, at the hands of his friend, forced to leave behind a daughter who needed him.

“Fate is not biased, nor is it kind,” she says.

She is a venerated Saint. But, heretic that I am, I pick up a clod of mud and hurl it at her. It hits her on the cheek.

“You wiped snot from my nose!” I yell at her. I feel absurd, and I don’t care. “You braided my hair! You held me when I was scared at night!”

I don’t want her to be this lifeless thing, this person immortalized in story and song, painted in tapestry, depicted in glass. She is my mother, as flesh and blood as I am.

She blinks at me, almost seeing through me. It makes me angrier, so I pick up another clod, lifting it high, and she flinches. I charge toward her, and she pulls back farther, shifting backward.

“You’re not a myth,” I shout. “Not a fable. You’re a person.” The fist holding the clod lowers to my side. I’m so tired. I don’t need answers anymore. I need solutions. “Help me.”

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but she looks a little humbled. “I never wanted this for you, dear Nightingale. You were warned. I sent the ravens.”

“Yeah, thanks for that. They’re a fucking nightmare.”

My mother is a Saint. Not just any Saint—a Sister of Necessity, a Saint of death. The Inevitable. “Is this why my bloodmate wants to find you? Does he think he can cheat death further by finding you?”

She frowns, looking over my shoulder as though she can see Galvin, read his schemes. “No. I believe your bloodmate has a different reason for seeking me.” She looks back to me. “His father sent him into the den of monsters, Nightingale. King Marcel is ruthless and loves power more than his own child. He set young Galvin on a path to be converted into a monster much like his father, more wicked without while Marcel is more wicked within.”

I have no sympathy left for Galvin. But I believe that Marcel gave his heir no choice. In some ways, Lonan was lucky to be marked second. Better to grow up in an orphanage and then under the tutelage of my godfather than endure whatever indifference and manipulation Marcel employed with his son.