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But where I’d imagined a transformation—a bright flicker of cruelty, splintering through the mask—Stian only exhaled a quiet breath too sad to be called laughter.

And Erik’s birth father said, with a tinge of regret, “That’s my boy.”

52

The confirmation produced a deep, wrenching sorrow inside me.

I had trusted this man, had let him train me as a mentor, tend to me like a father. I’d seen in him a quiet, steady kindness I still couldn’t bring myself to believe was an act.

And yet those two words—my boy—contained such vast affection that they unsteadied me, reminding me of my own father . . . and all the terrible things he had brought himself to do on my behalf.

Stian heaved a weary sigh and turned to me fully. “Please understand. If only Rheya had sent you back to Erik when you first arrived, it would have been a clean arrangement. All parties would have gotten what they wanted.”

“All except me,” I said calmly. “I was just a pawn to be traded back and forth.”

“No.” Stian removed his spectacles, rubbed the lenses on his sleeve, then set them back on his nose. “I believe you are the only person who has never been a pawn to him.” He took a step forward, features softening further. “My lady—”

“Don’t,” I snapped, making him flinch. My voice echoed in the emptiness. “Don’t do that.”

Because after everything, I couldn’t bear the mockery of his respect.

Stian’s brow pinched with sadness. “You know I do not use the honorific carelessly.” He set his hand over the penny blossom brooch on his waistcoat—the piece of Vereen he always carried. “You shall always be my ruling lady.”

A new ache twisted my gut, because this was just one more betrayal, cutting deep.

“I worked as Queen Wilhelmina’s private healer back in Daradon,” he said in explanation. “Though she possessed royal physicians, she favored my service.” He smiled bashfully. “She had many affairs. But she favored me in that respect, too.”

She took a contraceptive tonic with every man except her husband, Erik had said. But it seems the dose wasn’t quite strong enough.

“And when you realized Erik was yours,” I said, “you decided to poison him into a state of torment?”

Because I knew, instinctively, that Erik’s nurse had not been the one to administer his dullroot. Erik had only wanted me to believe she had.

Stian’s mouth flattened into a line, guilt shadowing his face. “I have always been an experimental practitioner,” he said tightly. “I believed that a high dosage, administered from birth, might sufficiently remove spectral sensation without the painful side effects. A good friend of mine owned a dullroot farm in Creak, and he supplied me with all I needed.”

Creak. That was Zeke’s province. And that good friend must have been Zeke’s uncle, who Mara had tracked down at a dullroot farm. Who had withstood the Hunters’ interrogation to protect Stian even after all these years.

Belatedly, I registered his phrasing: Sufficiently remove spectral sensation.

“You wanted to scar Erik’s specter,” I said, incredulous.

Stian winced. “There is evidence that rebuilding a specter after scarring leads to more powerful control, and therefore a more powerful state of Wielding. All I ever wanted was to make my son strong. To teach him all he could be.”

But that wasn’t all Stian had taught him, I realized now.

Focus on me, Erik had said when I’d been panicking from the dullroot, his words an exact echo of Keil’s. Because Stian must have coached them both on how to bring themselves back from the brink of terror.

Which meant that at some point in his life, Erik had been gasping in fear just as I had, unraveling from the inside out.

“I pushed him too hard,” Stian murmured as an odd sadness settled inside me. Sadness for the young boy who had been deliberately afflicted with a chronic agony and had been expected to bear it. “Once Erik took the crown and began eliminating every person I had bribed to keep his secret, I think a part of him wished to eliminate me, too. Instead, he showed mercy. I was exiled.”

Stian dropped his gaze, his spectacles reflecting the faint color now rising up the dayglass windows. “Even after I made a life for myself here, I wrote to him often. For seven years, he returned every letter unopened.” He looked at me then, with warm affection. “The first night I received a reply was the night you arrived on our shores.”

I swallowed hard. “Erik knew I would come here,” I said in realization. “He reached out to you.”

Stian nodded. “He believed that your connection with a certain person would urge you to this land.” Keil, he didn’t need to say; a quiet unhappiness already glimmered behind his gaze. “Erik told me to protect you. To make you strong enough to protect yourself.”

“Was that before or after you told him about my role here?” I asked sharply. “And told him about the Banarrati smuggling routes.”