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“I saw an estate much like Waisley though also like nothing else I’d ever seen. I was on a bridge in a garden. I crossed the beautiful visage toward the mansion home and found a giant of a man. He was in some kind of white dress draped across his huge figure. He stood proud over my father and beat him near to death. Someone was screaming from inside the house, begging him to stop. I could do nothing to stop it myself, but at the last second, the man turned, and he saw me. I screamed and was launched out of the dream.”
Fordham, who was normally so stoic, looked truly shocked by her words. “But that makes no sense.”
“I’m aware.”
“You never saw Tieran? You never faced the three challenges with him?”
“No.”
“You never chose each other above all else?”
“No,” she repeated.
“Then… how are you bound?”
She frowned and looked down. He inhaled sharply, as if suddenly everything made sense. All the pieces of the last week fit together for him.
“You’re not,” he whispered.
“No.”
“That’s why you’ve been failing all these months. Why you seem off during training.”
She met his gaze head-on. She had told him. He knew the truth now. She wouldn’t back down from it.
“Yes. We’ve been faking the bond all this time.”
“How?” he gasped out.
“The spirit plane,” she said.
“Like the raven psychopomp in the forest during our final trial in the tournament?”
“Sort of. Zina showed me how to access the spirit plane and find the signature of another’s magic. I can locate Tieran and speak to him anytime I want. We faked the second test that way.”
“So, what’s stopping you now?”
“We have to exit our bodies to enter the spirit plane. We can’t be present and on the spirit plane at the same time. When we try, I end up slipping off of him or not making the turn fast enough. He can fly just fine, but I can’t lead him.”
Fordham nodded. “That explains so much.”
“I guess so.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and sank lower. She didn’t want to answer that one. “I think it’s my turn, princeling. You’ve asked a few questions.”
He straightened, as if forgetting they were still playing a game. “Of course. I simply meant that I could have helped you through this. You didn’t have to do it alone.”
Kerrigan nodded, her throat tight at those words. “Thank you.”
“We can still figure this out.”
“Fordham,” she whispered. His eyes were bright on hers. “Who is Dacia?”
He went perfectly still. She’d asked him that question once before in a mountain room when she could have had him, if not for her mouth and her honor. He’d snarled at her then. He didn’t owe her an answer now. He’d made it clear that he owed her nothing. Still, if she was spilling secrets, she would see how far she could push him.
“I hoped you had forgotten.”
She laughed acerbically. “As if I could.”
He clenched his jaw. “Dacia was my… lover,” he said, choosing the word carefully. “We had been together many years. She wanted me to properly court her. She was a noble and of marriageable age, and everyone expected it of us. But the curse…”
Of course, the curse. The curse that made him second-guess everyone he cared about. For he was destined to hurt them.
“She tried to tell me the curse was fake—I’d only lost my mother to it; what did I know?”
She winced at those words. She’d said something similar.
“Finally, I agreed. I told my father that I was going to begin courting her publicly.” He ground his teeth. “The next day, she was captured on the outskirts of Ravinia Mountain, helping a group of humans and half-Fae escape their prisons.”
Kerrigan’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“She was a revolutionary, who believed in the rights of humans and half-Fae. She wanted to see the end of their enslavement and torture. I had no idea. She never once mentioned it to me in all of our years together. But when she was caught, she was brought before my father. I stood there while they accused her of treason and beheaded her on the marble floor of the throne room.”
Kerrigan gasped. “Holy gods, Fordham.”
His eyes were empty while he looked back to that moment as it all unraveled for him. “She denied my involvement to her last breath, but it was too much for my father. He didn’t believe her testimony. It was the moment that he turned on me, sending me into exile.”
Kerrigan covered her mouth, horror on her face. She’d known that he’d been exiled from his people. That he hadn’t known if he would be welcome back. But not all of… this.
“No wonder you hated me on sight,” she whispered.
He laughed without humor. “I hated everyone on sight after that. I’d lost the woman I was to be with, my kingdom, my entire life in one fell swoop. I’d done nothing but care for her, and look at how the curse repaid me.”
