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“You wouldn’t be able to decipher this, then, would you, lass?” the king prompted.
It took her a while to drag her enmity from Finian’s eyes. The king pointed to the manual. She saw the pages and visibly started. She got to her feet in shock.
“Why, that is my mother’s.” Finian let the pages go when she reached for them. “Where did you get this? ’Tis Mama’s.”
“I know,” he said thickly.
She looked up at him, her face pale amid her dark flaming hair. “You know? Where did you get it?”
“From my conduit. Red.”
If possible, she looked even more stunned. Her free hand swung out slowly, as if it were moving through water, until it made contact with the table behind her.
“Red?” she whispered. “But…that’s my father.”
“He was a spy,” Finian explained.
They were standing, he by the wall, Senna by the table, where she’d been when the realizations hit her. The king had left them alone. The room was small, but warm. That is all Senna was certain she knew in the whole world, except that Finian was holding her gaze and not letting go.
“Your father was an Englishman,” he said in that solid, earthy voice, slowing her down, pulling her back when her body was ready to float away, “but also a spy against King Edward and his ambitions. And,” he added, “I suspect your mother was, too.”
“Spies,” she whispered, unable to acclimate to this knowledge in a normal tone of voice. This required whispers, like all secrets do. “I don’t understand.”
But she did. Some small, young part of herself understood exactly what he meant. Too many nights trying not to listen to arguments that didn’t sound like debtors’ arguments. Too many explanations that never came. Too many Scotsmen.
“My mother was Scottish,” she said, as if that would explain…what? “Her mother—my grandmother—was sent to marry an Englishman. The family had just enough noble blood to be commanded about suchly. But my mother always called on Scottish saints to reprimand me, and claimed Scotland as her own. And my father—” Her voice broke. “My father always said, ‘As falls Elisabeth, so fall I.’”
Her eyes filled with tears. Finian’s face shimmered through them. “Why did they not tell me?”
He watched her for a long minute before speaking, and while she waited, her heart slowed. She felt calmer. “Perhaps they didn’t want you to get caught up in it,” he finally suggested. “Get hurt by it.”
“Oh,” she said sadly, “I do think that has already occurred.”
“Yer mam is dead, Senna.”
“I assumed as much,” she said with as much cold dignity as she could wrap around her. No tears. Not for being left, never again. “Twenty years have passed. ’Tis quite reasonable to assume she might have—”
“She died trying to escape.”
She looked away. Angled her eyes so they regarded the one part of the floor uncovered by rushes, underneath the king’s chair, where he’d kicked them away. The stone looked cold.
“Escape from where?”
“From Rardove.”
She wobbled. Her knees went weak. A dull thrumming started in her head. She started sliding down the wall. Her spine bumped over the uneven rocks. “No. Not Rardove.”
“Aye. Rardove.” He pulled her to her feet, brushed her bottom off for her, and sat her on a bench. “And now, mayhap because of what your mother and father did, the king of England is marching for Ireland.”
She looked up, startled. “King Edward? Marching here?”
“Aye.”
“That’s madness,” she spat, for some reason furious. “Cannot one war be enough for him?”
“Not when those are at stake.” Finian indicated the manual. “The secret of the Wishmés. Look.”
She shook her head.
