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“What chase?”
“The one to danger.”
Good gods.
Not this again.
“Father—”
Ansley lifted a hand and waved it in his son’s direction. “Let’s not argue. You say she was quick-witted in the stables?”
“Quick-witted” did not cover it.
“I’ve never met a woman with a sharper wit. It’s quite the wonder I don’t have cuts all over me.”
Ansley watched his son closely.
Then he noted quietly, “She pleases you.”
If the woman was half as clever in bed as she was out of it, she was to be the perfect wife.
He did not share that.
He stated, “She’s lovely to look at and she has the spirit of a bull.”
“That’s an odd comparison.”
“Bulls are stubborn. I’d pit her against any bull breathing, I don’t care how sharp their horns. She’d best it by just not giving up.”
His father smiled. “In other words, she pleases you.”
“Her father is a toad.”
Ansley’s chest expanded with the big breath he took, and then he released it. “Even before he lost the stature he built for himself conniving and borderline thieving and making himself richer off the hides of his friends and acquaintances, Edgar Dawes was a man with whom you watched your back.” A pause before he asked, “You heard them have words?”
“The exchange I witnessed was brief. But one thing was made clear during it. She can’t stand him.”
“Hmm,” Ansley hummed.
“What are you thinking?”
“His wife killed herself, you know.”
Loren nodded.
“After he sent Maxine away to boarding school.”
Loren said nothing.
“No one quite understood it. He was respectable enough. His title holds power. He has great wealth. At the time, he was quite good-looking. He’s gone rather to seed of late. But that’s only recently. She had the life many women struggle quite valiantly for.”
Loren remained silent, though he did it wondering what Maxine would think of that remark.
“No one sends their child away to school for twenty years without her coming home at least to visit,” Ansley remarked. “While you were with her in the stables, and I’d rejoined him, Derryman told me she hadn’t been back to Hawkvale since he sent her away. Not once. In two decades.”
“Should I take a seat, or are you going to get to the point?” Loren ribbed.
His father’s mouth quirked.
Then he said, “I think Maxine is a twin.”
Loren had no idea what he expected his father to say.
But it wasn’t that.
“A twin?” he asked.
“Perhaps she actually is Maxine, and the woman I visited with is her sister, who, for whatever reason, is registered at the hospital as Maxine. Perhaps it’s the Maxine with us who is pretending to be her sister. Although your mother wanted you to have the proper schooling, and thus you went to a proper school, you were always home for the holidays. I, personally, would never dream of losing that time with you.”
Loren said nothing, but he felt his face soften at the memories.
Because his father told no lies.
His early life had been marked with mourning, his mother dying when he was five, his sister dying when he was eleven.
But he’d learned to crave adventure because his father dropped everything and gave one to him every school holiday.
Ansley carried on, “I think one of the girls was hurt in a way that couldn’t be fixed, and perhaps the wife was responsible. Edgar sent the other girl away. And the guilt ate at her until she couldn’t take it anymore.”
“And once she took her own life, then why would the daughter not return?” Loren queried.
Ansley shrugged. “Perhaps she’s an unhappy reminder of the wife. I sadly forget the woman’s name, but I do remember what she looked like, and her daughter certainly looks like her.”
“Has word of twins ever been uttered about Edgar’s offspring?”
“What other possible explanation could there be?” Ansley queried. “When I say she’s the woman I sat with on several occasions, Loren, I do not jest. Except for the fact that Maxine was bright and sweet, what she was not was droll and quick-witted.”
In that moment, considering the possibility of twins, a thought occurred to Loren.
A thought about something he held in strictest confidence at the behest of his friend, a friend who was also his king.
Something that was a state secret of such magnitude, he’d die before he breathed word of it.
However, upon thinking of it, he dismissed it.
It was too fantastical.
And from what he knew, it took grave magic to affect it.
That being producing such a “twin.”
There wasn’t a witch in all the Northlands or Southlands who held this much magic. Not anymore.
But even if there was, no one but a very select few knew of the existence of that other world. A world, it was his understanding, that was markedly different from his own. It would be a profound shock to anyone who made the switch, impossible to recover easily.
In fact, decades had passed, and Loren could still see how living in a different world affected his queen. She navigated it rather well. But he noted when things surprised her, or at other times he caught it when Tor was covering for her.
