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“That’s how you see yourselves—”
“No, no.” I laughed. “You were too young to remember, laddie. I didn’t want to be king. I wanted to fix a broken world, and I wasecstaticwhen I got the opportunity to leave it. I’m a father, Michael. That’s always how I’ve seen my position here. I don’t rule over the humans for the sake of power. I do it because I created them, they are my responsibility, and I have the power to help them.”
He laughed with no humor. “If that helps you sleep at night.”
“We all knowwhy,” Rafael said under his breath. “It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with anyone being weak, or—”
“It has everything to do with how pathetic you all are,” Michael snapped, spinning around to look at his brother. “You areweak. You don’t understand how to lead. You’re naive. Pa’s shining light. Mum’s sweet boy. You’ll be the death of us all with that childish mindset.”
Rafael sighed, rolling his eyes once more.
“What makes you strong, Michael? What makes us weak?” Lux’s voice was calmer than mine, less annoyed than Rafael’s. “Because you managed to radicalize Matriax into supporting you, you’ll be a good leader? Because you rallied enough people together to fight a non-existent threat?”
“Anon-existentthreat?” Michael narrowed his gaze. “In a few thousand years, we will fight a war unlike any this world has ever seen. And how have we prepared for that, Pa? What will we do, Uncle? How will we fight the maalaichte cnihme when they come when you’ve raised a docile society on all these worlds?Allof them. The mortal world, the Fae, and here. All these men are weak. They have nothing to fight for, and—”
“Because there’s nothing to fight, you fucking moron,” Rafael snapped. “The maalaichte cnihme aren’t here, and they won’t be for—”
“You don’t know that.” Michael shook his head. “They may come backfarbefore the agreed upon date. They obviously know you all planned to bring the people to Morduaine and Matriaza. And what do we do then? What do we do when they land, and no one knows how to fight? What do we do when all those people are being butchered? It’ll be a matter of time until they find a way to get here, or to the Land of Light, especially when they have all that power within them. You’ve sheltered these people since they burst into existence, and we’ll lose them all to Taeral if you—”
“We win,” I said.
His face screwed up in confusion.
“I’ve seen it. Véa’s seen it. We know with absolute certainty that we’ll kill Taeral one day.” I gestured to Lux. “Me and him. We kill him. Yet, your plan was to kill us, because you think you’ll do a better job leading than we have?”
“I know I will.”
A quiet laugh that turned into a sigh. “C’mon, Michael. Be honest. This isn’t about being able to lead a war. You don’t know how to do that. You know how to put a fire under peoples’ asses. You know how to piss people off. You’ve never fought in a war. You know who has? Me. Véa. Venark. Brynn. Osonia, and Neia, and Larson. You weren’t even born yet, boy. You—”
“And look how that turned out.” His tone was flat. “You made treaties with the bastards. You didn’t fight—”
“Oh, I did.You weren’t there, child.” I stepped closer to the bars. “Admit it. Admit that this has nothing to do with the maalaichte cnihme and everything to do with the crown. With thefame. You want to be King of Heaven.”
Michael fell silent for a moment, eyes flicking over me. He traced his tongue along his teeth, giving a half smile. “Just like you, eh?”
I scoffed a laugh.
Fucking stars, he was so unbelievably dense.
“Don’t act as though you didn’t love the power, Nix. You always have. And I don’t know why it’d surprise you that I’ve vied for the same, even by the means that I have. The politics among our people have been filthy for eons. You’re proof of that. You didn’t rise to power with altruism. You did it with treason, just as I have.”
I laughed again.
Why was I doing this? Why was I here, arguing with a child in time out?
That was what this was. He and his brothers had thrown a temper tantrum. I wanted it to be deeper than that. I wanted to think that he was better. I wanted to believe that he had a profound reason to justify the last year.
He didn’t. None of them did.
We were too soft for them, because they read old stories about how brutally the rulers before us punished people who rose against the throne. We weren’t strong enough because somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of years that we’d been alive, we’d realized how much easier it was to rule people when we did so with dignity and honor. We couldn’t lead armies because we didn’t have fun when we killed and tortured.
He was power hungry. He was sadistic. And he was smart.
The leader of our greatest enemy had all those same qualities. It was the deadliest of combinations.
But he was behind bars now, and that was all that mattered.
“We’ll never see eye to eye, lad,” I said. “But I am dying to know where my father is.”
