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“No one wanted her around,” Queen Mab said, ignoring my question. “Can you blame them? The woman was a poison, spilling everyone’s secrets. Long ago, the king banished her from court, and she unleashed the frozen mantle of winter on the kingdom. She sent the Erlkings and the dragons from her home inthe woods to torment the Seelie. They must kill her to lift the curse. It has nothing to do with me.”
I clenched my teeth, scanning the shadow-drenched battlements for signs of Torin. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“At the banquet, the Seelie queen had taken my child, pretending to fuss over her,” she hissed. “The queen passed her to a nursemaid to hold. Someone brought out the severed head of a black bull. A barbaric threat, isn’t it? I tried to run for my daughter, but the Seelie king froze me in ice, and I watched as the nursemaid murdered my heir before me. Smashing her against the rocks. So when I cursed the Seelie royal family, believe me, they bloody deserved it.”
I stared at her, no longer understanding at all. “They killed your daughter?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Apparently, the nursemaid was a master of illusion. Maybe she couldn’t stomach the orders her king issued. Because here you are, Isavell. Alive.”
I’d suspected it already, but hearing it out loud had a dizzying, disorienting effect. Nausea rose in my stomach. No wonder I’d left a trail of blood in my wake, and why killing came so naturally to me. An actual monster had given birth to me.
The wind toyed with the queen’s white hair.
Did she know that the full force of my magic was so close to the surface now? That I could almost taste the cinders on my tongue? Before, she’d been stronger. Now? My magic was a raging river of fire beneath cold rock, and it was ready to erupt.
Love is a forge.
I inhaled deeply, seething. Was this what she thought love was? “So, this is the welcome you give to your own child whom you mourned as dead? Locked in a dungeon? Beaten? Starved? My real mother took care of me.”
Her eyes flashed. “Your human mother left you weak.”
Morgant pulled his gaze away from me, and I sensed that he wanted to disappear into the shadows.
As I stared at him, the pieces slid together in my mind. He hadn’t known who I was until Mab ordered him to heal Torin. He must have had questions after that. That’s when he began bringing me soap, telling me the clues I needed to learn to survive.
Queen Mab narrowed her eyes. “This isn’t what I wanted, Isavell. I wanted an Unseelie heir. A daughter with magic. With wings. Because without those things, you are not my heir. True, you’ve managed to summon a little magic. You have done a good job of destroying my home.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I only did what the tree wanted. It wants to be free of these stones. From your suffocating court.”
“You think you know my home better than I? This treeisme. The castle is a child I hold in my arms. I guess no one ever told you that motherhood can be a terrible burden.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, my heart twisting. Maybe Chloe left me “weak,” but she’d never treated me like a burden.
My anger was threatening to suffocate me. “What do you want from me?”
“I want an heir who isn’t broken, Isavell, my daughter. And all those deaths mean nothing if the Unseelie don’t get what we deserve—the kingdom of Faerie.”
A door in the tower opened, and three soldiers dragged out Torin by his wrists, coiled tightly in manacles of thick foliage. His gaze met mine, his pale eyes mournful.
“Let him go,” I snarled.
A dark smile curled her lips. “I don’t want to make my child scream, but a queen does what she must. Ava, what I do next will hurt me more than it will hurt you.”
My stomach plummeted, and I looked at Morgant. His eyes seemed to search mine. Pleading. His words rang in my head…
We all have wings in the royal family. Some are just too stupid to use them.
“You have blood on your hands already.” For just a moment, she lowered the vines until I was within her reach, and she lifted her hand to touch my cheek. Her eyes glistened. “You are my daughter, and this will hurt more than the others. But I ask myself sometimes—what is one more death when I’m already haunted by a sea of blood in my past? When it is all for the glory of our realm?”
I gritted my teeth. Flaming tongues of my trapped magic licked at the ice in my chest, melting it away.
“Torin’s death,” she cooed, “will not weigh on my soul at all. He did, after all, murder my son. I am going to suffocate him.”
I slid my gaze to Torin once more, feeling my soul scorched. The queen’s vines crawled over his neck, wrapping around his throat. Terror ripped through me as I watched them tighten, cutting off his air. His eyes went wide, and panic pierced my chest.
The monster queen had given birth to me.
“Then throw me off the tower, Your Majesty,” I yelled. “You’ve promised to do so since I first met you.”
