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“My parents died when I was seven.”
In spite of my anger toward her, my chest tightened at the revelation. I knew what it was like to lose parents, and I hadn’t been as young as her. My own father had passed when I was a teenager, my mother only a year ago.
“I was immediately placed in an orphanage,” Mirielle continued. “The conditions were…”
She hung her head, and a shudder ran through me. In my mind’s eye, I saw pictures of what the kingdom’s orphanages had been like years ago, well before I had taken the throne. My grandfather had not much cared about the lower classes in the kingdom, but my father had taken great strides to improve the conditions of the impoverished, and my mother had ensured that Silverhold never saw homelessness. I could only imagine what Mirielle had endured in her youth.
“Agnan came to the orphanage when I was nine.” Her tone was laced with shame. “He collected us, the females only, and took us to live with him. We were too young to understand what the Order of Souls was, but that’s what he banked on, training and indoctrinating us from a young age to do his bidding.”
My shoulders sank as a clearer picture of her life came to me.
“It was all dark magic, each of us trained in specific areas. Mine was botany—as you might have guessed.”
“What does any of this have to do with me and how you lost your memories and came to be here?” I asked, barely hiding my impatience. I felt like she was purposely avoiding the subject.
“I’m getting to that,” Mirielle sighed. “Please, let me tell you this in my own way, Zen. You asked me…”
She stared at me, her eyes blue pools of regretful sadness, and my chest panged again. “Will you let me tell you in my own way?”
I nodded curtly. “If you get there.”
She bit her lower lip. “We were all taught from the time we were brought to live with Agnan that the royals were evil, bad, that you were out to get us all and the reason we lived such impoverished, terrible lives. He made it sound as if you stole from us directly and that you needed to be stopped.”
She bit on her lower lip, and my back stiffened. “Your father…”
“The attempted assassination in Cyrus,” I breathed, remembering the bold move. That had been the year my father had died, the stress of his duties overtaking him. “That was the Order of Souls.”
“I was there,” she admitted. “I was thirteen, and it was then that I realized that I didn’t want to do this anymore, but Agnan insisted that you all needed to be stopped. Every king in every kingdom. It would start here, in Mystara, eliminating all the kings, from Ironhelm to Steelshire, but eventually, all three continents would be reunited as one—without any kings at all.”
I scoffed. “There have always been kings, always been a monarchy, dating back to the Original family.”
“I don’t know about all that,” Mirielle mumbled. “But that has always been the goal of the Order. A total commonwealth for all.”
She rubbed her eyes and sank back against the sofa. “I fought with him, I begged him, and for a time, Agnan let me stay behind when the rest of them went out and did whatever they were doing. He didn’t trust me to take part in their plans.”
I leaned forward, my hands growing clammy. “My mother…?”
“I knew nothing about that!” she swore vehemently. “Not until after it happened, and I confronted Agnan on it. He insisted that it wasn’t the Order who had done it. But I was suspicious, especially when he told me what he wanted next.”
I arched an eyebrow, waiting, but Mirielle appeared reluctant to carry on. Angrily, I hissed at her, disgusted that I’d let myself get “sucked in,” just as Endora had warned me.
“You said you would tell me everything!” I growled. “If you’re not going to do it…”
I stood, and she called out, begging me to stay. “I’m going to tell you,” she pleaded. “Just… just let me get my thoughts in order, please.”
Night had fallen outside now, and her head turned to look beyond my shoulder, her eyes shadowing to a navy as her thoughts darkened.
“He came to me and explained that he had a way of incapacitating the kings, all of them, but he needed my help. He said it was a fate worse than death because of your… your egos.”
Frowning, I turned back to her. “What?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it would quash your powers and make you look weak to your following, making it easier for the Order to sell their plan of a united world without a monarchy.”
I bristled. “Taking away my ability to shift.”
Sighing, she nodded. “Agnan had been following my work with the plants closer than I realized, toying with the most exotic finds I located, and found out that with a combination of science and magic, he could produce a concoction…”
She gasped and shuddered. “He’d already used one of the fae, one of the orphans, as a guinea pig. He knew it worked. It had been tried, and it was successful.”
