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The queen doesn’t care if he loves me, not as long as she gets Farin back.
Something I would have stood in the way of, fought against with my very being.
But I left.
I left Nox with her. With it.
It hits me then who the parasite has joined itself to.
“She made a bargain with it,” I whisper, hardly realizing I’m speaking. “Before, she wouldn’t yield to its demands, but that was before the parasite knew about Farin. Before it found a way to free him. The parasite…Cinderella. She changed the game.”
Queen Asha is speaking now too, but it’s not her voice that booms from her mouth. It’s the voice of something ancient, something terrible, and the moment I hear it, I know it isn’t right. It isn’t right for it to take up residence in the queen’s body, not when it was likely the cause of her pain, of her scars.
The queen has the parasite. She has Nox. She knows how to perform the ritual to tuck him away, to unleash Farin and give him full control of Nox’s body.
No no no no no.
It is her. Mother has returned after all this time, says the voice.
“If that’s the case, then why didn’t you recognize her at the Council meeting?” asks Kiran.
“Because she changed her face,” I whisper, remembering my observations when I met with her in the throne room. How there was something unnatural about her features. “With all her potions. She changed her face over the years so she wouldn’t be recognized.”
“How does one go about changing their face?” asks Evander.
“The bargain was already fulfilled,” I say, realizing now that the queen had been forced to let me leave the castle, because Nox had turned over the parasite, fulfilling the bargain.
Which means Nox’s sister had been freed.
So why had Nox stayed?
It hits me then that the queen agreed not to go after Nox when he left. That she never agreed to let him leave in the first place.
I gasp, but no one is listening.
The whole room is in chaos over the information that the Queen of Mystral is someone the Old Magic knows. Someone they call Mother.
I don’t care who she is.
If she lays a hand on Nox, I’m going to kill her.
I’m going to rip her to shreds and feed her blood to the mortar between the stone bricks of her palace floor.
CHAPTER52
BLAISE: AGE TWELVE
The servant’s robes are too loose.
They hang from my shoulders, droop at my belly, and sag at the floor.
Clarissa wouldn’t allow the tailor inside the manor when he arrived to fit me. She coughed in his face and claimed the house had come down with a mild case of the pox. It didn’t take much shooing after that to get him to flee the premises, but she did offer him my measurements before he left.
I watched him from the window, how he glanced at the paper then allowed it to fall to the wayside as he wiped his hands on his tweed pants.
I suppose this could have gone poorly for Clarissa, but nothing ever does, except for her gambling and inability to bypass a window display without being caught by the purse strings. The tailor could have made my robes much too tight, exposing the belly that’s left over from my pregnancy, but when the tailor dropped off the robes on our manor doorsteps, he left a note saying he’d measured the robes too large on purpose, that way I could grow into them.
Clarissa had been delighted.
