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But Lyrena was smiling.
Of course she was.
Soft and gentle, and with so much caring in her eyes, I almost melted into a puddle on the ground.
She met my gaze, but didn’t reach for me as she spoke. Not as soft as Cyara, but such gentleness in her voice. Such caring. I found it painful to care for my friends. A physical ache sometimes.
But it poured out of Lyrena as if it was nothing—as if she had all the love in the world to give. What must that be like? To be so completely, fundamentallygood?
“My parents weren’t courtiers, but they had power and wealth. I wasn’t interested in any of it. When they brought me along on a visit to Baylaur, I saw Arthur. I didn’t return home with them. I stayed, I trained, and when he became king, he selected me as one of his Goldstones.”
The answers to my first question was there in her words.
“You loved him,” I said quietly.
She nodded, her golden braid bobbing. What was left of it.
“Yes. I think he loved me as well. As best he could.” Slowly, she lowered herself down into the mess of vines and leaves. She crouched, rather than kneeled—always a guard, always ready to spring up and protect at a moment’s notice.
Still she didn’t reach for me. She didn’t need to, I realized. The power of her gaze was enough. I could see every emotion pulsing in her bright eyes. Gone was the elemental veneer of placidity. Here was a truly golden knight—bold, beautiful, and unabashed.
“But, Veyka, he loved you so much more. Everything…” She paused to drag in a breath. “Veyka, he was always thinking about you. Every choice was about you.”
Cyara’s hand on my arm tightened, almost imperceptibly. Still, I flinched.
My head was shaking again. I was starting to get a headache from the visual disturbance. “He was the King of the Elemental Fae.”
Lyrena didn’t waver. “He was your brother first.”
“You are misremembering. Or you misheard when he told you—”
“He didn’t have to tell me anything, Veyka. It was the things he did. He must have interviewed two dozen candidates before he selected your handmaidens.”
A flicker of Cyara’s wings—confirmation.
Lyrena wasn’t done.
“The rooms and apartments surrounding yours house only the most loyal courtiers. He sealed the Dowager in her wing and banished anyone who questioned him. Powerful alliances, houses who’d been loyal to the Pendragon line for thousands of years—stripped of their titles and sent away.”
But why? It was a political nightmare. Even with the Offering and the tentative peace between the elementals and the terrestrials, our kind were bloodthirsty. Arthur needed supporters within his realm. Not friends, precisely. But advisors. Allies.
Yet he’d sent them all away… because they objected to my mother’s confinement?
That could only have to do with me.
Lyrena was watching me. Waiting for the gap in my thinking. I didn’t bother to try and guard my thoughts as they played across my face.
She sighed, slight. Soft. “He assigned me to guard you, even though there was no precedent.”
“Goldstones are for the monarch, not the spare.” I’d known that, even then. But Arthur had been the King of the Elemental Fae. He could do whatever he wanted, even if it did break tradition.
But why would he?
“The ever-burning hearth,” Cyara said. “He instructed us to never let it burn out, or the charm would burn out as well.”
I could feel the blood rushing inside of me. Behind my eyes, the pressure was building to an intensity that had to be dangerous. I was going to explore. My head was quite literally going to explode from the influx of information.
“But why?” I managed. My voice was pitiful. A small, strangled sound. “What is so special about me? I am—I was—powerless.”
