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The hour-and-a-half planeride back to the palace was a tense and quiet affair. Every time I opened my mouth to say something, I clamped it shut again, sure that it was the wrong thing to say.
Cirilla and Elix sat near the cockpit, speaking in low tones as I regrouped with my best friend near the tail.
“That’s impossible,” Saint said again, but his repeating himself didn’t make the sentiment any less palatable.
“Which part are you having the roughest time with?” I shot out, sick of having to walk him through it, too. “The fact that she’s Agnan’s daughter, or that she has a sister who was in the Order of Souls and is trying to rekindle the murderous group?”
“All of it!” Saint spat, sitting back to fold his arms under his chest and glower at me. “And stop snapping at me. This isn’t my doing!”
“You didn’t warn anyone about this!” I hissed, needing someone to blame for this craziness. “You knew…” My breath caught. “Oh, gods! Did you know Agnan was her father?!”
Saint didn’t answer immediately, and I went dizzy with betrayal. “Are you fucking kidding me?!”
The females looked back at us, and I pressed my lips together, inhaling as I struggled to catch my breath.
“I didn’t know for sure,” he countered. “Of course not. But…”
“But what?!”
Saint sank back in the chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve played out how it could have happened, and Agnan had shapeshifting abilities—or so were the rumors as to the extent of his dark magic. Or maybe it was possession. Maybe he possessed my father’s body. It was the only way I could imagine my mother being fooled into being with someone else.”
I’d heard such rumors, too, but I didn’t understand how that played into what we were talking about.
“My mother would never have cheated on my father. She loved him—fiercely.”
“I always had a high regard for Glynda, Saint, but you don’t know?—”
“Idoknow!” he interrupted fiercely. “I know my mother. She was honest and strong. She would never have dabbled in dark magic… and when she figured out what had happened, that she had been tricked, she took strides to get Elix out of the castle. That’s why she always wanted us to leave here, Jace. To protect us and you. She knew that you couldn’t have someone like Elix here.”
I stared balefully at him. “But you brought her back here!”
“I didn’t put two and two together on that front until just now,” Saint confessed. “I always thought Mom wanted us out of the palace because it reminded her of Dad too much, that there were too many memories there.”
“How many more children does Agnan have running around?” I mused aloud, and Saint scoffed in disgust, shaking his head as he pondered the same question.
“That’s why he combed through orphanages, no doubt, looking for his own spawn,” he remarked. The entire affair gave me the creeps, but it also made so much sense now that I thought about it. The little that I’d known about the former leader of the Order was that he was a perverted old soul who sought out young faeries who were impressionable and easy to manipulate. His obsession with Queen Mirielle when she had been an orphan herself was legendary.
But there was clearly so much more to the story than that.
“Elix needs to do another DNA test,” I sighed. “Maybe Lysandra told her all that to get her riled up, or curry favor, or…”
“That’s a lot of trouble to go through if she’s lying,” Saint murmured in a low voice.
Excitement filled me, and I sat forward, my forearms over my thighs. “But what if you were right all along? What if Lysandra was really after Elix’s abilities to control the elements, and she conjured this fantastical story to get Elix to side with her? Maybe she was trying to build a kinship.”
“That certainly backfired,” Saint chuckled, but there was a spark of hope in his eyes at the prospect. “But do you think it could be?”
I shrugged. “The only way to find out is by doing a DNA test to confirm paternity. If we can shut down Elix’s doubts once and for all, that’s a start.”
“I’m not doing another DNA test!” Elix barked from across the cabin, and I cringed, realizing that she’d heard me.
Lifting my head, I looked at her imploringly. “Don’t you want to know the truth?”
She stared at me, her chin quivering slightly, but when she spoke, her words were even. “I know the truth, Jace,” she saidflatly. “I know who I am and what I am, no matter what my bloodline is. I don’t need a paternity test to tell me otherwise.”
Shame sank into my gut like a stone as she met my eyes, and I tried to shake my head and tell her that I knew who she was, too, but Saint interjected again.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he growled. “We won’t be in your way once we land. You won’t have to worry about seeing us again.”
