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“So my father,” I said, “...is Unseelie?”
She nodded. She looked at me as though she expected a reaction to that, but when she received none, she continued.
“I had no problems with the mission,” she said. “I gathered the information and sent it back. The Unseelie thought I was the daughter of a Lord who had kept away from Qam for decades. It wasn’t difficult to convince them, I used my powers.”
“Wasn’t Orla there?” I asked. “Couldn’t she have spotted you?”
“I don’t know who that is,” Amarra replied. “No one spotted me.”
I nodded. In the memory, Amarra had been very young. Although Orla was around Amarra’s age, I knew that she had not been working with King Duncan for too many years. Fiona had said that she did not even know Orla before she went to the trials.”
“And Lady Queill?” I asked. “Did you know her?”
Amarra shook her head. “The plan was to make the king like me so much that he would hire me as his mind magicker. The queen thought having one of her spies be his advisor would make the existence of all her other spies needless. She wanted to place me there and eliminate her other spies to reduce her chances of getting caught. She believed in me.”
She said that last part almost with pride.
“But you failed,” I said.
Amarra nodded. “I met Tynan in my third year there.”
I did not interrupt her.
“He was kind,” she said. “He was smart and handsome. I tried to ignore him, but he was so intrigued by me that he would not stop trying to become friends. I decided that it would be better to have him by my side than to have him so curious about me. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love.”
“You were tricking him,” I said ruthlessly. “It wasn’t real love.”
She gave me a look as though she was ready to argue, but then her shoulders dropped.
“You’re right. I did trick him,” she said. “When I found out that I was pregnant, I left him and the castle. At first, I thought I would live in the in-between realms and give birth there. I thought you and me could live out our lives away from the queen and her anger.”
“What would she be angry about?” I asked. “Because you failed?”
She looked up. There was hesitation in her gaze as though she wasn’t sure if she wanted to tell me.
“Because of you,” she said. “Because you were a double.”
“A double?” I asked.
“Fae born from both kinds,” Amarra replied. “Unseelie and Seelie... Fae like you. The queen believed double fae to be tainted with dark magic.”
“I have double skill,” I said. “Healing and mind magic.”
“It is common for double fae to have double skill,” Amarra replied. “Tynan was a healer.”
“And you have mind magic,” I said.
She nodded.
“Why would the queen get angry about my existence?” I asked.
“The queen claimed that the double fae were evil, unnatural things,” she said. “Lots of fae believed in that. My mother was one of them. She hated the dark fae, but she hated the double fae even more. She always told me that the queen was the best thing to ever happen to the realms, for she was the one who got rid of them.”
“Got rid of them?” I asked. “Of who?”
“Double fae,” Amarra met my gaze. “The queen went after them.”
I remembered the little girl I had dreamt of. The toymaker’s daughter. Kenna. She was a double fae, her father had said so.
