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My cheeks warm at their words. Of course I’ve wondered about my lack of magic. It’s something I’ve been ashamed of my whole life. It’s not as though I don’t have any—I’m not sure I’d have found the key to Ruarok’s cage if I didn’t—but it certainly isn’t as strong as either my mother’s or the king’s had been. I’ve always had something of a complex about it, worried that it somehow made me less of a Fae, but I told myself I simply hadn’t grown into my magic yet, and that it would come, one day.

But now the Mage is telling me what, exactly? That I’m not full-blooded Fae? What does that mean? That my father wasn’t who I’d been told? Or that my mother, orfather, or perhaps both, weren’t as full-blooded Fae as they’d believed?

The Mage speaks again. “When two people come together to create a child, that child gets half from its mother and half from its father. But who knows which halves. While you may look Fae on the outside, that doesn’t mean it’s who you are inside.”

Their words are like a blow to the stomach, winding me. This isn’t the news I’d come here to get.

Have I been judging Ruarok all this time on how he looks, how he’s not full-blooded Fae, when, in fact, I am no different? The news has rattled me to my core. I’m grateful, at least, that no one else is here to overhear. It will be my secret to keep, if I choose.

Maybe neither my father nor mother lied about who they were, but they believed themselves to be full Fae, except they weren’t. Then the part of my father that wasn’t Fae somehow found its way into me, as did the part of my mother that wasn’t Fae.

It’s true that we’ve inbred with other species for thousands of years. How could we ever fully understand our bloodlines, even if we claimed to? How we’ve changed from those original Fae, who were tiny and light of bone, and whose wings were strong enough to allow them to fly among the clouds? They simply do not exist any longer.

Though I’m aware I’m not here to be asking these questions, I can’t help myself. “If I’m not fully Fae, what am I?”

The Mage takes my hand. “Does it matter?”

I bite the inside of my cheek. “Maybe.”

“You need to be your own person, away from the expectations of others.”

“I am to be queen of Askos. How can I not focus on the expectations of others? That’s all I exist for.”

The Mage curls their pale, cracked lips and shakes their head. “No. You must accept who you are before you can lead anyone else. A person who is not strong within themselves cannot expect to be strong for others. And sometimes strength reveals itself in strange ways. Sometimes to be stronger, we need to accept that we are weak.”

I hesitate. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“You will.”

Their breath is like a snake’s rattle, shaking in their lungs. I do my best not to show my revulsion.

This kind of questioning is too easy to get lost in. I need to remain focused.

I inhale and start again. “The reason I’ve come here is to ask how to stop the rot from destroying the kingdom. It’s already taken my mother and the king. People have been left without their homes. It destroyed my homeland of Torremora. I can’t bear to see the same thing happening here.”

“A great query like that requires a great sacrifice.”

“I’ll do anything,” I say. “What kind of sacrifice?”

“A sacrifice of love.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“For everything that is light, there is dark. For everything that is good, there is bad.” They curl their hands into fists and press their knuckles together. “The rot is a great badness, is it not, so to fight it there must be good.”

I feel frustrated and helpless. “What kind of good? I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“I can’t tell you that. It’s personal, an individual choice.Whatever a person loves the most in the world they must also sacrifice.”

“The kingdom,” I say automatically.

But how can I sacrifice that?

Unless the Mage means a person, and I don’t even want to go there. The person I’d loved most was my mother, but she’s already gone. Then I have Skylar and Balthorne, but no, I won’t even entertain the idea.

To kill one in order to save the many?

I blink back tears at the thought.