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Lucais’s eyes darkened. “No.” He averted his gaze from mine and sighed deeply. “By the Oracle, I’m going to kill him.” A pause. “Aura, we can bed whomever we like for pleasure, and we very frequently do. It is reproducing that requires a mated pair because they have been blessed with a bond by the High Mother, signalling genetic compatibility for the creation of strong, healthy faelings.”

I felt my cheeks burning, and we shared a heated look before I asked, “How did the rebels manage to mate with the Banshees, then?”

Lucais cleared his throat. “We didn’t think it possible until it happened. The rebels were unknowingly harvesting their essence under the misapprehension that it belonged to the Witches, and Banshees are magic drainers. When the process became so intimate, something went terribly wrong. Like a merger between the two. It never should have happened, and what was born of their sins is the furthest thing from a faeling. Some of us believe that it was an intervention of the High Mother to punish them for their faithlessness.”

“Okay. So, when Wren saidmate, he meant—”

“They were fucking each other, Auralie,” he said soberly, the warmth in his eyes flaring as he took a step towards me. I stumbled backwards, brushing up against the wall. “And it produced something, almost in the way that it’s supposed to when a bonded couple do it with the intention to conceive a faeling.”

Mortification swam circles in my head, and I could only nod.

Wren had more or less confirmed their extremely prolonged lifespans with his firsthand recollections of a long-ago war, so it made sense that the fertility myth was true, too—but to restrict procreation to mates when love was a choice, and the bond wasn’t?

I wanted to know what Lucais thought about these things, but the conversation felt far too intimate for the middle of a draughty hallway, so he backed up from me, and we continued to walk. His fingers brushed against mine, and I wasn’t sure whether it was on purpose or not.

Mercifully, we arrived at our destination only a few moments later.

The double doors to the dining room were closed, and Lucais motioned for me to wait in the hallway as he cracked one door open and slipped inside. He didn’t click the door shut behind him, so when a sharp, lilting voice spoke, it filtered out through the gap.

“It’s a very clear case of dark magic,” she was saying.

“Except it was light magic that killed the Banshee on the road here,” Wren countered. His deep voice had adopted a casual tone that was annoyingly burned into my memory. The hairs on my arms rose at the sound of it, the budding start of a shudder knitting around the top of my spine.

“Hmph.Yourmagic.”

“Was not.”

“Can we—” Lucais interjected, but he was immediately interrupted.

“You expect me to believe that she was being attacked and you were physically able to donothing?” the stranger demanded, scorn ripe in her tone. “Is she even who we think she is?”

Wren’s voice turned as cold as death. “She most certainly is, and you will treat her accordingly.”

A tinkering laugh. “I heard she rejected it.”

“She didn’t know what she was saying.”

“Seriously—” Lucais tried again.

“She gets nothing until she becomes something,” the stranger persisted, a cutting edge to her voice.

“Oh, please.” Wren groaned. “You’re just jealous.”

“And you’re completely blinded by loyalty—”

Shoving against the door with my shoulder, I very nearly fell into the room.

Lucais’s hands shot out to steady me, and I gave him a grateful smile before turning to face the stranger, who had pissed me off with the tone she was using while talking about me. I didn’t care that she was criticising Wren’s blind obedienceto the High King or that he was defending me because of that obedience. But to say that I wasnothing…

Astonishment washed over her face and silenced the room.

As I surveyed the beautiful woman standing at the far end of the table, I began to lose my nerve.

If Lucais and Wren were beautiful, the High Fae woman was glorious.

She had long chestnut-brown hair pulled up into a high ponytail, accentuating the sharp definition of her cheekbones. Everything about her was narrow and angular, from her tall figure to her pointed ears and nose, and to the long red nails on her bony fingers, clutching a leather-bound notebook. Wearing a shimmering teal gown of silk chiffon with a neckline that plunged almost down to her navel, she held her head high as if she knew as well as I did at a glance that she could have been the High Queen.

“Auralie,” Lucais murmured, taking my hand to bring me around to the other side of the long table. “I’d like you to meet Morgoya.”