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“Do you suppose… that the rifts could open to other realms? Beyond the human realm?” she said softly.

My eyebrows followed the direction of her hand—up. “There are no other realms.”

She cut me a scathing look. “None that we know of.”

“If there were, then wouldn’t the rifts open to them as well? Wouldn’t Parys have found some mention of it?” I watched her trace the third and fourth mirror images, an unsettling tension taking my shoulders. I rolled my head to either side, forcing my muscles to stretch and relax.

“He didn’t mention a human-fae war, either,” she pointed out.

But she lowered her hand and didn’t try to press the point further. She could ask Parys to look into that, as well. None of it seemed pertinent to Arthur or the hidden rifts.

As she turned back for the opening, that tension that had lived in her shoulders during our descent returned. I followed her out silently, waiting for her to seal the passage behind us and lead back through the maze of waterfalls.

We made it as far as the dwellings when she stopped again.

I didn’t see what caught her eye. But I recognized the instant she began to come apart.

57

VEYKA

How dare she.

I would flay her alive.

I would use my daggers to cut a systematic pattern into her skin, deep enough it would not heal without intervention. If I ever found my brother’s blasted sword, Excalibur, I would drive it through her heart—if the twisted thing in my mother’s chest could still be called that.

I hadn’t set foot in the water gardens since the day after my father’s death, when Arthur became the King of the Elemental Fae and unlocked the gate. But sometime since then, in the months since I’d found freedom, the Dowager had come back.

I never should have looked. On the journey in, I’d kept my eyes purposefully straight. I knew if I let them stray, I’d never make it to the wall of carvings tucked behind the grand waterfall. The one my mother had strengthened to cover the sounds of my torture.

But as we climbed out, with Arran’s steady presence at my back, I could not resist the urge to glance to the side. To look at the squat dwelling that had been my home for twenty years.

Only to find it ransacked.

No, not ransacked.

Empty.

Systematically cleansed of every remnant of my existence.

Through the open door, into the singular room that had been my bedroom, schoolroom, playroom, and personal torture chamber, I looked expecting to see things exactly as I’d left them.

But there was nothing.

Not a single piece of furniture, not a book or a scrap of clothing. No evidence of me.

No evidence of what I’d endured.

I knew it was her.

Arthur would have asked me. Or at least, kept my things and asked me what I wanted, if I wanted any of it. Or if I’d rather it was all burned.

Only my mother would dare to take the choice from me. A message—that she was still in control. That she could still hurt me, even as I sat the throne.

I was going to be sick.

I stumbled, tripping over the force of my own emotions. I anticipated the crash of my knees, still bruised from the night before, the sharp lances of pain.