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Inkpots for eyes, she holds my stare.

I swallow under the assault of her gaze, then look down at my untouched plate.

My mouth wets at the sight of those cured ham strips, the healthy hue of glazed rose.

“I never wanted them.”

I gulp down the gathered drool in my mouth. A frown starts to knit on my brow. Then I lift my stare to Melantha’s unwavering one.

“My children,” she adds. “Perhaps that is the reason they are all doomed.”

Blankly, I just stare at her.

“Fated for ruin,” she muses, and I don’t at all get the sense that she’s more speaking to herself than me. Each word she delivers in this moment has intent, purpose. But what, I don’t know.

She clasps her teacup. “Mother mocks me with children I did not want, forced upon me, and who in time stole my love. Now, she wants to take them from me.”

Mute, I watch as she sips her tea, as casually as though we are merely discussing the phase just passed.

Forced upon me.

I don’t need more than a moment to understand what she’s telling me about the sort of male General Agnar is.

“I didn’t want to love them.” She sets down the cup, then pours a refill.

No steam comes from this serve.

We have sat here too long, the tea gone too cold.

“I tried not to.” The whisper of a smile flitters over her lips like a brushstroke. “I maintained indifference for Caius well enough.He is so like his father. But my Aleana, my Daxeel… One became my heart, the other became my soul.”

I scratch the edge of my chair.

No words gather in me to answer with.

What does one say to that, to any of it?

Melantha seeks no answer from me. Not yet.

She just stirs into her tea a heap of mulched stems. The small spoon clangs on the edges of the cup. “I knew when I birthed them, each one of them, what it meant. Agnar would destine them for the Sacrament. That is one of the reasons I fought my love for them.”

My lips tuck into my mouth and I bite down on them. I look at my plate.

For the first time since I sat at this table with her, Ijoinher.

I take a wedge of cheese, then flatten it onto a ham piece. I roll the ham around to make a sandwich, then lift it to my mouth.

If I wasn’t sitting across from Melantha, but rather was enjoying this snack alone in my bedchamber, I wouldn’t be so polite in my nibbles. This entire chunk would be crammed into my mouth, whole.

Melantha sets down the spoon on the saucer. “I was to represent the Sgail bloodline in the Sacrament in my youth. So long ago now.” There is a hush to her tone now as distance flickers over the dark pits she wears for eyes. “Two hundred years and I have never stopped yearning for my place as a contender. But my time in the Sacrament never came.”

I swallow, hard. A heartbeat thumps in my chest. Another passes. Then a third before I chance my question, “What stopped you?”

Her smile is bitter. It’s stained with blood long washed away, but pain that can never be erased. “I was in love.”

Creases etch into my face, a mask of blatant confusion.In love with Agnar,I almost ask, but she answers my unspoken curiosities—

“Bracken,” she whispers the name that jolts my bones. “Together, Bracken and I were to win the Sacrament, and emerge with our hands joined. We planned to be the face of dokkalf victory.”