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She gasped in a breath, tucking a lock of dark brown hair behind her ear with shaking hands. I grabbed for my tea blindly, took a single minuscule sip; the scorching hot water wasn’t enough to wash away that thorny little catch.

‘So it was like looking for a drop in the ocean, looking for you,’ she added, audibly fighting to collect herself. ‘But I knew Agenor would have resources I didn’t. Our bargain protected me, not you. And if he was still on her side, if he was just going to hand you over to her to be bound the moment he found you …’

Again she faltered a moment.

‘You couldn’t be forced or tricked to give him any information as long as he didn’t hear from you?’ I somehow got out.

She drew in a deep breath. ‘Yes.’

‘And in the meantime …’

‘I was looking.’ An almost apologetic shrug at the maps and letters around us. ‘You should have heard me drivel on about orphans and foundling children and the programmes we might set up to help them. Told them I needed all caretakers of such children to write to me, in order to make an estimate of the extent of the problem, spent years tracking every single child of hazy parentage I received letters about. And then after twenty years – aftertwenty fucking years– some painter arrived here with his whole village and claimed that his adopted daughter Emelin had been abducted and taken to the Crimson Court.’

My heart skipped a beat. ‘He told you?’

‘He had no idea who I was, of course.’ A bitter laugh. ‘I about died on the spot – all that effort to keep you away from the gods-damned island, and then they’d taken you there anyway? But then the news came that someone had burned the Mother’s eyes right from her face and Iknew– oh, I knewimmediatelythat that had been you.’

Celebrating all victories as if they had been her own, I’d thought yesterday, and only now I understood – because in a way, through twenty years of heartache and fear, the victoryhadbeen hers.

‘And then you still didn’t write,’ I said.

‘Oh, I tried.’ She shook her head. ‘But as far as the news suggested, you had vanished into nowhere. And it’s rare for any magical creatures to show up at the gates – my predecessors have refused any sort of coalition too often for them to keep making the effort. As much as I would have liked to ask them about you, I needed a contact I could trust first.’

That made so much sense I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t thought of it myself.

‘And then the battle at the Golden Court happened,’ she added, ‘and it turned out Agenor still had his wits about him after all – but when I tried to write to him, he was surrounded by fae warships. Bloody hard to get a letter through under those circumstances.’

The Moon fleet. I thought of the arrow in Creon’s back and couldn’t help but wince – hadn’t Agenor himself said that no one but alves had been able to reach the court after that siege had started?

‘I’d been dispatching messages to all human islands,’ Rosalind said sheepishly, ‘asking them to look out for magical visitors and tell them to contact the White City. I wasthatdesperate. And then out of nowhere …’ She swallowed. ‘Your letter.’

We’ve been hoping you would reach out to us.

Something was stinging the back of my eyes.

‘I wrote back before I told the others,’ she added with a joyless laugh. ‘Figured that if they tried to stop me, at least you would still be here the next day. Then packed my bags. Then tried to figure out how in the world I’d tell you all of this.’

I snorted a laugh. ‘And the plan on which you arrived was to blurt out the sordid facts at some arsehole of a consul with the whole world watching?’

‘Oh, no. That was all divine inspiration in the spur of the moment.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, corners of her lips trembling. ‘No, I was thinking I’d wait until we had the political games behind us – figured it would all be overwhelming enough and … well … you were clearly trying to focus on the matter of strategy …’

It hit me, then.

An understanding of such perfect clarity, again, that it truly was a marvel it hadn’t occurred to me the very first time she’d hastily averted her eyes.

‘You werescared,’ I said.

She froze. ‘Oh, gods help the mothers of clever children.’

Laughter escaped me, a surge of relief. ‘And that’s all? No tests or expectations? You just didn’t dare to—’

‘Yes, of course I was scared!’ she burst out, shoving her tea aside with such a brusque gesture that it splashed onto her bluish grey dress. ‘Maybe you wouldn’t even care! Maybe you’d be disappointed in me! Maybe the last thing you wanted wasmoreparents, after those … those …’

Her voice drifted off into the territory of sheer unspeakability.

Plenty of humans would have been proud to call themselves your parents.

‘Oh,’ I managed, throat constricting again.