Page 155 of With Wing And Claw

She stared at it.

She stared at it for so long the letters bled together on the parchment.

‘In hindsight,’ Agenor said, so softly, sogentlythat she barely recognised his voice, ‘I should have been able to put the pieces of the puzzle together long before finding this particular piece of correspondence.’

Pieces.

Her grades.

Stud horse.

She couldn’t breathe.

‘You did cause somewhat of a ripple during your first months at the academy. I’m not sure if I ever told you that.’ He hesitated. ‘The War of the Gods had ended only a few decades before you were born. There was this sense of excitement at the court, the notion of faekind being stronger than even the gods themselves, and then there was you – daughter of two extraordinarily powerful mages, the most powerful child born in quite a while. In a way, I suppose people saw you as a symbol of that new era of fae supremacy.’

Vaguely, Thysandra was aware of the disgusted sound emerging from Emelin’s direction.

If she’d been able to speak, she might have agreed.

‘So, looking back …’ Agenor slowly drew in a breath. ‘I suppose your existence may have given Achlys and Melinoë the idea to have children of their own again. New world, new power, new players on the stage. They were the most powerful creature in the world at the time. A loyal lineage would have cemented that power.’

‘And … and so …’

‘Well, Echion had already shown he was capable of begetting exceptionally talented offspring.’ A bitter chuckle. ‘Why mess with a proven formula?’

I did something entirely ill-advised,her father had told Silas.It may well be the end of me, and I won’t regret it for a moment.

Her hands were shaking.

‘And so she killed him,’ she breathed.

Agenor was silent.

‘But … but she couldn’t tell the world he’d rejected her. Of course.’ A manic laugh rose from her throat. ‘So she branded him a traitor instead?’

‘To their mind, he might have been,’ Agenor muttered – and she was standing on that walkway by the training fields again, wounded, hurting, and surer of herself than she’d been in her entire life.

A traitor to you, maybe.

But not …

‘But not to his heart,’ she whispered, staring at the letter in her hands.

Neither of them replied. When she looked up, finally, she found them still sitting side by side on her couch, watching her with eerily similar expressions – resignation, quiet anger,sympathy. Weakness, she would have thought once, to be sympathised with. Now all she could do was sink into it – let it wrap around her like the comforting softness of clean, warm, downy blankets.

‘And my mother?’ she said numbly.

Agenor looked at Emelin.

Emelin cocked her head. ‘You still don’t remember?’

Didn’t she?

The hounds kept quiet. Her father’s screams did not return. But even without them, there was no penetrating that blank hole in her memory – that hollow that should not be hollow at all.

She swallowed. ‘I … I can’t.’

‘Alright.’ Suddenly the girl opposite her no longer looked so young – barely two decades of life behind her, but she planted her feet onto the floor and leaned forward with the air of a scholar presenting centuries of painstaking research. ‘What Naxi told Tared – to pass on to me – is that your attempts to remember your mother’s fate felt a damn lot like my darling father’s attempts to remember what had happened around the day of Korok’s death. In that case, it turned out to be a binding-locked memory. We suspect the same might be true for you.’