Page 20 of A Court of Wings and Shadows

“I do not know your father,” he admitted, “but I can tell you he must have been human… or near enough. Yet he carried a trace of fae magic, thin, faded. Not like your mother.”

He paused, and in that pause something reverent passed through his gaze.

“You knew her?”

“I did. Her name was Loretha.” He spoke her name with reverence. “She was thought to have died before the Unification. Many of us believed her lost in the final collapse of the isle.”

My heart was beating too fast, too loud. “You don’t know what happened to her?”

He shook his head. “No. But as you are no more than twenty-two… she must have survived in the human world for some time. Long enough to bear you. Raise you, perhaps, for a season.”

My throat closed.

“She died when I was an infant,” I whispered. “I was raised by the Order.”

Alahathrial leaned back, his face carved with something like sorrow. “A princess raised by the Order. That would be funny, if it weren’t so… tragic.”

“Princess?” Tae’s voice cracked beside me.

Alahathrial turned toward him, lavender eyes glinting in the low light.

“Loretha was of the Light Court. Royalty through her mother’s line. Her throne fell long before the war reached its zenith, but blood remembers. Magic remembers.”

My hands trembled as I pressed them to my knees. “Tell me about you,” I said softly, desperate to ground myself in something.

He nodded once, folding his hands in his lap. “Before the fall of the Fae Isle, I was a soldier of the Radiant Guard, the sworn shield of the Light Court. I served under King Corenil and Queen Thelisira, whose reign kept the darkness at bay for nearly two centuries. I walked under golden trees that never shed their leaves, through crystal halls that hummed with magic born of sunlight and seafoam.”

He looked far away now, like the memory hovered in the flames behind his eyes.

“There were songs,” he said, voice lower now, woven with grief. “Real songs. Not like your ballads of war and conquest, but ones that breathed with the land. We sang to the trees to ask for their fruit. We whispered to rivers for safe crossings. Even our blades had names and sang when drawn. We did not live above our world, child. We lived with it.”

I listened, completely still, the chill of the stone walls forgotten.

“I had a mate once,” he said, more quietly now. “A son with hair like starlight and the mouth of a troublemaker. They died during the first incursion. When the Blood Fae struck without warning and broke the Crystal Bastion’s southern wing.”

He met my gaze again. “The Light Isle burned. The seas boiled. And I turned to the human king because I had no home to return to.”

He looked around at the lush prison that held him, lips twitching bitterly. “And our people were forgotten.”

I didn’t know what to say.

But something in me, something old and blood-bound, remembered.

Chapter

Four

Isat forward on the plush velvet couch, elbows braced on my knees, heart pounding with truths that didn’t feel like mine but settled into my bones all the same.

“Is my bloodline connected to the Virelith Crystal?” I asked, the words slow, deliberate.

Alahathrial’s lavender eyes met mine. He didn’t blink.

“It was rumored to have been created by an ancestor in your bloodline,” he said carefully. “A powerful fae woman whose magic was said to rival the very stars. But I cannot confirm it is true. Those stories were old when I was young.”

I leaned back, breath catching.

The stories. The rumors. The king’s obsession.