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She was younger than when she appeared in front of the palace gates, that last fading remnant of a soul Taly had carried with her unknowingly all her life. But it was still her.

Taly swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “I don’t understand. How do you have this?”

“Breena was my student,” Ivain said softly. “But she was also more than that. She—” He stopped to press a thumb to his eye like he was plugging a breach.

Sarina took over. “As you know, we had another sibling. Tessarin. She and Ivain were twins. She disappeared during the Schism with the other time mages.”

Taly nodded faintly. She remembered pictures from Harbor Manor of a lovely woman with the same pale blonde hair as Ivain, the same easy smile.

“Tess had a son,” Sarina went on. “And that son had a daughter, Breena.” She touched the glamograph in Taly’s hands. “And then Breena had… you.”

“We’re aware of the irony,” Ivain said, his voice just shy of level. “That by taking in what we believed to be an orphaned human, we were really opening our doors to family. Kin .”

Taly blinked at that word. Kin . It felt foreign, like trying on a coat that didn’t fit.

“We never met Breena’s daughter. No one did.” Sarina stroked Taly’s hair, fingers warming to curl the ends. “She kept you cloistered at her brother Esmund’s estate in Picolo. That’s where you were born, where you grew up. We’re told you had a very happy life there with Esmund and his family.”

A flash of memory, of soaring cliffs and rolling green hills. Taly’s fingers curled tighter around the glamograph.

Ivain looked worried, as did Sarina. The glance they exchanged screamed: why isn’t she talking?!

Then a tear dripped onto the image of Breena, still smiling. Then another.

“Thank you,” Taly whispered as more and more tears spilled over.

Sarina wrapped her in a hug. Ivain embraced them both with his long arms.

Taly cataloged each of their scents, so different from what she could remember as a human. Yet her new instincts immediately classified them as family. Kin .

It was a nice feeling.

She pulled back after a moment, roughly wiping the tears from her cheeks. “So, what… what does this mean, exactly?”

Caro didn’t show up in any noble records.

She would know—she’d spent sleepless nights at the palace memorizing them.

But Highborn eyes didn’t lie. Fey families were large, a natural result when its members continued to breed and nobody ever died.

She’d just assumed she was too far down the ladder to waste the ink recording.

Ivain and Sarina, however, were worth recording. And if she was this close to them…

She sensed the next shoe dangling, waiting to fall.

Ivain and Sarina shared a look. They were worried. About her reaction—how she would take this newest piece of world-shattering information.

“Breena left House Thanos as part of a marriage contract,” Ivain explained. “When she joined House Arendryl, she became Breena Venwraith.”

The world dulled, sound bleeding out of it like color from a painting. Even her own heartbeat felt far away.

Because that name—oh, Shards, Taly knew that name.

Breena Venwraith, the shadow mage who used illegal bloodcraft magic in an official Council-sponsored tournament and then managed to leverage that otherwise career-ending blunder into a crown.

She forfeited the win, of course, was never prosecuted—the noble families generally dealt with these sorts of things internally. Hers disowned her.

Except then, in a twist no one saw coming, the Crystal Guard, so impressed by her performance at the tournament and her get-it-done-no-matter-the-cost attitude, recruited her to guard one of their more “difficult” assignments.

And that’s how she met and fell in love with the High Lord of Water in the true story that would go on to inspire a best-selling romance, three stage adaptations, a vidreel classic still passed around dorms and parlor halls alike, and an entire library’s worth of spinoffs.

Taly laughed weakly. This was a joke. She’d watched The High Lord Takes a Mate one too many times, and now they were pranking her, obviously. Except nobody else was laughing…

“The High Lord of Water is my father.” It felt truly absurd to say, but nobody corrected her.

“This is a lot to take in,” Ivain said.

“And no matter which name you eventually choose, we’ll support you.” Sarina gave her an encouraging smile.

“Name?” Taly asked. “Oh… right.”

Because while the High Lord of Water did have a daughter, her name wasn’t Taly.

It was Corinna. She knew that because she was also in the vid—at the end in an epilogue that was tacked on roughly 21 years ago when the two lovers were tragically torn apart.

Some creative license had to be taken since no one knew what really happened, but the story now ended with a tired but hopeful Breena giving birth to a baby girl before the glamera faded to black.

They didn’t want to ruin the story, after all.

Better to tie up tragic loose ends in sterile white text flashing across the screen as the audience filed out of the theatre.

Taly tried to find some connection to that name, a thread that might lead her back to a memory, but there was nothing. Only the vague sense that the world was slipping out from underneath her, like a wave drawing out to sea.

Maybe she wasn’t getting enough aether?

She took a breath off the airbalm to see.

When that did nothing to stop the pieces of everything she had ever known from crumbling at her feet, she focused on something else—on one of the few pieces of the story she could grasp as it tumbled by, equally unbelievable but for some reason easier to digest.

Taly buried her face in her hands and groaned, “Oh, Shards… I’m the Lost Rose of Arendryl, aren’t I?”

“I…” Ivain hesitated. “I suppose you are.”

Everyone loved a good mystery. Even better, they loved a scandal involving the nobility.

Atlas Venwraith had one child, a girl who died during her Attunement Ceremony in some sort of freak accident, the details of which had never been released to the public.

The Dawn Court had tried to keep the matter quiet, out of respect for the grieving family.

But thanks to the connected suicide of a royal, a botched investigation, as well as the conspicuous lack of a funeral for both mother and child, Corinna Venwraith still lived on in the minds of countless conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Taly had heard all the major theories surrounding the disappearance of Corinna Venwraith, the Lost Rose of Arendryl. Was she alive? Was she dead? Was it an accident, or was it murder?

Or perhaps—and this had always been Taly’s favorite theory—the High Lord of Water’s only child, when tested, had been so depressingly lacking in magical power that her mother, in her shame, had taken her own life, leaving Atlas to then cover the scandal by sending the girl off to a convent in the Splintered Kingdom.

She lived there to this day, chanting benedictions and tending vegetable gardens.

Of course, none of them had gotten it quite right. Because, as it turned out, Corinna Venwraith was alive and well, kicking around Tempris as a secret time mage.

Taly’s head swam. She folded in on herself, forehead to knees, praying for the world to make sense again.

“Skye is going to have a field day with this, isn’t he?” she grumbled.

“Well,” Sarina said, “you did make him watch all those docudramas. Come to think of it, you’ll probably end up in the docudrama one day yourself.”

Taly let out a thin, high-pitched whine that sounded almost exactly like a teakettle.

Sarina ran a comforting hand down her back. “I think she’s taking it rather well,” she said to Ivain.

“I think she looks like she’s about to pass out.”

“Little one, when air goes out, you’re supposed to bring more in.”

Taly inhaled sharply and petted Marshmallow, who was sniffing at the ends of her hair that brushed the ground.

“This is only for your information now,” Ivain said. “But it will become an issue when we cross through the Aion Gate into the mortal realm. The High Lord of Water resides in Faro. We’ll need to present you once we arrive in the city.”

Taly’s head popped up. “What does that mean? Are they going to take me away from you?”

By blood, House Arendryl had a claim on her.

“ No ,” Ivain said firmly. “This is a unique circumstance, to be certain, but no one is going to take you away. I won’t allow it.”

Taly breathed a sigh of relief.

“Say something,” Sarina implored. “You’ve been very quiet.”

Taly opened her mouth, but nothing came out. In truth, she didn’t know how to feel. Too many emotions jostled for space, tangled like threads in a snarl—grief, wonder, something nameless and rising fast. There was no pulling them apart.

Carefully, she folded the glamograph, making sure not to form any new creases. “May I keep this?”

“Of course.” Sarina squeezed her shoulder. “We have others in storage, as well as a few of Breena’s things from when she was a girl. I can have them brought up to your room if you’d like.”

Taly jerked her chin. “Thank you, yes.” She stood. “I’m tired.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the reason she was leaving. She needed air, space to digest what this all meant.

They both blinked, but didn’t press. Just rose to hug her, each in turn.

Ivain told her she was safe, that she was where she belonged, and nothing and no one was ever going to change that.

Sarina threatened to hunt her down if she wasn’t in her bed come morning.

They said their final goodnights, and Taly was in the middle of letting out a sigh of what-the-fuck-just-happened as she closed the office door behind her, when she found Aiden waiting for her outside.

He stood when she appeared.

Taly blinked at him owlishly.

“They told you?” he asked.

She nodded, overcome by that same paralysis that had plagued him earlier.

Because Breena Bryer had a brother, and that brother had two children, a boy and a girl.

Her… cousins.

This was her blood. Her kin. She’d been surrounded by it all along.

Aiden took a slow step forward. “May I… hug you?”

Taly hesitated, then nodded, tears welling in her eyes. “Yes. Please. Hurry .”

Aiden chuckled and took her into his arms. Taly hugged him back fiercely.

“I’m going to be honest,” she said through the tears. “I’m less excited about being related to Aimee.”

Aiden just laughed and held her tighter.