Page 17

Leon

I don’t take her to my room, or hers. Some stories can only be aired out in the open. Some secrets need to be taken out in the light of day.

The private courtyard by Proctor Gallis’s office is one I remember from a previous visit. It’s nice and quiet, except for the trickling of a fountain and the chirping of the birds.

Ana sits on the stone seat opposite the water feature, her fingers picking at the lichen along the seat edge. Now that we’re here, I suddenly think this is a bad idea. I thought telling her about Mistwell would help her understand, but I could be giving her just another reason to hate me.

“You know, we had a fountain like this back in Gallawing,” she says, examining the etchings in the stonework.

I feel a rush of helpless fondness toward her. Even now, when I know she’s still furious with me, she has the compassion to give me the space I need.

“I’d watch the birds come and wash in it,” she continues. “I suppose it’s gone now. Or maybe it was only the house that got burned to ashes. I think I’d like it if some of the grounds survived.”

“But you don’t mind that the manor itself burned down?” I ask, intrigued by her distinction.

“No. I hated Gallawing. Everything it represents. Everything that happened—or didn’t happen—there. It’s why it’s easier not to talk about.” She pauses, then lifts her chin to me. “But I guess it’s still a part of me, something that will always be there in my past, whether I want it or not.”

She’s giving me an opening, and I straighten up, wondering where to begin.

“Even I forget sometimes how young I was when I went off to fight in the war,” I say at last. “That’s not an excuse, of course, but in human terms, I was barely eighteen. My parents didn’t want me to go, but my grandfather thought it sent the right message, and I was proud to represent our troops.”

I wander over to the fountain, putting my fingers under the trickling stream as I struggle with how to explain it all.

“It turns out I had a natural flair for soldiering. The pace of it, the way you can never rest for too long, because action could come at any moment—the long nights and bloody mornings.”

I look up, waiting for her reaction, but her face gives nothing away.

“I won’t sanitize it for you,” I say with a shrug. “That’s the truth.”

“I wouldn’t want you to,” she counters. “The truth is all I’ve ever wanted.”

I wonder if what I’m going to tell her will change that.

“It wasn’t just me who did well once we got to Trova. No one in your kingdom had fought real battles against our kind for a long time. They’d forgotten how to defend themselves against our…unique skills.”

“They must’ve not known what hit them,” she says.

“Yes, at first. But to be fair to them, the Ethirans learned quickly. Still, we swept through the west like a hurricane, driving them back. Once we heard Palquir was sailing up the Potamis to retake Elmere, we followed our enemies as they retreated east.”

I pause, trying to collect my memories. But they’re all a blur from those few months—an endless stream of riding and fighting and sleeping, only to rise and fight some more. That’s all Trova is to me now, just a list of places where I opened the earth and poured humans into it.

“I suppose you don’t know that I had a different name back then. I wasn’t always the Nightmare Prince,” I say before I can stop myself.

“No,” she says. “I didn’t know that.”

“Earthsplitter,” I say. “Makes a bit more sense, doesn’t it? I could end whole battles within an hour on the right ground.”

“So why did you do things different at Mistwell?” she prompts.

I still recoil a little from the town name, but there’s no going back now.

“Frankly, even though I was good at it, I’d gotten sick of all the killing. Maybe because I was so good at it. The victories had made me overconfident, and I was young and arrogant. I thought I could end the entire war in one quick sweep.”

“And you did,” she says. “Herrydan’s death marked the end of the fighting, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” I say, withdrawing my hand from the fountain water. “We knew he was in Mistwell with the last of his men, and we knew the town was full of Ethiran sympathizers. We argued for hours over how to take the town while minimizing fatalities in our ranks and among the civilians.”

I smile unhappily at the irony.

“So did you really intend to get them to surrender at first?” she asks. Then, more quietly, “What changed your mind?”

I push my shoulders back, preparing myself to finally say it.

“I didn’t change my mind. The whole thing was a mistake. I never meant for those people to die.”

Her eyes widen, but she stays calm.

“A mistake?” she repeats.

“Yes, it was an accident. I went to General Lestrides with my plan. He was skeptical, but I convinced him it was the best option. I would send my sensic magic into the town that night and influence Herrydan, as well as anyone else I could get to listen, to surrender.

“Part of me knew better than to stake everything on my sensic power. I was aware even back then that the kind of magic I did was complicated. It requires nuance and finesse to properly place an idea in someone’s head via their dreams. But I ignored all that.

I felt unstoppable. The entire kingdom knew I was powerful enough to win battles for the Trovians—what was one little town after that?

Why shouldn’t I use my magic however I wanted? ”

“But something went wrong,” she says.

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying not to picture it, but the images are always there. Even now, eighty years later, they haven’t faded one bit.

“The moment I woke up, hours before sunrise, I knew something terrible had happened. All those sleeping minds were just gone . I ran to the town, and that’s when I found them.

I’d sent Herrydan and some of his closest followers a dream about the gods.

I’d whispered to them that Ethira wanted them to surrender, to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. I told them it was his will.”

Ana says nothing, so engrossed by my words her breathing has grown shallow.

“What I had underestimated—what I might’ve sensed if I’d been more cautious and less sure of myself—was how desperate Herrydan had become.

He knew he was losing, he knew that his death was inevitable, but he also believed deeply that he was doing the gods’ will.

They all did. They weren’t just an army, they were a cult.

All of them were utterly convinced that Herrydan was their celestial messenger on earth.

And their precious leader had been praying every day, searching for a sign.

So when a message came to him one night from—as he thought—Ethira himself, demanding an ultimate, final sacrifice… he followed his orders.”

I press on, barely coming up for air. If I hesitate, I might not be able to tell the rest.

“His men killed the townspeople first. One by one, cutting them down with their swords or killing them with magic. No one fought back. They were followers of the Temple, and that just made them all lambs for the slaughter. And when they’d killed every man, woman, and child in the town, Herrydan gathered all of his soldiers in the courtyard and ordered them to turn on each other.

By then, I imagine the madness had fully set in.

After what they’d done, there could be no turning back, no acknowledgment that their grand leader might be mistaken.

They could only deal with what they’d done by believing it had to be done.

So, spurred on by visions of Ethira rewarding them in the Eternal Realm—visions I’d fed into their minds—they killed each other. ”

“How do you know this?” she asked. “I thought you said they were dead by the time you got there.”

“Because Herrydan told me,” I say simply.

“He waited until they’d all followed his orders, making sure each one had sacrificed themselves.

He was in the central square with a knife under his chin when I got there.

He told me about the rewards he’d been offered by the gods and about Ethira’s message to him. And then he slit his own throat.”

I remember it all too vividly. The red splashing in fat droplets onto the faces of his dead men lying at his feet. The triumphant light in his eyes slowly drained away, and I was left alone with the consequences of my actions.

Ana stands, unable to sit still anymore.

“So why didn’t you tell them it was an accident? Lestrides thought you did it on purpose, and you never corrected him. I saw what he wrote about it—that you said Palquir should be grateful for what you’d done.”

Those trips of hers to the library were more informative than I’d thought.

“What would be better?” I ask. “A ruthless ally who does something brutal to bring peace in the long run? Or a fae prince so wrapped up in his own strength that he massacres a town without even trying ?”

“You didn’t?—”

I cut her off, knowing her instinct will be to absolve me in some way. I saw it with my parents, my brother, and the rest of my unit. But I don’t want absolution.

“I might not have wielded the blades, but those people died because of me,” I explain. I step over to her now so I can lean forward and drive home the weight of my words.

“That’s why I want you to be careful, Ana. It’s why I want you to use your strength and power but never be a slave to it. Otherwise, you just might make a mistake like I did and end up being haunted by it forever.”

Morgana

I meet Leon’s eyes, trying to understand the weight of everything he’s just told me.

I can see him there in my mind’s eye, alone in the morning light beside the piles of bodies.

Rather than being sickened or horrified, I’m profoundly sad.

So much bloodshed, so much loss. In the end, it was the price Trova paid to prevent even more killing.

I wonder if the survivors of the war thought it was worth it.

And what about Leon? What did it cost him?