But before the Old Magic can overtake her voice, before I can witness what it looks like for the magic to control a person, the piece clicks into place.
Farin.
The queen wants Farin.
Farin is inside Nox—part of him, at least.
And Nox discovered the method to free the parasite from her curse, to place her permanently in control of her host.
A process the parasite would have known from lurking in the back of my mind, eavesdropping as he explained it to me.
The queen wants Farin.
The parasite wants power.
Each of them has the ability to grant what the other needs.
As long as they have Nox, that is.
It’s my turn to clamp a hand over my mouth. Suddenly, it all fits into place. Why it was imperative for the queen that I leave Mystral.
She wasn’t jealous of Nox’s attention, or if she was, that wasn’t the driving force behind her decisions.
The queen doesn’t care if he loves me, not as long as she gets Farin back.
Something I would have stood in the way of, fought against with my very being.
But I left.
I left Nox with her. With it.
It hits me then who the parasite has joined itself to.
“She made a bargain with it,” I whisper, hardly realizing I’m speaking. “Before, she wouldn’t yield to its demands, but that was before the parasite knew about Farin. Before it found a way to free him. The parasite…Cinderella. She changed the game.”
Queen Asha is speaking now too, but it’s not her voice that booms from her mouth. It’s the voice of something ancient, something terrible, and the moment I hear it, I know it isn’t right. It isn’t right for it to take up residence in the queen’s body, not when it was likely the cause of her pain, of her scars.
The queen has the parasite. She has Nox. She knows how to perform the ritual to tuck him away, to unleash Farin and give him full control of Nox’s body.
No no no no no.
It is her. Mother has returned after all this time, says the voice.
“If that’s the case, then why didn’t you recognize her at the Council meeting?” asks Kiran.
“Because she changed her face,” I whisper, remembering my observations when I met with her in the throne room. How there was something unnatural about her features. “With all her potions. She changed her face over the years so she wouldn’t be recognized.”
“How does one go about changing their face?” asks Evander.
“The bargain was already fulfilled,” I say, realizing now that the queen had been forced to let me leave the castle, because Nox had turned over the parasite, fulfilling the bargain.
Which means Nox’s sister had been freed.
So why had Nox stayed?
It hits me then that the queen agreed not to go after Nox when he left. That she never agreed to let him leave in the first place.
I gasp, but no one is listening.
The whole room is in chaos over the information that the Queen of Mystral is someone the Old Magic knows. Someone they call Mother.
I don’t care who she is.
If she lays a hand on Nox, I’m going to kill her.
I’m going to rip her to shreds and feed her blood to the mortar between the stone bricks of her palace floor.
CHAPTER 52
BLAISE: AGE TWELVE
The servant’s robes are too loose.
They hang from my shoulders, droop at my belly, and sag at the floor.
Clarissa wouldn’t allow the tailor inside the manor when he arrived to fit me. She coughed in his face and claimed the house had come down with a mild case of the pox. It didn’t take much shooing after that to get him to flee the premises, but she did offer him my measurements before he left.
I watched him from the window, how he glanced at the paper then allowed it to fall to the wayside as he wiped his hands on his tweed pants.
I suppose this could have gone poorly for Clarissa, but nothing ever does, except for her gambling and inability to bypass a window display without being caught by the purse strings. The tailor could have made my robes much too tight, exposing the belly that’s left over from my pregnancy, but when the tailor dropped off the robes on our manor doorsteps, he left a note saying he’d measured the robes too large on purpose, that way I could grow into them.
Clarissa had been delighted.
I practically trip over the hem as she pushes me into the foyer of the palace. We’re greeted by a footman who recognizes Clarissa from the few times she visited the palace while my father was well enough to attend meetings and balls, and the footman stumbles over his words in her presence.
My stepmother blushes, because of course she thinks the footman is dazzled by her beauty, when in reality he probably just remembers how she got drunk at the ball and called one of the servants a litany of offensive words.
Come to think of it, this is probably that very same footman.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Clarissa asks. “We have an audience with the king.”
The footman takes another glance at the summons Clarissa handed him when we walked in. I can practically feel his mind buzzing as he tries to find a way out of this precarious situation.
It’s clear enough what he’s thinking: there’s no reason to introduce the new household staff to the king. It’s ridiculous that Clarissa thinks this makes any sense, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
There was a time in my life when I would have cared, when I would have been mortified at Clarissa’s insistence that others treat her as if she were the Queen of Dwellen herself and not the penny-squandering widow of a human ambassador.
I simply cannot bring myself to care.
