“Back away from her if you want to ask any more questions,” Evander says, glancing down at Kiran’s hands. They aren’t glowing red, but the temperature in the room is certainly simmering.
Kiran doesn’t move, not until Ellie calls his name softly. She’s made her way over to Asha, whose eyes have glazed over. She stares out as if into the distance, though there’s nothing to see beyond the walls of this room.
Kiran is back at her side in an instant, tucking his fingers into hers, but when he speaks, he addresses me.
“Farin was the name of the son. The one from the story Asha’s Magic told when we first married,” he explains.
“Well, was the son a murderous lunatic who got a thrill from hearing others scream?” I ask, with just enough jest to hide the way my mind is whirring, trying to put the pieces together before my friends realize the vase has been dropped and shattered.
Kiran’s tanned skin goes pale at my joke.
“Crap,” I say, at the same moment Ellie clamps her hand over her mouth.
“You said his body lies within the ashes?” Kiran asks.
Evander gestures to everyone and no one at once. “Would someone please be kind enough to explain what’s going on?”
Asha’s face has gone as white as bone, and I dread what’s about to happen, what I’m about to witness.
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.
