“I’m fine,” I muttered, wincing through the pain as I leaned on the hurt leg for too long.

“Let him make that assessment.” Mother waited for me on the landing, attempting to make that assessment for him, inspecting me the way Karmuth had in the warehouse. “You always were astonishingly resilient, Isay. The way Kar screamed when they tortured you… It couldn’t have been easy. You can allow vulnerability to show. A woman’s greatest weapon is to appear weaker than anyone suspects.”

I raised a brow at her and scoffed, “Is that what you’re doing? Pretending to be weak?”

“I’ve never been as strong as you are, darling.”

“You’re saying you don’t have to pretend, you only want me to appear weaker.” I shook my head.

“Isay, that is most definitely not the case. All I’m saying is to let others take care of you should they choose to do so. Karmuth is a capable young man, a fine match. I couldn’t have chosen any better for you.”

“Mom!” My cheeks heated up and I avoided looking at her. It was easy to do occupied with stumbling up the stairs as I was.

She hooked my arm with hers when I reached the landing, nose crinkling only a little at the way I smelled. Keeping step with my wobbling gait, she shook her head light-heartedly.

“Don’t you go evading the topic! I do know how mating bonds are formed. Yours is very strong, and you should cherish it. Not many fae your age manage to find a mate this competent. Even females my age have trouble forging a bond such as yours.”

“I’ve heard,” I admitted quietly, a blush warming up my cheeks.

Of course she knew how mating bonds were formed. She’d certainly figured out how mine came to be. It was surprising that for once she didn’t criticise my decisions.

Her support in this was conflicting, since I still didn’t understand how Karmuth had changed from a death fae to my mate, from my mate to my relative, from my relative to… to a Vindican prince? Wasn’t that what the king had so casually implied?

“Would you please just tell me what’s going on?” I begged as we reached my quarters. We’d been slow enough that the physician knocked on the door just as my mother had gotten me to sit.

“I’m here to check on the princess,” he said when my mother opened the door for him.

“Come on in.”

A puny fae with a rugged haircut and a sharp nose that captured all the attention stepped into the room, politely avoiding looking at my bedchambers deeper in the space, not that it made any difference to me. Nothing in here was decorated by me; it was as generic as rooms in the palace came.

From over his shoulder, a bulging full bag slipped down and thumped to the floor by my feet. His eyes roamed over my appearance in a professional manner, but he hesitated to take a closer look.

“I assure you, you can’t harm me any more than what I’ve already endured,” I told him. “And nobody will do you any harm for doing your job. The king was in a strangely cheerful mood.”

He looked to my mother for confirmation.

She nodded. “Your life is safe. Please make sure all of those cuts heal without scarring.”

Everyone had heard what happened with the kitchen maid. It was not unexpected when the death fae did not rush to cover my wounds, instead taking deliberately longer to crouch down in front of the couch I sat on, expecting either of us to stop his advance at any moment. When the command did not come, he gingerly rolled my sleeve up to reveal one of the worst marks still visible on my skin.

While Elia had washed most of my wounds the best she could, there wasn’t a lot you could do in a dungeon with a cloth and ever dirtying basin of water. As he set to work, rubbing ointments and gels on my skin, I looked to my mother.

“You need not stop talking. I’ve asked you several times about my father, so don’t stay silent on me now,” I grumbled.

“You weren’t ready for the complicated explanation about our family, Isay,” she deflected with a sniff.

“What you’re saying is that you weren’t ready to tell me the truth.”

She paced the room before coming to sit next to me and taking my other arm, the one not tended to by a curious physician who did a good job at appearing not to listen.

“I met Prince Nefari in Elverstone. His family was visiting our court to pay their respects to my father, your grandfather King Ilario—”

“I don’t want to hear a fairy tale telling of how this all went down,” I protested. “I want the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth, Isay. Sit still and listen,” my mother insisted.

I pressed my teeth together and did as she told me to. If she wanted me to believe I came from not only one royal bloodline but two, she’d better have a convincing story to go with it. And a damn good explanation as to why I was only hearing about it now.

“My mother had fallen irreversibly ill several months prior and passed away a week before the Hessians visited. We always held each other in high regard, being the two mightiest light fae courts throughout time, although Hessia had begun to wane more than a century ago when more and more younglings began to either die at birth or never reached maturity. That’s a different story altogether, although connected to your birth.

“I was devastated by the death of my mother; her last days had been hard on us all. It was completely uncalled for, but not inhuman of me, to seek refuge in the arms of our guest. If Nefari had pushed me away, we’d never be having this conversation. He didn’t, though. I believe he held an affection for me that drew us both closer together.

“Several unprecedented youngling deaths had occurred in the Hessian court the same week, and we used each other to fight our griefs. He was close to reaching the full cycle of his ecos blooming, which is something I did not know at the time. I would have been more careful had I known. As it was, I’d been certain nobody would ever find out about our involvement, and the first months thereafter it did seem to be the case. Until I started showing.

“My father had been furious when he found out. Not only because I’d refused his assigned mate decades ago and hadn’t given it more thought since, but because even though we cherished the good relationship between Hessia and Elverstone, inter-court relationships are banned.

“Isay, I never talked about your family because my father disowned me the moment he found out about me carrying Prince Nefari’s child. He sent me out of the castle, only providing me with a small cottage by the waterfall. I’d tried to contact Nefari to have him take us in, but his hands were tied. His father wasn’t pleased by the revelation either, but he had no other heir, and casting aside his only child at a time when getting any more descendants was questionable was something he was not able to do. He did, however, dismiss all of my pleas and forbade me from reaching out again.

“Nefari promised to return for you, but he never did. I’m sure they both expected you to die at birth.”

I stayed silent. The physician had stopped patching up my wounds. My mother stared off into the distance. This wasn’t how I’d expected this story to go. My grandfather had disowned us, and he’d also sent us out of Elverstone when he found out my mother was having an affair with yet another fae royal.

I hadn’t known at the time how seriously he’d take this banishment. His own daughter… He’d disowned his own daughter.

King Grath seemed generous in the face of those facts. Perhaps we had landed in a better place. Despite the threats I’d thought I’d faced when I first came to Vindica, and the unfortunate horror of the past day, she might have actually done what was best for the both of us. An accepting, functioning family. Something she seemed to have missed out on.

“So Karmuth is really not my relative?” I murmured.

“As far as I know, Heriot has no royal blood in him. He is in no way related to Nefari. Honey, mating bonds have their way of knowing who to bind together. You wouldn’t have formed this connection if it wasn’t in any way right for you. You do wish to pursue this, Isay, don’t you?”

My heart fluttered in my chest at the thought of forging something permanant with Karmuth.

“With all my heart.”

Chapter 44

KARMUTH

I WAS NERVOUS BEYOND MEASURE AND STILL IN A HORRIBLE

mental state. Trying to reach out to Isay through our bond did not help. She was either blocking me, or I didn’t do it properly.

I was likely overusing the connection as is. Nobody was meant to have another person tangled up in their emotions twenty-four seven. I needed to get my answers the old-fashioned way, by talking to her, if she was willing to see me. But first, I was to listen to the king’s confession.

He sat behind his massive desk, littered with papers, some of which looked like correspondence with the other courts.

One in particular stood out with large capital letters of YOU SHALL NOT WIN THIS scribbled on it in an aggressive handwriting, and a PS: Thank you for the new car and a meal below it. The Audi we had searched for in the shed… the negotiation party Sinister had mentioned…