Birthright

“We don’t know that,” I said. “Flavio hated me. He was always looking for a chance to take me down. It doesn’t mean that my uncle sanctioned this attack.”

  “You still don’t think Kade orchestrated this whole thing?” Torn asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that my uncle cares about me, and it’s hard to believe that he’d do this do me. Flavio being behind it all makes more sense.”

  “It be true,” Skillywidden said. “Kade has a soft spot for the princess, though I dinnae think his affections be so innocent.”

  “He just gets confused,” I said, frowning at Skillywidden. “That doesn’t mean that he had my friends tossed in the dungeon, or that he wants us all killed.”

  “He looks at ye the same way yonder kelpie looks at ye,” he said.

  “Does he now?” Ceff asked, eyes shifting to black.

  “Fine, Princess,” Torn said, ignoring Ceff. “We’ll do things your way, but if Kade attacks, I’m not holding back.”

  “Not before I get answers,” I said.

  “We will wait until you get your answers,” Ceff said. “But Torn is right. If Kade is responsible for our imprisonment, we will not hold back.”

  After two years in iron chains, I didn’t expect them to. But I still wasn’t convinced that my uncle was behind their abduction.

  “Just give me a chance to talk to him,” I said. “Maybe this was all Flavio’s idea. The guy was a creep.”

  “I agree that the guard was a creep, but that tunnel came out in your uncle’s quarters,” Torn said. “I find it hard to believe he had no idea that we were down in that dungeon.”

  “We will give Ivy her chance to talk,” Ceff said.

  “That’s all I ask,” I said.

  “Fine, whatever,” Torn said. “No sense arguing with the married couple.”

  I blushed, and led the way to the Great Hall. Married couple? I liked the sound of that.

  Chapter 50

  “If that is the last order of business…” Kade said.

  He looked around the room, a serene expression on his face until he caught sight of me.

  “My dear, what are you…?” he asked.

  Ceff and Torn stepped into the Great Hall, cutting off the rest of his question, but I answered anyway.

  “I’m here for answers, uncle,” I said.

  “Seize those men!” Kade shouted.

  Marcus and two of the other guards broke away from the throne, and charged forward. I lifted a hand, eyes glowing, and sent a fire ball at their feet.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They’re with me.”

  The guards hesitated, eyes darting to Kade for orders. My uncle’s lips pulled back from his teeth.

  “Is this your decision?” he asked. “Have you forsaken our bond? Have you come to stand against me?”

  “I’ve come for answers, uncle,” I said. “I deserve the truth.”

  Having seen my uncle’s face when he caught sight of Ceff and Torn, I had a pretty good idea of what those answers would be, but I still wanted to hear his side of the story.

  “What truth?” he asked. “That I wanted you for myself? That these men were no good for you? They are unworthy of your beauty. You must see that.”

  “So it’s true then,” I said. “You were behind their disappearance all along.”

  A buzzing hum filled the room as wisps started talking all at once, and I was glad that I hadn’t tried to reach the Great Hall from one of the alcoves above. If my wings were extended, the crowd of wisps would have been deafening.

  “I did it for you, can’t you see that?” he said. “I’ve done it all for you.”

  “How could you?” I asked. “They are my friends. Ceff is my betrothed. I love him.”

  “You would choose the kelpie over me,” he spat. “Do you know what you are giving up?”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “With my knowledge and your power, we could have ruled over all of Faerie,” he said.

  “I don’t think Oberon and Mab would appreciate that,” Ceff said.

  “Oberon and Mab are gone!” Kade seethed, chest heaving. He turned back to me, a feverish gleam in his eyes. “Faerie is rife for the taking! It can be ours. Cast aside these fools, and join me. We can have it all.”

  “I never wanted power, uncle,” I said. “All I wanted was a family.”

  “Sniveling brat,” he sneered. “You’re as bad as your father. He ruined everything when he left Faerie. He brought down Mab’s wrath on our kingdom.”

  My chest tightened, and my vision blurred. I knew that there had been bad blood between the brothers, but I had no idea just how deep seated my uncles’ hatred was for my father.

  “He did it to protect a child,” I said.

  “You don’t even know, do you?” he sneered. “He claimed that he did it for the love of the child, but what of my feelings? All those years, all I wanted was one thing, one woman, and he stole her from me.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  I knew that there was a tragic love story in my uncle’s past. He’d confused me often enough for his lost love. I wanted to know more about her, why he’d come out of that relationship so broken, but I dreaded hearing anything that might mar my father’s memory. Then again, I’d come here for the truth.

  “Who was she?” I asked.

  “The most beautiful woman in all of Faerie,” he said. “And she would have been mine. She’d sent for each of us, your father and I, but he went first, he always went first. It was his birthright, and now I wish he’d never been born. He had her first, and so she sent me back to our court without giving me a chance, and kept him there in the palace. But she should have wanted me. Don’t you see? It should have been me.”

  “You’ve lost it, old man,” Torn said. “You’re not even making sense.”

  “I could have been the Unseelie King,” he said. “It should have been me!”

  A cold tendril wrapped around my heart.

  “This woman,” I said. “What was her name?”

  I’d guessed the answer, but I needed to hear it from his lips.

  “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” he said, voice a reverent whisper. “My dear, dearest Mab.”

  My father had been Mab’s boy toy. I was going to be sick.

  “What happened to my father?” I asked.

  “He risked everything, and left me to pick up the pieces, to rebuild the wisp court after Mab spent her anger tearing it apart, all for his ridiculous love for that child.”

  “Love isn’t ridiculous,” I said. “If you weren’t so obsessed with power, you might realize that.”

  “Love is a foolish human emotion that has no place in Faerie,” he said. “No place in you.”

  He was wrong. Ceff and Marvin loved fully, and they were fae. But I couldn’t help the retort that burst from my mouth.

  “Well, if love is a foolish human emotion, I’m glad to be a half-breed,” I said.

  I expected anger, rage. Instead, my uncle tipped his head back and laughed. A chill ran up my spine when his eyes caught mine again, trapping me in his ecstatic gaze.

  “Oh, my niece, you are many things, but you are not human,” he said.

  Chapter 51

  My throat tightened and my chest constricted, leaving me gasping for air. My uncle’s words, you are not human, making the muscles in my stomach clench. It was a lie. It had to be a lie.

  “What do you mean, she is not human?” Ceff asked, eyes shifting to black.

  Suffering from iron poisoning, he could barely stand without leaning on his trident, but that didn’t stop him from stepping forward, putting himself between me and my uncle.

  “I am half fae and half human,” I said.

  But I wasn’t so sure who I was trying to convince.

  “Oh, you might seem human,” Kade said, waving a hand at me. “You might even have human blood running through your veins, but that is just a technicality, a trick of magic. I don’t know how my bro
ther accomplished your present state, but one thing is certain. You were not born human.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “I have a human mother.”

  I knew my mother was human. She wasn’t a faerie hiding behind a glamour. I was sure of it.

  “Oh, I’m sure Liam found a willing surrogate to adopt you and pretend you were her own,” he said. “Knowing my brother, he probably laid a geis on her so that she could never reveal the truth of your birth.”

  That hit a little too close to home.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Kade said. “All that matters is who you are.”

  He was baiting me. I wanted to ask who I was so badly it hurt, but I pressed my lips together in a hard line. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  It was all lies anyway, wasn’t it?

  “If she’s pureblood fae, then who’s her mother?” Torn asked, tapping his chin with one claw tipped finger. “Liam only had one wife, and he never mentioned a lover…oh.”

  “No,” I croaked.

  I’d come to the same conclusion as Torn, but it was too monstrous to believe. My father had fled Faerie with a fae child. He’d claimed that he was trying to protect that child. Mab left Faerie soon after to find something that had been stolen from her—the thing most precious to her.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  The only thing keeping my world from shattering into a million pieces was the knowledge that the timeline was all wrong. My father had left Faerie over a hundred years ago. I was only twenty-five. No matter how you did the math, I couldn’t be that baby.

  “Yes,” Kade said, eyes wide. “I recognized you as soon as you stepped foot in Nithsdale. You look so much like her. The resemblance is uncanny.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You have her strength,” he said. He never blinked. When had he stopped blinking? “Her force of will. Mab is like a hurricane, a violent force of nature, and someday you will be as well. I’ve seen it in you. Her power. That penchant for violence. The desire to burn the world to ash and recreate it in your own image.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re lying…there’s no way…I’m not…”

  “What?” he asked. “Not powerful enough? Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve seen her power raging inside of you. I’ve helped to nurture it, helped it to grow. Soon it will break free of your father’s sorcery, and then you will truly be the worthy heir to Faerie.”

  “You’re the heir to the Unseelie Court?” Torn asked. He let out a low whistle. “I knew you were a princess—a wisp princess—but heir to the Winter Throne?”

  I shook my head. My hands were shaking, and my legs felt like they might give out at any moment.

  “I’m not…I’m not old enough,” I said. “That baby, if it was even Mab’s—which we have no reason to believe—would be nearly two hundred years old. So it can’t be me.”

  Please don’t let it be me.

  “I admit that I found this perplexing as well, until I recalled Liam’s friendship with the kitsune,” Kade said.

  “Inari?” Torn asked, frowning. “What does she have to do with this?”

  Normally, I’d perk up at that name, the private investigator in me coming to the forefront, looking for answers. I knew that Torn and Inari had been lovers, but that things hadn’t ended well. I’d tried to drill him for information about the kitsune when I found out that she was one of my father’s former friends, but Torn would never talk about her. I’d been trying to pry details about Inari from Torn since I learned of my father’s existence, but I had a feeling that I didn’t want to hear what he had to say next.

  “She used to visit our court, before Oberon and Mab left and closed the roads to Faerie,” Kade said. “And I finally recalled one of her special talents.”

  “Weapon crafting, nature magic that increases crop yields…oh,” Torn said, eyes wide. “Stasis magic. Inari can put a person in stasis.”

  “Yes,” Kade said. “I remembered a story she once shared about putting a fallen kitsune warrior in stasis while they carried her off the battlefield and to the nearest healer.”

  “But casting stasis on an injured warrior and casting it on a healthy child are two very different things,” Ceff said. “What father would do such a thing?”

  “A desperate one,” I said.

  “Mab would have been looking for an older child, and later a grown woman,” Ceff said, nodding as he came to the same realization that I had.

  “And one that was pureblood fae,” Torn said.

  “He was trying to protect you from the Queen of Air and Darkness,” Ceff said. “Mab would have jealously guarded her throne. You would always have been a threat, her enemy. He was protecting his child.”

  “Liam was a fool!” Kade said, spittle flying from his lips. Apparently, he didn’t appreciate my father receiving praise. “Who knows what Mab would have done with you? Who cares? Liam had the one thing I wanted, and he threw it all away for a child. He left Faerie, and he took Mab with him.”

  “I’m Mab’s daughter?” I asked, voice a whisper.

  “You’re the reason she left,” he said, glaring at me. “I should hate you, despise you, but I took you in. I taught you how to use your powers. You look so much like her. We could have been together. Finally together.”

  I made a choking sound, and Ceff stepped closer to Kade.

  “We’ve heard enough,” Ceff said.

  “Wait,” I said. “I have one more question. Uncle, in the years since my father left Faerie, did you ever hear where he’d gone? Or where Mab went to?”

  If we’d found a back door to Faerie, that meant there would be others. Word would pass between the two realms. In fact, I had heard that the Unseelie Court had a way of communicating between its branches in the human world and its seat in Faerie.

  “No,” he said. “He left, and she followed. My dearest left me, for him. Always, always for him.”

  Ceff raised an eyebrow at me, and I nodded. I was done with Kade’s ramblings. Ceff slammed a fist into Kade’s temple, knocking him unconscious mid-rant.

  “No fair, Fish Breath,” Torn said. “I wanted to knock him out.”

  “I will let you do it next time he wakes up,” Ceff said.

  “Deal,” Torn said, a slow grin stretching across his face. “So what do we do with him?”

  “Kill him?” Ceff asked. “Chain him in iron? Banish him from Faerie?”

  They were all reasonable suggestions considering Kade’s crimes and his penchant for diabolical schemes, but I couldn’t condone physically harming my uncle, and I didn’t want to send him off to wreak havoc on some other unsuspecting world. But there are other ways to hurt a man such as Kade.

  “Is there a way to strip a faerie of his power?” I asked.

  Power was the one thing that my uncle held dear. He had stolen so much from me, and I planned to return the favor.

  I also wasn’t stupid. I may not want my uncle imprisoned, but I didn’t want a magic toting sociopath wandering the world, biding his time for revenge.

  “Yes,” Torn said, frowning. “But you need a loireag to do the spell.”

  “Where can we find ourselves a loireag?” I asked.

  “There are only two that I’ve ever heard of, Princess,” he said.

  “Are they here, in Faerie?” I asked.

  “Aye, lass,” Skillywidden said, coming to stand near me now that Kade was unconscious and drooling on the floor. “We’ve all heard tell of the loireag. There be one for each court, Seelie and Unseelie.”

  “They are used in extreme cases, but it is rare for a faerie to be sentenced to having their magic stripped away,” Ceff said.

  “So there’s one of these loireag at the ice palace?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ceff said, but we would have no authority to request a stripping of your uncle’s powers. If we present his crimes before the Unseelie Court, there is no guarantee of what they will senten
ce him to suffer, or that they will find him guilty.”

  “He kidnapped and bound in iron a kelpie king and a cat sidhe lord,” I said. “That must be considered a crime, even here in Faerie, right?”

  “No,” Torn said. “Kidnapping is par for the course, Princess. It would take Mab herself to veto the court’s decision.”

  “We may not have a faerie queen, but we do have a princess,” I said. “Would that work?”

  Torn stroked his chin, deep in thought. The sound of his claws raking across stubble made the hair on my neck stand on end. His eyes met mine, and his lip lifted in a grin.

  “It might,” he said. “It just might.”

  Chapter 52

  “Are you sure that you want to do this?” Ceff asked. “Mab has been searching for you for centuries.”

  We’d already been over this. I understood his desire to keep me safe, but I was done with hiding. Plus, this gave me a chance to clear my name with the Unseelie Court, and find a punishment for my uncle that I could live with.

  “Fish Breath has a point, Princess,” Torn said. “You’d be serving yourself up on an iron platter.”

  I shrugged.

  “The entire wisp court already knows my secret,” I said. “It’s not like my uncle was discreet.”

  Kade, in his frenzied rage, had outed me in front of every wisp who’d been in attendance in the Great Hall. His rant cost me my anonymity. No point in trying to cover it up.

  I’d come to Faerie for the truth. I might as well embrace it.

  “You are the rightful heir to your father’s throne,” Ceff said. “You have more political clout than Kade, since this court is your birthright, not his. You can order your people to silence.”

  “Do you really think that would work?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow. “Because I don’t. It’s human nature, and fae nature, to gossip. Finding out that the wisp princess is also the winter princess is pretty big news, even for Faerie. People will talk, no matter what I threaten them with.”

  “But if you order…” he said.

  “No,” I said, holding up a gloved hand. “Let’s be honest. I’m a stranger here. Kade spent his entire life here in the wisp court, but I grew up in the human world. It might be my birthright, maybe even doubly so, to demand their obedience, but I haven’t done anything to prove my worthiness as a leader. Hell, I don’t want to. I just want to drag Kade’s ass to the ice palace, have his magic stripped, prove to the court that I’m no longer a threat to our kind, and return to Harborsmouth.”