I rub my hands over my arms. “My mother fears nothing.”
“Your mother fears many things. Think, Iskvien.”
I open my mouth to say my husband’s name, but it’s not fear she feels for him so much as hatred.
So I think of everything my mother has ever done. The books she has burned, the border lords she has crushed, the way she stole the children of all those who opposed her and “raised” them safely within her court.
“She fears the power of men,” I whisper. “She fears the past.”
A slight nod.
But it’s not enough.
I am not my mother’s past, I am….
It strikes me then, what my mother is most afraid of.
Her future.
Her downfall.
Her ruin.
“She fears… herself,” I whisper. “A young, ambitious princess with the power to overthrow her.” The shock of it lances through me. The way my mother loved me once. The way her heart grew colder with every passing year, until she was favoring my sister over me and pitting us against each other….
She loved me and then she didn’t anymore, and I never knew why.
I never knew what I had done to displease her so.
And it all began in my eleventh year, when my magic first came in.
“Your mother fears a younger, more powerful queen,” the Mother of Night says with knowing eyes.
“But I wasn’t powerful! My fae magic is weak, and—”
“You made yourself weak,” she says coldly, “to appease a woman who would never love you. And while she may not have known what sort of changeling was placed in her womb, she knew enough to fear you. Power stirs within you, little queen. The kind of power that can make the ground tremble beneath your feet and the oceans writhe. And every time your mother looks at you, she sees a hint of it, although she doesn’t quite know why you make her uneasy or why she should fear you.”
It’s one revelation after another.
And it feels like she stabbed me through the heart and my body is only just starting to realize the injury it took.
“If you wish to destroy your mother,” the Mother continues, “then you must become the future she fears. You must become a dark queen full of ambition and power. You must rise. And you must crush the little girl inside you who still calls for her mother.”
I press the heels of my hands to my brow. It’s too much to consider. I breathe a wretched laugh. “I came here to find answers, and you leave me with this?”
“You came here because you know the answers, but you don’t want to face them.”
I lower my hands. “I wish I’d never made that bargain with you.”
“Do you?” She arches a brow. “Never regret, Iskvien. Regret is the weakness that chokes the mighty. Your husband was fated to die three months ago. Your mother would be settling his crown on her head as we speak, as her armies sweep through the southern kingdoms. One thing averted fate. You. Your choice. Your bargain. You are the child of destiny, Iskvien. No fate can ever be set in stone with you walking through the world.”
“I will not free you and your kind!”
“Come,” she says, pushing to her feet. “I think you need to see something.”
I stare at her back as she walks away from me. Did she even hear me? Or does she simply not care what I said?
The island reaches a precipice, and it’s there at the top that we find an enormous well, filled with fog and glistening lights. It’s even colder up here, and I swear some of those lights pause in their slow circling of the misty waters as if they sense they’ve caught my attention.
I remember everything my childhood nurse, Nanny Redwyne, told me.
Don’t look to the lights.
Don’t let them know you can see them.
Don’t listen to their whispers.
“Let me show you who the monsters truly are,” the Mother of Night says, holding out her hand.
I eye it like she’s gifting me with a snake. “No. A thousand times no. I’m not entering that water.”
“You want to know the truth about me and my kind? These are the waters of the past. And they will show you what you wish to see. You want to know me and my kind, Iskvien? Then open your eyes.”
I steel myself.
On one hand: Don’t look to the lights. On the other: Know thy enemy.
I stare at her hand for a long time.
“Promise me thrice that no harm will befall me and that you will lead me out of those waters safely within the hour. And then you will release me back into my own world.”
The Mother smiles.
And then she promises.
Thrice.
The second the fog closes over our heads, the darkness of the cave vanishes. Every step makes that chill water creep higher, until my lungs clench in shock and I can’t quite get my breath.
A hand closes over my head, and then the Mother shoves me under, and just before I open my mouth to scream, I stagger into a new world.
A figure sits by the fire, wearing a crown woven of iron thorns and little daggers. He’s playing a woodland flute, and in front of him, dozens of dancers leap and twirl. I see the little horns in their hair and the cloven feet on some of them. Otherkin. Worshipping in a Hallow somewhere.
“When the fae arrived in Arcaedia, they named us monsters,” the Mother of Night muses as she stares at her kind, “and our words and customs were twisted until we became monsters who deserved to be slaughtered. But these were my children, little queen. They knew love. They knew kindness. They knew peace and happiness. Until your forebears arrived.”
I swallow hard. “There were blood sacrifices—”
“There were.” Her eyes darken. “The land requires blood to power the Hallows. Have you not felt them weakening?”
A queasy feeling fills me. “That is wrong.”
“Is it? Some were chosen by their people,” she continues. “And some volunteered, seeking
