Page 97 of A Kingdom of Pleasure and Torment

Her plan was successful.

There are entries about her pregnancy, her labor, the wisp of light she birthed and took to the nursery to be nurtured. She has such hopes for that wisp of light, a daughter she named...

After the Cenere tree I labored beneath, tended by a midwife of the Court of Seasons.

I throw the book aside as if burned, lurch from the bed and double over, vomiting up my dinner onto the pristine marble floor. My head swims. I am dizzy with the truth. Not the truth. The coincidence. It must be a coincidence.

I was born of a wish. Luthian gave me to my mother to fulfill her wish. She named me after the tree I was born beneath. She raised me, a human child...

A human child that she taught the ways of magic. Of flying. Raising plants from the ground. Listening to the birds. Noticing the flowers.

A human child of no consequence, raised by a faery woman who desperately wished for her.

But it is my name on the pages of this book. My appearance. My birth that is described. My mother named as midwife.

This cannot be.

It cannot be.

I have no wings. I have no magic. I am human, in all respects. I age. I bleed with the moon and burn beneath the sun.

I am human.

I am human.

The diary lies like a viper, waiting to strike me once more. My hands tremble as I lift it and trace the loops of my name, written in my mother’s hand.

My real mother’s hand.

Then, I turn to the next entry and read on. Luthian is furious. He thinks me too foolish to understand the consequences of my actions if I am found out. But how will Arcus find out? He believes the child in the faery nursery belongs to him. He celebrated her with a banquet and beamed with pride. He already has suitors lined up for her when she comes of age and returns.

I laugh with hysterical, giddy relief. Of course, it’s all a coincidence. Luthian was banished from court for five-hundred years, after Parphia’s death. I am not five hundred years old.

The cenere tree must have held special significance to Luthian because of Parphia. That’s why he granted my mother’s wish there. It probably wasn’t even the same tree, just the same, common type. There are cenere trees all over Fablemere. It is a coincidence.

That is what my heart wants to believe. My mind, however, accepts the grim likelihood that that diary I am reading belonged to my mother.

I’m drawn back to her final entry.

There is one person I can seek out to learn the truth of it. Not Luthian, for he will merely pile more lies upon the lies he already led me to believe.

I need Firo, and our meeting cannot wait until morning.

“Take me to Firo,” I order the palace walls, and stride to the door.

It opens onto a room full of clocks. Hourglasses, great tall, ticking things, smaller ones that rest on mantles and tables. All around me is the chaotic clicking of gears, faces without numbers, or with the numbers in the wrong order. Pocket watches dangle in the air; some of them have no numbers upon them at all. The ceiling appears to be missing, replaced, instead, with a swirling purple mist and a void somehow illuminated by darkness.

And in the center of it all stands Firo.

I wipe my eyes hastily on the sleeve of my robe. I’m a queen or will be in a few hours. I must occupy the role.

He doesn’t ask why I’m there. He simply says, “You could not know until the correct time.”

I open my mouth to protest, to demand how he knows and why he did not tell me. But he is from the Court of Time and Destiny. The only answer he will give me is the one he already offered.

Instead, I ask, “What does it mean?”

He gestures to a table, a huge clockface under glass. I do not recognize the hundreds of symbols around its edge and spiraling into the center, and I don’t know how to read the multitude of hands, some of them moving slowly, some quickly. Firo pulls out a chair and directs me to sit, then takes his place across from me.

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