Page 14 of Crownless King

“Your mother didn’t tell you?”

“She never spoke about it. And while she was alive, I was too young to ask those questions. We lived here, in this house, with no stairs or upper floors. My mother and I were the only highborn in Vensari. I never felt like I was different. She never opened her wings in my presence. I don’t even know what they looked like.”

A wistful expression crossed his face. He rotated the slim silver ring around his left little finger. I always found that ring too small and delicate for him, but he never took it off.

“Was the ring hers?” I tipped my chin at his hand.

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “That’s all I have left from her—the ring and this house.”

That’s all he had left. Period. He’d lost everything else because of me. But I didn’t bring it up and didn’t apologize. I didn’t want to spoil this moment. Voron was telling me about his past, and I wished to listen.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Mulena.” His voice remained even when he said it. It had been a hundred-and-seventy years since her passing—enough time for him to come to terms with his loss, or at least to learn to hide the pain of it.

“How did she die?” I asked softly.

He turned his head toward the window. “Royal guards came for her one fine morning. I was scared. But she told me to stay strong. She begged me to remember her.” His throat bobbed with a swallow. “That was the last time I saw her. They told me she was accused of treason and executed.”

I cradled his face in my hands. “I’m so sorry, Voron.”

He covered my hand with his, silently accepting my sympathy.

“I always believed her ‘treason’ had something to do with me. There is no law against harboring wingless children, but only because there had been no need to have it before me. No one had kept a wingless baby before.”

I drew in a shaky breath, and he took my hand in his, resting both on his chest.

“Please don’t think about my people as heartless creatures, Sparrow. The birth of a wingless child is so rare, no one expects it. When it does happen, it happens quickly. People simply don’t have a chance to react before it’s too late.”

“Yet here you are.Youwere saved somehow.”

“My case must be a lucky accident,” he said, then added with a humorless smile, “or anunluckyone, depending on one’s point of view.”

“Is there absolutely no one who could tell you what happened? Someone must know how you survived.”

“Notsomeone,butsomething. And it’s right here, in this house.”

ChapterFive

SPARROW

Icouldn’t believe my ears.

“You have a record of your birth, Voron? Like a witness statement? What is it? A letter?”

He shifted on the window seat, turning his head in my lap to see my face.

“It’s a book, Sparrow. Many houses of highborn keep family records. The records of the royal family are accessible to the public. Mine, however, are warded so no one can read them.”

“Why the secrecy?”

He shrugged. “It happened before I can remember.”

“If someone didn’t want people to know what happened, why not just burn the book?”

“A family chronicle cannot be destroyed until the last of the bloodline dies, which is me. For as long as I live, the book is going to be where it is, in the room behind the fireplace here in the library of Vensari.”

“Can I see it?”

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