Page 27 of Spark of the Everflame

I scrunched my nose. “There will be nodoting, thank you very much. I only mean that I can help. You don’t have to do it all yourself.”

She hesitated. “You know how Auralie feels about it, dearie. She’s already going to be furious about this morning.”

The heaviness I’d felt on the floor of the palace washroom settled back over me like a leaden cape. “It’s time to accept that she might not come back.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s been six months. There’s been no sign of her.”

“You can’t give up ho—”

“Don’t, Maura. Please. Hope without reason is... it’scruel.” I took a deep breath, willing the burning in my throat to fade. “I can’t keep pretending like life is still normal. Like she’s not...” My voice wobbled. “Like she’s not gone.”

Maura sniffled a bit, but remained quiet.

“Teller fears they’ll revoke his admission to the Descended academy without a Bellator serving as the Crown healer. Even if that’s not true—I can’t have him worried about it. He needs to focus on school. I have to take my mother’s place until he’s finished.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“What do you mean?”

“When your mother made that arrangement, she didn’t merely agree to serve until Teller finished school. She—” Maura’s mouth snapped closed.

I rose from my chair. “Tell me, Maura.”

She winced, her pity hanging in the air like a cloying scent. “The bargain was for life, Diem. Your mother agreed to serve in whatever manner the Crown requests for the rest of her life.”

“What do you mean, ‘in whatever manner the Crown requests’?”

“I don’t know the details, that was between your mother and the royals. She only told me that she would keep working here as much as she could, but requests from the Crown would be her priority.”

My knees felt weak. I leaned onto the table, gripping the edge. “And if she breaks the agreement?”

Maura rubbed her hands over her face and exhaled deeply. “I swore to Auralie I would never tell you this.”

“Maura, if this affects Teller, I have to know. It’s my job to protect him now.”

She looked at me with genuine pain in her eyes. “If she doesn’t fulfill the bargain, then her life would be forfeit. She would be executed by the Crown.”

The room began to spin. Suddenly the shadows were too bright, the silence too loud.

I fumbled for words. “But... the King—Teller says he’s unconscious. If he dies... maybe no one else knows. Maybe—”

“Prince Luther knows. He’s the one who negotiated it with your mother on behalf of the Crown.”

* * *

At dinner that night,it was all I could manage to shove bits of food around on my plate. As Teller and Father gabbed about their days, I offered just enough nods and smiles to not be rude, murmured just enough innocuous details to satisfy their questions.

My mind was amess.

I was ravaged by a thousand sparring thoughts, each one more terrifying than the next. None of them made sense. None of them I dared speak aloud.

When my mother had been here, it had been so easy to stay sheltered in the cocoon she’d built around me. I’d pushed back in all the ways that restless youth do, but I always surrendered in the end and accepted my curated existence.

She’d kept so many secrets. From all of us, but especially from me. Her daughter, her firstborn.

If anyone should have known the truth, shouldn’t it have been me? Before Teller, before even Father, it had been the two of us, alone in the world. An unwed mother and her bastard infant.

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