Page 78 of Fae Crown

“What? What is it?” Dashiell asked.

“Nothing,” I answered, a bit too quickly, too defensively.

“You’re hiding something.”

I snorted. “I’mhiding something, he says. Do you have any concept of how many secrets have been kept from me? How many times I’ve been lied to? You stillhaven’t even told me where exactly we are. Or how I could have been born when my mother had lost her mind. DidFatherhave sex with her when she wasn’t capable of making decisions for herself?”

Dashiell’s one blue eye blazed as if a fire were actually blazing behind it. “My king would do no such thing. Never. And especially not to Odelia.”

“Then how did I come to be?”

“You’ll have to earn that answer.”

“Earn the answer of how my parents had me. Great. Sounds really just there,Dashiell. Until such time as you deem me worthy of understanding how my father could have gotten my mentally ill mother pregnant, I’ll go ahead and assume the worst of him, shall I?”

That blue eye flared. His jaw clenched so that the bone delineated its sharp outline. He breathed in, out, in and out again, all the while trying to scald me with his silently accusing glower.

“How did you find Odelia?” he asked.

“How did the king find her?” I countered. “He assumed she was dead for most of my life, I presume?”

Dashiell hesitated, but only for a moment. “Of course. Don’t you think if he’d known she was alive he would have done something to help her before now?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like he’s done a thing to help hisdaughter.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Because you aren’t her. You aren’t the woman he loves. Just a cruel reminder of what he once had.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, truly I shouldn’t have. It’s what he’d been leading up to. He’d all but said this already in as many words. And yet—still—he might as well have poured salt over my open wounds.

I went totally still, so still that the man seemed to notice.

He opened his mouth, closed it. “I’m…” Closed it again. “Oren found Odelia by chance. Because he’s been trying to figure out how Talisa is so powerful for many years now. But you … how did you find her?”

I looked away, toward the curtains, wishing I could see out the windows. At least then I’d have some hints at where I found myself.

“I don’t owe you anything else,” I said. “At least not until I get answers of my own.”

The coverlet rustled as Dashiell stood and moved into my line of sight. I looked toward the opposite wall, mindlessly studying Edsel’s many healing accoutrements.

Dashiell sighed and—sliiide,sliiddde—drew open the curtains. Light streamed in but I didn’t yet look.

“Elowyn,” Dashiell said.

When I kept my stare fixed right where it was, on a jar labeledPowdered dusky cultivated lettucein a tight scrawl I guessed was Edsel’s, he added, “Talisa’s been feeding off Odelia for decades.”

Even my bones seemed to go rigid at hearing my mother’s long-lasting torment put so bluntly.

“Talisa will soon notice we’ve moved her, if she hasn’t already. We can’t afford to have Talisa ever find Odelia again. So, I repeat myself, how didyoufind Odelia when it took my king twenty-two years to come upon her?”

My father was no ally. He’d proven that much over and again.

Dashiell was loyal only to him.

There was no way I’d tell either of them of the map branded across my skin that only Rush and I had ever seen.

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