Page 89 of Stars May Fall

I leaned forward with a dangerous smile and rested one elbow on my knee. I knew that smile made people uneasy. “My house in Highfair where nobody can stop me doing exactly what I wish to do with you. Gregane is dead. Princess Annabelle has control of the palace. Your plan has failed. Now tell me what you meant about my mother.”

Lyrason looked up at the ceiling and dragged in a few sharp breaths. “This feels strangely familiar. Do you always do your negotiations while threatening death?”

I scoffed. “Maybe this is a little familiar. But this time there is no mediator. Annabelle’s not here to hold me back.”

Lyrason forced his face into a calm mask, and I could see the effort required. “I’ll tell you about your mother if you agree to let me live.”

I scowled. “I don’t even know what your information is worth.”

He blinked but that was as much of a promise as I was willing to make.

I sighed. “If you don’t tell me now, I will lose my patience and kill you. And because you hurt my wife, I’m tempted to use Gregane’s haemalcomy sword. It looks like it channels pain very, very effectively.”

“You’re a lot like both your parents, you know—your mother and your father.” He didn’t elaborate but swallowed and looked up at the ceiling before flicking his gaze back to me. “Your mother, Eloise Moore, invented the kryalcomy that channels vitality.”

I didn’t show any emotion, but Callum moved to my side, his arm lightly brushing mine, as if to reassure me that he was there. I waited.

Lyrason swallowed, noticing I was waiting for more. “Your mother was a kryalchemist. The king and queen forbade anybody from talking about her once she was exiled but…I knew her well. She was outstanding at her work. She invented a system for crop irrigation when she was young, which helped farmers and made her famous at the time. During a presentation of her invention to the Maegistrium at Ilustran University, she met the king and became his mistress. I was there. He was enchanted by her at once, despite her being a few years his senior. She was very lively, always buzzing with energy, and had these large dark eyes.” He had the audacity to smile at the memory. I tightened my fists but didn’t interrupt. Lyrason sighed and closed his eyes as if trying hard to remember through his exhaustion. “As far as I could tell, the king completely captivated and fascinated her. And of course, he spoiled her with lavish riches and even held a ball in her honor. It was quite controversial back then. Mistresses were meant to be much more discreetly kept. I think he genuinely believed he would eventually marry her.” Lyrason shook his head. “Such naivety. He must have been about twenty, maybe twenty-one, she was a few years older. She moved into the palace and joined the court, but your mother continued experimenting with different types of kryalcomy, despite the expectation placed on her to stop working. I think it was a distraction from everything else. She was scared by her enemies at court, I think, and became increasingly withdrawn. Her situation wasn’t easy—most of the royal family hated her, eligible women saw her as unwanted competition, and many disapproved of her presence as a mistress in court. Though she was always quick to smile when I spoke with her, it must have been hard. She became pregnant with you after about a year with the king.

“Tyler Gregane was a first-year student at Ilustran struggling to make ends meet. She hired him to help her in the workshop,mostly with hammering and heating the metal. She struggled to do that in the later stages of pregnancy since the heat would make her pass out. She was progressing with her experiments to purify blood from toxins or infections.”

Callum became more alert at his words and gave me a sideways look. I’d never imagined Sophie and my mother might hold similar passions.

Lyrason licked his lips before continuing, still looking up at the ceiling. “I decided to sponsor Mister Gregane’s studies, and in return he let me know how she was and what she was making. I encouraged him to help her as much as he could as she became increasingly alienated in the palace.” He turned his head to me. “When you were born, her interests changed, and she rarely visited her workshop. Her attention was completely taken up by you, and she spent most of her time in her small but grand house in Highfair. She no longer accompanied the king, but he would ask for you to be brought to him every few months. Gregane continued working under her, but it was only my money that kept him there. Their work was no longer progressing. She was too preoccupied, and Gregane didn’t have the knowledge or skill to progress without her constant direction. All her experiments almost went to waste.”

My chest tightened, despite my desire to remain emotionless. She had loved me enough to even lay her kryalcomy to one side to look after me. She hadn’t even done that for her lover. She had loved me. I had never quite dared believe it before. Nobody had ever spoken about her openly like this. The king had forbidden it as soon as she’d been banished, and my nanny had acted as if she’d never existed.

“Then the king declared his intentions to marry Charlotte DeReal from Cerith, a far more suitable match that he was under considerable pressure from the court to make. Of course, any mistresses had to disappear. Your mother went to Kollenstar,and her kryalcomy lab became Gregane’s, and so mine. Gregane finished his final year of studies and made a living using her workshop to fulfill orders from the Maegistrium, but in his spare time, I encouraged him to continue looking over Eloise’s old notes and experimenting. In return I cleared up some old debts and relationships of his. The problem was, she had taken many of her notebooks with her.

“Then one night, about eight years later, the king’s guards brought Eloise back, cloaked and in an unmarked carriage. The king had exhausted his attempts to treat his son of chronic lung disease that had lingered since his previous bout of pneumonia. The king knew Eloise had been experimenting with using kryalcomy to cure people of disease before she had left. He wanted her to continue her experiments and find a way to cure Stirling. Mister Gregane hadn’t even come close to advancing her studies. Nobody else in the Maegistrium had expressed any interest in this area, and the king knew her brilliant mind all too well. He also knew he could control her. She wouldn’t have the chance to spill his secrets or let the world know of Prince Stirling’s weakness.

“The surprise to me was how much she had learned in her time in Kollenstar. She had learned how to bind metals so they traveled in the blood. She worked under guard in her old workshop with Gregane, forbidden from entering the rest of the city. The king paid them handsomely. She remained like that for a year before she managed it. She invented a new form of haemalcomy, one that channels vitality, life itself.”

My heart plummeted. “No.”

Lyrason tried to sit up, but his bonds held him in place. “Eloise Moore was the greatest kryalchemist the world has ever seen. It’s a shame you inherited none of her talents. But she was like you in other areas. She would do anything, sacrificeanything to save the person she loved. Just like you would burn the world for Sophie. Morality is merely a matter of perspective.”

Dread grew in my stomach, though I kept it from my face. “So she saved Stirling?”

Lyrason sighed. “Yes. She invented the two poles, one that took life, the other that gave it. It was less effective back then. Only a small amount of vitality could be transferred, and Stirling had to have a disk of metal sewn to his skin. Anyway, I get ahead of myself. The king wanted to test if it was safe. He didn’t trust his former mistress, and the queen positively hated Elosie, so they asked for two lots of the haemalcomy. Then they poisoned you, a twelve year old boy. It was a slow acting but fatal poison, and it caused the biggest waste of talent this world has seen.”

I concentrated on my breathing to keep calm, dreading what I was about to hear. I didn’t want to be the same monster my father was.

Lyrason seemed to be enjoying my suspense. “Your mother attached one pole to herself, and one pole to your unconscious body to prove that her haemalcomy worked and was safe for Prince Stirling. You needed more vitality transferred than Stirling, so it was far more dangerous. Why she couldn’t have chosen a prisoner or somebody else to harvest vitality from, I don’t know. The concept of halfsouls never seems to have crossed her mind.

“Anyway, the haemalcomy slowly transferred vitality from her to you. Gradually, you improved. The king and queen were then comfortable enough to use the other set on Stirling, especially as he needed less energy transfer. Queen Charlotte used one end, Stirling the other. The queen didn’t trust anyone else and they believed it to be relatively safe. As long as they were linked, Stirling’s lung condition improved, but he wasn’t cured. He constantly took a low level of vitality from his mother to cover his disease, not that he was aware of any of this. It’swhy the queen was frequently sick and weak, though her life was only in true danger more recently, after she contracted heart disease. The king always knew this wasn’t a permanent solution, which is how he and I came to an arrangement. Gregane had kept me well informed, so I approached the king fourteen years ago, and revealed that I knew his predicament. I suggested that Gregane and I could potentially solve it by continuing Eloise’s experiments with haemalcomy to find a better way to harvest vitality from other sources. Gregane had learned a lot under her leadership that past year. I just needed the king to authorize our experiments on other people and keep us out of the Maegistrium’s sight. He agreed and gave me land and a much higher station in court. He even hinted that if I was successful, I might become family when his infant daughter was old enough.”

I heard the annoyance in his voice but ignored it. He had never deserved Annabelle. My mouth had gone dry as I processed the news. I licked my lips and barely dared to ask. “And my mother?”

“Initially, when she was connected to you, she was conscious and her mind remained sharp, though she used a wheelchair most of the day. She wanted to stay close to you, and there was no way she could return to Kollenstar. The king let her stay in the workshop, but within a week, she became far weaker than the queen due to your greater need for vitality. It happened quicker than I think she had expected. She was terrified for your safety. She worried that if she died or was taken far away, you would die too.

“So I helped her. We made a deal. She would transfer all her remaining research and documents and experiments to us as well as answer any of Gregane’s questions. In return, he would keep her in Adenburg and hide her existence. We never told a soul where she lived while she continued to feed you her vitality.To the outside world, including the king and queen, she simply disappeared.”

I stepped forward, my hands becoming fists. “Where is she now?”

Lyrason gave a slight smile. “I kept my bargain. I have always been a man who keeps his promises. She’s safe under my house, beneath where we house the Originals. She’s been unconscious for over a decade as you slowly suck the life from her. Who knows if you still need it. I once cured Duke James’s son with a single dose of vitality when he had measles as a young child. He only needed that one dose to recover. As far as I’m aware, in your case there’s no way to tell if there’s chronic damage from the poison that needs ongoing treatment. Maybe Eloise would’ve been able to tell if she’d managed to keep awake. But as it is, you drain her whether you need it or not. Like a parasite. You’re very like your father.”

Anger and horror bloomed in my chest. I had to put an end to this. I should have died sixteen years ago from that poison in my drink. I’d always labeled that as the first time my father had tried to kill me. I’d thought it was because Stirling had seemed more vulnerable and the king had wanted to remove any threat from his claim to the throne. I’d never imagined it had been a way to manipulate my mother. I’d thought she was hundreds of miles away.

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