Page 41 of Knight's End
Jorad looked at the ground. “I’d received some disturbing news—”
I recalled how Jorad had found out Willard had cheated. I quickly interjected, “He had leave to take a few hours.” I could hardly imagine Jorad drowning his sorrows at a tavern, but wherever he’d wandered, his heartbreak deserved a bit of privacy.
Jorad nodded at me in thanks. Then he spoke. “When I came in, you were discussing Gitmore and the difficulty of creating an alliance with them,” he said. “There were very personal reasons for the hatred between your mother and Queen Shenna.”
“What? What do you mean? Our reports say Shenna’s unbalanced. She’s filled that desert of hers with undead soldiers—”
“She created a barrier between herself and the sea. Now, you know why.” Jorad inclined his head. “Other nations didn’t agree with certain methods, didn’t believe in the same forms of protection as your mother.”
My eyebrows raised. I had never heard Jorad blaspheme my mother like this. Me, yes. Absolutely. But he’d always been one of her lapdogs. Did he disagree with how she kidnapped Avia? I opened my mouth to ask when he dropped another bombshell on me.
“Besides, your mother was always a bit biased. And I don't know that she ever told you the truth." His tone was carefully court appropriate. The disdain that normally dripped from his lips when he spoke to me was absent. I froze. That meant the truth he was referencing was about to cut me to the bone.
I didn't have the time or energy or the emotional capacity for any further surprises. But it didn't seem to matter with my capacity was. Fate kept prodding me down the path anyway. War and destiny took without mercy. "What truth?" I asked.
Jorad looked a bit smug when he said, "Your mother married the Queen's brother."
"And?" I didn't understand. My thoughts raced to my four fathers. None of them had had the blue hair typical of Gitmore. But, in the past, when wizards had been more plentiful, some royal families had taken to having their appearance permanently altered. I’d never asked my fathers… my thoughts started to pull me in different directions.
Jorad shook his head. "Your mother married him in a private ceremony. When she was just eighteen. She married him and him alone."
“That’s not possible. Her marriage was arranged—”
“He was a sailor. Self-proclaimed bachelor in love with the sea. Then they met. Once. She ran off, defiant. Hot-headed. Much like her daughter.” The disapproval was back in Jorad’s tone and in the slight curl of his lip. But I hardly noticed.
I was so astonished I took a step back, reeling from this new information. How could I not know something so important in my own mother's history? A woman who had determined the ins and outs of nearly every single day of my existence up to the age of eighteen. The woman who seemed to know everything about me. But it felt like the mother I thought I knew—the Queen I thought I resented—was actually a stranger.
It felt like a punch to the gut. Tears filled my eyes—from shock and betrayal. Ryan wrapped his arms around me from behind. Connor reached up from where he sat and took my hand. Fortified by their touch, I swallowed and tried to push back the little girl inside who wanted to scream. I blew out a slow, steady breath.
Connor rubbed my hand with soothing circles. "She had a life before the one you knew. I doubt she wanted to talk about an old husband with her new knights around.”
“She should have told you she ran away. You probably wouldn’t have repeated that move if you’d known she’d done it,” Declan teased.
His joking helped take the edge off my hurt. I glared at him teasingly for a moment before I turned back to Jorad. "Who was he? What happened?"
“They were attacked on their flight back to Evaness. By a dragon. The squadron of our flyers had been chasing it. Prince Andersen’s pegasus burned. He fell into the sea. Your birth father was amongst the soldiers. His peace power was the only thing that kept your mother from the same fate. It was how they met."
It felt like a tree branch had just fallen on my head. I was hurt and shocked, even heartbroken for mother. It was too much. I moved from Ryan’s arms and dropped Connor’s hand. He pulled out a chair for me and I sat. I couldn't believe it. I imagined my poor mother … married maybe a day before her husband was torn away from her. I stared listlessly at the tabletop and traced the wood grain with my finger now. "My father always said he met my mother rescuing her from a dragon. I thought he was joking."
Jorad shook his head. “Gitmore called the attack deliberate. They called it an assassination. Since then, the Queen has maintained quite a propaganda campaign against your mother. The locals there might be hard to convince.”
My head sunk into my hands. The entire world was against us. Dragons, I could fight. Beasts, I could tame. But hatred? Disdain? How could I fight that? “How can I convince any of these other countries to put their people at risk for mine? What could I possibly offer?”
Ryan’s voice was a dark, scary scratch, like a claw on your windowpane in the middle of the night. “I don’t think we should offer anything. I think we need to ensure that they know it’s in their best interest to fight.”
“How do we do that?”
“We bring the fight to them.”
“But our provinces … how can we bring the fight to Rasle or Sedara? How can we do that and stop them from taking over more of our provinces? We don’t have the manpower—”
Connor’s hand slid over mine. “You’re gonna have to choose, Bloss Boss.”
Everything inside me tightened, though I knew he was right. Lose a province? Or eventually lose a kingdom? My mother’s face appeared in my mind. One of the many lessons she’d forced me to endure as a teenager unfurled. Queen Gela’s gaze had been calm when she’d told me exactly what I’d gotten wrong in that day’s disastrous lesson. “Sometimes a queen must choose who to save and who to let go.”
I’d told her that was a shite excuse for lazy people.
She’d simply smiled and tilted her head. “It’s the sad reality we face. One day, you’ll see.”
I took a deep slow breath as every eye in the room fell on me. Tension and anticipation filled the room like mist, making the air heavy and hard to breathe. I let the sharp words fall from my lips like an executioner’s axe. “We need our allies. Sedara in particular. But how can we convince them?”
Ryan’s grin reminded me of why he’d become my general. “I have a few ideas.”
