Page 152 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

A wave of conflicting emotions washed over Reina’s face as she shook her head. “Steady. Considerate. Patient. You’re already more capable of bearing the crown than you think, Owain. Look at all you’ve done!”

At first, the words felt misplaced, as though they belonged to someone standing behind me.

The image of a petition from a coastal village about flooded grain stores flashed in my memory. I’d resolved it in an afternoon. A second dispute arose: two bannermen, their faces flushed and hands twitching toward their swords, were on the brink of bloodshed over a patch of land. Both departed the keep with an agreement in hand and their pride sufficiently intact.

But also the quieter, thankless things. Nights with the stewards until the candles guttered, hands ink-stained, eyes burning, making certain winter wouldn’t starve us while Berian slept.

No riots. No shortages. The kingdom hadn’t crumbled. The people hadn’t suffered for the darkness in my blood. Gods, the Tir barely realized Berian was sick!

There had been no moment of becoming. I’d simply been doing it all—day after day—while waiting to be told I was failing.

The realization settled slowly: I’d spent so long cataloguing my failures, worrying over every shadow that moved beneath my skin, that I’d never once looked up to see all that I’d accomplished. Instead, I’d been waiting for proof that they’d been right about me.

It never came.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to call it proof of success. But for the first time, I couldn’t call it proof of failure either. It was the closest I’d come in a long time to feeling like I was enough.

The silence stretched just long enough for a new perception of myself to take root.

I looked over at Reina, really looked. She’d said there was more. Something in the set of her jaw told me she’d been carrying something unbearable—and it was my time to share it.

“Say it,” I said.

“I’m certain the Assembly murdered your mother.” She kept her eyes locked on me. Then took a controlled breath, but it didn’t entirely soothe her.

I heard her. I understood the words. The architecture of the sentence was simple enough: subject, verb, object. The Assembly. Murdered. Your mother.

My mother, who’d spent years half-alive after a pregnancy that should’ve been straightforward. My mother, who’d been examined by dozens of Assembly physicians and declared, with great professional sorrow, to be simply too fragile for the heavy mixture of Fae blood running through me. The woman who’d looked at me while I held her hand and told me I wasn’t the reason she was dying.

I’d held that absolution like a stone in my pocket for years. It was something to reach for when the dark thoughts came—when I couldn’t control my magic. The last thing my mother did was try to grant me a life free from guilt.

I’d never entirely believed her. Carried the guilt around anyway.

But they had taken her away from me. They’d taken her before she could give me anything else.

I found I’d sunk my back into the chair without realizing it, as if staying still was the only thing that could spare me from further pain now.

The best I could muster was a voice that was flat and functional. “How?”

She told me the lie that she and everyone else had believed: that too much Fae blood caused pregnancy problems. How Lunette had firmly and decisively dismissed that as a possibility.

Coming from anyone else, I might’ve dismissed it. But I trusted Luna completely.

Then Reina’s story jumped nearly thirty years into the past. She told me about a trip to the Assembly’s stronghold in Caervorn while I was still young. Of a young blonde-haired empath with trembling hands, forced to use needle and thread to cover the Assembly’s crimes. And of a mundane guard who’d held Reina at sword point for trying to take the evidence from them.

“They gave me the scrap of enchanted cloth your mother wore for their ‘treatments’ as evidence against the Assembly,” Reina said. “It was covered in Amara’s blood.”

They bled my mother. Did they have no limits to their barbarity?

But then I felt an unexpected jolt of recognition, so potent it threatened to erupt as an unmanly gasp.

“Aunt.” I sat forward. “Did the mundane man have a scar here?” I slashed across my cheek.

Reina blinked. For the second time in my memory, I’d genuinely surprised her. “How,” she said slowly, “could you possibly—”

“If I’m right…the empath and guard are the parents of Darreth’s new queen.” As I spoke, fragments of the truth began to coalesce. The serendipity was unbelievable. “I met Heleth and Taig at Emrys and Isca’s wedding.”

Reina stared at me. I watched her turn the coincidence over—looking for the angle, the implication, the politics beneath the thing. The silence stretched long enough that I could hear the fire settle in the grate.