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She wouldn’t be surprised by this moment, would she?

Numbness slipped between Gerard’s ribs like a knife, spreading a heavy, distancing chill through his chest. As if from very far away, he took in the facts of the situation and ran them through his strategic brain.

Queen Ailana’s watchful shard of ice in the corridor outside must have melted by this point. She would not see what happened next or know to alert Lorelei and mount a magical rescue. Any attempt to flee on his own would be useless. Every Imperial palace was full of guards. Resistance would only give Otto the perfect excuse to order him cut down before Gerard could even attempt to spread the news of the truth behind his arrest and whatever “crimes” they might claim he had committed.

Cool logic mingled with the leaden inevitability of fate.

Every honor he’d won, every challenge he’d mastered since he was only eight years old—they’d all been fought to stave off this outcome. His parents’ ending. Had he ever truly believed he could escape it in his turn?

Despair felt as heavy and inescapable as the weight of memory. Still, he followed the lessons he had been taught, and he kept his face as impenetrable as stone.

“Your Majesty.” He bowed obediently under the weight of every watching eye. Then he turned to walk with calm, unhurried steps out of the room and down the corridor towards his latest prison chamber.

This time, there would be no escape.

29

For years, Lorelei had both anticipated and dreaded each new, rare, and inevitably public encounter with her immortal mother. This, though, had to be the worst possible timing to be trapped in their first private conversation in over two decades.

“Mother.” She nodded politely but did not curtsey—because in this liminal realm outside either of their worlds, they were neither of them ruler, and she knew better than to relinquish her authority. Still, around her mother, it was always a struggle to keep her voice light and unaffected. “It is, of course, a pleasure to see you, but I’m afraid that at the moment, I do have a rather urgent—”

“What could possibly be more urgent than explaining your abandonment?” Morgana demanded.

Lorelei’s mouth fell open for a long, stunned moment—brought about not only by the accusation itself but by the shockingly emotional tone of her own mother’s voice, after decades of courteous but distant communications.

When she finally regathered her composure, she asked with unhidden incredulity, “My abandonment?”

“I just returned from an entirely fruitless and disheartening set of meetings with the encroaching court of Faennor,” Morgana snapped, “only to discover my own court in turmoil, because, apparently, my daughter had arrived without any prior warning, insisted upon inserting both herself and an unknown human partner into the Tournament of Leaves, disrupted the proceedings with her personal lovers’ quarrels, and then publicly chose to break her own vow and dishonor one of our most ancient rituals, expelling herself from my realm before the trials were over—without ever stopping to share a single word of explanation with her own mother!”

There was so much wrong in that summation that Lorelei couldn’t even begin to summon a sensible or diplomatic response. Instead, the words that somehow escaped her lips were, “Why would I expect you to care?”

Oh, goddess, what a mistake! Humiliation burned beneath Lorelei’s skin. She gritted her teeth and forced back into place the lid of the mental box where she’d thought she had safely buried all of her most embarrassingly childish emotions about her mother years ago.

Queens do not have the freedom to allow their own feelings free rein. That had been one of her earliest and most important lessons. Perhaps it was the turmoil of her current fears for Gerard—in combination with his cracking of all the old defenses around her heart—that had loosened her grip on those older, more inappropriate emotions, too. Regardless, she drew a deep, calming breath through her nose and began once more in a placating tone. “That is…”

“You didn’t expect me to care?” Morgana sounded every bit as incredulous as Lorelei had a moment before. It was the first time that Lorelei could ever remember seeing her mother look genuinely baffled. “You are my only child.”

Apparently, this was the day for all of Lorelei’s most dangerous and tumultuous emotions to be uncovered, dragged out in public, and riffled through like playing cards for other people’s entertainment. Setting her teeth together, she said coolly, “We both know you haven’t thought of me in that way for decades, but that is of no matter now. In the meantime…”

“What nonsense are you speaking?” Morgana stared at her, green power curling and twisting around her in unhidden consternation. “Has someone been poisoning you against me? Feeding lies into your ears? Your father, before he died—no, wait. Is it that human lover you’ve taken up with?” Her upper lip curled in scorn.

Lorelei rolled her eyes. “I never trusted a word my father spoke to me, and Gerard has nothing to do with this.” Nothing except the revelation that some exceptional people could, after all, be trusted with the keys to her heart …

But that list did not include the beautiful, powerful fae woman who stood before her now, holding her trapped in the shifting silver aether. No urgent messages could reach Lorelei here, no matter how desperately Gerard might need her help … and it was that reminder that helped her refocus on what mattered now: escape. “You’re the one who’s been fed lies,” she said briskly. “I did send you a letter before I arrived, regardless of what Lord Oberon may have intimated. Ask enough of your courtiers, and you’ll find someone who saw him publicly wave it in my face before the tournament began.”

Morgana’s deep-green eyes narrowed, and the lighter green vines that held her long plaits of hair in place lengthened to creep around her like decorative armor. “You truly believe that he would intercept my letters?”

“I saw it,” Lorelei said firmly. “Just as I saw and heard Oberon whisper a true-name command into my partner’s ear the moment before our final trial began, ordering Gerard to murder me.”

In an instant, Morgana’s eyes shifted from forest green to venomous black. “He did what?” Thunder echoed in her voice.

“That was why I had to leave,” Lorelei said. “It was the only way to save us both.”

“The only…?” Morgana shook her head violently, and leaves scattered from her autumn-brown hair with the force of her agitation. “Are you trying to convince me that you were at risk of true death from a human? When you stood in Efaelen, with all of your powers and the land itself at your call?”

Lorelei drew a deep, steadying breath as she looked into her mother’s eyes and forced herself to speak without emotion. “I couldn’t harm him,” she said. “I never will, and I won’t allow anyone else to touch him, either. He is my chosen consort.”

“Ah—!” With a choked-off sound of frustration, Morgana turned a quick circle in place, her gold-and-orange gown swirling about her legs. If they had stood on solid ground, Lorelei had no doubt that thorns would be bursting out of the grass in response, loyally seeking to defend her mother from whatever enemy was causing her such distress.