They were fast approaching the Grand Gallery. The seed of doubt in Quin’s chest grew. Was he walking directly into his own execution? At least he knew the Kaer better than anyone. Should his life be in danger, he could disappear down any number of secret passageways.
He was so tired of disappearing.
“Did you want me to find you, Toby?” Quin said quietly. “Were the symbols for me?”
Tobin stared at him, face inscrutable. When he spoke again, his voice had an edge.
“I won’t lie. After your father exiled me, I spent months hoping you would come after me. Years.”
“You knew my father. You know what he was capable of.”
“I desperately wanted to believe you would discover some deep well of courage inside yourself and face what your father had done.”
Quin stopped cold. “I know what my father did. I was there.”
“Cowering behind a tomb. Yes. I remember.”
The words struck Quin like an arrow. No one regretted his cowardice more than he did.
“I don’t just mean what your father did to me,” Tobin said. “If you had come looking for me in the village, you would have discovered there was a movement of people, small but growing, who opposed your father’s rule. We oppose all systems of governance that exploit and abuse power. After Zaga and Angelyne took the throne, we opposed their rule, too. Magic relies on a monumental imbalance of power, so you might say we oppose magic most of all.”
“I never took you for a revolutionary, Toby.”
“I never took you for a king.”
The heat crackled in Quin’s hands. In that moment, he couldn’t believe he had ever loved the boy by his side. He pressed his hand over his heart, the unsent letter to the Twisted Sisters in his jacket pocket. A weak boy. A scorned son. A used, manipulated lover. Whether prince or king, I have always been the pawn. I have never been the leading man.
Quin shoved his hands into his pockets, calming himself. He needed more information, and a better sense of what the Embers were planning. He picked up his pace, this time taking the lead, until they stood outside the Grand Gallery.
“Prepare yourself,” Tobin said, and reached for the black stone doors.
Chapter 11
Poisoned
MIA STARED AT NELLADINE in astonishment. The Shadowess was her mother. The House of Shadows was her home.
“Just what we need,” Pilar muttered. “More surprise parents crawling out of the woodwork.”
Mia didn’t reply. She stood motionless, riveted by the scene playing out before them. The Shadowess moved slowly toward her daughter, almost dreamlike, coming to a standstill a few feet away. Mia sensed the impulses warring inside her: the urge to clasp Nell to her heart, tempered by the desire to give her space.
“It’s so good to see you, Nelladine.”
Her voice was low and mellifluous. She spoke with a strong Pembuka accent that in Nell only emerged in certain words.
“Mumma,” Nelladine said, her voice breaking.
She stepped forward, bundling the Shadowess into a hug so tremendous it swept the woman’s feet off the floor. Being a good bit taller, Nell stooped to rest her cheek on her mother’s shoulder, her thin braids cascading down both their backs.
“I thought you were lost to us,” the Shadowess whispered. “That you had gone to Prisma and I would never see you again.”
Her face was obscured by Nell’s hair, but Mia could tell she was crying.
“Kaara akutha. Welcome home, my girl.”
Nell was never afraid to paint her emotions on a broad canvas. She laughed easily and cried easily, too. So Mia was not at all surprised to see tears streaming down her friend’s cheeks. But this reunion felt different from the reunion with Stone. Mother and daughter clung to one another, quietly, almost reverently, as if each were holding the most precious thing.
Mia was deeply affected. She felt happy for Nelladine. Then something oozed through her, green and bilious.
Envy.
It didn’t take long to deduce the source. This was the reception Mia had longed for from her own mother. A tender embrace. A warm welcome. What Mia would have given to have her mother wrap her arms around her and tell her she was home.
“Looks like Nell didn’t bring us here to save the four kingdoms,” said Pilar. “She was homesick.”
“It could be both,” Mia retorted, though she’d been wondering the same thing. The only person who can help, Nell had told them.
Help whom, exactly?
Mia studied the other people in the Swallow. The whole audience was rapt. A few of them had tears in their eyes. One woman cried openly, her hand pressed over her heart.
When Nell finally pulled back from her mother’s embrace and began to make introductions, the Shadowess greeted them warmly. Her gaze was intelligent, enlivened by a sparkling curiosity.
“Kaara akutha. You are most welcome here. I am so sorry for all you have suffered.”
“Mumma, you’re doing that thing you do,” Nell chided, drying her tears on her sleeve. “You’ve only just met and now you’re going to scare them off with your mind reading!”
We have suffered, Mia wanted to say, but Pilar beat her to the punch.
“She’s not wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter if she’s right, it’s still a creepy thing to do.”
In the Shadowess’s eyes, Mia saw a gentleness that moved her. So different from the way her own mother had averted her eyes.
“I’ve come to see suffering as a kind of shadow,” the Shadowess said. “It’s fluid and ever changing, and it can reveal things to us we never would have seen if there were only light. But if we honor the work it’s doing, if we work with it instead of against it, the shadow will lift.”
“Sounds like just the kind of thing the Shadowess would say,” Pilar said.
Mia winced. Did Pil have to scoff at everything?
But the Shadowess only smiled.
“Please,” she said. “Call me Muri.”
The next hour passed in a dizzying blur. There were people to meet, cheeks to be kissed.
“We must feed you,” Muri said after a while. “You’ve come a long way.”
“Allow me.” Stone smiled brightly. “Food is my specialty.”
Nell’s brother led them to an impressive array of steaming dishes. He went down the line, lifting lids and proudly displaying plate after plate of foods Mia had never seen. Plump little fingers of sticky banana leaves. Thick fava bean soup sprinkled with cumin and dolloped with joguhr cream. Ovals of fried cheese—haloom, Stone told her—melted over roasted onions. Flaky pink pastries stuffed with sautéed spinach. Braised piglum on a bed of soft yellow grains.
“Try the lamb tajin,” Stone said, opening an orange clay pot to reveal, with great pride, a salmagundi of pulped brown meat indistinguishable from pulped brown dates. “It’s a Pembuka specialty. It simmers for hours. Doesn’t look like much, but the flavors are amazing.”
“I’ll bet they are,” Pilar muttered under her breath.
As they piled food onto their plates, Mia studied Pilar. Even holding a serving spoon, she maintained a defensive posture, shoulders tensed as if she might need to wield the spoon as a weapon. You’re safe here, Mia wanted to say. Though in truth she couldn’t provide a rational explanation for why she knew they were safe. She just knew.