Rhia’s re-composing face got paler with every word Laura spoke.
“What did you expect, Mother?” Laura turned on her heel and marched to the back of the room, where she leaned against the stone wall and balled her hands into fists.
Everyone else, except for Scott, who walked over to Laura and stood beside her, sword ready in case Rhia was telling the truth and could get out of the cell anytime, stayed where they were.
There was a long silence during which Maray gathered her thoughts. Those were words, all words, no substance. Her father always said, “If you want to win an argument, you need legs to stand on”. Rhia didn’t have a leg to stand on, and the rest of them didn’t have anything but speculations. They knew about all the horrible things she had done, but all they had for a reason was that Rhia supposedly wanted to bring darkness into both worlds as she reigned over them. Had she ever said that? Had anyone actually ever heard her speak the words?
Maray ignored all of the armed guards and the teeth-baring Yutu around her and worked up the courage to speak the way her father would. “Give us one example of you protecting us, and I am willing to listen,” she said with a surprisingly clear voice, which was followed by the gasps of almost everyone else in the room.
“We are here to get answers, so give her a chance to speak,” Maray explained.
“Answers as to how she tried to kill Gerwin,” Laura hissed from the back of the room, “not give her a stage to manipulate us into believing she is innocent.” There was pain in her mother’s words, pain beyond anything Maray had ever seen on her.
“Will somebody listen to my granddaughter?” Rhia asked with a somewhat impatient tone. “She seems to be the only one with reason in this stinking hole of a dungeon.”
“Your stinking hole of a dungeon,” Heck reminded her, and his arm tightened around Maray.
Rhia smirked. “You have got a point there, Brendal.” Then, she turned back to Maray. “I was only trying to protect you. At least, that was the plan. And then with the growth of power, I got so carried away. The magic warped my mind into doing things I never believed myself capable of. And you have to believe me when I say I did one or the other good thing along the way.” Rhia gazed at Laura’s hateful face, then back at Maray, who was eager to hear it all. Whatever it was. Answers. Until she understood.
“I protected your mother by exiling her,” Rhia continued. “She was safer in the other world, under a name that wasn’t connected to the Cornay name, and hidden from all eyes of the court.”
“What are you talking about, Mother?” Laura had pushed away from the wall and was slowly returning to stand beside Maray. Beside them, the Yutu growled.
“You know it was I who opened that rift, and you know who helped me and what I promised them for their help,” Rhia said to Laura, and Maray remembered her conversation with Jemin about the Shalleyn. How Rhia had promised them Allinan for their help, and how her plan had been to defeat them with Maray’s added powers and reign forever.
Laura nodded and glanced sideways at Maray, almost as if she were afraid Maray would ask for details, but Maray didn’t need to. Jemin had told her what they had been hiding.
“I got your blood, Laura, and it made me immortal, and I could use a little more of it to keep my strength. But Maray,” Rhia continued, turning to her, “your blood is what I need to make sure Allinan is safe.”
Maray didn’t react to her statement, but asked her one simple thing. The thing she and Jemin had been planning to ask. “Tell me the truth about the Shalleyn, Rhia,” Maray demanded.
“You know about the Shalleyn?” Laura observed her with orb-like eyes.
Instead of Maray’s answer, the room was filled with Rhia’s dusty laughter. “You two should really be talking more, given that each of you was ready to give her life for the other.”
Laura shot her a dark look. “Don’t waste your speaking time on useless comments if you want to have enough of it to tell the full tale.”
Scott replaced Heck’s sword at Rhia’s throat, and her laugh died immediately. She stepped out of the blade’s reach, and the light fell into her face, revealing a half-healed cheek.
“The Shalleyn are not the ones you should be worried about, my dear,” Rhia said with an almost compassionate tone. “There’s something much worse than them out there. See, I wasn’t the only one to bargain with them, and the other person had more to offer.”
“Worse than the Shalleyn?” Laura asked, horrified, and just the tone of her voice had Maray’s blood going cold.
“Who is worse than the worst demons you know?” Rhia asked a rhetorical question. “Someone who controls them and unites their powers, all in one…”
“Why does that sound a lot like those tales you would tell to let yourself off the hook?” Laura smirked at the Queen and earned a sly smile.
“Should I prove I have been telling the truth by coming out of this cell?” she threatened, but she didn’t wait for anyone to respond. Instead, she walked right through the iron bars. “Save your strength, Commander,” she said as he speared his sword in her direction. “I will only hop the border to evade your attacks.” She turned around. “Same for you, dogs.”
The shifters growled at her, baring their teeth, but they didn’t move when Scott didn’t move. Neither did Pete and Goran.
Rhia grinned, obviously satisfied with the effect of her performance, and stopped right in front of Laura.
“My daughter, you have endured so much. I have let you believe that all I cared about was power, but that’s the opposite of the truth.” She lifted her hand as if she was about to touch Laura’s cheek but refrained from it at a bark of one of the shifters. “All I want is a great and blossoming future for Allinan.”
“And how does killing Maray and me achieve that in any way?” Laura asked bluntly.
Rhia laughed. “Killing? That was never the goal. What brighter future for Allinan can I wish than my own daughter?”
“Yourself,” Maray reminded Rhia of her plan, to outsmart the Shalleyn and rule over both worlds for all eternity, and earned a surprised look.
“Think what you will, child,” she said from lips that had regenerated to a degree in which they looked more like those of an old woman on the one side and were falling apart on the other side. “I might be immortal, and my powers are beyond anything you can comprehend, but those powers are not my own, and as you can see, they are destroying me. I need to have stronger blood within me in order to contain them and stay intact.” She gestured at her face. “I am not the only one with tricks,” she pointed out. “When I struck the bargain with the Shalleyn, they left out that I wouldn’t be able to survive using their magic if I didn’t have someone who would help me share it, and so, when I started falling apart, and I finally believed them, I set out to find him—“
“Who?” Maray and Laura asked in unison, and it couldn’t have been clearer that the rest of the people—and Yutu—in the room were craving the exact same answer.
Rhia smiled and turned around. “Now you’re curious, aren’t you?” She walked toward the cell she’d come from in slow steps and spread her arms as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “The same as I was curious when I first heard rumors about the impossible.”
Heck threw Maray a look that was more a plea to let him kill her there and then. Was she playing with them? Was this all a trick? Her biggest trick ever?
“After I realized what a horrible thing I’d done, Feris was the only one I could confide in,” Rhia said as if she was speaking about a historic event and not her own real-life experience. “Your father, Laura, when he heard about what I had done, didn’t take it too well.”
Laura gasped as her mother admitted the murder of King Almein. “That’s why you killed him?” she asked incredulously.
“No, not because he didn’t agree with my methods, but because he threatened to expose me to the council and later the entirety of Allinan—and the elect few in the other world who correspond with our ambas
sadors.”
She turned around as if she was presenting on stage. “And, of course, someone needed to take the blame. Dear Sander Boyd… he was the first my husband informed, and when he started spreading word about my plans to reunite both worlds and rule over them—and the cost of demons returning to Allinan—and his revolutionaries began plotting my downfall, I had to act.”
Maray already knew that Jemin’s father had been wrongly accused of being responsible for the First Breach of Dimensions, but now that the context was becoming more and more pronounced, everything cringed inside of her.
“And naturally, no one was allowed to see my actual state,” she gestured at herself again. “That’s where Feris came in. He helped me find a way to conjure illusions strong enough to at least keep my appearance together for a couple of hours before I aged back into a walking corpse.”
Rhia paused, waiting for reactions to her news, but the room had gotten oddly silent. The initial anger and lust for blood had evaporated into the dumbfounded state of all participants.
“While Unterly was the only one of the council who knew, who agreed with me and my endeavor for a union of both worlds—and my methods—Feris helped me out of his sense of duty. And there were rumors that there was someone who had powers beyond all warlocks and devil-children we’ve ever heard of.”
Maray wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But she couldn’t help staring and waiting anyway.
“Who?” Laura asked, voice becoming small, dry, almost like an echo of the royal Maray had gotten to know over the past months.
And Rhia turned her head, eying the wall instead of the group of people around her. “Are you sure you are ready to hear this, Laura?”
“What if I tell you everything Gan Krai ever categorized as supposedly impossible is actually possible?” Rhia smirked at the small group of people who were all on red alert, prepared to throw themselves at Rhia if she showed any sign of intending to attack either Laura or Maray and, at the same time, were hanging on the Queen’s lips, eager not to miss a single word. Maray could taste it in the air, the morbid fascination with the regenerating Queen, the fear she was playing another mind-trick on them, and the horror she was actually speaking the truth.
“What if I tell you it’s true, not because I have seen the devil-child or Maray do it, but because I have done it before, and he has done it before?” She waited for them to comprehend, and when there was no response other than confused glances, she added, “Gan Krai himself has done it before.”
“Gan Krai died about four-hundred years ago,” Heck corrected, sounding hopeful that this was a nightmare and he would wake up and find Rhia back in her cell, actually responsible for all the drama and the murders. “And all he ever wrote were theories of battle magic and spells he didn’t think practically possible.”
“That’s what his books say,” Rhia countered. “Have you seen his diaries?”
There was a thick silence layering the room, heavier even than the humid air. Maray checked her mother’s expression and found her face blank. She seemed to be struggling to make up her mind what exactly to believe. As was Maray.
“When Corey first burnt Feris,” Rhia began, going back in time to explain, “Feris set out to find answers, and he found them close to here, in the forest just outside the city. There was a warlock who had been a hermit for years—and, as it turned out, for decades, for centuries. An immortal—Gan Krai.”
Maray sucked in a breath. If Gan Krai was immortal, and everything he’d ever written down to not be possible, beyond the ‘natural limits of magic’ as he called it, everything all warlocks in Allinan had ever believed to be true was a lie. Even when Corey had told her that hardly any warlock was able to make their own basin function without bracelets or other magic devices which replaced almost everything that used electricity in Maray’s former world. While in D.C., and later in Vienna, they had used electric stoves and light switches for lights, here, magic ran in the veins of the country, in the guts of the city. It was in the rocks and in the salts they used to fuel the vehicles and portals, it was in the lightbulbs and in the bathroom sink. And now, Maray learned that there was more. Immortality, battle magic, binding spells… this generation wasn’t the first to be confronted with it. Gan Krai had done it all before.
Beside her, Laura had gone rigid, and Heck, Scott, and the rest of the guards and Yutu were coiling to attack a danger they hadn’t even known existed.
“And dear Feris… all that ever mattered to him were Allinan and that child. He helped me create those illusions so Allinan would keep its memory of their Queen—beautiful and young and glorious—and he did it because he knew I had the power to make him help me.” Rhia’s face turned sad, an emotion Maray knew from her own reflection in the mirror, but seeing Rhia fashion that grim expression was a challenge. Firstly, because no one could be sure her emotions weren’t all a trick, secondly, because what reason did Rhia have to be sad if all she ever wanted was right there in her grasp? She had freed herself from a cell by simply walking through solid bars like a ghost. She had her daughter and granddaughter, both of whom she needed for her blood, within arm’s reach. And yet, her eyes were watery—not in a decaying way as they had been before, but a clear lapis-lazuli, and they were moist with tears.
“Gan Krai’s help comes with a price. It always comes with a price. He is the devil.” Rhia directed her eyes at Laura. “He was the one to close the rift for me. He had done it once before to ban the Shalleyn from Allinan. But the truth is, he never banned them. He had them running his errands while he kept biding his time, playing his games. He has been out there for centuries, and he is bored. Our suffering is his entertainment. And when I say he is the devil, I mean it. He is the devil, and his blood runs in the veins of all devil-children.”
Maray’s hands were shaking. Did Corey know? Had Feris ever told her?
“The orphan girl is just another of his experiments. One of his best, he admitted to Feris when he told him.”
Maray buried all questions about Corey and Feris, instead focused on the core of the disaster. “What price did he ask from you?” Her voice was unsteady, hoarse, words struggling to keep on her tongue, but she asked anyway.
Rhia didn’t take her gaze off her daughter. “Laura’s hand in marriage,” she said in a tone that sounded as if it was echoing from an open grave.
There was murmuring behind Maray. Goran and Pete made noises of outrage, and the Yutu growled in a tone that was more disturbing than scary.
But before Laura could speak, Rhia continued with a sad smile. “Do you think I didn’t know you were the rebellious type, Laura? Why did you think I sent you on those missions to the other world with Langley?” She didn’t wait for a response. “You were young and eager to find love, and there were people there in the other world who knew enough about our world to provide you with a safe environment. People I trusted. I couldn’t let that monster get his hands on you. Not after everything he had done. Experimenting on human babies to see if he could implant magic…”
Maray’s head twitched to the side as she heard a gasp from her mother. But it wasn’t a sound of surprise; it was an escaping sob which came with a tear and a grimace of agony. Maray reached out her hand and wrapped her fingers around her mother’s to support her. These pieces of news were difficult to hear, even for her. How bad must it be for Laura to listen to them being manipulated by her own mother to leave Allinan—and all for Laura’s safety?
“I can only begin to imagine what he would have been capable of doing with you… and your children…” Rhia didn’t let anyone stop her. Not that anyone tried. The entirety of the room was eager to know. “And when Gerwin agreed to court you…”
Maray felt her mother tense beside her. ‘Agreed’? Did that mean he had never been in love with her?
“And when you fell in love with him, I knew all I had to do was be against it and you would make a run for it. Plus, if I exiled you and threatened to come after you, you’d never return. And pain
ful as it was, it worked. I kept you safe…”
“You kept me safe by feeding lies to me? By making a man marry me against his will? Why didn’t you just tell me the truth, Mother?” Laura spat through her tears. “Given it even is the truth.”
Maray felt the rage, she felt the heartbreak. Her mother’s reality was just imploding, and all they could do was watch and listen. And the humiliation of having others listen as she learned the truth. Scott, the guards, the shifters… Maray could only imagine the pain her mother was going through and the explosive fight that she could expect the second her mother and her father were in the same room again.
Had she really misjudged everyone? Her father was a diplomat, and he would never hurt anyone intentionally, but did that mean he would never form alliances that involved lies? He had done it before with Laura in order to protect Maray. What spoke against having done it before on the Queen’s order? Even if he was a commoner, from the other world… Was he really? Or had he been following Rhia’s commands from the beginning? What was true at all? What could she believe? And if Gerwin had acted on Rhia’s commands, why would she want to hurt him now? Or hurt him just to get to Maray—according to the note in the dumpling.
“Why?” Maray asked, her heart racing as she managed to say the words. “If he did your bidding and married Mom, what exactly did Dad do to you that you decided to poison him?”
Had Laura’s face been a mess of insecurity, fury, and pain, now it slumped back into an unreadable mask. Maray’s question had pushed her over the breaking point.
“In case you haven’t realized, I would never hurt Gerwin.” Rhia’s eyes locked on Maray’s, and her gaze was full of accusation, cold and hard once more. All tears drying in a newly-found anger. “Gerwin saved Laura’s life. And had it not been for you, Maray, I would never have had to use my own daughter’s blood to protect myself and all of Allinan.”
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