by Layla Heart
Finn sighs, but accepts the list, and I watch as his eyes grow as he reads it, his jaw setting. Then he meets my eyes, nodding, his gaze troubled.
“What?” Rune looks at each of us, then takes the paper from Finn’s hands, his eyes gliding over the names. “What’s so special about the list? It’s just a list of names and families.”
“Not just any families.” I try to figure out how to say this. Trying to see if I’m just seeing connections because I want there to be or if this is real. “Someone from my mother’s family is on the list. Both of Litha’s family names are on the list. Of course, the witch queen would make sense, but her father’s name is on there too, which could still be a coincidence.” I look up. “But by the way Kit and Finn reacted, they probably found their family names on it too.”
“My dad’s family line.” Kit nods.
Finn finally sits down, his hand over his wound, as he blinks quickly. “Both my mum and dad’s family names are on there... One of the younger princes was there. At the time, it wasn’t uncommon to send young princes to live with the witches for a while to get better magical training. But, curiously, his keeper was from my mum’s family line.”
Phoenix frowns and starts typing on her laptop before she lets out a frustrated sound. “Of course, my mum’s line is on the list, we’ve been connected to the witch’s royal family for, well, since forever. But my dad’s family line is on it too. I hadn’t caught that yet.” Her face falls as she turns the laptop around showing the biography of some intimidating lady. “My dad’s family changed their name, which isn’t something a lot of people know. The list says that this woman was at the court at the time this all went down. She was later executed for being part of the resistance during the war. She helped dragons to escape and to keep them out of the fae’s grasp. She was cool, but my dad’s family didn’t think it a good idea to keep the last name of a known resistance fighter, no matter how impressive her deeds.”
I look around the table. What did we just see? Did we really just find a connection between all our families that takes place at the exact time the witch kingdom fell into pieces and about a decade before the war?
Are our families connected to the last war?
12
I stare at the list in front of me. When we realised that we all had family members on the list, we dove deeper into each of the names on it. I don’t know what we expected to find, but definitely not this web of names and connections, going back to way before the last war and stretching all the way up until now.
When Litha woke up, we all had breakfast together, before we cleaned out another room downstairs, and pulled out all the information we could find about the people who were at the queen’s court at the time.
It feels like we’re finally making some progress, even when some of the things we found make us uncomfortable. For example, the guy who is probably the father of the last witch queen’s child is also an important contributor to the research on power-suppressing substances, but he’s also related to Rune’s mother. Someone from my biological father’s family was also at the court, a succubus who was supposedly just a history teacher to the last queen’s teenage daughter. They were all there at the same time, it looks like a coincidence, since none of them have really important roles, but it’s still curious. It wouldn’t stand out to most people, a teacher here, a researcher there, a glorified nanny, anything, because the witch queen’s court was known to be very diverse. There were almost thirty incubi and succubi there, twenty-five or so dragons, lots of werewolves and a couple of fae, who were already on iffy footing with the others at the time. Each individual being there wasn’t something that would stand out, it’s just the fact that we’re all related to these people that makes it suddenly obvious. They were, in a way, perfectly hidden in the crowd.
Litha puts her head on my shoulder as she watches me write something down. ”Missing prophecy?”
I nod. “We can’t be the only ones who found this out. It’s been nearly twenty years since our prophecy was spoken, enough time for people to start putting things together. Did they figure this out and is that why the documents were stolen? I don’t know, but it’s worth checking out.” I jot a couple more things down, just random thoughts.
“Do you think our families knew?” She slides onto my lap, leaning back against me, and I wrap my arms around her. It’s probably not as comfortable as when she’s sitting on Bane or Rune’s lap, but it’s nice to have her with me.
“I really have no idea.” I push the papers aside. “They could know, at least some of them may. But if they do, then what does that say about the fact they’ve kept this hidden? Or if they don’t know, is us being here at the exact same time just a coincidence? It’s all possible.”
Bane stumbles into the room, his arms full of books, and Litha shoots up, grabbing the ones that are about to fall. “Thanks. Sorry about that.” He huffs. “I may have slept a little last night, but my brain is starting to get fried and my body is getting shaky. I have no idea what I’m running on now. Coffee, probably.” He puts the books on the floor next to the table. “I went to the attic. I don’t know, I was curious, I guess. And I found these.” He picks up one of the books, putting it on the table. “These are history books, or something, but not of a history we know. It’s... off.”
I take the book from him, it doesn’t look very special, just a notebook someone scribbled in. “Why do you think these are history books?” They look like random scribbles.
Bane pulls a face. “When I say ‘history’ I don’t mean history as we’ve been taught it. It’s... I don’t know how to explain it.”
Litha takes one of the other books, flipping through it easily, reading a couple of words on each page. “This looks almost like rambling or something. It talks about events that happen, but there isn’t really a connection from page to page.”
“Yeah.” Bane sighs. “That’s what I figured. But check the last couple of pages of them.”
I flip to the end of the notebook. There’s a list of page numbers, together with another set of numbers and then there’s a mark behind each of them. “What’s this about?”
“No clue.” Bane shrugs.
“I remember those symbols.” Litha sits up straighter. “My parents taught them to me. Dad said that he used to play this game with his parents.” She slides her finger down the page. “Complete. False. Complete. Undecided. False.”
So, the page number of an entry in the book, some set of numbers and then if something is completed or false?
What did Bane just find?
“Kit? Bane?”
I glance up at Litha, who is staring at the list of names of people who were at the court with the last witch queen.
“Yeah.” I try to see what she’s seeing, but I’m not sure what connection she’s made.
“Here.” She points to the list. “Twentieth on the list, third-generation and then some other number. Listed as undecided. 2003, more numbers, page 87.” She flips back, reading the page in question, as I look at Bane. I have no idea what she’s found, but it seems to be a good thing, for now.
The room is totally quiet for a while, until Litha lets out a light curse, terror flashing through her and I tighten my grasp on her. What’s happening? “Fuck.” She closes the book, pushing it away from her decidedly. “We’re going to need a lot of time and markers and... very strong stomachs.” She takes a deep breath, like she’s trying not to puke.
“Why?” Bane stands up, coming closer.
“Prophecies in and of themselves aren’t that special, they happen all the time. Most of them are just recorded and not really proclaimed or anything, at least, that’s what Phoenix explained to me.” She takes another deep breath. “These are prophecy records. Each one written down as best as someone could remember them. Then, at the end of the book, they tracked which family from the court was involved with it, specifically, whose line was involved, and then if the prophecy actually was fulfilled.” She looks at Bane and then at
me, her eyes disturbed. “I think we’ve got our answer. Someone has been tracking us, at least, they’ve been tracking the descendants of the people who were at the court at the time. Someone has been tracking specific people and specific prophecies, for however long. Maybe because they knew it would lead to us, or maybe not, but who would have known of our existence over a hundred years ago?”
Bane shakes his head slowly. “I don’t think anyone would have known or even really considered it. Prophecies don’t happen that far out into the future, a handful of decades at most. But these books existing is a big deal. Some of these books go back to the time during the last war. The only thing is, we don’t have the most recent copies, they end about...” He picks up the newest looking notebook, for the simple fact it’s not bound in leather but something more akin to cardboard. “Eighteen years ago.”
Ice floods through me as my heart hurts. I can feel the pain flash through Litha too, and I don’t need to feel Bane’s emotions to know we’re all thinking about the same thing. Especially when his face is this pale.
The notebooks ended eighteen years ago. There’s only one big event that happened eighteen years ago, one event we’ll probably not find in any of these notebooks.
Litha was born. Litha was born, her family fled to the human world and the current highest priestess died.
And now we’ve found the connection between the last witch queen, the elixir that prevents dragons from shifting, the people at the queen’s court and us being here right now. And it leaves me with many more questions than answers.
But, most of all, it makes me wonder if the death of Phoenix’ grandmother eighteen years ago was really a natural death, or her trying to protect us, or someone else? What happened that night? And how much of it is connected to what happened to the last witch queen?
13
“Did you know?” I stare at the screen of my laptop. Mum is in one of our homes, one where she can easily have important meetings, and she looks... It looks like she’s had as rough a week as we’ve had. “Did you know about these?” My voice breaks and I wipe at my cheeks, frustrated. Of everything we’ve found out this week, this one frustrates and somehow hurts me most, because these are all prophecies spoken by my mum’s family and I’ve never heard of this.
“What are they?” Mum looks confused, but with the things we’ve found out in the last days, I’m not sure I can trust anything she says...
“Notes. Notebooks. They...” I sigh. “They’re prophecies. They’re prophecies about families. Our family, among others. They go...” I take a deep breath and Litha squeezes my leg lightly. Everyone’s here in the room, giving moral support or something, and I’m sitting with Litha at the table as I’m calling Mum.
“They go all the way back to the last witch queen.” Litha finishes the sentence for me. “They record all prophecies made about families who were at the witch court at the time the queen went missing.”
Mum blinks, frowning. It looks like she’s thinking for a moment. “I thought...” She takes a deep breath. “I thought those were just legends. I thought the existence of those books were just legends. I thought...” She shakes her head, her frown deepening. “Sorry. I had no idea.” She reaches up, covering her mouth with her hand, tears in her eyes. “I had no idea they could be real.”
“What about Dad?” If she didn’t know about them, maybe someone else would know, since someone did write these down. “Would he know about them?”
“Why would he know about some notebooks?” Mum seems genuinely confused now. “He’s not involved with that part of things, you know that.”
“Someone moved them here, after grandma’s death. Nobody has looked at them since, at least, it seems that way, they were just stored in the attic. Who else would know about these?” I’m trying to make sense of what’s in the books, but it’s hard when everything is so confusing but also so... it’s hard to keep all the threads that we’ve found in the last week separate, especially when not all the prophecies in the book have come to be, but still provided interesting clues about people. What we do know is that it’s all connected, it’s all much more connected than we even presumed.
“I wish I could help. I wish I could help you make sense of them. If I could just...” Mum sighs, shaking her head. “I wish I could come over, but I can’t leave right now. There’s been... A lot has happened in the last week and... It’s not safe for me to visit you. Sorry.” She looks up, nods, and then looks back at us. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go. The rest of the high coven is here. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, yes?”
“What’s going on?” I lean closer to the laptop. “Mum? What’s going on?”
“Nothing to worry about.” But the smile she’s showing me is fake. Something is definitely wrong, and now we’re not there, we can’t just push them for answers... “I love you. I’ll talk to you soon.” And she disconnects the call.
I stare at the screen for a while longer, pain flooding through me. Worry, but also frustration. We’re being left out. Whatever is going on, we’re being left out of it. Which is much easier now we’re here in this house and not on campus.
Bane stands up. “She said she thought they were a legend. The books. Right?” He comes over, closing my laptop as he looks thoughtful.
I nod, trying to pull myself together, but that’s hard when you’re doubting everything you’ve ever thought to be true.
“What if that’s the way they’ve been kept hidden?” Bane looks at everyone in the room. “How many times in the last week have we heard the word ‘legend’?” He points the book he’s holding in Finn’s direction. “The legend of the pregnant witch who left her family, who turns out to be the last witch queen.” He points the book to me. “The legend of the notebooks filled with prophecies, that turn out to actually exist and store prophecies of a very specific group of people. Heck, the disappearance of the last witch queen is a legend in and of itself. Kidnapped? Killed? Fled her kingdom? Nobody knew.” Then he puts the notebook down. “Even we are a legend, in a way. Prophecy, yes, but also legend. Because nobody believes that a group of kids can bring peace to the kingdoms. What if we stop believing in ‘true’ and ‘false’? What if we stop believing that things aren’t true, because others don’t believe them to be true? What if ‘legends’ are exactly the things we need to be looking for, because they’re the best way to hide the truth without people questioning it?”
“How?” Litha raises an eyebrow at him. “How would we even look for them? How would we know if something is enough of a ‘legend’ to pay attention to it?”
“We don’t know, not yet.” Bane pushes himself off the table, walking over to the window looking out to the forest in front of the house. “But it feels like it’s too much of a coincidence not to dig deeper into it.”
I nod. He’s right. Even if I don’t know who wrote the notebooks, they seem to be true enough, and they seem to be filled with information that’s going to be important for us. At least, information we desperately need to connect the handful of disjointed things we know.
Finn looks over to me. “It’s the highest priestess who speaks the prophecies, right? Just your family?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“That means that whoever wrote those notebooks, needs to be close to the highest priestess. Really close.” He stands up carefully, coming over. “I don’t believe that nobody is keeping track anymore. I believe that your grandmother, and even your mother, may not have known about what was going on. These notebooks may have turned into a ‘family legend’ decades ago, but we know that the last notebooks to be stored here were from eighteen years ago. Someone is keeping track, right now, there has to be.” his eyes darken as he lets out a laugh without any joy. “I’ve stopped believing in coincidences.”
“So, we need to find out who is keeping track now?” Litha frowns, blinking.
“No.” Finn shakes his head. “We stop relying on others.” His eyes settle on me. “We have our own highest priestess right here.”
“No.” I hold up my hands. “I’m not one yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be one. I’m just the heir, I have no powers.”
“But what if the powers are in your blood? What if your family is the highest priestess not because of a connection to the royal witch line, but because of your prophecies?” His voice drops. “What if there’s something much bigger going on, something we don’t know yet? And I don’t mean our prophecy. I mean, what’s the chance that right before the last war, our ancestors were together at a witch court, which fell apart, and now we’re all here, with the prophesied new witch queen? There’s no chance that something like that ‘just happens’.” He raises an eyebrow and I can’t deny how logical that sounds.
I nod. “What if none of this is a coincidence? What if all of this was planned? Or, at least, what if most of it was planned? Or maybe it’s just a crazy group of people trusting fate and prophecies to make things right in the end?” I slowly stand up, pulling Litha with me, going over to the guys, looking over them. “What if, a crazy idea, this was planned to happen? We were planned to happen.”
Rune nods, though I see the confusion in his eyes. “The fae have been known to be a war-happy people for centuries.” He glances at Finn. “Sorry.”
Finn nods, looking determined. “It’s true. The last war was just the end of a long line of smaller struggles. We only see it as a ‘war’ because of the scale of the ending, not what happened in the time before it.”
“What if they knew they couldn’t win against the fae king? Our ancestors? Or, maybe, what if they tried and lost?” Litha holds my hand tighter. “What if they were like us? They tried to fight the fae king. But they lost. They lost the witch queen. Maybe because she was pregnant, or maybe they already knew what was coming? Maybe our ancestors knew that the fae were already working on the anti-shifting stuff, and they inserted one of their own in the mix?”