“What . . . ?” Raine began.
“Not now,” Daemonar said quietly.
“You have to do something,” Jaenelle Saetien said. “He’s having one of his funny turns.”
Daemonar almost jerked her off her feet when he stopped moving. “Funny turns? What’s wrong with you? You never used to make light of something so serious. And Prince Sadi is not having a ‘funny turn,’ cousin. He’s in a cold rage, and the coven of malice is the reason for it.”
“Don’t call them that,” she snapped. “It makes them sound—”
“Like what they are.”
She tried to pull away from him, but he tightened his grip on her arm, maybe hard enough to bruise. Right now he didn’t care. She was being willfully blind, and he was desperately afraid of what was coming.
“He is having one of his . . . fits,” she insisted. “Moments after I introduced Delora, he called her Dorothea.”
A shiver went down Daemonar’s spine. “The name Dorothea means nothing to you?”
“Maybe I heard it in some dull history lesson.” She shrugged, but he suspected that she remembered enough from stories shared within the family and just didn’t want to think about why her father looked at her new best friend and saw his most hated enemy.
He didn’t say anything else, just delivered her to her first class and walked away.
Raine continued to stay with him, and he wondered where the instructor was supposed to be.
“What does that name mean to you?” Raine asked.
“Death and destruction. War.” When Raine stopped walking, Daemonar turned to face him. “Family history—and the price that was paid to save the Blood in Kaeleer. That’s what that name means to me.”
“Prince Sadi didn’t make a mistake, did he?”
He shook his head.
“What are you going to do?”
“Send a message to my father.” And to Witch.
Surreal found Tersa in the cottage’s kitchen, standing next to the table and staring at a broken vase, a dozen red roses, and a dozen flowers that looked like daisies but were the same color as the roses. She wasn’t sure what advice Tersa could give her about this latest collision with Jaenelle Saetien, but Daemon’s mother did know about being broken. He was right about that. Besides, she and Tersa had been looking after each other, on and off, for most of her life. Who else could she talk to?
“It’s getting colder,” she said as she removed her outer coat and scarf, placing both over the back of one kitchen chair. “We might have our first snow tonight.” She let her psychic senses flow through the cottage. Just the two of them here. “Where is Mikal?”
“He’s out doing boy things.” Tersa paused. “Or talking to a girl. Maybe kissing, although it’s early in the day for kissing.”
Not in her experience, but that wasn’t the reason for concern. “He asked Daemon for permission?”
Tersa frowned at her. “The Mikal boy lives with me, so he asked me.”
She’d better talk to Mikal soon and find out what rules Tersa had laid down before the boy found himself in trouble with the patriarch of the family—especially right now when Daemon’s temper would be sharper and colder than usual.
Tersa reached out and tapped Surreal’s chest. “What’s broken can’t be mended. Put the pieces back together, they won’t be the same. Can’t be the same.”
“What can’t be mended?”
“The girl broke the bond. Can’t mend it.”
“I have to mend it. She’s my daughter.”
“Not anymore.” Tersa stroked Surreal’s hair, an odd gesture since Tersa’s hair was always as tangled as her mind. “She is Daemon’s daughter. You are Daemon’s wife. That is your connection now. You build new feelings or you don’t, but what the girl broke in you can’t be mended.”
She knew the truth of that, had grieved for it last night. “I tried to keep her safe.”
“You did that. Now it’s time to let go. Soon it will be time to be a guide—if she chooses to listen.”
Tersa stepped back and picked up two flowers. “What is this?” She held out the flower in her left hand.
“A rose,” Surreal replied, relieved to have a distraction.
“And this?” She held out the flower in her right hand.
“A red daisy.”
“Are you sure?”
Surreal shivered. Broken Black Widow. Mad Black Widow always living near the borders of the Twisted Kingdom but never fully sane. And that meant Tersa had seen some things that only one other Black Widow had seen. If she went to the Keep and asked, would Witch also tell her a part of her heart had broken beyond mending?
Tersa set those flowers down and picked up two more, both roses.
“A daisy travels, calls itself a rose, blends in. Changes itself in order to become one of the land’s roses, while others . . .” Both flowers bloomed. One remained a rose while the other unfurled its petals to reveal itself as a daisy with needle-thin thorns filling its center. “. . . hold on to what they were and wait to reveal their true nature. The trusting, the unwary are fooled by daisies that claim to be roses. You can’t afford to be a fool.”
Surreal pressed her hands against the table. Daisies and roses. Hayllians and Dhemlans. The mingling of bloodlines. Why not? Sadi had Hayllian and Dhemlan bloodlines. He couldn’t be the only one. Hayllians could have come to Kaeleer over the centuries, married into Dhemlan families and adopted those family names. Honorable men and women who had been drawn to the Shadow Realm.
But what about the ones who were less than honorable? What about twigs from the family trees of Hayll’s Hundred Families who had slipped into Kaeleer shortly before or after Witch had purged the Realms of Dorothea’s taint and now were biding their time, fostering the corruption that had eventually destroyed Terreille?
Or was the interest in Hayllian memorabilia a sign that the corruption already had taken root again? Were the girls who were being broken another sign? And what about the disruptions within the Realm’s most powerful family caused by a girl’s rebellion?
An orchestrated rebellion?
“Jaenelle Saetien,” she whispered. She shouldn’t have consented to let the girl go to that damn school.
“You can’t save her,” Tersa said. “Not this time.”
Jaenelle Saetien skipped one of her classes—it was a class that everyone found boring and useless, anyway—and waited for Daemonar to leave his afternoon tutorial. She’d wanted to meet him sooner, but he’d been a prick and had refused to give up a lesson. So she had to give up one of her classes instead.
He walked out of the building, gave her a slashing look, and kept going.
She hurried after him. “We have to talk about this morning!”
“Do we? Seemed pretty clear to me.”
She tried to grab his arm and jerked back when she met a defensive Green shield that had some snap to it that hurt. “Why are you pissed off at me?”
“You want me to pat your head and say ‘There, there, no one minds you turning into an insufferable bitch,’ or do you want the truth?”
“You’re being mean!”
“Just giving back what you’re dishing out, darling.” Daemonar finally stopped walking. “Tell me this: Did you tell Delora about Prince Sadi’s need for solitude? Did she come up with calling it his funny turns, or did you belittle what he does to protect all of us as a way to impress her?”
“I needed to talk to someone, and it makes those times sound . . .” She trailed off as she saw his eyes fill with hot anger.
“Tame? Amusing? Harmless? He isn’t tame and he isn’t harmless, and you’re damn lucky his temper didn’t snap the leash this morning because he would have splattered the coven of malice all over the green.”