“You can.” His voice is growing irritated. “You simply have neglected that ability—along with all your others.”
My spine stiffens at the implication. “You seem to believe I possess some kind of power because of…what, exactly? An oddbirthmark on my chest? Surely, you realize how absurd that sounds. There hasn’t been maegic in Anwyvn since the Cull. It was extinguished when they slaughtered all the high fae. Everyone knows it.”
He is quiet for a beat. His question, when it comes, is delivered with terrifying softness. “Then what happened on that cliff side? To that man who tried to rape you?”
I flinch. “I don’t know.”
“You do.”
“No, I don’t!” I gnaw my bottom lip, trying to quell the surge of rising panic. “All I know is, one minute he was tearing at my dress and the next he was on the ground writhing in pain. Whatever happened to him wasn’t something I did.”
Not consciously, anyway.
His voice is still soft. Soft in a way that makes me nervous. Soft like a snake, just before the kill strike. “And what’s your explanation for the bridge? Hmm? How have you rearranged reality to suit your safe little delusions when it comes to that?”
“The bridge?”
“When you fell through that splintered slat. What happened?”
“I…” I shake my head again, a swift jerk of confusion. “I got lucky, I guess. The bridge pitched in the wind…I was tossed up onto it.”
“Lucky,” he mutters. “Skies above.”
“Yes,lucky!” I snap. “What else would it be?”
“You’re serious.”
I nearly bite through my lips trying to hold in my more furious retorts, instead uttering a bald “Yes.”
“Fine. Let’s talk for a moment about that lucky wind.” Penn sidles a step closer to the bed, putting me instantly on alert. He stops just short of the carved post at the foot—not close enough totouch me, but still too close for my liking. “Wind that came up out of nowhere, so quickly it defied the laws of nature. Wind that moved not from one direction, in a current, but whirled in a curious vortex that centered aroundyou. Wind that pitched your dangling body in such a way that you were delivered, in one piece, from almost certain death. Wind that dissipated in a single blink as soon as you were safely back on solid footing.” He pauses, letting his words penetrate the thick fog of denial and confusion wrapped around me like a blanket. “I have seen some strange things in my time on this earth. Inexplicable things. Monstrous things, even. But I have never, in all my years, seen anything like that wind.”
If my pulse was a drumbeat before, it is now a roar. The blood rushing between my ears is so loud, I can barely hear my own thoughts.
“It was a squall,” I say weakly, not believing the words but somehow still needing to voice them. “A freak windstorm…”
“It was no squall and you know it. You know the truth. You just don’t want to believe it.”
“And what truth is that?”
He takes another step toward me. His eyes never leave mine as his left hand rises to grip the bedpost. “Youcalledthat wind. Conjured it from thin air.”
“That’s…That’s not possible.”
“It is.”
“What does…” I suck in a sharp breath. Inside my head, my thoughts are a jumble. Each question spawns two more, until my mind swarms in increasing disquiet. “What are you saying?”
Penn’s patience has all but evaporated. “I’m saying that mark on your chest is no birthmark. It is a Remnant mark. A sign of elemental power. I recognized it the moment I saw it.”
Memories slam into me, hurling me back a week’s time—tomy hanging tree. Noose around my neck, iron at my wrists. And two burning eyes fixed upon me with such intensity, it seemed to singe my skin as he pulled loose the laces of my dress to examine the whorls and spirals etched between my breasts.
He’d known even then.
What that mark means.
What I am.
It seems wrong, somehow, that he knew so long before I did. That Istilldon’t know. Not really. Even now, I feel frustratingly in the dark about my own identity.