I sat forward. “Was it Rhiannon, or the stag commanding her?”
He shrugged. “She claimed the idea, as she did with all others. But you and I know how easily she was influenced.”
My gaze darted around; I could almost see the shadow of Gawain passing through this room, into the hallway. “So Rhiannon had you planted here as a baby, then you were stolen. Maeronyx stole you.”
“You can see why Rhiannon wanted every changeling from the other courts dead.”
Yes. The attack on the wall, the slaughter that followed… Rhiannon had a vendetta.
“And Noctere’s god allowed that?” I asked. “Thieving another court’s changeling?”
He snorted. “The stag permitted a slaughter in your district, and you think the black maw wouldn’t allow for the theft of one fae child?”
I clasped my hands tighter, until my nails dug into my skin.
“Maeronyx is in closest league with her god,” he said. “And the black maw is a cruel one.”
After what I’d seen of Sylvanwild and Highmark… What the hell had Dorian encountered in the winter court?
I wouldn’t ask. I couldn’t.
I said, “Changelings tend more toward power.” In the Eldermaze, Thalassa had told me Dorian had an exceptionally large well of power for a man. I had seen it. Which meant… “It was no accident that Gawain killed your family.”
His red-rimmed eyes lifted. He said nothing, which said everything.
A mercy. Itwasa mercy my mother had died instantly.
And the pain of losing her, my friends, everyone I had known—it empowered me. It made me wrathful, a terror.
Because of it, I’d killed a queen.
“But I saw your home,” I said. “In the forest…”
He seemed to see past me. “I escaped the winter court when I was fifteen. Three years of Gawain’s training, brainwashing, torture. One night I stole a horse and rode for the border. When the horse fell from exhaustion, I walked.”
My chest felt like it would burst. My eyes stung with horror or anger or grief or all three at once.
“I made it into the forests, and then I collapsed. Haskel was the one who found me.”
Haskel. That was why Dorian loved him.
“He brought me to Rhiannon. Her rage was incredible—not over how chewed up I was, inside and out, but over the theft of a prized plant.” Dorian. Dorian was the plant. “I was barely sane. That was why she gave me over to my mother—my real one.”
His real mother. A fae. The paranoid one. She’d built a tunnel, and yet…
“She was lowborn, which was why she’d given me up. But when I came back to her, she swore never to lose me again. Gawain came and killed her, too.” His mouth twisted in the slant light. “My mother knew wards, but not offensive magic.”
“And Gawain is a spymaster,” I whispered.
A grim nod. “If anyone could break a ward…”
He’d spoken of the cottage in the Eldermaze.Just like every dream of that place, he had said one night, under the stars.Something was trying to get inside, and I was trying to keep it out.
“I tried to end him that day,” he said. “I still wasn’t strong enough.”
The scar on Gawain’s jaw. That was Dorian’s rage, the second time Gawain had come for him. He had lost both his mothers to the same man.
I clutched my head in my hands. “You told me you’d known the fae in the trials your whole life.”