Page 10 of Malice

An all-too-familiar shame trickles down the back of my throat. “Half.”

“Your mother. Who was she?” His grip tightens.

“I don’t know,” I admit, heat burning in my cheeks. Perhaps this man is telling the truth about his captivity. Even the youngest child in Briar knows the story of the Dark Grace, and I don’t appreciate being made to retell it. “She left me. When I was an infant.”

“Twenty years ago.”

A cold that has nothing to do with Kal prickles across my shoulder blades. The sea crashes outside. “How do you know that?”

He smiles, a real smile this time. He glows with it. “Because I knew her. Lynnore.”

The breath leaves my body.Lynnore.For twenty years I’ve wondered, haunted by the specter of parents who abandoned me near the harbor like I was no better than a basket of rotting fish. I pictured my mother a hundred thousand ways. Weak and destitute, hoping someone would take pity on her cursed child. Indifferent and shrewd, willing to cast me off for her own gain. Terrified and lost, having birthed a defective Grace and too afraid to claim it.

And now those ghosts have a name: Lynnore.

“Why should I believe you? My mother left me to die in an alley. If you were her friend, then—”

“She did not leave you.” The prisoner’s black eyes flash. “Lynnore entrusted you to a woman in the Common District, where you would be safe while she came here to help me. Free me from this tower. And then we were going to leave together—all of us.”

A wind whistles through the cracks in the stone. The fishmonger. He could have had a wife. I imagine the woman waiting with me as the hours ticked by, apprehension building. And then, when my mother never came back for me, she panicked. Her husband would have wanted nothing to do with a hideous infant and her unknown powers, and so he delivered me to the Grace Council. Which means my mother might have walked these very stones. Smelled the salt and the mold and the reek of fish. It takes me a moment to find my voice and I struggle to disguise how much Kal’s words have affected me.

“She was—she was Vila?”

“Only partly. Like you. Oh, Alyce. I can see her in you. The same mouth and nose.” He lifts my hand. “The same fingers.”

I remove myself from his grasp and retreat farther into the sunlight. “Why would she have wanted to help you?”

Hurt flits across Kal’s features—an expression I know well from the number of times I’ve been brushed off or shoved aside—but he continues. “They did not know about her Vila blood. She disguised it well. And she found me here, much as you just did. We were kin, in a way, as both of us hailed from Malterre. And she understood the cruelty of this prison. No one deserves this fate.”

“But how did she hide from the Fae ambassador? I couldn’t.”

Endlewild.

A full-blooded Etherian appointed to the royal household and tasked with holding together the alliance between the Fae courts and Briar. It was he who recognized my Vila blood when I was dumped in the lap of the Grace Council. He who led the experiments to see if I was Vila enough to kill, or just a darker version of a Grace. My insides wither at the thought of his golden Fae eyes and bark-like skin, brown and grooved like that of an oak, and that same pain from Hilde’s shop resurfaces. This time, I can’t help but press the heel of my palm into the place on my middle.

“She appeared human. More so than you do,” Kal adds quietly, as if worried it will offend me.

“Is that why she never came back for me? Because it was easier for her to hide?”

“They killed her.” He grinds his teeth. “The beasts. It was just after she attempted to sever my bindings. But the power of the enchantment was too great. She went back for you. We would try again another day. I was watching her return to Briar as I always did, and they intercepted her. I do not know how they knew she was here. Or how they determined what she was. There was some kind of argument, and then they threw her into the sea. These abominable shadows rendered me powerless to stop them. And you—I thought you were dead, too.”

“Beasts? Who do you mean?”

It couldn’t have been Endlewild—then there would have been no questions about my origins when I turned up in the Common District. And I doubt it was the king’s men. But Kal’s mouth just opens and closes, the bones of his neck straining as he struggles to speak. Callow screeches outside, and it seems to knock a dose of sense into me.

I have no reason to trust this man. No proof that what he says is true. “This is too much. I have to go.”

“Wait! I can help you. I know the power that runs in your veins. The gift of the Vila.”

I pause mid-step. “The curse, you mean.”

His dark brows knit together. “Is that what you think? What they told you?”

Against my own instinct, I find myself rushing on. “What else can it be? All I can summon is ugliness and pain.”

“Alyce.” I’ve never heard my name spoken that way before, with compassion, and it almost hurts. “You are so much more than that.”

“What am I?” The question is barely more than a whisper, an aching need that’s plagued me since I was old enough to understand the extent of my otherness. “You said my mother looked more human than I do. Why? I’m part Vila, but what about the rest? Do you know?”