“Yes. This girl is identical to her. The mirror image. That face. Those eyes. Everything about her. The curve of her lips.”
My hand drifted, touching my mouth. Perla had made similar remarks, and I always thought her merely embellishing, or trying to forge a connection in my mind for the mother I would never know.
“Father, the king and queen died at the start of the eclipse. As did so many.”
Those words woke and shook me from a lifelong slumber. No. My parents did not die at the hands of dwellers. I could have understood that. Not the betrayal. Not their slaughter at the behest of someone they trusted. Anger that I thought beyond me after all these years burned like a fever through me.
“If this is not her, then it’s her child. The one she was carrying at the time of the eclipse. She would be of a like age,” the king intoned. “The child must have survived, and this is she.”
I dragged in a shuddery breath, astonished at how accurately he had deduced the truth.
“That’s not possible,” the prince said.
“It is possible. I know what I see before me.” King Tebald’s gaze roamed over me, and I felt his absolute certainty. He knew. I could deny it. I could let his son continue to tell him he was wrong. But he knew.
“The queen did not survive the dweller uprising on Relhok City. She never gave birth.” Prince Chasan spoke in a coaxing tone, as though his father were feeble-minded. He wasn’t even addressing me and yet his words hit a nerve. My last frayed nerve.
I couldn’t hold silent. Not with fresh outrage pumping through me. And did it really matter? There was no hiding the truth anymore. The king knew.
“No,” I growled, straining forward as that last nerve snapped free. “Dwellers did not kill my mother. Or my father. My parents were killed at the hand of the royal chancellor, the false king who now sits on the throne of Relhok.”
A long pause followed my outburst before voices erupted all around me. My bravado fled in the volley of sound. The din was overwhelming and made me cringe and shrink into myself.
The prince grabbed my elbow, his grip once again hard, as it had been on the Outside. He swung me to face him. “Luna, what the hell are you—”
A steady clapping thundered through the room, close and deep and resounding. “I knew it! Splendid. Brilliant!” Tebald cheered. The buzz of voices ebbed at the king’s applause. “The true heir to the kingdom of Relhok stands before us.”
Cold washed through me. My secret was out. Suddenly the light around me felt brighter, hotter on my skin. Sounds were more jarring, painful to my ears, the smells more overwhelming.
I should have convinced him he was mistaken and there was no connection between the late queen and me. It didn’t matter how convinced he was; I should have tried to deny the truth.
“Luna?” It was Chasan’s voice, hard and questioning, full of menace.
I gave myself a swift mental shake. It would have only been a delay to the inevitable. The moment I arrived in Ainswind, it was simply a matter of time before I was exposed.
There was no going back now.
ELEVEN
Luna
I WAS LED to the dais at the far end of the room and seated to the right of the king as his honored guest—a fact that he declared loudly and effusively to all in the great hall. The initial excitement faded away, but I was far from forgotten. The prince was at my other side and Maris was close, to her father’s left. I sat stiffly, hands clutched in my lap in an attempt to still their shaking.
Fortunately, I was given something to do when the food arrived. I ate with gusto, falling on the food like I had never eaten before. Apparently the biscuits had not been enough to tide me over. I stopped short of moaning, overcome at the taste and sheer abundance of it all.
It also didn’t hurt that eating saved me from conversation. Chatter flowed around me, and I did my best to answer the king between bites of food and sips of a drink that made my head feel warm and fuzzy. As with the food I tasted, the drink was like nothing I had ever experienced, and I imbibed freely, licking the exotic juice from my lips, not wanting one drop lost.
At one point a warm hand covered my own as I reached for my goblet again. “Have a care, princess. Those bigger and stronger than you have lost their heads over too much of this stuff.”
I did not miss the emphasis the prince placed on the word princess. As though it were something loathsome and dirty on his tongue. Why should he resent the truth of my identity? It was almost as though he preferred me before, when I was just a peasant to him.
And that’s when I sensed it. I felt their stares. Not all of them were delighted with my rise from the dead. Their resentment and dislike were palpable.
I tugged free, eager to be rid of the sensation of the prince’s hand smothering mine. Lifting my goblet back to my lips, I took a greedy gulp and sighed, making the sound deliberately loud. “You don’t know me, Your Highness.” Nor do you have any inkling of the strength that lies in me . . . what I’m capable of . . .