“Be that as it may,” Janta said briskly, after clearing her throat, “Haman must have run into your mother somehow, then engaged in an affair. There is no way to prettify it—his actions were most reprehensible.”

“Affairs between consenting adults are common enough,” I admitted reluctantly. I was definitely not entitled to cast the first stone there, and my mother had been older than Haman. But the fact that he’d abandoned me, his child…

“Yes, but what makes it so dishonorable,” Janta lowered her voice, “is not the affair as such, but that he was engaged at the time.”

“What?” I leaned forward, gripping the arms of my chair tightly. I’d known it was highly likely that my father had a family of his own by now, but the idea that he’d dallied with my mother when he’d been promised to another stung. “He had a fiancée?”

“Indeed,” Janta confirmed, disapproval clear in her voice. “As you are aware, betrothals between mages are an extremely serious matter, and even more so in his case. His bride, and current wife, was the daughter of the former High Mage of Castalis. For the last ten years, Haman himself has held that office. Those two families have more or less monopolized the power in Castalis for several centuries.”

I snorted—I could easily see how the other mages in Castalis chafed under that cozy arrangement, not to speak of the humans.

“I can only imagine your mother must have been very alluring to Haman,” Janta went on, “because jeopardizing his future marriage and career through an affair with a shifter was an extremely foolhardy move. He must have taken great pains to hide his relationship with her, so that neither his own family nor his betrothed’s would ever find out.”

“I guess that explains why my clan never knew who he was,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely certain that Mafiela didn’t know my father’s identity. She and my mother had been very close. “So he returned home and married the woman he was engaged to?”

“Yes, Lady Aria Ragir,” Janta confirmed. “They married the year you were born, and have three children now.” She pulled an article from a celebrity Northia magazine in Dara and pushed it across the table to me. “Here is a picture of them.”