He pulled down the blankets to expose my right shoulder. I had once thought him the pampered, privileged son of a mage House, as highborn as he was arrogant. The callused touch of his fingers, however coaxing and sensual, reminded me that he had been born to a very different life. With kisses, he traced the two seamed scars on my shoulder. “I hurt you instead. How could you know that horrible thing your sire threatened you with?”

“The latch of the coach conceals two gremlin spirits, one inside and one outside. They can see and talk. When I was climbing up the tree in the spirit world, I saw through its eyes.”

“Ah, yes, I remember you talking about the latch.”

“Are you saying you don’t believe me about the latch?”

He kissed my forehead. “Love, why did you try to kill your sire? You would only have killed yourself.”

I brushed my fingers across his lips. “I was so angry and afraid that I forgot.” I swung out of bed and padded over to the table to dress. “Although now that I think of it, if you hadn’t stabbed him the first time and he hadn’t boasted that the injury would fall on his children, then you wouldn’t have known to stop me from trying to kill him.”

“That is convoluted logic even for you.” Sitting up, he shaped four globes of cold fire as easily as I might inhale. “Love, how did your mother get pregnant by the Master of the Wild Hunt?”

I got into my undergarments. “He threatened to kill Daniel, and the other survivors, unless she allowed him to impregnate her.”

He nodded gravely. “The women in my village suffered much the same. My grandmother was sent up to the mage House to work in the hall. One of the men fancied her. Village girls like her weren’t allowed to say no. He kept her as his mistress until he got her pregnant and discarded her.”

“Is that why you bloomed with cold magic? Because your grandsire was a magister?”

He smiled as at an old joke. “The man who sired my father on my grandmother was a clerk, not a mage. He was sent to Four Moons House as part of the retinue of a woman from another mage House when she married the mansa’s father. Who’s to say the magic came from his breeding? It might have bloomed from an unknown seed. It might have come from my grandmother.”

“The same place you got your looks? From your grandmother?”