“I…” I hesitated. “Guess I can’t, but he offered to help me find my dad before the door appeared in the library. Orian may be a lot of things, but he doesn’t strike me as the type to offer niceties under false pretences. I don’t think he has the same inclination for deception as Maeve or your father. Not saying he’s incapable—or had the choice to refuse—but if he’d known, I truly believe he would have avoided me completely rather than feign cluelessness.”

Unless he was a better actor than I give him credit for. Who knew?

“Hm, I agree that his nature is to be avoidant rather than bothering with all the unnecessary theatrics, and you are an intelligent creature.” He grazed his thumb across the back of my hand. “You can read people better than anyone I’ve ever seen. If my brother has a hidden conniving streak, he will have misled us all.”

“Still, if it eases you, you should talk to them when we return.”

Cair nodded, and I was content knowing it would be resolved eventually.

“Why would the king send us here, though?” I asked, glancing at Zadok—who’d observed our interaction silently, and with avid engrossment. “He could’ve killed me at the palace. Or did he not want to dirty the floors?”

The older Fae hung his head in shame. “I created the poison for him over a hundred years ago,” he admitted. “He wanted to make sure to punish me too.”

Now that I hadn’t expected.

He really was fucking unhinged.

“I’m sorry,” Zadok muttered, visibly distressed. “I never meant to⁠—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I assured him, hoping he picked up on my sincerity. “He’s the one who should be sorry, though I know finding an ounce of remorse in the king is as likely as getting shit from a rocking horse.” He’d probably double-down and kill me again to be sure his point was made. “You’re not to blame, and you should never have been forced to feel like you were.”

Cair nodded in agreement.

“In a roundabout way, I’m glad he did what he did.” I shrugged, snorting at Cair’s bewildered expression. “Not killing me, that was too much, but leading me to you…” I gazed up at Zadok again, who seemed on the cusp of shedding tears. “We wouldn’t have found you otherwise. We saw your name on a ledger, then there was a diary that mentioned this place, and we went off that.”

His face stuttered over the word diary, but he recovered quickly. “Ah yes. The ledger he made me keep of all the creatures he deemed a threat to the throne. Those written in there typically ended up banished or killed.”

My brow furrowed. “You wrote your own name? Even the last entry?”