Eneas sighed and sank onto one of the stools. “I’m so sorry, Agnes,” he said. “It is the exact fate your mother wished to avoid for you. Alethea felt trapped by her mother’s expectations, the idea of becoming royalty, of being who Ambrosine wanted her to be instead of just herself. Don’t we have enough? she used to say. Isn’t Culinnon enough? But even Culinnon frustrated her. Why was all this power kept in one place?”

“We’ve seen the Arboreal groves,” Leo said, sitting down at another stool.

“And all the mertags, of course,” Agnes added, following his example.

“Culinnon is a special island,” Eneas said. “But to your mother, it was a prison. Ambrosine never appreciated Alethea’s thirst to be different, to explore, to create. She wanted to be an artist, she wanted to travel and experience new things and meet new people. And once she met Xavier, she thought she had figured out exactly how to slip from her mother’s grasp. Who would follow a matriarch whose daughter married a man from Kaolin?”

“So that’s why she married him?” Agnes asked.

“It was,” Eneas said. “At first. But she underestimated Ambrosine’s ambition. And her patience. Ambrosine is not one to scrap a plan because there are a few bumps along the way. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had already approached Xavier herself, already made a deal with him. She very likely contacted him the minute she heard he was sniffing around her daughter.”

“What was the deal?” Leo asked.

Eneas leaned forward, the light of the lantern casting shadows on his face. “He would be required to have all of his children born on Culinnon. That way she could make the claim they were truly Pelagan, truly Byrnes. If you had been born in Kaolin, no one in Pelago would have accepted you as her heir. And in exchange, she would give him something more powerful than money or jewels—she would give him an Arboreal and a mertag. One for each child born on the estate. It was a fantastic price that would keep him wealthy for generations. It would make him special. Different. The envy of Old Port City—and that was all your father ever wanted.” He smiled sadly. “Well, until he fell in love with your mother.”

Leo made a confused huffing sound and Agnes sucked in a breath.

“Until he what?” Leo asked. He couldn’t imagine his father being in love with anyone, least of all his own wife. That had been the one thing about their relationship Leo had felt certain of.