“I’ve always worried that it was something the Älvolk did.” Sarina frowned as she looked at her husband and tenderly touched his hand. “Som learned of Johan before I left, and I tried to sneak out carefully so they couldn’t use their inovotto muitit on me the way they had on the others that tried to escape from Áibmoráigi. But I fear they got to him somehow.”

“It’s all right, love,” Johan assured her. “I remember you, and I remember Nikolas. That’s more than enough.”

“That’s enough of this,” she said quietly, and when she looked back at us, she blinked her moist eyes. “You didn’t call to hear the story of my life. You want to know about Senka.”

I cleared my throat. “Um, yeah. I mean . . . I would be happy to hear anything you might be able to tell me. At all.”

“I didn’t know her well,” Sarina admitted. “The Älvolk usually prefer to keep outsiders away, but Senka was an exception, primarily because she was an ideal candidate to be a mother of the thrimavolk—young, álfar, and fertile.”

Hanna’s nose crinkled in disgust. “Fertile?”

“She had two daughters, twins, I think,” Sarina said. “She brought them to the city once while I was still there, but I never met them.”

“Wait. When did you leave Áibmoráigi?” I asked.

“In 1988.”

“And how old were the twins then?” I asked, but as I did the quick math in my head, it didn’t make sense.

I didn’t know how old Eliana and Illaria were. When she’d been with us a couple months ago, Eliana had seemed like a naïve teenager, but Illaria seemed older, more like an adult in her mid-twenties. But it was 2019—for Eliana and Illaria to have been born before Sarina left, they’d have to be in their thirties now.

But I had spent a couple weeks living with both Eliana and Hanna, and there was no way that Eliana was over twice Hanna’s age. In fact, if that math was correct, Eliana would be older than Hanna’s parents.

“I’m really not sure,” Sarina said. “I only saw them from a distance. Toddlers, maybe?”

“So how old would that make Eliana?” Hanna asked, and by her confused face, I guessed she was just getting to the same conclusion I had.

“I really couldn’t say,” Sarina said. “She was very protective of her daughters, and in turn, the Älvolk were protective of Senka, particularly the young men. Indu, Som, Lemak. She never seemed all that interested in them, not romantically, but that didn’t stop Indu from following her like a hungry calf trailing its mother.

“I thought he was what drove her off, actually,” she said, almost offhandedly.

“Indu drove Senka off?” I asked.