She set her dismembered eye on the nightstand. “I don’t want to lose this. The cub will start chewing on it, and wouldn’t that be awful.” The old woman turned back to me, pointing at me with a skeletal finger. “Veix dedicated you to Suless. That means something. You can’t hide yourself from Suless now. She knows all your secrets.”

I knew why she spoke of herself in the third person. Kaen had likely forbidden her from revealing her identity. Of course, that didn’t change how troubling her words were.

Assuming they were true.

“You know you would be good at magic. Do you think Tya would have a child who didn’t have the gift? She breathed it into you from your birth, stamped it into your bones, set it spiraling into your blood. Yet you’ve done everything but study it. Swordplay? Yes. Strategy? Oh please. Tactics. Yes, tactics. Your father’s gifts. But not your mother’s. You reject those.”

“Are you so sure?” I said. “I haven’t been here that long.”

“I think all you have to do is ask.” The way she looked at me emphasized her dowager’s hump, her spine’s curve. “And your mother would be only too glad to teach you.” She reached out toward me with a twisted hand and touched my arm with the lightest sweep. “But she isn’t half as good a teacher as I am.”

“Any help you’d offer would come poisoned. I’m not the fool Veixizhau was.”

Wyrga cackled, like the laughter of her hyenas. “Can you blame me? The abused dog snaps at her keepers. You know what it’s like to rebel against your jailer, don’t you? Are you so fond of Xaltorath?”

I winced and looked away. Wyrga knew far too much about me. Maybe what she’d said about being “dedicated” had some truth to it. If so, I had even more reason to curse Veixizhau. She had laid my secrets bare to a monster.

Wyrga grinned once more. “Where was your mother when you needed her?”

“Shut up.”

“That’s why you deny her, why you deny her gifts. She had nothing to give you when you needed her protection, and so now you would deny her the satisfaction of knowing any talent of yours stems from her.”

A shuddering exhale escaped me. The fact Wyrga might be right galled me. My father hadn’t known I existed, but my mother had no such excuses. Worse, in my mother’s eyes, I had been created as nothing more than a tool, not born from love or lust or even accident but purely to fulfill some idiotic prophecy.

Tools can be traded. Tools can be discarded. Tools can be broken.

“I had a daughter once,” Wyrga said. “She felt very much the same about me, but in trying to rebel against me, she became me. Isn’t that funny?”