“For what it will be worth, you have it,” he promised. “As will Elena.”

Her head tipped to the side.

“These words,” she whispered. “They surprise me. For a man of such skill and intellect, you do not know your own worth. I hope my daughter can help you find your way to understanding the magnitude of that.”

Again, Cassius made no reply, but that feeling of pride came back.

“I have one other thing to discuss with you,” she said.

“Please go on,” Cassius bid.

“You must take Aelia and Theodora with you to Notting Thicket.”

His princess being his princess and the future queen of another nation, he had no say. Only Elena could abdicate, if that was her wish, and he could not imagine, how she was in her realm, how clear her devotion was to it, that she would.

His daughter, and Theodora, he, and Elena, had the only say.

Therefore, he shook his head. “Elena and I have discussed this, and we’re told there’s much unrest—”

“They must not be in The Enchantments.”

The way she spoke those words made Cassius’s mouth snap shut.

“I do not know, I cannot say, but I do not like what I feel in the veil,” she told him. “And I know one thing as a mother. No daughter is safer anywhere than with her parents.”

“If you feel The Enchantments are in danger, we will not leave,” he declared.

She shook her head.

“Wodell is on the precipice of greatness. The like Ares cultivated in Firenze, and Mars has continued to nurture. This must not be imperiled, for it is also on the precipice of ruin. It must be given every opportunity to fall the right way. And it goes without saying the plans for Airen must move forward. The Enchantments might be shaken, but we will survive.”

“You understand if they don’t, if you don’t, I will have a woman and a daughter on my hands who will be inconsolable.”

“Ah,” she murmured.

“Ah?” he asked.

She smiled a small smile. “And there you will find your worth, Cassius, for this is wholly untrue. They will be, for they will be consoled by you.”

Cassius felt these words like a punch in the chest, so much, they left him winded.

“I will be gone, Cassius, it may be weeks, it may be months, but it will happen. And now…now…” She drew in a delicate breath and released it. “Now I can go in peace, knowing I have left my Elena to you.”

“Ophelia—”

“I am tired,” she muttered, maneuvering out of her hanging chair.

She couldn’t expect to leave it at that.

He stood. “Ophelia—”

She was moving slowly across the room, but she stopped and looked at him.

“When my babies were young, I taught them to read the cards,” she whispered.

Her words, the look on her face, Cassius braced.

“Every morning as wee girls, they turned a card,” she shared. “And I told them the meanings, day after day, until they could read them themselves and understand the omens.”