“People always commented on how accurate it was, but I hadn’t really understood until now.” She shook her head, turning to her friend. Carys knew what it was to seem like a foreigner in her home court. Her parents were Northern but she grew up in the South. “The Easterners scoffed and laughed at my mother, but she had always tempered their taunts by telling them one day she’d be the mother of the Queen. That shut them up.”

“People don’t mess with the Fates.” Carys chuckled.

“No, they don’t.” Bri frowned. Some fae even doted on her mother in the hopes of currying favor with a future royal. She had done well for herself, Helvia Catullus. She was probably in her castle in the East now, gloating as the news traveled to her of where her daughter had ended up.

Carys’s voice dropped to a whisper. “When was the last time you spoke with her?”

“Many years,” Bri replied.

The pair didn’t talk about her parents often. Carys had met them a few times at celebrations in the East, but even when they were in the same room, Bri had kept her distance, treating them like strangers. Her mother’s plotting and scheming had grown out of hand. The second Bri and Tal had turned sixteen, they pledged their swords to the Eastern Crown Prince. Her mother’s outrage was larger than any hurricane. Gone were her sixteen years of planning to put Bri on the throne in the West. She had been hiring spies and sowing seeds of discontentment for years, and with Bri’s pledge, all the results of her mother’s actions vanished. No one could have known that Bri’s lifetime pledge would be transformed toward fealty to the High Mountain Court or that Remy would absolve Bri and Talhan of it.

Bri scowled and kept walking down the hallway, Carys a step behind.

“What?” Carys asked.

“I can’t help but wonder how much of this is my mother’s doing,” Bri grumbled, marching toward the stairs that led to the wine cellar. “She’s been trying for years to create distrust in the Crown. She’s been whispering in people’s ears for years that Queen Thorne was unfit to rule.”

“I don’t think she did this, Bri,” Carys said. “She might have ruffled a few feathers, but Queen Thorne was the one who let the witch hunters off their leashes. She was the one who befriended Hennen Vostemur.”

“But perhaps her people would have set her straight.” Bri balled her fists as she jogged down the steps and threw open the cellar door. “Perhaps there would have been more faith in her.”

“She is one person, kingdoms away,” Carys said, eyeing Bri as she grabbed the first two bottles of wine off the rack. Carys considered the bottles and rolled her eyes, leaning past Bri to grab another for herself.