“Are you going to tell us what’s going on, Bri?” Hale asked, his gray eyes piercing into her.

Bri looked up and down the table, her eyes landing on Lina again. These were her friends—her family. She should tell them what that dying soldier said about Baba Monroe . . . and yet, the words caught in her throat for a moment. Too many threads were being knotted together and she couldn’t untangle them all. She took a steadying breath.

“One of the scouts who attacked us,” she said before taking another long sip of wine. “He told me that the High Priestess was named Baba Monroe.”

Gasps rang out, sharp whispered conversations springing up around them. Silverware clanked onto porcelain plates as everyone stopped eating to listen. They all turned toward Hale, but it was Remy who spoke.

“Your mother’s fae, not a violet witch,” Remy said, voicing Bri’s own doubts. “She’d never help Gedwin Norwood’s child after the way he treated Hale and her.”

“How is your mum?” Bri asked, thinking of the gorgeous, green-eyed fae.

Kira was like a sea goddess living in the far reaches of Haastmouth Beach, banished there by the Eastern King. Bri had accompanied Hale to visit his mother a few times when they were children, spending the summers swimming in the rolling ocean waves and running across the rocky stone beaches. That all ended when Hale was appointed a commander of his father’s armies, but Bri still thought of Kira and those summers fondly.

Remy leaned down the table with a smirk. “She has a boyfriend.”

“Rem.” Hale rolled his eyes at the gasps of delight from Carys and Talhan.

“Really?” Carys leaned in further, intrigued. “One of those fishermen in Haastmouth?”

Remy nodded. “Timmy.”

“No way.” Carys grinned.

“I’m happy for her,” Bri said, chuckling at Hale’s reddening cheeks. “It takes a special kind of strength . . .”

Her words faded off and the group instantly sobered. Hale reached for Remy’s hand, Renwick doing the same with Rua, as if her words threatened the magic that tied them together. To ever move on after losing her Fated, even if it had been three decades . . . She was proud of Kira for permitting an ember of happiness in her life after all she’d been through.

“Could it be an alias?” Talhan asked, pulling the group away from their somber thoughts. He tipped his head toward Cole. “Paying homage to this ancestor of yours?”

His face paling, Cole leaned down the table, looking at Hale. “What was your mother’s name?”

“Kira,” Hale said tightly.

Cole’s eyebrows lifted. “I don’t recognize that name but . . . There was a family tree in the journal.” Cole pushed back from his chair. “I’ll go get it.”

Renwick pinched the bridge of his nose as the servants came to collect the dinner plates. “I thought after my father’s and uncle’s deaths, there would be peace.”