Page 35 of The Prince's Fealty

It was a good question. What if she was wrong?

“When did the landslide stop?” she asked.

They looked at her in confusion.

“The night you saved everyone up the mountain,” she prompted. “When did it stop? When did the storm stop?”

Tor blinked. “Oh, uh, a little before dawn, I think.” He glanced at Pel. “I wasn’t really tracking the time.”

Pel nodded. “I remember the sky lightening.”

She smiled faintly. “I imagine that’s true. But I mean to suggest that the landslide stopped and the storm dissipated after you poured so much of your magic into the shield grounded in the mountain. Since that night, the weather in the area, though far from perfect, has been better than it has been in years.”

Pel and Tor exchanged glances. Thatwasinteresting. Especially since they knew that Tor had actually been borrowing the High King’s magic and, they’d conjectured, some of the Fealty magic. It didn’t prove anything definitively. Maybe that was all a coincidence. The landslide had to stop eventually, after all. But it was suggestive when put together with everything else the exiles had experienced.

“You’re sure it’s worth the risk?” Tor demanded. “Absolutely certain?”

She was silent for a long moment, and then she looked him right in the eye. “Do you know what happens when a ruler pulls too much from the Fealty?”

Tor’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“When they pull too much from the Fealty, they don’t burn out their magical core. They burn out the cores of their citizens.”

There was a collective intake of breath from everyone in the cave—except for Pel’s mother and Tama. Cavun wasn’t pretending not to listen anymore, and Pel couldn’t blame him.

“That’s why the exiles left,” she continued. “It’s why they forswore their Fealty and fled. Because they were tired of being burned out and killed.”

Pel let out an unsteady breath. All those Unremarkable who’d died in the war. He’d had never understood why they’d been using magic to begin with, how they could have used so much that it killed them.

But this made a terrible, awful amount of sense.

“The avatars,” Tor breathed. “The royal ones.”

She nodded, her expression grim. “That were presented to the people as though they were protecting everyone, as though royalty fighting with avatars meant that people didn’t have to fight or die.”

And instead, the rulers had powered them with their own citizens, and when they’d drawn too much, it had killed them.

“Does everyone know?” Tor choked out.

“The exiles,” Pel’s mother answered. “The rulers. I knew as Forex’s spouse since I lived through the war with him.”

Tor looked stricken. “Why didn’t my mother say anything? Why didn’t my brother?”

It was a question they couldn’t possibly answer.

Instead, Pel’s mother said, “You’ve nearly died twice, Prince Torex, by expending too much magic recently.”

Pel flinched, and Bav shot Tama a furious look. She didn’t meet his eyes, staring intently into the fire.

“Yes,” Tor acknowledged.

“You had another source of magic with you at the time,” she pursued inexorably. “And yet he was unharmed. Why?”

Tor met Pel’s mother’s eyes with ones that glittered. His jaw was clenched, and he gritted out, “Over my dead body.”

To Pel’s surprise, she smiled. “Exactly. There’s no definitive proof that an Extraordinary can consciously protect those they’re bonded to, but I have always been of the opinion that it’s more likely to be a decision than not. You value other lives over yourown. And for that reason, the majority of the exiles who fled this very thing more than twenty-five years ago are willing to put themselves in your hands. They trust you to do the right thing in a way that they’ve not trusted a ruler to do in a very long time.”

Tor’s hand in his lap was visibly shaking. Pel picked it up and twined their fingers together. Tor cast him a fleeting smile of gratitude before looking back at Pel’s mom.