16

Birthright

The visit with Bryn’s mom had been mercifully short, and Bryn didn’t say much on the walk back to the apartment. I took a long shower—both because I needed to wash the stress and grime away, and to give Bryn the privacy to talk to her boyfriend and process what she’d learned today.

When I came out of the bathroom, Bryn apologized for the awkwardness, and she forced a smile as she suggested we still try to have a good time.

“You’re never in Doldastam, and I never take time off, so we ought to make the most of it,” she announced.

And she had a point, so I agreed, and we spent the afternoon doing things around town while we pretended that Bryn wasn’t internally reeling. We saw the Tralla horses, and we rode her horse, Bloom, around the edge of the city. For supper, she took me to Juni’s Jubilant Confectionery, and I had the most delicious semla ever.

After that, Bryn took me on an after-hours tour of the palace. She explained all the battles depicted in the giant stained-glass windows, and when we went around the corridor with all the kings’ portraits, she knew facts about every one.

I took a picture of Elliot Konrad Strinne, the sixth monarch in the Strinne Dynasty and the twenty-eighth monarch of the Kanin kingdom. Nearly twenty years ago, he’d fallen ill with an infection of the blood, and he’d died when he was only twenty-six years old. According to Pan’s mother, she’d worked as a human trade liaison to the King, and she and Elliot had fallen in love and they had Pan together.

Since he was half-human and a technical claimant to the throne, the Kanin kingdom refused to acknowledge Pan’s request for a paternity test against Elliot’s blood. The Inhemsk Project worked hard to discover the proper lineages of trolls of mixed blood and find their place in the kingdoms, but they only had limited power within the Mimirin. Pan would likely never get confirmation one way or the other that Elliot was his father.

But looking at the portrait of Elliot on his coronation, painted when he was younger even than Pan was now, I could see the resemblance was undeniable—the same dark eyes, full lips with the subtle smile at the corners of the mouth, thick sharp eyebrows, and strong shape of the jaw.

When Bryn had shown me everything of interest—including the new chandelier with a bajillion crystals that had to be replaced after the Invasion of Doldastam—we went back to her apartment. We sat on the balcony, our feet propped up on the railing, sipping wine and watching the late-evening sun setting slowly over the boreal forest that surrounded the city.

“Thank you for showing me around today,” I told her. “I’ve had kind of a rough summer, and it was nice to have a vacation from that.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” She took a big gulp of her drink. “Sorry for being distant today.”

“No, I’m sorry for dropping a big downer like that on you.”

“It’s definitely not a fun way to start the day, but I’m glad you told me. It’s just a surreal thing to think that my entire life has been based around the fact that I was born half-Kanin, and it turns out that might not even be true.”

“I can only imagine.”

“You met Indu, right?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yeah. I think I spent about a month with him, but I don’t remember most of it.”

“He erased your memory so you wouldn’t remember what he’d done.” Her voice was hard and flat. “He’s a real bastard, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, I think he is.”

“You don’t know what he wants? Why he’s going out, knocking up ladies, building up an army of daughters, and stealing your blood?” she asked.

“He’s also collecting rare flowers from the Vittra,” I added.

“So he’s an eccentric bastard,” she said wryly.

“I’m working with a Trylle healer, and I’m hoping that if I get my memories back, I’ll know what’s really going on,” I said.

“I know some of them. Which healer?”

“Sunniva Kroner. Her brother Tove is helping too.”

“Mmm.” She took another drink. “The Kroners are powerful. If anyone can do it, they can.”

“I hope so.”

Bryn was silent, and in the fading light, her jaw tensed as she stared up at the sky. “I have to know.”

“What?” I asked.

“I have to know for sure if Indu is my father or not,” she said, her voice low. “There’s still a chance that my dad is . . . my dad.” She looked over at me. “The Inhemsk Project does DNA testing, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” I pulled my feet off the railing so I could sit up straighter. “But we don’t have his DNA.”

“No, but we have yours,” she countered. “We can check if we’re sisters.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I mean, I think so.”

“Good.” She smiled thinly, then downed her drink in one long gulp.

Bryn offered me another drink, but the length of the day—the last few days, honestly—hit me all at once. I declined and changed into my pajamas just before sacking out on the futon.

I woke up from a nightmare I couldn’t remember, but I was gasping and sweating, and it took a minute to shake the feeling that spiders were crawling all over me.

But when I realized I was safe in Bryn’s office, bathed in morning light, I took a deep breath, and I got up to open the window. I pulled over the desk chair so I could sit right in front of it and let the cool summer breeze blow over me. It also let in the stench of the city, mostly the horse manure this close to the palace stables, but the air felt good, cooling the drying sweat on my skin.

The thing about Bryn’s apartment was that the walls were very thin, but that wasn’t surprising. The complex was kingdom housing, similar to the tacky addition on the Mimirin, made for government employees. The biggest difference was that this was new and modern, because the old one had been destroyed in the war. At the Mimirin it was mostly docents and intellects, but here it was all guards and trackers.

From the other room, I heard Bryn and Ridley talking—her quieter but firm and calm, him a bit louder, anxious, uncertain.

“I’m not telling you not to do this,” Ridley was saying. “But you are talking about using part of your savings on something really spur of the moment.”

“I know, but this is important to me,” Bryn replied evenly. “I have to know who I really am.”

“But Bryn, you do know who you are,” he argued. “You’ve always known. You’re the most bullheaded troll I’ve ever met, and that’s not changing if you’re Kanin or Trylle or human, for Odin’s sake.”

“Really? You really believe it wouldn’t change anything if I was human?”

He was silent, then mumbled something I couldn’t hear, then louder, “. . . but that’s not okay. You shouldn’t lose your job.”

“But I would, and we both know it,” Bryn said.

“Do you think Indu is human?”

“Ulla doesn’t know for sure. She thought maybe Omte or álfar.”

“So he could still be Kanin? Or human?” Ridley asked, and Bryn didn’t make an audible response. “Then maybe it’s better you don’t know. Right now everyone believes you are Skojare and Kanin—and you really might be. You’ve worked so hard to be accepted as you are. Why change that perception?”

“Because it’s not the truth. I won’t live a lie, even a beneficial one.”

“But I don’t know why it has to have any bearing on you,” he persisted. “Iver still raised you. You still grew up completely enmeshed in the Doldastam culture. Hell, you led the rebellion that saved the damn kingdom. You are Kanin, no matter what your blood says.”

Her voice was thick when she said, “It’s not about that.”

“Then what is it?” Ridley asked.

“Our abilities are passed through our blood,” she reminded him gently. “You can change the color of your skin because your father could, and I’m drawn to the water because of my mother. Indu has been going around impregnating as many women as he can because he thought it was important to pass something along. If he is my father, I need to know what’s in the blood he gave me.”