Lazar and the King had similar features, but the King’s were sharper and somehow less kind. And right now his small brown eyes were trained on Nepenthe.
She felt strange alone with him. She wanted to recoil and puff up her chest and extend her tentacles all at once. She had seen puffer fish do the same at the bottom of the River when they defended themselves against a threat. She stood her ground instead, consciously breathing in and out and willing the gills that opened around her mouth in the water to stay closed now.
“I require your assistance. Your magic. Your mother and the Coven spelled my son once before. I need your power once again,” the King said simply.
“Has his memory come back? The spell takes too much work. I need the Coven.”
Nepenthe did not love admitting that she wasn’t powerful enough. But she remembered the statues that the Prince had made here once and she could not trifle with the lives of others based on her pride.
There was an undercurrent of disapproval with the King’s every word and glance, but he proceeded as if she should be accustomed to it. Or more likely, he did not care what she thought.
It was not the first time people had assumed that Nepenthe did not have feelings. But she trusted Ora, as opposed to the King, whom she did not.
“I don’t want you to erase his memory again. I don’t want you to bind him. I want you to teach him how to control his Snow. As you know, my son has developed some abilities and rather than stifle them—which is what we’ve been doing for years—I’m hoping that you and your sister can teach him a few things. Magic is power. Magic can win wars.”
Nepenthe shook her head no, reflexively. Her mother had told her that magic and war had always been kept separate from the beginning of time. Witches had always refused to take sides. But then a nagging thought crept into her brain. If a royal had magic of his own, who was she to stop him? The question of helping Lazar seemed a gray area—and witches were not opposed to live in the gray. Still, training the Prince seemed to go a step further than that.
“The forces that took your mother from you—those same forces threaten my kingdom now,” the King said.
“What does that have to do with Lazar? Do you know who killed my parents?”
“Yes, I do. And I think you can teach my son to stop them. And in the process you will come face-to-face with those who took your parents from you.”
“Tell me now. Who killed my parents?”
“They call themselves the Outlanders. They’re from the Hinterlands. We have faced outside forces before, but nothing like this. They are not fans of witches. They are not fans of Algid.”
“But why would they target my mother? She was harmless.”
“She was a friend of the crown. And she was a witch. They believe in the prophecy: that the Coven may one day prove to assist the crown to even greater power. Every witch is a threat to them.”
The King paused a beat and then prodded, “Do we have an agreement?”
“Witches do not believe in revenge. It is an earthly thing. A human thing,” Nepenthe said, but as the words left her mouth, even she didn’t believe them. The image of her mother in the Grotto came back to her.
“Like I said, I can bring you face-to-face with those who took your parents from you. What you do once you know is entirely up to you.”
Nepenthe nodded. She wasn’t quite sure what she was agreeing to, but she felt as if she had no choice. The promise of finding out what had really happened to her parents was too much temptation to turn down.
She could hear the Witch of the Woods’s voice in her ear. She was supposed to have given up all earthly things. But not knowing what really happened to her parents and why was the thing that tied her to the land above all else. Learning the truth might be the thing that set her free of it for good.