and out of that respect grew a fierce love.” Eneas gazed up at the ceiling. “Oh, how I wish you could have known him in those days. He was so quick to smile, to laugh even. She brought out the best in him. She brought out the best in everyone.” He rubbed his eyes. “I miss her so much.”
“Were you . . . in love with her?” Agnes asked.
Eneas chuckled. “No, no, my dear, I am not attracted to women like that. Your mother was simply a beautiful soul. I was not the ideal choice of companion for her, a lowly merchant’s son from Arbaz. But she would visit every summer and she did not care about my pedigree. We were so close, almost as close as she was to Matthias.” He looked at Leo, his expression tender. “It must have been quite a moment for Matthias when he first laid eyes on you. Alethea reborn.”
Leo didn’t know what to say to that. He wished he could have known the woman whose face he bore.
“But I digress,” Eneas said. “Xavier managed to convince Alethea to have her children born on Culinnon. I remember myself thinking it was strange at the time—Alethea had vowed never to return to the island lest her mother not let her leave. And Xavier did not tell her of the deal he had struck with Ambrosine. How he got her to go, I still do not know. But we went, very close to her due date, on a secret ship in the middle of the night. Swansea was tasked with telling anyone who asked that they had left Old Port to have you delivered in a specialized facility.
“The night before she went into labor, we were alone in her favorite room in the estate, a solarium high up in one of the sequoias that looked out over the Arboreal grove. And she said, ‘Eneas, if anything happens to me, keep my children away from this place, away from my mother. Don’t let her try to do to them what she did to me, or to Matthias, or to Hektor. I want them to live their own lives, the way they wish to. Make sure they know they are loved. Don’t tell them about any of this.’ Of course, at the time it was an easy promise to make. ‘Nothing is going to happen to you,’ I reassured her. ‘You will raise your children and love them for who they are.’ She patted my hand and said, ‘Xavier will take care of them. He’ll be a good father. That’s where they belong. Not here.’”
Silence filled the cabin. Leo’s heart felt like sludge in his chest, his throat painfully tight. Agnes’s eyes glittered with tears.
“And then she died,” Eneas said, staring at the flickering light of the lantern. “That night was one of the worst of my life. I found myself wandering the glass halls of the estate, not caring where I was going, not thinking about anything except loss. I came upon a study I was unfamiliar with—the door was ajar and there was a light shining from within. I pushed the door open, not really curious but more for something to do. The room was empty, the desk covered in papers—some were correspondence, others looked like property deeds, or legalese, or invoices. But one name caught my eye. Agnes. The name Alethea had chosen for you.”
“She chose it?” Agnes asked.
Eneas nodded. “Xavier chose yours,” he said to Leo. He felt as if he had become glued to his stool. The thought of his father picking out his name was too foreign a concept for his brain to fully comprehend.
Eneas turned back to Agnes. “Ambrosine was going to keep you,” he said, the barest hint of a growl in his voice. “She was never going to let you return to Kaolin with Xavier and your brother. She was going to keep you here and use you as she had wanted to use Alethea. To make your life about power and Culinnon and a new nation to control. She wields this island as a weapon and you were the magic bullet. An heir, at last.
“And she was never going to hold up her end of the bargain. She had never intended to let Xavier have so much as an olive branch from Culinnon, never mind a mertag and Arboreal.”
He pressed his hands against the table, fingers splayed.
“I took the papers and went to your father at once. He