Dodging Calamities (Artemis University #7) - Erin R Flynn Page 0,69

she deserves. Now.”

As much as what he said meant a lot to me, I took his being distracted to my advantage and broke his hold… Only to square off with Hudson, who was ready. I was still tired, and the adrenaline from my panicking slowly leaked out of me as he caught me.

“You’re not mating anyone you don’t want to,” he said gruffly, chuffing hard and his dragon riding him. “But you are getting the answers you need and have been fighting so hard for. Yeah?”

“Okay,” I sighed.

He spun me around, but didn’t let me go, marching me over to the table.

I stopped when I saw the hobgoblins again, something hitting me as I read their array of expressions. “Did you know who I was?”

“No, only what you told us,” Irma answered, her skin turning a color to show me she was confused like the others.

But Ryfon turned the color I recognized to be guilty.

“I did.”

“Get the fuck out of my house, Ryfon,” I bit out. “You knew and didn’t tell me? Didn’t warn any of us?”

“You do not speak to a hobgoblin in such a way,” Neldor snapped, looking appalled, as if I’d committed the gravest of sins.

I threw back my head and laughed. “No, he deserves that for not telling me, but you’re so worried about them now? You have…” I trailed off and waved my hands in front of my face. We kept skipping all around. We needed to start from the beginning and get some answers.

And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way it seemed, as we gathered around the kitchen table.

14

“Why did the war start?” Mel asked when I couldn’t seem to figure out where to begin. The hobgoblins were fretting about the kitchen, upset Ryfon knew and had been sent back to school since I didn’t want him in my house.

Everyone had taken a time out while we ordered Portal Chow that they had also had delivered to school and picked up there. We’d all gone to separate corners or had freshened up and now were sitting.

“That’s not—” Neldor started to say.

“It doesn’t matter,” I whispered.

“You will be educated in what you should, but it’s not for them to hear,” he corrected.

I gave him a hard look. “It doesn’t matter. I will learn from the light side or yours. That won’t even be the truth and in the end, it doesn’t fucking matter whatever you all were warring over, as it wasn’t worth the fallout. You have no idea the fucking ripples it has all cause, not just for me, or you, but all fair folk, Faerie, and this whole world. So I don’t fucking care what you fought over this time. It was stupid.

“I want to know what happened that you all frozen. What is that magic? Who went off the deep end, and how did all the maps of Faerie disappear? That’s the stuff I need to know to figure out what we’re going to do about now, because there’s a massive fucking mess left in the two-decades wake of your godsdamn war. So what happened?”

He couldn’t hide his shock at my reaction, but seemed to understand this was the only place to start, wiping his mouth now he’d polished off a few burgers. “Your mother came up with the idea to mate us while pregnant, knowing you would be a girl, and that would stop the warring. It was brewing and ramping up and… She got glimpses now and again, and clearly saw something.

“She would not tell anyone, but it shocked many. They were outraged, but she would not be deterred, saying thousands of years of us fighting needed a solution no one would ever think to try, and that was this solution, as we had no princess. She was kind how she said it, whereas many tore down my mother for not having a daughter to rule next. Your mother stated it must be the gods’ will to combine the courts.

“That actually gave my mother pause, and she agreed to halt the fighting and send an envoy to discuss it after I told her I agreed with the idea. Unfortunately, there was an accident on the way, and my father died. They weren’t simply mated and married, but true mates and my mother lost part of her soul when he died. And it was an accident, no matter how many said it couldn’t have been.”

“But your mother assumed Tamsin’s mother set the whole thing up to take out