“Forced?” Veronyka asked. “As far as I can tell, you were just serving Avalkyra Ashfire willingly.”
“As far as you can tell,” Doriyan repeated softly. “But I’m not talking about this, about now. I’m talking about then.”
“What happened then?” Veronyka pressed. Alexiya had made it sound like Doriyan and Sidra were devoted servants of their queen, but apparently that wasn’t true.
“She would have had me be a dog,” Doriyan said, jerking his chin toward the darkness of the mine. Toward Val. “Eating scraps and fetching toys… burying bones…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “For years I tried to get away, but I never could. So I did it—running messages, creeping around the capital… that was one thing. Fighting soldiers—that I could do. But dead bodies and newborn babes? Killing innocent people? I did not sign up for that the day I earned my wings. I did not sign up for it.”
“What bodies… what babies?” Veronyka whispered, dreading the man’s answer, though she thought she already knew—instinct or shadow magic, she wasn’t sure.
Doriyan seemed alarmed that he’d said so much and cast a terrified look over his shoulder into the mine. Val might have used shadow magic to force Doriyan back then, but she wasn’t doing it now—there was no presence of Val in his mind.
Doriyan’s face scrunched into a grimace, and he jabbed his thick hands through his wild, unkempt hair. He lurched forward, and Tristan stepped between them again as if to block him, but Doriyan paused just out of reach. “I was there the day you were born,” he said, speaking rapidly. “I was there. And that woman wanted me to hide you—me and Sidra.”
“You mean Avalkyra?” Veronyka asked. But she’d been dead already, hadn’t she?
“No, another one of her ‘loyal servants,’ ” he said scathingly. “Ilithya Shadowheart. We were supposed to hide you from your father so he never knew of you. But he came…. He heard the screams and he came. The look on his face, when Ilithya told him that your mother was gone…. We watched from the balcony. But that was not the worst of it. That woman,” he said again, such vitriol in the words that Veronyka swore she could feel the burn of them, “she told him you were dead too. Showed him a cold, lifeless baby… one that Sidra had fetched from the morgue. Never have I seen a man weep as your father did. He wandered out…. There was nothing left for him in that room, in that city. Sidra was sent away with the living baby—she’d been holding you out on the balcony, a hand over your mouth, though you did not cry.”
She stood, frozen, his words washing over her in wave after icy wave. A part of her was desperate to know more about herself and her family. Her parents. But not this.
Veronyka blinked rapidly, trying to dispel the imagery floating in her mind’s eye, but all she could see was blood and death.
“The thing is…,” Doriyan began, voice quiet again. “I was awake by then. Not before. Before… there was a shadow in my mind, a hold that I couldn’t shake.”
Veronyka wrenched herself back to the present and focused on his words. Surely he was talking about shadow magic?
“It was my own fault. I let it happen…. I won’t let it happen again. Daxos could see it… could sense it.”
Daxos, Veronyka remembered suddenly, was the name of Doriyan’s phoenix, whom they had yet to see. Next to Veronyka, Tristan perked up, as if he knew what Doriyan was talking about.
“And after she died… it was gone. I was awake, and…” He looked at Veronyka, eyes wide with remembered horror. “It was a living nightmare. After Sidra left with you, I was sent for your father.”
Tristan was next to Veronyka now, his arm around her shoulders, but she was rigid as stone.
“Ilithya told me to kill him,” Doriyan said, pain marring his features. “She told me to follow and kill him, just to be sure….” He swallowed. “But I did not.”
Veronyka swayed on the spot, the relief gushing through her like a flood, and Tristan clutched her more tightly. She felt woozy, disconnected from her body. She had suspected—maybe even hoped—that her father might still be alive, but it was hard to feel glad in that moment. It was hard to feel anything.
“Daxos and I flew and flew… and never looked back. But still, this past haunts me,” Doriyan finished, eyes staring hopelessly