a queen like her sisters.
She closed her eyes briefly. There’s no point in feeling sorry for yourself. Being a queen didn’t matter to her. What was important was that Nevis had given her a big clue. An Embraced army?
When she opened her eyes, she noticed the ripples coming from the barge and undulating their way to the riverbanks. Cause and effect. Lord Morris had claimed there was an Embraced army, and Brody had disappeared searching for it. Since he hadn’t returned, it seemed likely that he hadn’t found the army yet. Had Lord Morris been speaking the truth, or had he taunted them with lies before dying?
She recalled everything she knew about Lord Morris. Before Leo had become king, when King Frederic had ruled Eberon, Morris was his chief counsel and the head of the Church of Enlightenment. In those days, the kings on the mainland feared those who were born Embraced, so they had them hunted down and killed as infants. That way, the Embraced children could never grow up and use their magical powers to usurp the royal thrones. In Eberon, it had been Morris’s job to eliminate the children.
But once Morris had become a member of the Circle of Five, had he realized that keeping the Embraced children alive could help the Circle take over the world? Had he hidden the children away to train them as an army? Was the widely believed story that the Embraced children had all been murdered actually a lie?
It wouldn’t be the first time that Maeve and her sisters had come across that sort of falsehood. Growing up in the convent on the Isle of Moon, they had always believed that they’d been hidden away because they were Embraced. But in the last few years, they’d learned that this was only partially true. There had been other reasons. Luciana had been sent away because she was a twin. Brigitta’s father had gotten rid of her to make everyone believe she was dead. Gwennore had been taken away to punish her mother for giving birth to a half-breed, and Sorcha’s mother had been trying to protect her from the plague.
At the convent, Mother Ginessa had told the five young girls that they were orphans. For her elder sisters, that had also proven to be a lie. What other falsehoods would they discover?
As she did every day, Maeve wondered if she would ever know the truth about herself. She had no idea where she had come from. The nuns at the convent had estimated that she was nearly a year old when she’d been left in a basket by the front gate. That had been midsummer, so from then on, the nuns had celebrated her birthday in late summer. But no one knew why she had been abandoned, so they had assumed she was Embraced like her adopted sisters, and that her actual birthday must be when the moons embraced in autumn. That theory had proven correct when, at a young age, Maeve had displayed the odd gift of being able to communicate with the seals that lounged about on the nearby beach. Then, at the age of sixteen, she’d shifted for the first time into a seal.
This was one of the reasons she’d always felt close to Brody. His past was mysterious, too, and he was also an Embraced shifter. Because of a witch’s curse, he could maintain human form for only two hours each day, and unfortunately, he spent most of that time in secret conferences with Leo or whichever king he was currently helping. So it was only on rare occasions that Maeve saw him as a human. When he wasn’t looking, she would study him intently, memorizing every bit of his handsome face and lean, strong body, so she could keep the image in her mind until she saw him again.
She wandered slowly back to the cabin and stopped by the door. When she’d left, the door hadn’t latched properly, and now the gentle sway of the boat had caused it to swing halfway open.
“I don’t think the Embraced army could be in Eberon.” Luciana’s soft voice filtered across the cabin. “The land is all cultivated. There would be no place to hide.”
“Rupert is having the mountains in northern Tourin checked,” Brigitta said, referring to her husband by his pirate name. “But I don’t think anyone could be hiding there. The lords in the highlands are very loyal, and they would have reported anything odd to us.”
“I suspect there