Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,66
I don’t understand, though. What’s iron got to do with it?”
“He might be cursed,” Ken said with a shrug. “But they’re the richest because of it. No curses in my family, if you don’t count my mother’s ability to be heard for miles when she’s mad.”
“Same,” Zoe said. “My parents divorced a few years ago, so I usually split my time between New York with my dad, and France with my mother. Her family had land in Avalon near Maidenkeep, but escaped to France after the frost. Not much else to talk about.”
Tala shivered. “And we’re heading for Maidenkeep?”
“Yup.” Ken cast a sidelong glance at the prince, but Alex was frowning at some point in the distance, paying them no attention. “Vasilisa the Beautiful’s original castle. All sorts of heroes ruled there for a while, like Ye Xian—the one with the glass slipper, right?—and Briar-Rose, and Snow White, and Jack Giantkiller.”
His voice hardened. “My family lost friends there. Good people. The Snow Queen froze the castle, supposedly with them still inside. We all want a crack at taking back Maidenkeep. The Cheshire promised we would. That’s partly why we’re dragging you into this mess.” He flashed Tala a quick, sheepish smile. “We’re hoping you and His Highness’s firebird can help even the odds.”
“That might take a while,” Tala said, wincing as a loose branch scraped against her cheek. “I don’t have as much control of my own curse yet to even any kind of odds.”
“It’s a lot to take in, I warrant. But you’ll do fine. You were pretty good against those ogres.”
“And for someone whose world paradigm just went through a very radical shift,” Zoe added, “you’re taking all this in better stride than others might have.”
Tala’s sneaker sank into a deceptively shallow-looking pile of snow, and she flinched at the cold soaking through her sock. “How long have you guys known the truth about my dad?”
The others hesitated. “From the very start,” Loki admitted quietly. “We thought you knew, at first.”
Tala rubbed at her eyes. “Aren’t you angry? Why would you let someone who’d done the things he’s done join your cause? Especially when he was responsible for most of the things you fought against?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I think we’ve got enough time to explain exactly why it’s complicated.”
A longer pause. “He was a murderer,” Zoe acknowledged. “A killer. But he also saved the king’s life more times than anyone can count. Not just Alex’s father, his father before that, and the one before that too. Want to know why we were selected specifically for this mission?”
Tala nodded her head yes, curious despite herself.
“It was because your dad, well, he saved some of our families too. He got Ken’s great-grandfather out of an ambush in Nanjing, when they were surrounded by artillery on all sides. The Japanese would have tortured him as a traitor, since Avalon was fighting alongside China during that war. My Jewish great-grandmother was only one of thousands he’d helped smuggle out of France at the height of the Vichy regime.”
“He hauled both my fathers out of Avalon before the frost came,” Loki supplied.
“He took a bullet for my mother,” West chimed in.
“We all owe your dad something,” Zoe concluded. “The Cheshire knew anyone going into this needed strong ties to your father, able to look past old resentments. He’d made the decision to pull him, you, and your mother out of Invierno together with Alex, and he didn’t want someone with revenge on his mind leaving him to ICE or another Beiran agent. He didn’t have any proper identification that wasn’t forged, you see, since he’d been the Scourge for centuries and the Snow Queen wasn’t exactly strict on paperwork.”
It was a nice gesture of good faith, but they’d wound up leaving her father behind all the same. Tala was too emotionally exhausted to say that out loud, though, or argue the point further. “How old is my father?”
The others traded glances, looking to see who would speak up first. Oddly enough, it was West who took the bait. The boy sniffed the air, didn’t like what he was smelling, and covered his nose. “Dad said he was young for hundreds of years. He was a teenager who was knighted, and the Snow Queen and him took a shine to each other somewhere along the way. But then he turned on her after the first World War, but it wasn’t till much later, after he met your mum and the frost came, that he started becoming