“What are you doing here?” Agnes asked as he released her.
“Once I arrived in Ithilia and heard what your grandmother had done, I knew I had to come find you. Both of you,” he said, nodding toward Leo. “I went straight to Matthias. Caught him just in time. He’d already locked up your father and Ezra. I believe we got out of Ithilia just before the Kaolin navy arrived.” He shook his head. “What a foolish war. It would have been better if Braxos had never been found.”
“Ambrosine locked Father away in something called the wailing caves,” Agnes said. “Will they hurt him?”
Eneas touched her cheek. “He does not deserve you. No, the caves will not hurt him. Their walls shriek. He will have an unpleasant, sleepless night, that’s all.”
“We met Phebe in Arbaz,” Agnes said. “She lent us her ship so we could follow Leo and Sera here.”
Eneas smiled again. “I am glad she got to meet you. She has heard much about you over the years.”
“She showed us that letter you wrote,” Leo said. “About a deal made and broken.”
“And Ambrosine told me she wants to found her own country, of just the northern islands,” Agnes said. “And declare herself queen and me princess.” Her nose wrinkled. Even after several days to get used to it, Leo still found the idea strange and ridiculous.
Eneas sighed and sank onto one of the stools. “I’m so sorry, Agnes,” he said. “It is the exact fate your mother wished to avoid for you. Alethea felt trapped by her mother’s expectations, the idea of becoming royalty, of being who Ambrosine wanted her to be instead of just herself. Don’t we have enough? she used to say. Isn’t Culinnon enough? But even Culinnon frustrated her. Why was all this power kept in one place?”
“We’ve seen the Arboreal groves,” Leo said, sitting down at another stool.
“And all the mertags, of course,” Agnes added, following his example.
“Culinnon is a special island,” Eneas said. “But to your mother, it was a prison. Ambrosine never appreciated Alethea’s thirst to be different, to explore, to create. She wanted to be an artist, she wanted to travel and experience new things and meet new people. And once she met Xavier, she thought she had figured out exactly how to slip from her mother’s grasp. Who would follow a matriarch whose daughter married a man from Kaolin?”
“So that’s why she married him?” Agnes asked.
“It was,” Eneas said. “At first. But she underestimated Ambrosine’s ambition. And her patience. Ambrosine is not one to scrap a plan because there are a few bumps along the way. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had already approached Xavier herself, already made a deal with him. She very likely contacted him the minute she heard he was sniffing around her daughter.”
“What was the deal?” Leo asked.
Eneas leaned forward, the light of the lantern casting shadows on his face. “He would be required to have all of his children born on Culinnon. That way she could make the claim they were truly Pelagan, truly Byrnes. If you had been born in Kaolin, no one in Pelago would have accepted you as her heir. And in exchange, she would give him something more powerful than money or jewels—she would give him an Arboreal and a mertag. One for each child born on the estate. It was a fantastic price that would keep him wealthy for generations. It would make him special. Different. The envy of Old Port City—and that was all your father ever wanted.” He smiled sadly. “Well, until he fell in love with your mother.”
Leo made a confused huffing sound and Agnes sucked in a breath.
“Until he what?” Leo asked. He couldn’t imagine his father being in love with anyone, least of all his own wife. That had been the one thing about their relationship Leo had felt certain of.
“Yes,” Eneas said. “He fell in love with her. And she with him. Not at first—oh no, they would have fights that you could hear from five streets away in the beginning. And she hated Old Port and all the smoke and smog and factories and uptight women and starched dresses.” He shifted on his stool and his face softened. “But then it all changed. It was Alethea who introduced him to people who actually knew theater—she used to spend time in the East Village, meet the artists and dancers and actors, learn which producers were looking for what shows or what the next big thing was going to be. They came to respect each other, your mother and father, 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.”