3. Adair

Chapter 3

Adair

"He seemed . . . nice," Titania said after a moment of silence.

The member of the household staff in charge of guest rooms had taken the Moonstriker party up to their suite a moment earlier, and they were almost certainly out of earshot. Well, unless one of them had an ability that meant otherwise—one of the many reasons it was always best to keep your thoughts to yourself if they weren't kind.

I couldn't have said whether Titania was holding to that or if she was too drunk to be bothered keeping her own counsel and truly thought Rain Moonstriker had seemed nice.

In her defense, he had seemed nice.

He'd seemed a lot more than that to me, but nice was a good enough way of putting it, if a shallow one.

Clearly, Oberon did not agree.

"Nice?" he demanded, spinning toward his sister, a flush rising in his cheeks along with his temper. "He's a mewling child. The youngest, most irrelevant child of the Moonstriker' s irrelevant sister. They might as well have sent someone from a different family altogether."

Titania turned to him, looking suddenly entirely sober. "You might not like it, but Cove and Delta Moonstriker colead their family. She's not irrelevant like I am. There are rumors that she's the one who's actually in charge, and he sits the throne for show."

Oberon scoffed, waving her away. "You'd like to think that, but that doesn't make it true. She's only of any importance because he didn't want to be saddled with a marriage, so she had the children." He gave her a hard look with that, lips pursed in irritation, as though he was disappointed that Titania hadn't become the family broodmare to make up for his lack of progeny.

He was disappointed in that, I realized after a moment, watching the emotion pulse over their bond. It had never been a good one, their bond. Thin and brittle and brown. So many of Oberon's bonds were brown, but not a normal average brown, warm and friendly, indicating a good relationship, if not a great one. His brown threads were a strange amalgam of green, something that usually indicated close friendship, and red—the color of hatred. As though there was still the memory of a friendship that had been, but it had become so tainted with hate that neither member of the bond remembered what it was truly like to care for the other without also despising them. I'd never had a sibling, but I couldn't imagine hating my own sister if I'd been so blessed.

I turned my mind back to the discussion, though. Titania might want it to be true, that Delta Moonstriker was as important as her brother, but that didn't mean it wasn't the case. What if Delta Moonstriker had more power in her family than outsiders thought? In practice, it meant nothing to us or to the summit. But it was an interesting piece of information to file away for later, and it might mean something to Rain Moonstriker himself, if a person wanted to have a...friendly relationship with him.

Titania was already dismissing her brother when I looked to her, taking a sip from her drink. "So your fragile ego doesn't like the kid. He still has the power to do what needs done. You need him, whether you like it or not."

For the first time in all the years I'd known them, I thought Oberon was going to strike his sister. He balled his hand into a fist, released it, then did it again.

He did eventually lift his hand, but it was to swat the glass out of hers. It smashed against the tile floor, sending shards of glass flying in every direction and making the smell of whiskey fill the air. "Stop fucking drinking. I need you at least conscious and not making a laughingstock of the entire family this week. That whelp might be worthless, but Huxley Dawnchaser and Dane Sunrunner actually matter, and I refuse to have a replay of years past because you can't control yourself."

He stalked off, grumbling something about needing some time to himself, so I decided that he didn't want me with him. In that moment, it didn't matter what he wanted, because there was no way I was going off to be alone with an Oberon who was so angry he'd almost just assaulted his sister.

And for what? An imagined insult because he didn't want a man who was clearly the Moonstriker heir to matter, and his sister doing the same thing she did every day? Was this a sign of what was happening to him?

After a moment of silence, Titania put her hand to her mouth again, making a sound that was something between a laugh and a sob. She squeezed her eyes closed, a single tear trailing down her cheek, but she ignored it. Didn't even wipe it away. Just took two long, deep breaths, and then opened her eyes again.

"He really hates us. Women. Thinks the world would be a better place without us entirely, I think."

I pressed my lips together tightly, considering. She wasn't...wrong, exactly. He was sexist as fuck. He thought that women were weak. Unable to protect themselves or hold positions of power. It was ridiculous, but I knew enough of his history that I could see the timeline of it laid out before me like it was a page in a book.

Oberon loved women. He only found women attractive.

So starting in his youth, he'd had a string of ill-fated romances with them. The first, and I'd always thought most serious, had ended when the woman he was in love with had lost a duel and an eye along with it. For most people, that wouldn't have mattered. For Oberon, it was the end of the relationship. A one-eyed woman could no longer be a duelist, and Oberon would never marry someone who couldn't fight a duel for his family's honor.

It hadn't been the only one of his romances that ended in a duel. There had been half a dozen of them. Interspersed had been a handful of family scandals, some of which had ended with entire vassal families leaving Gloombringer lands forever. There had also been one or two personal arguments, though those had been later, and mostly because the years had made Oberon harder rather than kinder. He'd gotten more difficult to live with as time had passed, and even he knew it.

Eventually, he'd given up. His only feminine attention these days was bought and paid for, and lasted no more than a single night at a time .

The problem was that he was incapable of blaming himself for all these disasters, so he blamed the women. And if they were at fault, there had to be an intrinsic fault in all women. Women, therefore, were lesser.

It was all bullshit, of course, but reality didn't change how he acted and what he thought.

In that moment, I wished Titania were the one in charge of the family. She wasn't handling things well. She was incapable of most of the job of being a family head, with her constant drinking. But in this moment, she was doing a damned sight better than her brother. She hadn't been the one who nearly struck him, after all.

I glanced back up the stairs, where the Moonstriker party had disappeared.

Titania, it seemed, was paying more attention than I'd given her credit for, because she spoke up. "You could see it, couldn't you? He's important. He is the heir, isn't he?"

Turning back to her, I nodded. "If he isn't, then he's...no, that's wrong. He's definitely the one. I've never met anyone that important who wasn't a family head or going to be one."

She watched me for a moment, then cocked her head. "Not even yourself?"

And that was...fuck me, but no one had ever asked about my threads before. They always wanted to know about their own, or the threads of the people they loved or hated. I was a purveyor of information, not a source of it.

"I don't..." I stopped, looking down at myself. I had a lot of threads, of course. I always had, since the moment they'd appeared to me in that museum. "I can't tell. It's like hearing your own singing voice. Mine don't look the same to me as yours or his do. "

She smiled at me. "Regardless, I'm pretty sure before that young man arrived, you were the most important person to the future of the Summerlands living in this place." She glanced behind her, to where a maid had just slipped into the room. "Sorry Lily. You know how I am. Butterfingers." She held up a hand and wiggled her fingers, as though to indicate that she'd accidentally thrown a glass halfway across the room.

The maid gave her an indulgent smile, waving the concern away. She must have known the truth already. Well, that or she didn't care. The link the woman had to Titania was light gray with hints of a maternal plum. Another from her, solid red-gray, stretched out in the direction Oberon had stormed off. So much red in the people who actually knew him.

"I'm sure you're wrong," I told Titania, going back to our conversation. "You're the current heir to the Gloombringer line, you know. You're pretty important yourself."

Her bond to me pulsed with that same odd plum striation that the maid felt for her. "You're sweet, Adair, but we both know I'm never going to lead a house. You know it because you can see it"—she waved around herself, as though indicating the threads, even though she couldn't see them—"and I know it because I know that the moment I walk away from you, I'm going to go get another drink."

That couldn't stand. Maybe she was right, and I thought it was unlikely that she would ever be the Gloombringer, since she had half as many threads as her brother, but that didn't mean she wasn't important. Wasn't worthy. Half as many as his thousands was still a lot of threads, and her threads were lighter, brighter, and friendlier than his. That meant something .

Besides, I'd just seen the strongest thread of my life appear out of nothing. It could happen. "You're selling yourself short. I can't tell you how to live your life, but I promise you, more people in this house love you than him. You have a life left to live. You just have to start by not thinking it's already over."

The smile she gave me for that was more genuine, and she reached out to press her cool palm to my cheek. "Whatever happens to us, you need to start thinking about yourself for a change. You're the last Courtwright too, you know. We're not going to have kids, Oberon and me, and you're going to outlive us. Hopefully by a lot. Whatever happens with the summit, it's going to bring a lot of people here you wouldn't otherwise have a chance to interact with. Do me a favor and think about your future this week. What you want from it, not just what's best for Gloombringer."

My throat felt tight and my eyes stung with emotion. It was the most kindness a Gloombringer had ever shown me in the thirty years I'd lived and worked in their presence. I'd never expected such a thing.

Still, I nodded to her, and after I'd managed to compose myself, I told her, "I promise. But I'm not ready to give up on you just yet, even if you are."

She dropped her hand, still smiling at me, and nodded back. "Then I guess we'll just have to look out for each other. Meanwhile, that Rain Moonstriker cuts quite the handsome figure, don't you think? And a future family head as well. He'd be an impressive catch."

Her blue eyes twinkled with mirth, and I'd never in my life imagined being teased by...well, anyone, let alone a Gloombringer. It simply wasn't done. Teasing went along with emotions in the pile of things that were generally frowned upon in Gloombringer lands.

And clearly, either I was obvious in my interest, or Titania could see through me. After this long with the Gloombringer, sometimes I struggled to feel my own emotions, or at least to understand them. And Titania did have a true Gloombringer sapphire, a stone she constantly wore at her throat. While I didn't know her specific abilities, most of the Gloombringers of old had been able to at least read emotions and thoughts.

Dammit.