Rosslyn barely kept pace with her father as he strode briskly through the palace halls.

She made the struggle to do it, however, despite the sensation of weakness running through her whole body.

Every so often, she would see servants poking their heads out from rooms where they were dusting or performing some other task—or pretending to do so, so they could be in position to check on how she was doing when she walked by. As a member of the Royal Family, she had to remain constantly conscious of how people perceived her. And Rosslyn was the heir.

At least her new lack of depth perception did not present an insurmountable problem. She simply had to follow in her father’s footsteps, and she would not bump into any of the various hall decorations.

Nevertheless, Rosslyn found that tapestries, suits of armor, paintings, and other innocuous objects that she had never taken much notice of before seemed to swim out of her blind spots to cause opportunities for accidents and embarrassment. She had to be extremely careful.

The walk was exhausting.

It was only when they were past the doorways walking down a narrower section of hall—and after looking behind her to check that no one was watching from the other end of the hallway—that she took a chance to grab her father’s sleeve and pull slightly.

That got his attention. He immediately slowed.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I am still recovering.”

“Yes,” he replied in a hush. “Yes, I am terribly sorry. I was so excited to have you awake and the butterfly here—I need to take things a bit more slowly. It is only natural that you would still be weak from the poison.”

“Poison? So that was it…”

“Yes, you were asleep, because your body shut down all nonessential functions to purge the poison from your system. That was what the healers informed me of.”

“So, I have already received the attention of our best healers,” Rosslyn said slowly. She swallowed a lump in her throat. Her fingers reached up to hover over her blind right eye.

Her father stopped and looked back at her, his face troubled and guilty.

“Yes,” he said. “It is as you imagine. Healing magic can only accelerate your body’s natural healing process. So your body was unable to completely heal from your injuries. You have some scarring. Mostly minor, on your arms. But there is also your eye.”

She nodded, took a deep breath, and buried the urge to scream. Her turbulent eyes calmed.

“Very well,” she said quietly. “That is my fate.”

To be half-blind is not as bad as losing both eyes. I will train to overcome it.

After a moment, she asked, “How are the others who were with me? My stepmother and the knights?”

“Carolien made an almost complete recovery. She will be glad to see you back on your feet again.”

“Almost complete?” Rosslyn asked.

The King shrugged. “One of her arms suffered some damage of a kind the healers could not clearly explain to me. She will never be quite as strong as she was. But she is content with her situation.” His voice turned dark. “As for the knights, only three survived.” He shook his head. “The poisoned weapons the assassins used allowed them to slay far better men than themselves. When the bodies were examined, almost none of the dead had suffered more than superficial injuries. But a simple cut was enough to get a lethal dose of poison into the bloodstream. Only two were strong enough to endure the poison besides you and Carolien. And one fighter was fortunate, or skillful, enough to avoid being cut.”

All the men I led, who I promised to remove from harm’s way… Almost all of them died.

“Would you please tell me the names of the survivors?” Rosslyn had to speak around a lump in her throat. She tried to hold back the tears.

Her father pulled her into a tight embrace.

“You do not need to pretend to be strong with me, Rosslyn,” he murmured in her ear. “I know that this cannot be easy for you. To lose the knights serving under you, and your eye—it is right to mourn them.”

She fought with herself for a few long seconds, before she allowed herself to relax into her father’s arms, and a few tears finally flowed from her eyes.

After a few seconds, she felt her father change his posture slightly and knew that he was channeling Mana. Then the power left him.

Rosslyn pulled back and saw that her father had conjured a wall of light behind them.

She looked toward him questioningly.

“I know you would not want anyone else to see you cry,” he said quietly. “Eventually, we will draw the attention of the staff. And I also do not want anyone else to see where we are going.”

She nodded. “I am well now, so let us move on.”

He sighed and shook his head. She could tell that he was thinking she had suppressed her feelings again, but he said nothing. They continued down the hall.

To her surprise, her father did not lead her directly to the palace chapel. Instead, they entered the library.

“I must recover some books for our conversation,” he said. “Items that we do not simply lend out to anyone who walks in.”

I had thought that I would be doing most of the talking, since we have not yet discussed what our spy informed me of in Stalenton.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He walked toward a corner of the library where Rosslyn could see a comfortable leather armchair, but no books. She raised an eyebrow but followed silently.

As he reached the corner, he touched one of the wooden panels on the wall. His hand seemed to press in slightly, and the panel slid aside to reveal a small cache of what appeared to be dusty, hand-made books.

“What are those?” Rosslyn asked quietly.

“The secret history of the country,” her father replied, his voice very low. “Also of our family, its rise to power, and our relationship with the butterflies.” As he spoke, he kept his eyes fixed on the books themselves, until finally he bent slightly and began gathering them up in his hands.

She stared at him until he looked back at her.

“What?” he said.

“I was waiting for the part where you tell me the joke,” she replied. “Is there truly a secret history of this country?”

“Their names were Sir Lachlan, Sir Fergus, and Sir Leith,” her father said evenly, evading her question by jumping back to one she had asked much earlier.

“I had not realized that Leith of the Watchwater was a knight,” Rosslyn replied quickly. “Father, are you telling me I was lied to all my life? Or that things were kept from me, even though I was next in line for the throne?”

“I knighted Sir Leith myself, as an acknowledgement of his sacrifices in getting you home. He lost a sworn brother in that forest, I understand.”

Silence filled the room for over a minute as Rosslyn waited for her father to address her question directly, while he avoided her eyes.

“Let us move on to the chapel,” he said, finally meeting Rosslyn’s gaze. “Where we can talk uninterrupted.”

He swept the books up into the crook of his arms, took a blanket from atop the armchair, and draped it over his body, carefully protecting the books from any prying eyes.

This is real, Rosslyn realized. I did not expect it to be a joke, but this is something father is taking completely seriously. What strange secrets will those old books unfold?

She followed her father through the hall again, as he led the way to the chapel. She allowed her mind to wander. She did not need to try to figure out the books’ contents. They were about to be explained to her.

Instead, she revisited her conversation with Jocelyne—the information she needed to make certain she conveyed to her father before they left the chapel. Her mind also played over the visions she had experienced during her coma and that fateful night in the Deformed Forest when she had lost half her field of vision to an assassin’s blade.

She was so wrapped up in memories that she bumped her head as she and her father rounded the corner to enter the chapel.

This will take some getting used to, she thought irritably.

Then she followed her father to the same nook where they had spoken last time. He set down the stack of books on a pew. The two settled into their seats, and Rosslyn’s father began to speak.

“The story of our country’s founding is not so different from the one people know,” he said. “There is a small detail that most people miss.”

He opened one of the books. On the first page, there was an illustration of a man with a butterfly sitting on his shoulder.

“Is the detail the butterfly?” Rosslyn asked, raising an eyebrow. “I know they were a friendly species to humans…”

“More than that,” her father said. “They are responsible for teaching our ancestors how to use magic—”

“Wait!” Rosslyn said. “I think I remember this.”

Her father raised an eyebrow but waited silently.

“I remember a man wearing the clothing of a peasant talking to a butterfly,” she said slowly. “The butterfly was magical, and he was trying to teach the man how to use magic too. But the instructions did not work for him.”

Something was wrong with that sequence of events, she now recognized. Something that had not been as glaring in her coma visions. Subsequent members of our family had magic, but magical gifts are understood to run in bloodlines. So how did it change? Did the man turn out to have a hidden aptitude that I did not get to see before the vision shifted?

“How do you remember that?” the King asked, his expression dubious.

Rosslyn shook her head. “I do not know. It was a vision from my coma. I saw many scenes from the past.”

She quickly relayed the basic outline of her visions’ contents to her father, and his face gradually transitioned from skeptical to confused to shocked.

“The Goddess is acting upon you, daughter,” he murmured when she was done.

“But why?” she asked.

“Perhaps it will become clearer once we have told each other everything,” he said. He held up the book again. “This was our first ancestor of note. The story that is written in these pages is what happened to change his life, as he told the story to his eldest son, and as that son told it to his eldest son. The first couple of generations were illiterate, so that was the first son who was capable of keeping a written record.”

“That must have been over a thousand years ago,” Rosslyn said, shaking her head. “How did we keep something a secret for so long?”

“It helped that every other family that leads one of the Holy Kingdoms was keeping the same secret,” he said. “No humans in that time had any natural talent with magic. Our ancestor had children with the butterfly, and those children carried the creature’s magical gifts in their blood.”

“What?!” Rosslyn simply stared at her father, mouth slightly open, for several seconds.

“I know,” he said after letting her digest the information a bit. “It sounds incredible.”

“It sounds physically impossible.”

“No,” he said. “Any sufficiently powerful magical creature gains the ability to change its shape.”

“Oh my Goddess…”

“Yes, it is quite strange to think about,” he said. “The butterfly and the peasant, long ago, not knowing they were creating a dynasty that would last a thousand years.”

“Where would they even get the idea from?” Rosslyn asked.

Her father shook his head. “I have no idea. I know that the creatures we call mystic beasts have been interbreeding with humans for some time. The descendants of the families touched by those relationships had powerful gifts. Sometimes the magical blood would run thicker or thinner, and it had to be preserved by intermarriage between magically gifted families. But that is the true origin of all the world’s magical humans. That was how the Holy Kingdoms acquired their rulers. Almost all great families on the continent can trace their lineage to some magical creature or another.” He held up another of the handful of books. “We have attempted tracking who is descended from which creature, though our information recorded in this book is potentially unreliable. These matches have historically been hidden from the public. Some of those with the strongest blood were not even royals. One of our ducal families has tended to have a particularly powerful strain. Those of us who were aware of this ancestry placed the species our families had a history with on our flags.”

Rosslyn breathed slowly in and out as she tried to calmly consider what her father was telling her.

“I can guess why we would keep this secret,” she said finally.

“It is a scandalous piece of information,” he said. “You know that the High Priest of the Goddess is hostile to monsters, for understandable reasons. Imagine if it became known that a monstrous heritage is the secret behind our power. It could become an excuse for revolution or for greater oversight by the priesthood.” He paused for a moment, then continued, “And giving us our magic is not the only way the butterflies have helped us historically. The second matter is something I did not intend to discuss in front of this butterfly.”