HEART STUTTERING UNCONTROLLABLY, Maarit's lips parted in shock at the revelation. Her eyes searched his for truth, but she could rarely tell what he felt simply by looking into his eyes. Even when his expression was pained, he always seemed to be repressing something—a certain emotion, a certain scar from the past, a certain intolerable truth.

       "It was—King Tevenot?" Maarit gasped, disbelief colouring her face. Though the initial panic she had felt was gone, she pushed at Theodoracius's chest and took a step away from him, shaking her head vigorously. "But—why? No, that does not make sense. He was a good man. He was always a good man. Everyone in Bonvalet knew that. He saved Alexander's life; he had mercy on the criminals; he used to give out gold to beggars! The number of times he steered the country away from war, signed peace treaties—"

"A good man?" he scoffed in interruption before letting out one of his sadistic, booming laughs. The sound sent shuddering chills up Maarit's spine. "My father was many things, but a good man has never been one of them. No one knew him. I was the only one who ever did. If they had known him, they would never have revered him the way they did."

"Explain it to me, then," she said between gritted teeth. Her fists clenched at her sides, trembling with a painful longing to reach out to the king and shake him—agitate him—until she stirred up his sediment and brought the sunken veracity to the surface. "Make me understand you. I may be a soothsayer, but I cannot read minds. Prove that what you are saying is the undeniable truth, for God's sake. I cannot possibly believe you after everything else you've said and done."

       She paused, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. Her mouth was dry as the desert, and just as arid, for though she searched for more well-intentioned and meaningful words, none blossomed up from her throat.

       "There is something very wrong with me," she blurted out, "because I want to believe you. Make me believe you."

       Theodoracius appeared conflicted for a moment, as though his memories were grappling with one another from inside his mind. Sinking his teeth into his own bottom lip, he looked at the floor and uttered a single question, an undercurrent of melancholy laced between the words. "What did you see in your vision of the past?"

       "My vision?" she asked, taken aback. Her mind went back to the boy she'd seen, the pained expression on his face—and for a moment, she screwed her eyes shut as though it would block out the remembrance. With closed eyelids, it only grew clearer.

       She knew.

       She had known since the moment she had seen the beautiful boy with locks of silken hair and a face that had only just begun to harden into a mask. Then, the boy had been learning how to hide behind his own visage—but now he knew.

       "I'm aware that you failed to tell me the whole truth of your vision," Theodoracius said dolorously. "But I can surmise the nature of what you must have seen." He let out a sigh so heavy it must have removed the weight of the country from his shoulders. "I do not know much about fate. Whether it is truly inexorable or not is unknown to me, just as it is unknown to any other mortal being living on the soil of our world.

       "If there is one thing I do know, it is that the past does not lie. The future is not carved into the stars; the present may very well be a deception. But the past—it is the only unalterable part of our wretched, useless lives. Whatever you saw was not a falsification conjured by the gods. It was not a glimmer of what could be. You said there was evil in this castle—evil that probably lies in its very foundation—and I have lived it."

As the burden his words held settled in her mind, Maarit held her breath. "What I saw," she whispered, "was a horribly broken boy. I only wish he'd show himself to me now and explain why I should believe in him."

In the rapidity of the bat of an eyelash, his expression shifted to something dangerous and wildly unpredictable—the look that was only ever found in the eyes of rabid beasts. Maarit instantly regretted having said anything at all. She had only been hoping he would open his locked vault of a heart and show it to her. Just once.

He whirled around and locked the door to the cellar. "Come with me," he muttered under his breath, before striding down the corridor without once turning back to check that Maarit was following him.

She darted after him, question after question swimming in her mind. His pace was so quick that she had to jog to keep up. She followed the king up flights of stairs, her palms damp with sweat. There was a lump in her throat that prevented her from asking where they were going. When, at last, he stopped brusquely in the middle of one of the hallways, Maarit nearly barrelled into his backside. His robes, which had been flowing out behind him as he walked, whipped her across the face.

       Theodoracius did not seem to notice. His gaze was fixated on the wall, eyes dragging over three paintings in particular. He remained that way for a moment before turning to her, a horrible smile on his face that implied just about every emotion besides happiness.

       "This," he said, stabbing his index finger in the direction of the three paintings.

       Maarit furrowed her eyebrows and stepped closer to get a better look at them, squinting to make out the smallest of details in the dark. The leftmost painting had three main elements in its foreground: a man with a crown atop his head, a woman standing at his side, and between them, an infant girl beaming up delightedly with rounded cheeks. To the right of the first painting was another image, this one showing the same crowned man embracing a young woman. The third was a depiction of the man, cowering beneath his cloak, a dark female figure looming over him.

       She recognized the last one. It had been one of the few paintings to catch her eye when she had first walked through these halls.

"I don't understand what this has to do with your father," she said, voicing her thoughts. She whirled around to face him, skepticism drawing across her features the way the paint once had across these canvases. "Why are you even showing these to me? What do they mean? They're just art. While I certainly am not in the mood for games and riddles, this feels like you're attempting to distract me, or change the subject..."

He was not listening. There was a faraway look in his eyes as he spoke, more to himself than to her. "These paintings were created by a soothsayer. He thought in images the way you think in words. He recited his prophecies using art rather than writing. I do not know much about him, as I was only a toddler when he painted these. However, I do know that he was blind. Perhaps it truly is the blind that see the most."

He paused to run his fingers over the frame of the first painting.

"This is a sequence of visions that the soothsayer saw. A king's wife gives birth to a child—a girl." He stepped before the second painting in the sequence. "The daughter grows up loving her father, and she is, in turn, the king's pride and joy. But in the end," he continued darkly, gazing up at the final painting, "the daughter ends up being the king's greatest downfall. She betrays her father. She murders him, committing the greatest sin a daughter can commit. Patricide."

He was not, in the slightest, quenching her thirst for answers. If anything, he was merely raising more questions; but she was almost afraid to interrupt him.

"Everything he did," Theodoracius spat, "was calculated. Everything. He gained sympathy and love from the entire country while his castle became a slaughterhouse. He even got a warlock on his side for his own ulterior motives. He didn't have mercy on a poor teenage thief he found on the end of a rope, being hanged! He knew what he was doing! He knew all about warlocks, he knew that Alexander Picard was one, and he knew he would be in his debt forever."

       His voice was nearing hysteria. Maarit hadn't a single clue what he was attempting to tell her; she only knew that he was in pain.

       He began to stride away again. She continued to follow him closely, realizing that he was headed for the dining hall. When they reached it, he thundered down the stairs and made a single hand gesture that informed the guards to leave the room. They hurried out, leaving Maarit alone with the king. He was not even looking at her, for his hands gripped the edge of the table like it was his only lifeline. She approached him cautiously watching the unsteady shudder of his chest.

His fingers buried themselves in his hair and tugged at the roots.

       After a long while, he spun around to face her as if he had already known exactly where she was standing.

"When I was eight years old," said the king, fingering his collar, "my mother fell pregnant." Maarit listened to him intently, hanging onto every word he spoke with bated breath. "I remember hearing numerous times how everyone hoped the king would be blessed with a son. A son is all anyone ever wants. They do not seem to understand that if everyone births a son, there will be no more sons to be had. Such idiots. Too consumed by their ignorance to formulate their own opinions." A frown pulled at the corners of his lips. "One day, I awoke to have servants inform me that the queen was in labour. They brought me to see her as she gave birth. To a girl."

He grimaced as though remembering something horribly painful. But Maarit's breath hitched in her throat for an entirely different reason.

She had never known the gender of the dead infant. No one had. In fact, according to every story she had ever heard about the royal family, the infant had perished unborn.

"I'm certain you have heard the stories: that my mother died in childbirth, and the infant, whose sex was unknown, died along with her," Theodoracius observed, eyebrows quirked upwards. "A fine work of fiction. That was the story Father disclosed to the public. Something about the poor baby getting stuck in the birthing canal, was it? In reality, he was enraged that the child was female. He feared the prophecy, feared that fate truly was inevitable. In his rage, do you have any idea what he did?"

Maarit was shaking and so, she realized, was Theodoracius as he laid his soul and his past out, handing it to her on a golden platter for her to devour. She watched him come undone before her in ways she never had before.

The more he divulged, the more sickened she became. The insinuation of what had happened made her feel like her insides were being carved out. She could guess what was coming next, but she couldn't hear it, couldn't bear to listen—

"He killed my mother and my infant sister when she was mere seconds old," he said, his voice so thick with emotion that she thought he was crying. "She had barely taken her first dozen breaths before he murdered her. To be certain that no daughter of his would ever harm him." He let out a low chuckle. "How ironic it is that his son killed him when it was a son he so desired!"

"H-he killed them?" the young witch choked out.

       "And he made me watch," the king whispered with a sad, fake smile that spoke volumes. "I loved my mother and I loved the baby. I was only eight years old and prepared to lay down my life for an unborn little girl. I had to watch as he tore them down and mutilated their bodies. Maarit—I wanted to die. I couldn't bear such pain. I—I hoped he would kill me."

       It was so much worse than she had ever imagined it to be. She couldn't blame him for killing his own father. She would've done the same.

       "He hated that I loved my mother so much. Called it sick and considered me weak because of it. He didn't understand love. He only related it with sexual acts and dubbed my love for my mother as something unnatural and incestuous. Jealousy ate away at him, as though he had to compete with me for my mother's affection. He never even came close. She would've chosen me a thousand times over."

       Theodoracius pulled a chair out and slumped into it, bending over the table with his head in his hands. Maarit immediately sat beside him; his head shot up at the sound of the chair legs screeching against the floor.

"That wasn't the last time he killed anyone." His voice cracked. "After he killed my mother, he impregnated many of his mistresses. They all gave birth to girls, and he killed them all. Child and mother. There must have been at least nine mistresses. He thought it was his fate catching up with him, haunting him for defying his destiny."

Maarit's hand flew to cover her mouth. "So their bodies..."

       "In the cellar you just saw," Theodoracius finished, nodding. "The castle has two cellars. The one I showed you is the secret one. I would have gotten rid of the bodies, but I couldn't do it alone and I'm not fond of the idea of my Royal Guard and servants thinking worse of me than they already do. No one would ever believe that it was Tevenot who did it. I've been the only one to know about any of this."

       Unsure of what to say, Maarit stumbled over her words, trying to convey her empathy. "It must be hard," she sighed, "keeping such secrets inside for so long. Having no one to talk to about all of this." She swallowed the lump in her throat and was surprised at how gentle her voice sounded. "Tell me more. You can keep talking to me."

       The boy-king's hand fumbled with the collar of his shirt again. He reached up and shakily unbuttoned the top, then pulled the fabric down to reveal the scar that Maarit had been wondering about all along. She couldn't help the way her gaze trailed down his collarbone.

"He tried to create a warrior," he rambled on. "He broke me every day and watched as I put myself back together. Told me that trust was a fallacy, pain was a fallacy—love was a fallacy. With those words, and cracks of whips, and once even a blade slashed across my chest, he tried to make a tamed beast. He lost hold.

       "Weapons know no loyalty. They can belong to whomsoever happens to have their hands wrapped around the hilt. Do not turn a child into a weapon unless you are prepared to have that weapon wielded against you."

       Silence ebbed its way between them until the king broke it once more with seven heartbroken words.

"Father made a monster out of me."

       "Why do you talk about yourself like that?" she snapped in protest, sounding harsher than she had intended.

What bothered her was the disdain with which he spoke of himself.

She had called him a monster countless times before she had known the truth. A pang of guilt punctured her heart. Compared to his father, Theodoracius Rangelov was a saint.

"Because it's the truth, and I hate lying. I am exhausted from having done it so often, and for so long. Yes, I murdered my father. Yes, I had an innocent boy blamed—he poured the wine into the poison, not the poison into the wine. And every day, I am filled with guilt for everything I have done that would imply I am anything like him. I make mistakes. I regret. I sympathize. But none of that changes the truth: that Tevenot Rangelov was a monster, and so am I—not for murdering him, but for allowing an innocent boy to take the blame. For sitting idly by while my father slaughtered his mistresses and the girls they bore him. For arresting you and taking you from the safety of your home, no matter how treasonous it was for you to incite rebellion in the village. I am a despicable human being wearing my father's face."

Before she knew what she was doing, she was reaching out and covering his hand with hers. "I never thought I'd say this and mean every word, but I don't blame you," Maarit said, "for hating him enough to kill him."

       For a split second, he met her gaze and hope flashed across his features.

▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Ah, finally! Revealing all of that is a huge relief. I've been holding onto this information about Tevenot and Theo for so long that it was painful.

I haven't mentioned this before, but Theo is my favourite character in this book, so I really wanted all of you to know some more about his past and see why he's so complex. It has been really fun reading all of your comments and seeing most of you gradually go from hating him to kind of liking him, but at the same time being unsure of whether or not you ought to like him.

What are your thoughts about this chapter? What do you think of Theodoracius now? Do you think he is worthy of redemption? Do you have any theories?