All Chapters of MATERD TO THE SON OF THE DEMON KING: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Mercy's POVKaelen came to us at dawn, before the guards changed shifts, before the palace woke up enough to notice him slipping down the hall with something clutched against his chest.He had a letter in his hand.He looked like he hadn't slept, and I doubted he had. There were creases in his shirt that hadn't been there in the throne room, like he'd spent the hours since sitting on the floor of some forgotten room, turning an envelope over and over without opening it."I found this in my mother's things after she died," he said, setting it on the table between us like it might bite him. "I never opened it. I didn't want to know what it said badly enough to risk what knowing might cost me.""Know what?" Timothee asked."It's addressed to you. Both of your names, actually. Yours and Corin's."Timothee stared at the envelope like it was a live wire, the kind you don't touch even when someone tells you it's been switched off."Why do you have it?""Because my mother was the one who deli

Mercy's POVWe left before the palace fully woke, which meant we left before anyone could talk us out of it.Kaelen had argued for waiting, for gathering more guards, more supplies, more of anything that might make the trip feel less like four people driving straight at a problem none of us understood yet. Mercy had shut that down within a minute of him raising it. More people meant more chances for word to spread before we were ready for it to. Whatever we found out west, she wanted to find it quietly.I hadn't argued. I'd learned a long time ago that arguing with Mercy once she'd decided something was less about changing her mind and more about wasting breath neither of us had time for.Kaelen drove the first stretch, some old truck he'd pulled from a garage nobody used anymore, the kind of vehicle that belonged to a version of the kingdom that still remembered how to be poor. Timothee sat in the back with me, one hand resting on the burned photograph fragment like it might disinteg

Mercy's POVWe searched the rest of the building until the light gave out completely, and what we found only made the picture worse.A stack of letters, unsent, addressed to a woman who'd been dead for years, judging by the dates. Some of them were only a few lines. Others ran for pages, dense with handwriting that started controlled and ended jagged, like whoever wrote them had started calm and lost the thread of that calm somewhere in the middle. I didn't read them closely. It felt like trespassing on something that wasn't meant for anyone but the two people it was written between, one of whom couldn't answer anymore.A child's drawing, faded almost to nothing, of two boys standing in front of a castle that looked nothing like the one Timothee had grown up in and everything like the one from old storybooks, the kind meant for children who still believed kings were kind by default.Underneath the drawing, tucked into the same box, I found a small collection of pressed flowers, brittl

Mercy's POVNobody moved for a long moment. Corin stood in the doorway like he owned the silence, and maybe out here, he did.I could feel the crown's mark on my palm again, that same warmth it had carried since the throne room, except now it pulsed instead of sat still, like it was reacting to something in the room beyond the four of us standing in it. I didn't know if that was a warning or a recognition. Maybe there wasn't a difference, not with something this old."You knew we were coming," I said."I've known for six years that someone would eventually come," he said. "I didn't know it would be you specifically. Though I suppose that makes sense, given what you're carrying."His eyes dropped to my palm, to the faint silver line the crown had left there, and something flickered across his face, gone too fast to name."You can see it," I said."I can feel it. The same way you can, I'd guess, though nobody's ever bothered to teach either of us what that feeling actually means." He st

Timothee's POVCorin kept the proof in a metal box under a loose floorboard near the hearth, and watching him retrieve it told me more than the contents did. He didn't hesitate. He didn't check to see if we were watching. He'd rehearsed this moment, maybe hundreds of times, alone in this room, imagining the day someone finally sat across from him and asked to see what he'd been carrying.Mercy had come back in a few minutes after me, quiet, giving me the space to collect myself without making it a production. I appreciated that more than I could have said out loud. Corin waited too, no impatience in it, like he understood better than anyone what it cost to hear something like this and still be expected to function afterward.The papers inside were old, some of them barely legible, handwriting cramped and hurried in a way that suggested whoever wrote them hadn't wanted to be caught doing it. Names I didn't recognize. Dates that lined up, uncomfortably, with two periods of my childhood I