Page 151 of First Light
“It wasn’t like that!” Aisling slammed her hand on the table. “You don’t understand anything. You’ve been here a few weeks and you think you know anything? I loved Seren!”
“But you loved Lachlan more?”
Aisling curled her lip. “Lachlan should have been mine. If Seren had stayed away with her dragon, he would have grown to love me. Ineededhim to love me. The whole reason they kept me in this court was so I could be his queen.”
“I read her journal.” Carys blinked and looked back at the black leather book sitting on the table by the large open volume and the candle. “She loved you too. She wanted to give you a life away from here. She knew?—”
“She knew I loved her husband, and she wanted me gone.” Aisling’s cold facade cracked. Just a little. “At least she didn’t pity melike you. Like Duncan. Likeall of them! I hate it. They think I don’t see it? I do.”
“She was your best friend.”
Aisling’s blue eyes turned frosty. “Friendship? What is friendship? If she loved me, she would have left when she saw him falling in love with her. They never should have been together. It was bad for everyone, Carys.”
“She was in love.”
“She was selfish,” Aisling spat out. “She only thought about herself. Not Lachlan. Not the Queens’ Pact. Selfish.”
Carys blinked back tears. It was obvious that Aisling had rationalized her betrayal. “And you weren’t? It wasn’t selfish to kill your best friend?”
“I needed to take some action.” She walked back to the fireplace and the cauldron. “Regan sent a raven from the Anglian court. She said that with Seren sick, I could do something about my situation. She said I was being… pathetic.” Aisling’s face went blank again.“Pathetic.”
“Seren didn’t think you were pathetic.”
“Lachlan did.” Aisling’s lip curled. “I heard the pity in his voice.”
Duncan had called it. There was nothing worse than pity.
The mental fog was clearing as the light grew brighter. “You poisoned her, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t poison! The fever was bad.” Aisling frowned. “Itreallywas bad. I looked in Regan’s old grimoire for something to help and… I found it.”
“Found what?”
“It was only a spell. One spell I added to the potion recipe. I wasn’t trying tokillSeren.” Aisling walked over and stared at the waterlogged journal. “Iwasn’ttrying to kill her. I wasn’t. I just wanted to kill the love between them.”
Carys was no magic user, but she could easily see how a spell to kill the love between two people could quickly morph into a lethal curse. “Kill their love?”
Aisling looked up, her eyes distant. “Don’t you see? If their lovedied, Lachlan would seeme. That was all I needed. For him to not loveher. Then there would be room in his heart for me.”
“Love doesn’t work that way.”
“It does for Lachlan!” Aisling’s laugh was manic. “Don’t you think? Seren died, so he went to the Brightlands to find you.” She wandered over to the table and flipped through the leather-bound grimoire, a bitter smile marring her beautiful face.
“Lose one Seren; find another,” Carys whispered.
“Even the foreigner can see it.” Aisling’s voice dropped to a low growl. “Easy as anything for a prince with passage through the gate.”
Despite the fog that permeated Carys’s mind, the words still stung.
“So what happened?” Carys forced out the words. “Did you make the potion wrong? You didn’t kill their love; you killed the woman.”
“Oh, I made it correctly.” She flipped a page and ran her finger down the book, her eyes glittering in anger. “Despite Lachlan’s disregard and my family’s blindness, I am a brilliant mage. The potion I made wasperfect.” Aisling looked up, and for the first time, there were tears in the corners of her eyes. “It was perfect.”
Carys tried to play on Aisling’s humanity. “But the potion recipe was Regan’s, not yours. And Regan’s idea of killing love was different than yours.” She twisted her arms against her bindings. “Let me go, Aisling. I don’t blame you. It was Regan who killed Seren, not you.”
Aisling’s expression fell away, and her face went blank again. “That’s not… exactly true.”
“What do you mean?”