Free When Magic Dares (Darkly Fae Book 2) by Tera Lynn Childs

you,” he started to say.
    But she interrupted. “ After ,” she said, not breaking their eye contact, “my sister finds our father.”
    “Finds your…?” It took several full seconds for Tearloch to register the meaning of her words. What she suggested.
    He looked at Arianne. “Princess?”
    She dropped her head, closed her eyes. Their fingers were still entwined, and through that touch he felt the weight of her despair.
    “King Drustan,” she said, her voice tight with emotion, “is missing.”
    He had to force his jaw to unclench. “For how long?”
    Arianne raised her head, looked directly into her sister’s gloating eyes, and said, “Since shortly after Callie ran away.”
    “Ten years ago,” the witch said. “Almost to the day.”
    “Ten years?” he echoed.
    The Deachair king had been missing for a decade? And no one had noticed? How was that even possible? Surely someone would have realized the king was gone. There had been diplomatic envoys and royal events and meetings of the unseelie council. No, the king could not have missed all such things for a decade without notice.
    “Impossible,” he said.
    But the turbulent look in Arianne’s eyes told him the truth. In them he saw shame and horror and, deeper below, pride.
    He instantly understood. Somehow she had managed to keep secret the king’s disappearance—a fact that would have left her clan vulnerable to attack from virtually every side, both friend and foe—and had ruled in his stead with no one the wiser.
    Ten years? Arianne couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old at the time. Not more than a year or two after the night he found her in the hedge maze.
    All he wanted to do was stare at her in complete and total awe. How had he ever viewed her as weak or frivolous? How could he not have seen the inner strength that made his own look weak and frivolous by comparison. At her core, she was stronger than any warrior he had ever known.
    He had only one question. “How?”

Chapter 13
    Arianne choked out a laugh at Tearloch’s question. How indeed.
    “Stubborn will,” she replied sheepishly, her cheeks burning with shame. “And a palace full of clever, dedicated fae.”
    Looking back, she could almost not believe it herself. A child of eight, taking the place of a powerful king? Pure folly.
    She had been lost. Her mother dead, her sister fled, and then her father after. Alone in the world, with nothing but her title and her clan to rely on. And so she did what she had been trained to do. She ruled. She had never stopped to think of the impossibility of her pursuit.
    He stared at her. Would not stop staring. She threatened to crumble under the scrutiny.
    He should not have learned this. No one outside of the palace should know. That Callie had somehow found out, that she knew and still stayed away…
    Arianne shook off the fear and self-pity. Now was not the time for questions and clarifications. They were here on a mission, and her sister would have to make another demand.
    “I have no idea where to find King Drustan,” Arianne said.
    If she had, she would have found him and brought him home long ago.
    Callie surprised her by saying, “I do.”
    She said it so casually, so… dismissively. As if this life-changing information were no big deal. As if finding their father hadn’t been Arianne’s greatest wish for the last ten years.
    Clenching her fists against the overwhelming urge to launch herself at her sister, she spat out, “You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
    Callie shrugged.
    “Why?” Arianne demanded. “If you knew where he was, you must have known how alone I felt… Why didn’t you go to him? Why didn’t you come back and bring him with you?”
    Her unspoken question hung in the air between them, as tangible as the grass beneath her feet and the mountains looming above her. Why did you leave me all alone?
    As the seconds ticked on, Arianne gradually realized that she was holding Tearloch’s hand