To Kill A Kingdom | ACOTAR

Chapter 11 - "Well, that's something they're definitely not getting."

Caedmon was teaching Evette how exactly to narrow down her winnowing when Cassian joined them. She was trying her hardest, but she either kept going too far, or going too little. "We're going to the Town House for dinner." Cassian told them both. Evette looked up at him from where she was knelt on the ground - she didn't know what the Town House was. "Do you both want to join us?"

Her uncle turned to look at Evette for an answer, and she simply shook her head in a denial. "I need to learn how to focus my winnowing." Evette replied. "I'm not going to waste time eating when I could be working on that." She knew she needed to perfect her winnowing.

"Very well." Cassian replied, and he looked over them both for a few moments, before he moved on and left them alone.

After a good hour or so of trying to focus winnowing, she sat down on the ground for a break. She patted the floor beside her for her uncle to join her, and he did so. "So, how are things back home? Since the failed coup?" Evette asked her uncle. "What's being done to deal with it? To find them?"

"I don't think it'd be wise to discuss." Her uncle shook his head at her. Evette gave him an annoyed look. "Emory is being questioned almost daily - but he says nothing. Your mother doesn't want to resort to more...violent ways to get the information from him for obvious reasons. So, we're getting pretty much nowhere on that front."

"And, we have literally nothing on the others. It's like they disappeared completely." He continued to explain. "There are many places they could have gone. Hiding out on Tattoon is the most likely. And we don't...we're not exactly welcome there. Not anymore. If we send spies...they'll be brutally murdered. It's not a risk your mom wants to take."

Evette looked to the ground at the knowledge. At the knowledge that her mother, her uncle, herself, and her brothers weren't welcome at Tattoon - the home and land to Angevin's best warriors.

"Wait...do you think it was a scheme to kill me?" Evette asked, suddenly finding it very hard to swallow. "If they are hiding out on Tattoon...it likely means it was an attempt to kill me...do you think they wanted to kill me that night?" Evette asked.

Evette didn't want to finish her first thought - after all, she and her brothers had made a promise to each other to never tell Caedmon, their mother, or their aunt and cousins what truly had happened that night. Never - it was to only stay between the four of them. She knew what had happened that night, and knew she'd probably deserve them wanting to kill her.

But it did very little to change the fact that it was hard to accept that her own family wanted her dead.

"It is very likely, yes." Her uncle replied softly.

"Because of...what happened?" She asked him, and she turned to look at him.

"There could be many reasons." He reasoned with her. "Just like there are many places that they could be hiding out now. It is not confirmed they're in Tattoon. It's just one possible place they could be."

Evette ran her hands through her dark hair. "I don't think they'd be anywhere else." Evette replied. "It's clear. Tattoon is the only place they could go. They staged a coup against mother, and calculatedly, me. Tattoon stand with them, of course, how could they not? They hate me...they wish for retribution for what happened to their people. They look to remove me."

"But they won't...they will fail." Her uncle assured her. "For as long as I live, you will not die by anyone's hands."

Evette had been 16 years old when she had discovered how cruel, twisted, and cunning the Fey were. Her aunt Dulcamara's lover and the father to her cousins had been one of the cruellest. He was jealous that her mother had had a daughter, and that his lover hadn't. So, he and his wicked family had come up with a plan - to get rid of her when she was just a child.