The Lost Sisters recap

A companion novella to The Cruel Prince, told as a long confessional letter from Taryn Duarte to her twin, Jude. Taryn retells their shared childhood from her own side: their mother's flight from Faerie, Madoc's arrival and the murders, and their upbringing in a court that despised them for being mortal. Where Jude decided to fight for a place, Taryn decided to earn one by being agreeable, and she explains her secret courtship with Locke, who was pursuing both sisters at once and asked her to keep silent about it. She admits she stayed quiet while Jude was humiliated by Cardan's circle, admits her jealousy, and argues that her own strategy of accommodation was no more cowardly than Jude's was reckless. The letter carries her through the discovery of the deception, the sisters' rupture, and her engagement to Locke, and closes with an apology she concedes is incomplete: she wants forgiveness, she is not sure she deserves it, and she is not sure she would choose differently.

Previously, in The Cruel Prince: the mortal twins Jude and Taryn Duarte were carried into Faerie as children by Madoc, the redcap general who had killed their mother, once his own wife, and the human man she married. Raised in his household alongside their half-fey sister, Vivienne, they grew up despised by the fey gentry, particularly Prince Cardan and his companions Nicasia, Valerian and Locke. Jude sought power to protect herself, swore herself to Prince Dain as a spy, killed Valerian when he attacked her, and discovered that Locke had been courting both sisters at once and that Taryn had known and hidden it, which broke the twins apart. At the coronation, Prince Balekin murdered the High King and most of his heirs with Madoc's help, and Jude escaped with the youngest prince, Cardan. Learning that her small brother Oak was secretly the true heir and that Madoc meant to rule through him, Jude made Cardan High King on condition that he obey her for a year and a day, imprisoned Balekin, broke Madoc's plan, and sent Oak to the human world. Taryn remained in Faerie, engaged to Locke, still estranged from her sister. This novella is Taryn's account of those same years.

Taryn addresses her twin directly, setting out to explain rather than excuse. She goes back to their mother, who fled Faerie and Madoc with her half-fey daughter and built an ordinary mortal life, and to the day Madoc arrived, killed both their parents in front of them and then took all three girls home with him as his own. Taryn describes the two conclusions the twins drew from the same childhood: Jude decided that safety lay in becoming dangerous, and Taryn decided that it lay in becoming unobjectionable, since mortals in Faerie survive on the goodwill of the fey. She recounts the daily humiliations of their schooling among the gentry, her habit of absorbing them quietly, and her irritation at a sister whose defiance drew more attention onto both of them. Then she turns to Locke, who noticed her, courted her, and asked her to keep it secret, and she describes what that attention was worth to a girl who had spent years training herself not to be noticed at all.

Taryn admits the part she has been circling: she knew Locke was courting Jude at the same time as her, understood that he was arranging the two of them into a story he found entertaining, and said nothing. She kept silent through her sister's public humiliations, weighed jealousy against loyalty and chose the courtship, and she describes the calculation without pretending it was noble: Locke could give her the settled place in Faerie she had wanted since childhood, and telling Jude would have cost her that. When the deception came out and the sisters broke, Taryn was accused of a betrayal she does not entirely dispute. Her defence is that Jude, too, kept secrets, took risks that endangered them both, and never once considered that Taryn's way of surviving might be as deliberate as her own. She closes with an apology she knows is partial, an engagement she intends to go through with, and an acknowledgement that she may never actually put this letter into her sister's hands.

The letter ends without absolution on either side. Taryn has said what she came to say: that she loved Locke and wanted him, that she knew he was courting Jude at the same time and said nothing, that she watched her sister be humiliated and did not intervene, and that she would make many of the same choices again because the alternative, as she sees it, was to be as exposed and as hated as Jude made herself. She asks for forgiveness while admitting she has not really earned it and is not certain she is sorry in the way Jude would need her to be. She is engaged to Locke and will marry him, which secures the place in Faerie she has wanted since childhood, and she does not pretend the marriage is a triumph so much as a settlement. The confession is addressed to Jude but framed as something Taryn may never manage to hand over, so the sisters are left where the previous book left them: each convinced the other chose wrongly, still bound by blood and by a shared childhood neither can put down, with the quarrel unresolved and Taryn's wedding ahead of them.