Marc wanted, badly, to go find this harpy and destroy her. Instead, he pulled Aldara close to his side and tucked his arm around her. "So you have no idea why you were different?"

"Geraint and I talked about it a lot. He thought that perhaps greed and vanity had been the reasons for the curse in the first place. My mother wasn't like that, so she broke the curse, not for herself but for her descendants." She took a deep breath and gave him a forced smile. "But I survived and ...