For hours, I had bucked and twisted beneath them, as thick iron needles pushed through the moonsilk and dragged the thinspool of copper thread along. Piercing, burning, pulsing, sending my screams echoing up into the rafters of the Murenger. And Boralas had sat beside me, feigning comfort while directing the movement of the needle to ensure I could not attempt to leave again. Printing bruises on my hands from the strength of his grip, punishment disguised as soothing. My throat burns as if remembering the grating cries I couldn’t stifle. “I tried to jump from the roof. I thought that if I could not fly, then I would rather fall.”
Callan’s hands slow in their careful examination. “After surviving so much?”
“Survival becomes tiring,” I murmur into the pillow. “After a while, I wondered if it would not be easier. If I was only prolonging the inevitable. I regretted surviving at all.”
Callan moves my hair to the side, the knot I attempted this morning loosened and trailing as he nudges it out of his way. His fingers are… soft. “Perhaps you survived for a reason.”
I had thought the same. Had focused on that, on considering why I was the one to live when everyone else had fallen. “My sisters saved me that day. They pushed me outside, and they closed the door. That was when I saw you. But I do not know why.”
“Because they cared.” His hands shift lower, pressing in gentle assessment.
“No,” I say quietly. Remembering the urgency. The intention behind every movement. The way they had pushed, and pulled, and waited for just the right moment to push me through that door. I have studied every moment of that day so closely within my own mind that I can recall every single one of even the smallest details. Callan pauses. “There was more to it than that. But I do not know the reason. Only that there is one.”
My fate, whatever it might be, drove them to action. To give me a chance, while they blocked the Caelumnai with their ownbodies. And now it is forever hidden, for faeytes cannot read their own destiny. “Perhaps returning to Asteria will show me the why of it.”
My initial plan to try to avenge my sisters no longer feels as strong as it did. Perhaps because a punishment has already been paid in the ones the Caelumnai lost that day.
The imbalance has already been corrected by a goddess I thought had abandoned us. And now I do not know what to do.
Perhaps I might find an answer to the question that has haunted me for ten years. To why my sisters ensured that I would survive, alone, while the rest of them fell.
Callan hesitates. But all he says is, “Perhaps”.
His hands lift. “I have the path of the copper. I’ll go slowly, but the threads are deep. This will hurt, Selene. More than I had feared.”
I take a breath. Wrapping my arms around the pillow, I bury my face in it. “Do it.”
“You’ll tell me if you need me to stop.” I open my eyes to find his face close to mine. The bronze maegistwists in his eyes as I watch. Callan’s brow is furrowed in a deep frown. “Promise me.”
At my nod, he pulls back. I wait, my body tensing in silent anticipation.
It starts small. The inexplicable warmth I’m coming to associate with his gaze sweeps down my spine, resting at the very end. It grows warmer still, and I shift at the brush of something delicate. Testing. Seeking. It tickles the very base of my wings, spreading in small brushes over the silk.
I take a slow, deep breath—
Agony. My back bows beneath the white-hot poker of pain, my cry bursting out before I can stop it. The warmth disappears as I slump, gasping, my fingers twisting in the pillow.
Warm fingers—Callan’shands—grip my hand, pulling it free. “Breathe, Selene. Look at me.”
I shake my head, sobs building in my throat. Another wave of agony rips down my back, and I arch up, my throat opening on a silent scream.
He’s there. He’s right there with me, his eyes on mine as he grips my hand tightly. My face crumples, and he sees. “You’re going to be free of this. Of them. You’re doing this, and you’ll have your wings back.”
My wings.
The words croak as I force them out. “I don’t even know how to use them, Edgeborn.”
Another first stolen. That first, moonlit flight from the Sanctum, with my sisters beside me. The pinnacle of an Ascension ceremony that did not happen.
I have had so many firsts taken.
And when I tried to takethisfirst back, alone beneath the burning Terrosan sun, determined to fly or die trying, my wings refused to open. The silk curves did not beat.
Three feet, perhaps. Maybe even four, before I fell, tumbling with a scream that brought others running to see the commotion. Boralas’s men had found me, bruised and bloodied and somehow still breathing in the courtyard of the Murenger. He had dragged me back inside by my hair and made sure that I would never attempt it again. Weighed me down with copper in my wings, copper around my ankle, and ensured that I would feel the pain of my choices with every breath I took for the next eight years.
I had reached for a single moment, tried to take back something of what they had stolen, and I failed.
“I tried.” I whisper the confession as the pain recedes, just for a moment. “And I failed. They won.”
