“A toast to him as well, then,” Wynnie offered, pouring a fourth cup and wiggling it out to Mirelda with a ghost of a smirk. “May the fires of all seven hells be warmer than his heart ever was.”
Mirelda hesitated only a moment before taking the glass and tossing it back in one swallow. Wynnie cheered, and evenDraven let out what might have been a chuckle if I paired it with the faint softness in the bond.
I couldn’t help it—I laughed too, even though the sound wavered on the edge of breaking.
“But did he die trying to help you in the eleventh hour?” I asked.
My voice was thicker than I intended, and my throat burned with every word. Under all my resentment, that single moment of care from him had carved out a hollow I didn’t know how to fill.
“No.” Draven’s jaw clenched. “He was a bastard until the very end. I hated him.”
I let out a sound between a scoff and a very bitter laugh. “Sometimes I think I hated my father, too.”
In pieces. In jagged shards. In all the ways he had made me feel shielded even when he made me feel forgotten and insignificant.
Wynnie nodded, eyes bright in a way she would murder me for acknowledging. “At least… at least you didn’t call him a shartwyrm right before he died.”
I met her gaze earnestly, squeezing her hand.
“I thought it, though,” I assured her in a grave tone.
Then we were laughing again, until the sound fractured into something closer to sobs, hysterical and disjointed as they may have been.
Draven’s arm tightened around my shoulders, anchoring me to something stronger than the grief clawing through me, and Mirelda poured me another fortifying glass of gin.
Outside, Winter raged. Monsters hunted. Death circled us like a patient predator.
But here in this small circle of broken people who refused to leave me, I felt something else settle in my chest. Not comfort,not yet, but the shape of a family I had chosen and one that had chosen me back.
And when the night finally quieted, when Wynnie fell asleep upright and Mirelda slipped out, when Draven gathered me into his arms and pressed his lips to my forehead, I realized with a painful kind of clarity, I hadn’t lost my family today.
Not yet, anyway.
Chapter 28
Everly
It was easier than it should have been to go about my life in the wake of my father’s death.
He hadn’t been a part of it to begin with, so all I had to do was tuck the memory of his final wheezing breaths away somewhere with all the torture and bloodshed and pain I kept in my box of trauma, then let the world keep turning as it would.
Mostly, it worked, especially since I was now able to be out and about in the palace. I started to oversee the villagers myself while Wynnie shifted her focus to the bustling infirmary, trying out new tonics and salves on an increasing unknown array of monster injuries.
The rest of the time, I still threw myself into research. I had told Draven about the Gorenvyr. Though it hadn’t yet been spotted again, it was enough to make me wonder what other Elderborne might emerge.
There were only three more known to history at all, and each of them was horrifying enough to make the Korythid look like a children’s pet.
I also had Draven accompany me to the glorious library, requesting everything I could find on the history of portals while Draven let his patrols know to be on the lookout for them.
Today, though, I was back to reading about Batty, wondering what else I had missed in the book about her.
The margins were dense with notes about bonded skathryns, about their habits and instincts, about how some were said to sense frostbeasts long before wards failed or sentries sounded alarms.
‘Protectors,’ the text had called them. Early little warnings wrapped in wings and teeth and venom, and of course, snow-flaked fury.
Batty, of course, seemed to take that particular revelation as a personal compliment.
She stood straight up on my shoulder now like a guard-skathryn on official duty, chest puffed, obsidian eyes sharp. I suspected she was proud. Of herself, certainly. Possibly of me too, for having finally learned something useful about her kind.
