“Your mother?” I asked.
“The Autumn Duchess. She governs this region of Wynmire.” Thessaly’s expression softened slightly. “She has… questions. About your marks. About what you’re becoming.” “She also has answers. About the convergence. About what’s really coming.”
I felt Kaelren tense beside me. “Absolutely not.”
“Shouldn’t that be Elle’s choice?” Thessaly asked mildly.
Everyone looked at me. The marks at my collarbones pulsed with warmth, and through them, I could feel the forest’s curiosity. The trees knew Thessaly, trusted her in their slow, ancient way.
“One night?” I asked.
“Sunset to sunrise. You’ll be fed, rested, and protected. And my mother will tell you things the Crown doesn’t want you to know.”
“Elle,” Kaelren warned.
But I was tired of running, tired of not understanding what was happening to me. “We accept.”
Thessaly smiled, and autumn leaves swirled around us. “Then follow me. The Autumn Court awaits.”
As we walked deeper into the forest, following paths that seemed to appear just for Thessaly, I noticed Kaelren’s carved marks pulsing with agitation.
“You know her,” I said quietly.
“I knew her. Before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I became what I am. Before the Bloom rejected me. Before everything went wrong.”
There was pain in his voice I hadn’t heard before. Real, raw pain that his usual cold control couldn’t quite hide.
“Was she…?”
“She was many things. None of them matter now.”
But the way he watched Thessaly move through the forest, the way his marks flared when she looked back at us, suggested otherwise.
Great,I thought.Magical ex-girlfriend drama. Because this situation wasn’t complicated enough.
“Jealous?” Peeble whispered near my ear.
“Shut up,” I hissed back, but couldn’t quite deny the twist in my stomach when Thessaly smiled at Kaelren with obvious familiarity.
The Autumn Court’s entrance was marked by trees whose leaves werepermanently caught in fall colors despite the season. The air was crisp here, smelling of apples and wood smoke and that particular scent of leaves turning.
“Welcome,” Thessaly said, gesturing to an arched doorway that seemed to be carved from a single enormous tree, “to the Court of Eternal Autumn.”
11
Kaelren
The Autumn Court hadn’t changed.
It still existed in that space between waking and dream, where reality wore thin and seasons bled together. The great hall was carved from the heart of an ancient oak, its walls breathing with slow life. Fairy lights—actual fairies trapped in gleaming bubbles—provided illumination that shifted between honey and amber. The air tasted of harvest and endings.
And at its center, on a throne of woven branches and dying leaves, sat the Autumn Duchess.
Merithra looked exactly as she had 30 years ago, which meant she looked exactly as she had five hundred years ago. Ageless in that way of old fae, beautiful in that terrible way of predators. Her hair was every shade of autumn—gold, red, brown, burgundy—and her eyes held the patience of trees and the cruelty of winter’s first frost.
