A throat cleared, and a low voice sounded behind me. “Evie.”
Arvyn turned and smiled, rising slowly to his feet. “Here he is,Forlorenkel.”
Kael stood behind us, breath misting faintly, flushed from labor. His leather tunic hung over one arm, the black undershirt clinging to him, sweat-damp. His ash-blond hair fell wild about his face, and somehow that made him seem even more himself.
“Greetings, Arvyn,” Kael said softly. Then his gaze found mine, and my heart stumbled. “Our chamber is ready.”
Our chamber?
“There is stew coming,” Arvyn said. “Sit, both of you, and eat first. You must be hungry.”
At the word stew, my stomach betrayed me with a quiet growl. I prayed no one had heard, but my cheeks warmed all the same. Arvyn said something to Kael in Elvish that I couldn’t catch, then took his leave.
I watched him go, his back outlined by firelight, his silhouette dissolving into the smoke. The warmth of the flames lingered on my skin, but inside I felt cold.
Kael stepped closer, his nearness both anchoring and unsettling. I thought of the she-wolf, of Mauriel, who had mothered him for a time, of the storm that lived within him. A boy loved by a beast, raised by elves, claimed by the academy. Every part of him was born of ruin, and yet he stood unbroken, steady, self-contained, untouchable.
He caught me staring. For a heartbeat, I thought he might speak, might finally let me see the truth beneath his silence. I ached for it, to know him whole. But he only nodded toward the fires, where elves were ladling stew into woodenbowls.
We joined them in the glow of Stenhalla. Naila, the pathfinders, the laughing children, all wrapped in the low hum of grief and renewal. And in that moment I understood. Of all his power, Kael had never truly belonged anywhere. Not to the wolves. Not to the elves. Not to the world of men.
And yet… Somehow, impossibly, I wanted to be the place he could.
Chapter 20
Kael
The wolf scratched the bars of its cage again, the storm aching to destroy everything around me. Seeing the desolation in Vallûne drew that primal rage out of me. Those creatures we fought, born of a theory that had begun forming in my head, were the perfect targets for my wrath. And when one seized Evie in its disgusting, oozing vines, I lost it. And I struck her again.
I could have killed her, just as I could have killed her twelve days ago, but something inexplicable happened. I felt it ringing through the air, an echo of my power coursing through her and bouncing back to me. It was like staring into a mirror that stared back, showing me every part of myself, naked and raw.
Most seers, augurs, clairvoyants, and seerlings siphoned echoes or premonitions and shaped them into visions. They did not conjure the arcane; they interpreted it. They read the residue of what had been, of what might be, and of what pulsed through others.
But Evie was different. She took the storm, mirrored it, and threw it back. Not in defiance, but in resonance.
I’d begun to suspect Evie might not be a seerling at all. Perhaps she was something else, something the academy’s archives held norecord of. Something new. And she likely had no understanding of what had happened.
When my own lightning struck me, everything went quiet. I wanted more of it. I ached for it. I wanted to see what would happen if I struck her again while her power was loose.
When Naila arrived, relief settled on me like a shroud. At least she was alive. But hearing of Mauriel’s death chipped away at my heart, or at least what was left of it.
I’d been fourteen when Henrich had taken me to the academy. Before that, the tribe had been my home. I had left out of necessity because the storm inside me endangered them all. Yet even now, years later, part of me still belonged to them, to that raw, unvarnished life where the air smelled of pine smoke and salt, and laughter carried farther than fear.
Each time I returned to Vallûne, the ache grew sharper. The wood elves were rough-edged but loyal, their hands scarred from hunts, their eyes steady in a way the courtiers’ never were. I envied that steadiness. They looked at me with the kind of love that could withstand time. To them, I was stillForlorenkel, the wolf-child, the lightning bearer, the one who had to leave for the good of the tribe. And I wanted to believe that meant something. But standing amid their ruin now, I felt only the emptiness of failure.
I’d still visited the tribe when they’d come to Vallûne every spring, but the plague had broken that rhythm. The walls of the cities had swallowed us all. When Befest opened its gates again, I’d returned, and I would never forget the last words Mauriel had ever said to me.
Your eyes don’t shine anymore.
I hadn’t thought they ever did, unless the storm was about to break.
Stepping into Stenhalla again felt almost like coming home. The scent of wet wood, the distant rush of the falls, the murmur of familiar voices—it was enough to stir something buried deep. I saw my cousins again, some I hadn’t seen in a decade. Naila wasted notime putting me to work—my sister, ever the commander—and I helped carry beams to fortify the walls around the caves. My muscles remembered the labor, the rhythm of sweat and breath, and for a fleeting moment I felt human again, as though the Court and all its golden chains were far behind me.
All the while, Evie was getting my life story told by Arvyn. The man loved to talk, and perhaps that was for the best. If she was to know me, let her hear it from someone who saw me as I had been, before the plague, before the Court, before the storm, when I’d still been just a boy chasing storms through the mountains, believing they would never catch me.
During dinner,Naila spoke of the attack. The wood elves never ascended beyond the tree line, yet they knew it had come from the summit, just as Evie suspected. They’d spotted black veins crawling down the cliffs of the valley. One morning, a herd of deer had stumbled into the village, panicked, diseased, carrying the darkness with them. They collapsed along Vallûne’s paths, and the blight took root there, spreading through the night until the whole village had been consumed.
I caught the worry in Evie’s eyes. She must have wondered if the same would have happened to the farming village had more of the goats been infected. If it still might, should we wait too long.
