‘I wasn’t,’ came the flat reply.
‘You might want to eat that before it actually does go off…’ Arden paused, catching the absurdity of his own words before shrugging with a self-satisfied grin. ‘Never mind, I suppose.’
Both men sat in silence, the weight of exhaustion and unspoken thoughts hanging between them like an unseen veil. Arden’s eyes wandered across the camp, tracing the small clusters of Fae gathered around their fires, their murmurs muted beneath the soft crackle of flames. His body stiffened when the princess approached, her presence quiet yet commanding, as she lowered herself gracefully onto the far side of the fire.
Her green eyes, unseeing yet unflinching, fixed on the dancing blaze. Arden knew she could not truly see the flames, but something in her expression told him she saw them dance all the same.
‘My father is dead,’ she said at last, her voice low, each syllable carried like a secret on the wind. Soft, contemplative, and strangely fragile.
Arden glanced at Kage, uncertain of how to answer, the words heavy in his throat.
‘He is,’ he said carefully, testing the weight of the admission.
‘So you’re… free.’
Her words struck Arden like cold iron. His spine straightened, his expression unreadable. ‘I’m Black Lotus,’ he said at last, his tone a shield. ‘We are not free.’
The princess sighed, the sound soft and aching. ‘Perhaps none of us truly are,’ she muttered. ‘We are all bound to something… someone. But my father, the king, is gone, Arden Briar. So tell me, what stops you from walking away?’
Arden frowned, confusion creasing his brow. ‘I don’t understand… Even with the king dead, the queen still lives. You still live. We are bound to the crown.’
‘That you are,’ she said with a bitter snort, a sound too sharp to mask the sorrow in it. ‘Without the Black Lotus, we Fae stand no chance against the witches. And now, with the king dead… I fear—’
‘Do not fear,’ Arden interrupted gently, though his words held a steel edge. ‘We belong to the crown.’
Beside him, Kage shifted, the subtle stiffness in his posture betraying his discomfort at Arden’s choice of words. Yet Arden did not waver. It was the truth. He had been forged into the perfect weapon, sharpened by blood and loyalty until there was nothing left of the boy he had once been. He belonged to the Hawthornes. He had killed for them, bled for them, surrendered every shred of his soul for them…
And he had felt nothing at all.
His life had been a sequence of orders, obeyed without question, without thought, without heart.
Until.
Until those eyes, blue as fractured ice and infinite skies, had entered his world and shattered everything he had believed himself to be.
‘I do not wish for you to belong to the crown,’ Rio said, her voice slicing through him, sharp and deliberate, like a blade finding the weakest chink in armour. ‘I do not want the world to remain as it was when my father still drew breath. He clung to the old customs, to the bones of a dying era. But things must change.Wemust change. And for that, I ask you to fight. Not as a Black Lotus but as a Fae.’
Arden stared, his brow furrowing, confusion etched across his face.
Rio exhaled slowly, the sound weary, as though it had been pulled from somewhere deep in her soul. ‘Do you know why theBlack Lotus exists, Arden Briar?’
‘Yes… years ago, a prince fell in love with a peasant, and his father—’
‘No, Arden Briar,’ she interrupted, her tone steel and sorrow in equal measure. ‘Not that truth. Not the romanticised beginning sung in taverns and court halls. Have you never wondered why it endures? Why, generation after generation, every king has kept the Black Lotus by his side?’
‘Because we are the king’s blade. We protect the Fae.’
‘Could kings not simply train soldiers for such a task? Why take orphans? Why burn their past and sever every tie of love? What purpose lies in cruelty so deliberate?’
Arden did not avert his gaze, his jaw tight, his face carved into stone. ‘To make certain we never felt. So that we would always follow orders, no matter the cost.’
‘Are you so sure that is the whole purpose?’
Arden’s teeth clenched, an edge of warning sharpening his voice. ‘What are you saying, your highness?’
Rio’s sigh came slow, tired, almost unbearably sad. ‘There is a reason they take the youngest of our kind and mould them into obedience, stripping them of everything that makes them whole. The court is full of men, highborn nobles who slip into the pleasure courts to indulge their darkest whims. And what, Arden Briar, do you imagine becomes of the bastards born of such vile indulgences?’
Arden frowned, unease flickering in his eyes. ‘The women of the pleasure court take remedies to prevent pregnancy.’
