Something in my chest tightened. “Thank you.”
Rydian rolled the map closed and handed it to Eirnan. “Send your scouts. We move at dawn.”
The meeting dissolved after that, everyone filtering out. Keres and Slade bickered their way toward the campfires. Daegel lingered just long enough to mutter something aboutrechecking our supplies. Thorne followed with a whistle that couldn’t quite mask his weariness.
Eirnan paused at the exit, meeting my gaze once more. “I am glad our paths have crossed again, my lady.”
“Is that why you traveled with the king?” I asked. “To find me?”
“It’s he who asked to travel with us.”
“And why did you?” I asked.
“He vowed to be a better king than his father.”
“And has he been?” I asked. “So far, I mean.”
“The donations ended. The centers are closed.” His eyes sparkled with grief and hope. “It’s a start.”
“It’s a start,” I agreed, surprised and relieved to hear Callan had done so.
He dipped his chin. “We have you to thank for it all. You’ll have our blades, my lady. And whatever magic we have left.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rydian
Night settled over the Withered camp like a slow bruise. The air was colder here than it should have been, even this far north, thin with frost and laced with a magic that was all wrong for the autumn kingdom. Beyond the trees, the river whispered as the current ran—a sound I was beginning to hate after our visit with Patamoi. Or maybe it wasn’t the river’s whispers but the voices in my own head that tortured me now.
Every time I closed my eyes, I sawherstanding before me, flames burning beneath her skin like defiance given form. And every time she looked at me, there was a question in her eyes that I was terrified of having to answer.
I sat alone by the dying fire, Callan’s map unrolled across my knees. My mind should have been on strategy—on Heliconia’s army, on the tunnels Eirnan promised would get us into the Concordian war camp—but every thought circled back to Aurelia.
To the way she’d disappeared inside Callan’s tent. To the private moments they’d shared. To the moment she said she didn’t know if he’d accept Heliconia’s offer.
Would she care if Callan married another?
The thought made something inside me snap taut, irrational and sharp. I told myself it was worry. It wasn’t.
By the time I realized I’d stood, my feet were already moving.
The camp was quiet, the Withered sleeping in tents pitched in uneven rows. Their campfires were nothing but embers now, a symbol of the powerful fae they’d once been. I moved through them like a ghost, following the tug in my chest I’d long since stopped pretending to understand.
I found her at the edge of the clearing. She stood on a rise above the camp, the wind teasing strands of her hair free of its braid. The moonlight turned her into something almost divine—half sunlit honey, half frost, all untouchable.
“You should be asleep,” she said without turning.
“So should you,” I answered.
Her shoulders tensed, then eased. “You’re restless to get moving again too.”
“Something like that.”
Silence stretched between us, filled with the soft creak of branches and the faint hum of her power beneath her skin. I could feel it even from here—warmth against the cold, life against the ruin of this place.
She finally looked at me. “What is it?”
“Callan.”
