The corridors were empty at this hour, lit only by occasional torches that threw dancing shadows against the stone walls. Her bare feet made no sound as she wandered, following some instinct she couldn’t name. Past the great hall, still and silent. Past the kitchens, where the banked fires sent warmth curling under the door. And up a narrow spiral staircase she hadn’t explored before.
She emerged onto the battlements and stopped short.
Gareth stood at the wall’s edge, his back to her, staring out across the moonlit landscape. He wore only a thin shirt and breeches, as if he’d left his chamber in haste, and his dark hair hung loose around his shoulders.
He didn’t turn at her approach, but she saw his shoulders tense slightly. He knew she was there.
“May I join you? I mean, if you’d rather be alone, I completely understand. I can just—I’ll go back to my chamber and stare at the ceiling some more. It’s riveting, truly. I’ve memorized every crack in the plaster, which is quite an achievement considering there’s no plaster, it’s all stone, so technically I’ve memorized every crack in the mortar, which is—” She caught herself. “Sorry. I’m doing the thing again, aren’t I? The rambling thing. Feel free to wave me off.”
He turned and regarded her for a moment, his pale eyes unreadable in the moonlight. Then he inclined his head toward the space beside him. An invitation.
Elodie moved to stand at the wall, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from him despite the cool night air. For several moments, neither of them moved. The wind whispered across the moors, carrying the distant cry of a night bird.
“Can’t sleep either, I take it?” she said, then immediately winced. “Obvious question. Sorry. Of course you can’t sleep, you’re standing on the battlements at—what time is it even? There’s no time, is there? I mean, there is time, obviously, time exists, but there are no clocks, no watches, no—” She pressed her lips together. “I’ll stop now.”
In the moonlight, she caught a ghost of something that might have been amusement cross his face. His hands moved in response, the gestures silver-edged in the darkness.I do not sleep much. Not anymore.
“Since...” She hesitated, then touched her own throat—a gesture toward the scar she’d glimpsed beneath his collar. “Since that happened?”
His jaw tightened. His hands lifted again, slower this time.Since before that. Since I came here.
Three years. Three years of sleepless nights, standing on these battlements, watching Dunharrow Keep in the distance like a man guarding against an enemy he couldn’t fight. The thought made her chest ache.
“What was it like?” she asked softly. “Before. You don’t have to tell me—God, you absolutely don’t have to tell me anything, I’m just being nosy, it’s a character flaw, one of many, and I have this terrible habit of asking questions I’ve no right to ask, so please feel free to ignore me entirely?—”
He held up a hand, cutting off her flood of words. Then, deliberately, he stepped closer so she could see his hands more clearly in the moonlight.
I was young,he signed.Ambitious. I believed...
His hands paused. She watched him draw a breath, watched his fingers curl once, twice—as if testing whether he had the strength to form the words.
I believed if I served well,he continued,if I was loyal, I would be rewarded. Protected.
“And you weren’t.”
I was a fool.The bitterness in the gesture was unmistakable.I gave everything to a man I looked up to, one who saw me as nothing. A tool. A weapon to be used and discarded when it became... inconvenient.
He stopped, his hands falling to his sides. Drew another breath. And only then did he turn to look at her directly—those pale eyes like winter frost in the moonlight, waiting for her reaction like a man awaiting a verdict.
Elodie felt the weight of his words settle into her bones. She understood that kind of betrayal—not at the same scale, not with the same violence, but the fundamental wound was familiar. The discovery that your trust had been misplaced. That the people you thought valued you saw nothing at all.
“I know something about that,” she said quietly. “Being dismissed. Being... unseen. Not the violence, obviously, cheese and crackers, I’m not comparing what happened to you to—it’s just, the underlying thing, the betrayal part, the realizing that people you trusted didn’t actually...” She trailed off, staring out at the dark moors. “Sorry. I’m making this about me, and it’s not about me. This is your trauma, and I’m over here hijacking it with my comparatively pathetic academic woes?—”
He moved. Not toward her, exactly, but into her line of sight, demanding her attention. When she looked at him, his hands were already moving.
Tell me.
“It’s stupid.”
Pain is not stupid.
She laughed—a brittle sound that surprised her. “Right. Yes. Well.” She pulled the blanket tighter, armor against the night and the vulnerability threatening to crack her open. “Five years ago, I wrote a paper. An academic paper for my doctorate. It was about fairy folklore—the archaeological evidence for it, the material culture of belief. I was trying to bridge disciplines, you see, to show how people’s inner lives shape the things they leave behind. Pattern recognition across multiple fields. It was ambitious. Probably too ambitious.”
She was talking faster now, the words tumbling out the way they always did when she was nervous, when she was scared, when she was standing on a medieval battlement telling her deepest shame to a man who communicated in silence.
“I called it ‘The Fae Paper.’ Catchy, I thought. Memorable. Turns out it was memorable, all right. Just not in the way I intended.” She gripped the parapet, the stone rough against her palms. “They laughed at me. My colleagues, my professors, grant committees—everyone. Called me ‘the fairy girl.’ Still do, actually. Five years on, and I still can’t walk into a conference without someone making a joke about pixie dust.”
She felt her throat tightening and forced herself to keep talking, because if she stopped talking she might cry, and that was absolutely not happening.
