And I couldn’t go to her.
My face was known. Thiago had confirmed it back in Ashvale.
I was a king. I’d commanded armies, navigated centuries of politics, held a kingdom together through wars that should have ended it. None of that training had prepared me for helplessness.
The raven clicked again. Softer this time.
I looked at the bird. The bird looked at me. Its amber eyes held steady, unblinking, and for a moment the two of us sat in a silence that felt less hostile than usual.
“You can get in there,” I said.
The raven tilted its head.
“You’re a bird. You fly. Walls don’t apply to you.” I was talking to an animal and I was aware of how far I’d fallen. “Her window is on the second floor, east side. Percy confirmed the position.”
The raven’s feathers ruffled. Interest or irritation. Difficult to distinguish with this particular creature.
I stood. Crossed to where Giselle had stashed the supply packs and pulled out the items I’d been carrying since Veyndral. Things I’d packed in the quiet of my quarters.
A sprig of Glowwood moss, sealed in a cloth wrap to preserve the bioluminescence. It grew in the forest north of the palace, pulsing blue-green in the cold months. I’d cut it from the trail where I used to walk when the council sessions ran long and the crown sat too heavily on my skull.
The trail I’d imagined showing her someday, when all of this was over and the portal was stable and she didn’t hate me.
A small pouch of ground herbs. Compounds from Farmon’s medical stores, blended for bond deterioration. Percy had described her symptoms: the nausea, the shaking hands, the weight loss. The muted bond was eating her alive from the inside. These wouldn’t fix it, nothing short of restoring the bond could fix it, but they’d slow the damage.
And a note. My handwriting, formal, because five centuries of penmanship training didn’t switch off even when writing to the woman I’d destroyed.
‘This grows in the forest where I will take you when this is over. The moss glows brighter in winter.’ - L
I’d written six versions, burned five. This one survived because it was the only version that didn’t beg, and she deserved better than begging on paper.
I bundled it all into a cloth wrap small enough for the raven to carry. Tied it to the bird’s leg with a leather cord. The raven tolerated the process.
“Her window. East side, second floor. You tap until she opens.” I held the bird’s gaze. “You don’t let anyone else see you. You don’t record anything for anyone but me. And if you lose that package, I will personally pluck every feather from your body and stuff a pillow with them.”
The raven squawked. Launched from my arm with a force that left talon marks through my sleeve. It banked east and disappeared over the tree line toward the compound.
I sat back down. Alone in the forest, hands on my knees.
Five centuries. In five centuries of ruling, I had never once sent a bird to do what I couldn’t do myself. The king doesn’t delegate his own survival.
But I was delegating my heart to a raven with an attitude problem because I couldn’t walk through that door myself. Not just because the compound would kill me. A king who abandons his post leaves a kingdom exposed, and an exposed kingdom means a council that votes to classify Mira as a threat.
My presence here protected her from one enemy. But my absence from Veyndral exposed her to another.
I could never be separated from the crown.
Yet beneath the duty I’d been hiding behind for centuries, sat the truth I couldn’t dress up in politics.
I was terrified she hated me.
Anger I could face. Anger meant she still cared enough to burn. But hatred was the flat silence of a woman who’d looked at what I offered and decided it wasn’t worth the cost. That fear lived in a place no enemy could reach.
Hunters could wound me. Silver could slow me. The council could strip my crown. But Mira looking at me with nothing in her eyes would end me faster than any weapon Thiago had engineered.
The guilt was more familiar. It lived in the space where the bond used to pulse, feeding on the memory of her face when I’d spoken the words that ended everything.
I’d chosen the rejection. The decision originated with me. A king’s calculation: sever the bond, protect the kingdom, contain the threat. The kind of decision I’d made a thousand times in council chambers and war rooms.
