“Solian is precocious. Age is irrelevant.”
“You left that book there on purpose.”
The smile didn’t waver. “The placement was coincidental.”
“You are cultivating a tiny version of yourself.”
Lucian descended the main staircase into the courtyard. The king of Veyndral, dressed in council attire, obsidian crown catching the fading light, looking every inch the ruler of an ancient kingdom. Mireille saw him and launched herself off the wall without warning.
My heart stopped.
Lucian caught her, opened his arms mid-step and absorbed his daughter’s free fall as though it was their routine. Mireille wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her apple-sticky face to his cheek.
“Papa, I sat on the wall but Mama said get down.”
“Mama is correct.”
“But you said...”
“I said you could sit on the bench. The wall is not the bench.”
“It’s a tall bench.”
Lucian looked at me over Mireille’s copper head. I raised an eyebrow. He raised one back. Our daughter, balanced on his hip, watched the exchange with the focused interest of a child who was learning, very early, exactly how to play her parents against each other.
“She gets that from you,” Lucian said.
“She gets the climbing from you.”
He crossed the courtyard and kissed me. Brief, possessive, the automatic gesture of a man who’d been waiting for me to come home and marked my return the same way every time.
The bond vibrated between all four of us: Lucian’s steady gold, Solomon’s silver current, Percy’s warm amber. And mine, copper-threaded and wolf-bright, woven through theirs.
The evening gathered around us. Dinner was a catastrophe.
Mireille refused anything green. Solian ate in silence while studying the table’s grain pattern. Percius fed half his plate to Nox under the table and thought no one noticed. Percy burned the pancakes and I ate them with genuine pleasure while Lucian watched with an expression of aristocratic suffering.
After, when the children were in bed, Mireille’s hand in Lucian’s, Percius sprawled across Nox’s back, Solian already asleep withEdgar the Third perched on his headboard, the four of us stood on the balcony where I’d been crowned.
The kingdom spread before us, torches dotting the streets, wolves running the forest perimeter, the eternal hum of a civilization that had existed for a thousand years in isolation.
“The council approved the resolution today,” Lucian said.
I looked at him. Solomon’s posture shifted beside me. Percy leaned forward on the railing.
“Veyndral will open its borders,” Lucian continued. “Formally. To Lytopia and the allied kingdoms. To the human world. Trade, diplomacy, cultural exchange. The isolation ends.”
A thousand years.
A kingdom built by refugees who’d hidden from a world that hunted them, protected by mountains and mist and stubborn independence that separation meant safety.
Now, because of a war that had exposed the cost of that separation, a cure that had healed the damage, and a human woman who’d walked through a portal and refused to let two worlds stay divided, the doors were opening.
“Scared?” Percy asked.
“Terrified,” Lucian admitted. “But it’s time.”
Solomon said nothing. His hand found mine on the railing, squeezing once.
