He exhaled, the sound dry and worn at the edges. “If there is, no one’s told me. It comes when it wants. Shows what it wants.”
After a moment, she said, “That’s a shame. Could’ve made things easier.”
Mathias let out a dry breath of a laugh. “Would’ve made a lot of things a lot easier.”
“I meant for you.”
She shifted beside him, not touching, but close enough that he felt the shape of her warmth against his shoulder – not her, exactly, but the space she took up in the cold.
“Oh. Yeah. Me too.”
That pulled something close to a smile from her, brief and sharp. The wind shifted. The moment loosened.
She was quiet for a while after that, gaze drifting back to the sky. Then, softly – almost like she was speaking to the stars, not him – she said, “I know something about people only seeing what they think should be there.”
Mathias turned but didn’t interrupt.
“They used to look at me and expect to see fire. Said it would come with time.” Her mouth pulled to the side – not quite a smile, just something crooked and bitter that didn’t last. “And when it didn’t, they looked again—and all they saw was the absence of it. As if the lack made me smaller. As if that was the only measure that ever mattered. Turns out, even the right blood isn’t enough when it runs quiet.”
She didn’t look at him when she spoke next. “You’re hoping keeping me here will change something.”
Mathias didn’t answer, but she wasn’t expecting him to.
“For the war. For your town. Maybe even the whole cursed continent, if you’re feeling ambitious.” Her tone was almost careless, but there was steel under it – not cruel, just tired. “You’re betting a lot on someone who couldn’t even master her own birthright.”
Her words lingered, settling into the space between them like ash—the kind that clings long after the fire’s gone. Wind scraped along the stones at their backs, pulling their warmth from them. Somewhere behind the cloudbank, the moon had begun to rise, pale and misshapen. She didn’t shift again, didn’t pull away. Just sat there beside him, quiet now, the weight of expectation and consequence pressed into the space they shared.
“General…” Mathias started, not really sure what he was about to say but determined to say it nonetheless.
“Ara,” she said, before he could finish. “You should call me Ara.”
The name fell into the shadows like something placed, not given – deliberate, unadorned. Mathias held it for a moment, then nodded once, slow.
“Ara.”
Behind them, just beyond the broken threshold of the temple, Maeve stood without sound. Her face was unreadable in the dark, the wind tugging at the edge of her sleeves. She hadn’t meant to linger. But when their voices had carried – low, stripped of performance – somethingin her had stilled. She remained there long after they fell silent, her gaze fixed, her fingers curling slowly around the pearl hilt hidden deep in her pocket.
Each day she had tended the soldier—seen the mark, heard her voice, watched the way she moved through pain with the control of someone who’d had to learn it early. And each day, the sharp end of certainty crept closer. It wasn’t fear that held Maeve back, but the knowledge that if she spoke too soon – if she was wrong – the cost would be immeasurable. So, she waited, still as the stone beneath her feet, the weight of the dagger grounding her hand, the truth not yet ready to be spoken aloud.
Chapter Twenty-One: Frejara
The days no longer pressed so hard at the edges. They passed, not easily, but without the constant bristle of teeth. I still woke to the sea breeze clawing through the beams and the ache of half-healed wounds pulling at my skin – but something in me had loosened. Not stilled, not softened, just uncoiled enough that I no longer spent each hour scanning for a way out. The maps I kept in my head—of exits, of weaknesses, of the possible arc of a blade through the dark—had begun to blur.
I still watched Mathias, still measured the space between us when he approached, but sometimes my attention drifted, unguarded. And Maeve, with her broth-scented hair and the careful hands of someone used to tending what’s broken, no longer felt like a threat masked as care. I caught myself listening to her muttering as if it were familiar – and that, somehow, disturbed me more than the rope ever had.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise he’d stopped tying my hands. The door still locked each night, the bolt drawn with that same careful scrape, but the binds were gone. And whereas the ropestill sat there, twined neatly by the satchel near the archway out, it was now left untouched in a way that felt purposeful rather than forgotten. At first, I thought he’d meant to return for them and simply hadn’t. But the second night passed the same, and the third. And by the fourth, I lay there long after the fire had burned down to embers, staring at the dark beams overhead and thinking not of the missing rope, but of the choice behind its absence.
When I finally asked—half curious, half trying to catch him in whatever game he thought he was playing—he didn’t answer right away. Just glanced toward the fire, then back to me, and asked, “Where would you go?”
It wasn’t unkind, nor was it to corner me. It was just a simple question, dropped into the space between us like a stone into water. And I found I didn’t know. Not because the paths weren’t there – they were – but because none of them led anywhere I could walk without him. The cliffs offered no passage. The marshes beyond were crawling with eyes that dreamed of my head on a spike. And the townsfolk would not skip a beat dragging me to the gallows if they thought that whatever covenant Mathias and I had was broken. That was the truth of it – sharp as a knife and lodged just as deep.
He spoke like someone with no use for performance. Each word was offered with care, never more than he meant, but never less either. Over time, I began to test them less – not because I’d grown complacent, but because I couldn’t find the cracks. His answers were always the same shape as his actions, and there was something in that steadiness that pulled more from me than I intended to give. I found myself speaking of things I hadn’t thought about in years—the weight of a command banner in the wind, the sound of boots sinking into the floodplains of the Ironvein River—and didn’t pull back when he listened.
We sat nearer now; the distance between us had thinned, and though no word passed about it, neither of us moved to reclaim the gap.Sometimes it happened by the fire, when one of us shifted and our arms brushed together in passing; other times on the broken steps at the back of the temple, where we sat with the dawn creeping over the sea and the warmth of the light caressed our skin. The air between us had changed – not charged, not tender, just quietly altered – and I began to notice the small things more keenly: the sound of his breath in the cold, how the weight of him shifted when he leaned forward, the rough brush of his hand against my arm when a gust sent a scatter of ash through the room, his fingers at my sleeve for a beat longer than needed, and I didn’t draw away.
And Maeve. Maeve came each day with the same deliberate calm, a bowl of water balanced in one hand, the sharp, clean scent of herbs trailing after her. She examined the bruising where the branch had struck, her fingers firm but careful, as she cleaned the raw skin around my wrists with practised ease. She asked whether the dizziness had passed, whether the ache behind my eyes still came and went, and I found myself answering. I’d memorised the rhythm of her hands by then—the sure way she folded the linen, the press of balm smoothed in slow circles across my skin.
One morning—impossible to tell which, as I had already stopped trying to count how many had passed—she adjusted the collar of my shirt to check for bruising along my upper back, and her fingers paused. Not for long, but long enough. Her hand remained there, resting lightly against the edge of my shoulder, while her gaze fixed on the skin right underneath it. I could feel the intent in the way she traced the lines with her eyes as if trying to place them against something she had once known. She didn’t look at my face, just lowered the fabric again with that same quiet precision, then reached for the bowl as though nothing had changed. But I had felt the shift – subtle, measured, and unmistakable – and for the rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way her hand had stilled.
