No. I forced myself upright. I needed Nyara. Nyara would know what to do, would know how to reach Junis, and Junis could take me back. I could not do this without Colsar.
I needed him. If something was wrong?—
My breath caught, the thought cutting off before I could finish it. I would not survive it. And neither would anyone in Veynar who had even a hand in it. Colsar would destroy them before I ever had the chance, and part of me wondered if that was already what he was doing now. I hoped Maridale had delivered my message. I needed to get to him.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood, slower this time, steady enough to stay upright. I moved toward my clothes, reaching for them, for my cloak, each step taking more effort than it should have. One step. Then another. The room tilted before I could adjust. The edges blurred. The darkness came too fast, and everything went black.
CHAPTER 5
The Admission
“I’m starting to regret ever saving you,” he said, his voice cutting through the last remnants of sleep. “You’re clearly determined to kill yourself. I should’ve saved myself the effort.”
My eyes were still closed, but I managed, “Fuck you,” before forcing them open. The world came back wrong. I couldn’t understand why my body felt so light, why there was nothing beneath me, why the air seemed to move around me instead of past me. Then the realization struck all at once and my breath caught as I looked down and saw nothing beneath me at all.
I was suspended in the air. “Put me down.”
“A thank you would be nice,” Teorin muttered, as though this were nothing more than an inconvenience.
The air shifted around me as he lowered me back onto the bed, slow and controlled, the mattress rising to meet me in a way that felt almost unreal after the absence of it. I braced my hands against it instinctively, grounding myself before I could think too much about what he had just done.
A tray had been set beside me. “Eat your replacement meal, Ashen,” he said. “We have places to be, and clearly without food you’re going to pass out.”
My hands were still trembling, but I reached for the bowl anyway, the weakness in my arms making the motion slower than it should have been. The smell was different this time, not the sour rot of Fraisah but something milder, something I could tolerate if I forced myself not to think too much about it.
“Do you need help?” he asked, quieter now.
“No.” I steadied the bowl and lifted the spoon, forcing myself to eat even as my grip threatened to give way. It took effort to keep it from spilling, more effort to swallow, but I kept going, one slow movement after another until the worst of the shaking eased.
When I finally looked up, the breath I had just taken caught in my throat.
He did not look like the man I had met in the forest.
His eyes were not the usual dark, but something else entirely. The color had vanished, replaced by a depth of black so complete it swallowed the shape of his pupils, leaving nothing behind but a surface that gave no sense of where he was looking or what he was thinking. It was the black they had been when he yelled at the weaver, or when he fought. Never for a normal conversation. This was...different.
Gone were the plain clothes. What he wore now was chosen to be seen. But none of that held me the way the circlet did. It rested against his head as though it had never been absent, as though everything I had seen before had been something less than the truth.
“Why do you look like this?” I asked, the words quieter than I intended. Something tightened in my chest, a mix of confusion and something that felt too close to betrayal to ignore. “Who the fuck are you?” I said, more firmly now, setting the bowl aside before my hands could betray me again. “I’m tired of this. Tell me the truth.”
He exhaled, and whatever sat behind his expression pulled further away instead of forward. “That’s exactly what I’m here to do.”
The difference in him was unmistakable. Not just in how he looked, but in how he sounded, in the way the words came from him without the roughness I had come to expect. He did not sound like Arven. He sounded like someone else entirely.
“Why are your eyes like that?” I asked.
“Like what?” he said. “The way they’re supposed to be?”
He let out a short, humorless laugh that didn’t reach anything else about him.
“I simply glamoured myself,” he continued, as though explaining something obvious. “The same way you did when you went to the tavern at night so your golden eyes wouldn't make others feel uncomfortable.”
There was a faint edge to the word, like he was testing whether I would deny it.
“This is who I truly am, Ashen.” His voice had changed again. Colder now. Removed in a way that made it feel like he had stepped further away rather than closer. “My mother was the sister of the Thren King.” He paused, just long enough for theweight of it to settle. “She was also the wife of the former King of Veynar.”
“Under Thren law, not Veynar law,” I said, the words coming easily, pulled from something Colsar had told me once.
Something moved in Teorin’s face then, brief and contained, as though he had almost reacted before deciding not to. “None of that is what’s important,” he said after a moment. “Or relevant.”
