I take the blade. Our fingers brush. He doesn’t linger, but he doesn’t pull away either.
“Kieran—”
“Later.” His eyes meet mine, and for just a second the ice cracks and I see something underneath. Not anger. Not jealousy. Something older and quieter—the look of a man who has already made his peace with sharing and is choosing to prove it through action rather than words. “We survive this first.”
I nod. File it somewhere I can examine later, when arrows aren’t trying to find my spine.
The forest has gone quiet in the wrong way. Not peaceful. Waiting.
Then Kestra’s voice cuts through the trees: “DON’T SHOOT. ASH, TELL THEM NOT TO SHOOT.”
I’m running before I process the words, Kieran half a step behind me, Finnian covering our flank. The blade feels good in my hand—familiar in a way that probably says something unflattering about my psychology.
We burst into the hollow to find Kestra standing between our group and a ring of armed figures, her arms spread wide, her face desperate in a way I’ve never seen from her.
“Please.” She’s not talking to the figures. She’s talking to me. “Please don’t attack them.”
Orion has his fire ready, orange light licking up his forearms. Tiana is crouched low, hands full of shadows she borrowed from somewhere or someone. The armed figures—eight, no, ten of them—have bows drawn and blades raised and every weapon is pointed at Kieran.
Not me. Not Orion. Not even Finnian with his Seelie gold still flickering at his fingertips.
Kieran.
“This is not going well,” I say.
“Stand down.” Kestra’s voice has shifted—harder now, commanding, the princess showing through the spy. “All of you. Now.”
Nobody moves.
I have seconds before someone does something stupid.
“Kieran.” I don’t look at him. “Lower the Spear.”
The silence stretches.
“Kieran.”
“They’re aiming at my chest.”
“And you have approximately three seconds before I make that your smallest problem.” I step forward, putting myself between him and the arrows. Stupid. Definitely stupid. But it gets the reaction I want—his Spear lowers, just an inch, just enough.
I look at Kestra. “Talk fast.”
“They live here.” She’s breathing hard, unshed tears in her eyes, and Kestra doesn’t cry. Ever. “They’ve lived here for decades. Since before I was born. They know every path, every danger, every safe passage through the forest.”
“And they want to kill your brother because...?”
“Because his father drove them here.” A new voice—low, rough, belonging to the man stepping through the ring of armed figures. He’s tall, broad, Unseelie in the way shadow clings to him like a second skin. But there’s something else there, too. Something wilder. The forest has gotten into him the way it gets into things that stay too long.
His eyes find Kestra and stay there.
Oh.
“Jadeve.” She says his name like a prayer. Like an apology. Like something she’s been holding in her mouth for years and finally gets to taste again.
He crosses to her in three strides, and his people part around him like water, and when he reaches her his hand cups her face with a gentleness that doesn’t match his size or his scars or the violence still humming in the air around us.
“You came back,” he says.
