“They have reason to help me.” Her voice is quiet. Certain. “And I’m asking.”
Something passes between them. Years of history I’m not privy to. Secrets Kestra kept even from her brother, and I understand now why she never talked about how she survived those years in the tower. She wasn’t just surviving. She was living a whole other life in the spaces between.
Jadeve exhales. Looks at his people. Nods once.
“We escort them,” he says. “Through the safe paths. No deviation, no delays, no contact with the deep forest dwellers.” His gaze settles on Kieran. “If he causes problems, we leave him for the trees.”
“Charming,” Kieran mutters.
I elbow him in the ribs.
“I appreciate you,” Kestra says, and the gratitude in her voice is raw enough that I have to look away.
Jadeve’s people begin to move, forming up around us in a protective formation that puts Kieran squarely in the center where they can watch him. Practical. Also pointed. I file it away and fall into step beside Kestra.
“You could have told me,” I say quietly.
“No.” She doesn’t look at me. “I couldn’t.”
There’s a story there. A long one, probably painful, definitely not something she’s going to share while we’re marching through a death forest with her secret lover’s militia.
I don’t push.
But I reach out and take her hand, and she lets me, and we walk like that for a while—two queens who don’t know how to be queens, holding onto each other because the alternative is falling apart.
“Wait,” I pause, looking all around us. “Where’s Whispen?”
26
Ash
No one knowswhere my soul keeper disappeared to.
The guys still look panicked over losing him. I laugh. They have no idea that the little demon does this. I assure them he’ll show up. Eventually.
Orion looked the most disturbed. I save the question for another time as I grab boots.
I don’t put them back on. It feels wrong to.
Each step on the soil does something I don’t have a word for yet. Not healing. More like remembering. Like the ground has been waiting and my feet finally showed up.
Jadeve’s people move around us like they belong to the forest. Because they do. The creatures that have been trying to eat us for days part for them like water.
The path through the Dark Forest is thin and we’ve been walking for a good hour. Quietly in line. Jadeve and Kestra at the front with multiple men between all of us. Behind them, Tiana. The four of us bring up the rear, no men behind us.
That was intentional.
Kieran and Finnian walk side by side, their heads bent together. Behind me, Orion’s warmth almost heats my back.
And as much as I want to turn toward it, I’m lost in my own head. The walk more meditative than I want it to be.
Sabina once told me that healing isn’t linear. That sometimes grief of who we were sneaks up sideways, steals your thoughts before you notice they’re gone.
I notice mine are gone when I’m already somewhere else.
My heel presses deep into the soil, toes between leaves, and the forest breathes out as I breathe in—the boundary between here and somewhere else going thin the way it does when the trial decides I haven’t suffered enough today.
“Duck!”Pepper shouts.
