“I prefer the orgy smell.” Orion chuckles. More to himself than anyone else.
“Comprehensive improvement.” Finnian sighs.
“We need to move,” I say. Not because I want to. Because it’s true.
“I know.” Ash doesn’t open her eyes as she lays on her back in the water, nipples pink in the sun. “I dreamt we need to get to the Academy tomorrow by nightfall.”
Not that is interesting. “Nightfall?—”
“I know.” She yawns, her jaw cracking. “Give me thirty more seconds.”
She can have thirty more minutes. I say nothing about this. I give her thirty more seconds.
The water moves around us. Orion breathes slow and even. Finnian watches the light. The forest holds its breath the way it does before something changes.
“Okay.” Ash stands. Water streams off her, off the thorn patterns, off the pink-silver hair plastered to her shoulders. She looks nothing like the woman who arrived at the Academy. She looks exactly likeherself. “Let’s go start a war.”
“Inspiring,” Orion says without moving.
“Get out of the water, Orion.”
“In a moment.”
“Now.”
“She sounds like you,” Finnian tells me.
“She’s more effective than me.” I stand. “Which is saying something.”
Orion gets out of the water.
I follow last. Slower than I should.
My reflection catches in the water and my father’s jaw looks back at me.
I hold it. Don’t flinch. Don’t swallow it. Don’t rebuild the mask before anyone notices.
You made me into something that could survive you,I think at the dissolving face.You didn’t account for what I’d do once I didn’t need to anymore.
The boy in the corridor is not who is standing here.
I know he’s expecting me to show up as the man I always was. The Fae he raised and knew. He doesn’t know me now.
My father has been silent. No summons. No shadow link. No spies that I’ve detected, and I have been thorough—not because he trained me to be, but because the people walking ahead of me deserve someone who’s paying attention. That distinction matters. It didn’t used to. It does now.
Months of silence from a man who once summoned me for breathing at an unapproved volume.
He’s decided something. He’s simply waiting for me to find out what.
I keep walking.
Ash fled his court. His response was sending men into a forest where he knew they’d die. Expendable. Performative. The kind of retaliation designed to be seen failing.
Which means the real move hasn’t come yet.
My father is always scheming. Even in sleep, even when it doesn’t look like it.
The people ahead of me deserve someone paying attention. Not someone drowning in anticipatory dread.
