I know what I’m protecting now. That changes the math. All of it.
“You good?” Ash falls back as we walk toward the tavern.
“Thoughtful.”
“Penny for your thoughts?”
“I know that saying.” I do not, in fact, know the saying.
Ahead, Finnian turns around with a smirk. He knows I don’t know, the bastard.
“Oh, oh!” Ash smacks my arm. “I cannot believe I forgot. With everything happening it completely left my brain until right now. This very minute.”
She’s beautiful when she rambles.
“What did you forget?”
She reaches into her pants, my pants, and pulls out a stone.
I stop breathing.
She has absolutely no idea what she’s holding. I can tell by the way she’s turning it over with the mild curiosity of someone who found an interesting rock on a walk and isn’t sure if it’s worth keeping.
I was twelve years old. I stood in the corridor with my hands at my sides and my face arranged into the careful blankness my father had spent years teaching me, and I watched him hand my mother’s stone to a woman who would spend the next three centuries using it to murder her people.
I said nothing.
I have never stopped saying nothing about that moment. It became the floor of everything else I built. The first lesson. The thing that taught me that obedience was the only currency I had.
And this woman, who punched a god, murdered her handler, and took three men inside her on a bed of moss, picked it up from my closet floor like loose change and forgot about it because she had bigger things to do.
Something between a laugh and a breath escapes me. Of course she did.
“Ash.” Everyone around us pauses. We are just outside the tavern. The sun beats down. She still has no idea. “Where did you get that?”
She turns it in her palm. The Stone pulses. Responding to her thorns. To the three bonds blazing at her wrist. To the blood it’s been waiting for since before she was born.
“Your closet.” She blinks at me. “What the fuck even is it?”
“That was my mother’s.”
“Mab.” Ash squints at it like she’s deciding whether to be impressed.
The Stone of Fál. In her hand. In my trousers.
“The Stone of Destiny.” Finnian laughs, reaching for it. She hands it over. He examines it the way he examines everything that matters. Head tilted, thumb tracing the edge, his pupils blown wide enough to swallow the amber. “How long have you had this?”
“Since we fled the castle.” Ash sets a hand on her hip. “It felt significant. I kept it.”
Orion whistles low. “You just carried the Stone of Fál in your pocket for weeks.”
“I didn’t know what it was.”
“Amarantha had the stone.” Ash frowns. Her eyes do that thing, the sweep that isn’t a sweep, the one that starts at my mouth and ends back at my eyes in under a second. She finds whatever she was looking for. Her frown deepens.
“She did.” Tiana walks out of the tavern. Glances at the stone. “I stole it.”
We all look at her.
