I know this about her.
I know a lot of things about her that I have carefully, methodically, never said out loud.
I should let it stay quiet.
I am, by any reasonable measure, extremely good at letting things stay quiet. Three centuries of choosing precision over confession. The careful word over the honest one. The perfectly constructed sentence over the one that actually means something.
“Ash.” I step up beside her.
She doesn’t look at me. She does, however, marginally not increase her pace, which I’m choosing to interpret as an invitation.
“I need to tell you something.” I watch my feet find the path. “And I want to preface this by saying that I am aware this is terrible timing, and that I have rehearsed this conversation approximately forty times in the last few hours, and everyversion of it was more articulate than what’s about to come out of my mouth.”
Four steps.
She still isn’t looking at me. But she isn’t telling me to stop.
“After he said yes.” Four words. The most efficient demolition I’ve managed. “You deserve to know what that means.”
The forest breathes around us.
“My parents were executed when I was young.” The same register I use while teaching stubborn seventy-something-year-old Fae younglings. The only voice I have left that doesn’t shake. “Treason. Fabricated, I know that now, I knew it then, if I’m honest, which I’m trying to be currently, with varying success.” A branch moves ahead, Kestra redirecting us three degrees left without breaking stride. “Amarantha appeared at the pyre. Soft words. Softer magic. She was family, cousin, and she made herself the only safe thing in a very unsafe world.”
Ash says nothing.
I take that as permission to keep digging.
“She made her interest clear.” My voice stays steady through what I can only describe as an act of significant personal will. “I was young and grieving and she had engineered the isolation with what I can now recognize as considerable skill. And then she offered.”
“And you said yes.”
Her voice. Flat. Eyes forward.
“No.” Harder than I intend. “I said no. Explicitly. In complete sentences, which felt like the least I could do.” I watch the path. “I refused her bed. Her claim. I refused and then I?—”
“Finnian,” something calls my name from the left.
Not a creature. Not a dweller. A voice. It has the right cadence, the right warmth, the specific texture of someone who knew me before I knew what I was.
My mother’s voice.
I stop walking.
“Don’t.” Kestra’s hand on my arm. Immediate and firm. “It’s not her. Whatever you heard, it’s not her. The forest finds the thing you’d turn for. Don’t turn.”
My hands are not steady.
Ash doesn’t look back, but her pace slows. One beat. Two. Until we’re walking level again.
She heard something, too. I’d wager my entire archive on it. Whatever it called to her, she didn’t turn either.
Neither of us names it. We keep moving.
“Eyes forward,” Ash says. Quiet. Not to me specifically. To all of us. “Both things at once. The forest and the conversation.”
“Both,” I agree.
And somehow that’s how we keep going. Eyes up. Watching. Everything else still hanging in the air between us, unfinished, because the forest wants us distracted and we are refusing to be.
