Just the specific true thing, delivered the way Ash delivers everything,directly, without ceremony, like facts are the only kindness worth offering.
I needed to hear those words out of her mouth.
“Neither did you.” The words come out before I’ve decided to say them. Before Ash allows any guilt on her shoulders over what happened to me. “About Amarantha. About what she had over me. She kept that binding in her back pocket for thirty years.” My feet find the path. “That’s how she works. Stacks favors, stacking debts, stacking the odds.”
She’s quiet.
“You walked into that room without knowing what she had on me. What she could do.” The truth of it sits between us, ugly and specific. “That’s not on you. We’ve all been manipulated.”
She doesn’t answer.
I’m not asking for anything. I just needed her to know that I know.
We keep walking.
Not level. Half a step behind.
It’s the most honest distance we’ve managed.
Something moves in the trees to our right. It pauses and turns, a head full of too many eyes looks at us. And the moss on the nearest trunk goes dark, all at once, like a held breath.
We freeze.
Kestra holds up a fist. Nobody breathes.
Forty seconds. Sixty. The thing turns its too-many eyes away and keeps moving, and the moss comes back slow, pulse by pulse, blue-green and patient.
“Keep moving,” Kestra says. “Don’t run. We’re here.”
Kestra’s shelter is a tree where the base is larger than a castle tower. And deeper than an oubliette.
The entrance is hidden behind hanging moss. We slip through one at a time into a root hollow larger than it has any right to be. Bioluminescent growth covers the curved walls, pulsing soft blue-green. The air smells of deep earth and living things growing in the dark. Wild Court magic clings to every surface, dormant, but present.
It responds to Ash when she enters.
The moss brightens. Fractionally. The roots shift with a sound like a slow exhale, making room, the way a house settles when someone it recognizes comes home.
She doesn’t notice.
She moves to the far corner where the growth is thickest and lies down on the soft earth, curling into herself with theparticular economy of someone who has learned to take up exactly as much space as necessary and no more.
Processing. I know the difference with her. The stillness that isn’t rest.
Kestra and Tiana settle near the entrance. The shorthand between them is old, the way they position without speaking, dividing the watch between them without needing to discuss it.
I sit against the curved wall.
I reach for an academic word for how I’m feeling. There isn’t one. I reach for the precise clinical term, the correct scholarly register, the language that has gotten me through three centuries of things I didn’t know how to survive.
Hollowed out. That’s what I land on. Not a scholar’s word. Just the true one. Like something has been removed that I didn’t know I was still carrying.
I look at my hands. Steady now. Lined with scars of failed experiments and callouses where they bled.
Footsteps, light and deliberate, creep closer to me.
Tiana settles beside me.
“The Summer Sword serves the Seelie Queen,” she says.
