I know. The Summer Sword serves the throne, the queen. The legitimate throne. Tatiana was grooming an heir, Kestra told me that much. And Amarantha took the crown by conquest, not blood.
“You’re Tatiana’s heir.” The words come out flat. I should have put two and two together when I met her in the walls. But too much happened too fast. “The binding doesn’t serve Amarantha. It serves the true queen, the one she stole from.”
Tiana’s expression doesn’t change. “Thirty years I’ve been waiting for someone to put that together without being told.”
“I’m a fast reader.”
“I noticed.” She extends her hand. “Help me take back what’s mine. First act as queen, I break your chains at the root. Youractual choice. Eyes open. You can choose, the Summer Sword, or?—”
I look at Ash, it’s not hard to understand what she means byor. Ashlynne. And she is my future, my choice.
I take her hand.
The magic is clean. Sharp and honest, nothing like glamour’s warmth, no warmth at all, just a bite of truth that says this is real, this is yours, you chose this. The debt mark burns across my inner wrist and I watch it form.
Underneath the sting, something I have to sit with for a moment before I can name it.
Not relief exactly.
The specific feeling of wanting something and knowing the want is mine.
I didn’t know I’d been missing it until it came back.
Tiana returns to Kestra without ceremony. She doesn’t wait for my gratitude. She’s not doing this for my gratitude.
That, more than anything, tells me I chose correctly.
I cross the chamber.
Ash faces the wall. I lower myself beside her. Not touching. Close enough that I could, if either of us were the kind of people who did that without permission.
We’re not. We’ve never been.
The hollow breathes around us. The bioluminescent growth pulses slow and patient, indifferent to the specific disaster of two people sitting in the dark not talking about it.
I close my eyes.
At some point her breathing evens out. I don’t mark the exact moment, that feels like something I’m not allowed to have yet, but I notice when it happens. The way you notice when a sound you’ve been bracing against stops.
This is the most unguarded I’ve seen her.
I don’t look at it too long. That also feels like something I haven’t earned.
Outside, something screams in the dark. Far enough to be safe. Close enough to remind us what’s waiting.
The debt mark burns faintly on my wrist. But this debt is in my favor.
19
Ash
“I know why you’re here.”
Power pulses just under the surface. Like the hum from a transformer.
I’m in the same spot I was with Vanessa. In the bar. Only it’s Pepper’s bar.
It’s always been her bar. And right now she’s standing behind it, her arms wide, those steel grey eyes unforgiving and cold.
