The almost-bond pulses again. Warm. Same as always.
I reach for it the way I reach for the Cauldron.
This one’s still there. Small comfort. Better than nothing. I’ll take it.
I reach for the Cauldron anyway because I always reach for the Cauldron, even now, even after days of finding nothing. My hand moves before I catch it. Toward my chest. Toward the scar tissue. Toward the specific absence of something I’ve carried since I was a fledgling and didn’t understand the ways of the courts.
Kieran watches me do it. Doesn’t look away.
“Dagda took it clean?” he asks.
“No.” I drop my hand. “Clean would have been better.” I try to find the words for it and land on the only comparison that makes sense. “You know when you lose a tooth? As a child?”
A long pause. “I didn’t lose teeth the way you did.”
Right, Unseelie Court and Wild Court couldn’t possibly lose teeth the same way.
“The tongue keeps going back to the gap,” I say anyway. “Every time. Expecting the tooth. Finding nothing. Every time surprised.” I gesture at my chest. “Like that. Except the gap is the size of something I’ve carried for years and the surprise never stops.”
Kieran is quiet.
He’s quiet in a specific way, not the silence of someone with nothing to say but the silence of someone deciding whether to say the thing they have.
“My mother’s magic,” he says finally. “After she died. Moros had her chambers sealed. Everything of hers removed.” A pause. “I kept reaching for things that weren’t there. Scents. Sounds. The particular cold of her magic, which was nothing like my father’s cold.”
He says it like weather. Like it costs him nothing.
But he said it.
Four days in a Dark Forest and Kieran just handed me something true without anyone asking him to. I don’t know whatto do with that. I don’t make it a thing. I just take it and put it somewhere careful.
“Yeah,” I say. “Like that.”
We walk.
Whispen’s light has gone gold and quiet. He knows better. Either that or the forest has finally impressed upon him that some silences are load-bearing and breaking them has consequences.
The almost-bond pulses. Warm. Steady. The only thing in the last four days that hasn’t changed, hasn’t moved, hasn’t gotten smaller or further or harder to feel.
I don’t deserve it. That’s what I think at 3am when the Dark Forest makes its sounds and Kieran is a shadow on the other side of whatever temporary shelter Whispen finds us. I don’t deserve the thread of it because I was supposed to protect her and I watched them drag her away and did nothing. Champion of the Wild Court. Couldn’t keep one woman safe.
Couldn’t keep your people alive.
The thought arrives the way it always does. Not loud. Just permanent.
Then I see the centaur.
Or what’s left of one.
It’s at the tree line to my left, half-hidden by hanging moss. Old death, weeks, maybe more, the body claiming back into the earth the way Wild Court things do. But the markings on the flank are readable even now. I know those markings. I’ve seen them in the borderland registries. Wild Court outer guard. The ones who patrol the forest edges.
The ones I was supposed to coordinate with when I was still the Cauldron’s keeper.
Before I wasn’t.
I stop walking.
“Orion.” Kieran, behind me.
