He doesn’t ask.
His hand finds my shoulder where he grips onto me. The movement pulls at the púca scratch on my arm, still raw, still burning low despite Kestra’s ice, but I don’t shift away. Some pains are worth carrying.
He’s warm. Not the ambient warmth of someone running exertion, but heat radiating through his shirt in a way that reads as fever.
“Thank—” he starts.
“Don’t.” The debt-system still lives in my head. “Don’t say it like that.”
A breath. Something that might be a laugh. “You’re right.”
We walk.
“Tell me something,” I say. Keeping him focused. Keeping him here.
“Like what.”
“Anything. Talk to me.”
A pause. Then, slowly, “The binding has a sound.” His voice is different already. Still Finnian, still precise, still the words chosen carefully, but something underneath that has loosened. “Low. Constant. I noticed it as I tried to fall asleep on the floor. Like tinnitus. Like living beside a river so long you stop hearing the water.”
I tighten my arm around him.
“I noticed it when I met you.” His weight is heavier now, leaning. “It changed. The sound. It shifted pitch when you were near, and I didn’t understand why for weeks.” A breath. “Now I do.”
“Finnian—”
“Amarantha.” The word comes out like something spat. Not his usual careful neutrality. The venom is working and a fucked up part of me hopes he keeps talking. “She knew. She had to have known. The way she watched me with you, that particular expression she wears when she’s found a pressure point.” He stumbles and I catch him. “I’m sorry. I know you?—”
“It’s fine. Keep talking.”
“She made me—” He stops. Something working in his throat. “The things she made me see. The floor. You saw me on the floor, Ash. You saw?—”
“I know.”
“I was on the floor and I thought—” His voice has cracked. Open. Wrong in the way deeply private things are wrong when they come out without permission. “I thought if I could just survive until you…if I could just…she kept saying you weren’t coming. She kept saying you’d agreed to the Unseelie terms, that you were safe, that you’d simply decided?—”
“I didn’t decide anything.” My voice comes out harder than I mean. “I was trying to keep Kieran alive.”
Because he has the Spear,is what I don’t say. Does he even know?
“I know.” A pause. “I know that now. Then I just—” He exhales. “I believed her. And that’s the part I can’t—” His hand tightens on my shoulder. “That’s the part I can’t find the edges of. That I believed her over you.”
The forest moves around us. Kestra is still ahead. Still moving.
Finnian is burning up.
“Every time you look at me.” The words come slower now. More effort behind each one, like he’s pushing through water. “I wonder if you see her. When you look at me. Whether you see what she made me or whether you see?—”
“Finnian.”
“I need to say it,” he rushes out, spittle flying. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “The venom is going to say it anyway and I would rather, I would rather you hear it from me. What’s left of me. Before it just starts?—”
“Then say it.”
A long breath.
“I loved you.” He says it the way you say something you’ve been not saying so long the shape of it has worn grooves. “Before Amarantha dropped her inheritance trap in that room. Before the trials. Before I understood what you were or what you’d mean to the courts. I loved you when you looked up at me in the dining hall and was tasting our foods for the first time.”
