Before I knew what you were.
“She ordered me to bond with you.” The words spill now, the walls fully down, the venom finding every crack and pulling. “That’s true. She wanted the intelligence, wanted the access, wanted a way in. And I went to you intending to do exactly what she asked because I didn’t know how not to. I had unknowingly been doing what she asked for years, I didn’t have another setting.” His breath shudders. “And then there you were. Ash, I was so undone by you.”
I keep us moving. One step. Another.
He stumbles hard. Both of us go sideways against a tree, his full weight coming down, and I take it.
“I’ve got you.”
“Don’t leave.” His voice has gone strange. Distant, like he’s hearing himself from underwater. “Please. When this is over, when the venom, please don’t?—”
The part of me that runs clocks the exit. Force of habit. Twenty-eight years of muscle memory pointing toward the door.
I don’t take it.
I don’t know what that means yet. But I don’t take it.
“There’s more.” He stumbles over the words. “I tortured Davis. With the same truth stone they used on you. Well, another piece of it.”
I grunt. Davis probably had it coming.
“I hold the crown,” he whispers.
This time I stop on the path, my jaw working open and closed.
“WATER.” Kestra’s voice shatters the moment and the questions building inside me. “I hear it. Fifty meters.”
“We’re almost there.” I get him moving again. His feet finding the pattern, muscle memory carrying what his mind can’t right now. “Fifty meters. Walk with me.”
“Don’t leave me.” He’s burning up. His hand comes up to my jaw, palm flat against my cheek, fever-hot. His eyes find my face and they’re amber and ruined and terrifyingly open. “Please. Don’t?—”
“I’m here.” I keep us moving. One step. Another. The sound of water getting louder. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I mean it.
That’s the part that gets me.
The part of me that runs is still there. I can feel it in my legs, the old readiness, twenty-eight years of knowing exactly how to make myself light and mobile and gone.
I feel it.
I keep walking toward the water anyway.
Pepper’s voice somewhere in the back of my head,I stopped leaving the light on for you a long time ago—
I know.
I mean it anyway.
23
Ash
The grotto finds us.
That’s what it feels like, not that Kestra leads us to it, but that the forest decides we’ve earned it and moves aside. The path opens through a curtain of hanging moss and there it is. A waterfall falling into a natural pool, the rocks around it thick with bioluminescent growth, every surface breathing soft blue-green light.
Wild Court magic. Old and ambient and completely indifferent to courts or politics or anything that happened in the last three hundred years.
