I draw in a slow breath, release it even slower. My singular anchor. The devastating tremor hasn’t left my chest. My fingers shake as I take the handkerchief Soria offers. Even the small movement sends another aftershock through me.
Time loses shape. I have no sense of how long we sit like this before another knock sounds at the door.
A healer enters.
For a moment, panic surges—sharp, blinding—until instinct tells me the purpose of his visit is not urgent intervention for me but the delivery of something final. Something decided. Soria helps me rise.
I turn toward the healer, and feel a vague recognition—not the junior apprentice who’d come hours before, but the senior among them. The same man who stood at my bedside when fever nearly took me. The sight of him alone is enough to send me back onto that razor’s edge where breath and hope both feel unbearably fragile.
If he is here… then Ace is no longer receiving life-or-death care. For better or worse.
When he finally speaks, the room holds its breath with me. “I believe he will pull through.” My knees nearly give. A fresh rush of tears comes—relief and grief tangling together, indistinguishable.
The healer continues speaking, offering details, prognosis, warnings—but they wash over me without form. I cannot take in anything beyond the most essential truth:
Ace is alive.
Vale listens for both of us, absorbing every word with the sharp, focused attention of a commander reclaiming ground after a devastating blow. The tension in his shoulders loosens—just barely—but enough for me to feel it.
Soria presses a glass of water into my hands, her own tear-streaked smile trembling with the same exhausted gratitude that floods through me.
I drink. I breathe. And for the first time since the blade fell, the world lets in something that isn’t pain. Something like light.
Time remains a blur.
Odrin returns, hair a wild, disheveled mess, and for a brief moment my heart aches for the foolish guard whose poorly delivered message shattered me. I can only imagine Odrin’s fury. I will care about that later. Not now.
Food arrives. We try. We fail. We make the motions of survival with hands still trembling from the earlier blow. Silence settles over the room like ash—thick, clinging, impossible to breathe through. None of us have enough strength left to speak. Even thinking feels like dragging stone through sand.
It’s Odrin, the steady commander with the ginger beard, who finds a way to shift us forward. “We’ll be no use to him like this,” he mutters, slumping into a chair. “Sorry-looking lot we are.” His attempt at humor—muted, raw—cracks something open in me. Not laughter. But the smallest loosening of the tightness in my ribs. The acknowledgment that we are all barely holding on.
He’s right. Ace will need us. But not like this.
A soft, humorless breath escapes me at the thought of Ace’s reaction toall this melodrama. He would be thrilled to learn how thoroughly our hearts had been wrung on his behalf. He will have notes on our performances when he’s well enough recovered to give them.
Gods, Ace.
The thought of him steals the ground from under me again. Numbness creeps in—a hollow, suspended state. And as much as numbness feels like its own death, I fear it may be the only way I survive until dawn.
Odrin and Soria retire to their quarters. I know they will return at first light—or earlier—unable to keep themselves away.
Vale and I move through the room like wraiths. Slow. Exhausted. Untethered.
The body lags behind reason, still braced for every shadow, every sound. I know we need rest. I know it with certainty. But knowing does not quiet the part of me still listening for a knock at the door that could unravel me all over again.
We lie atop the bed without bothering to undress. Still in the clothes we pulled on after scrubbing the blood from our skin. Vale drapes a throw over me, though it barely chases away the shiver clinging to my spine.
He dims the lanterns — not all the way. No one here trusts the dark tonight.
The weight of him settling beside me, usually a balm, feels almost unbearable. Not because he is unwelcome. But because every ordinary gesture, every familiar ritual, feels like a lie compared to the terror still clawing at the inside of my chest.
I glance at him. Shadows cling to his face in ways I’ve never seen. The firelight dances, but the darkness in him does not retreat. Fresh tears sting behind my eyes at the sight—the king who has carried the world now crushed beneath a night that will mark us all.
I inch closer. Our bodies share warmth. Shared breath. Shared vigil. The smallest unraveling of the pain. He opens a book. It doesn’t matter which one. The words swim shapelessly on the page, but his voice—the rise and fall of it—anchors me. Quiet. Steady. A lifeline as vital as the one he offered when I clawed my way back from death.
I feel him sag under the weight of it all. The exhaustion. The fear. The responsibility. I shift upright, closer, trying now—finally—to be the one who steadies him. The book rests open in his lap, his thumb holding the page. I reach for it, then pause.
A thought strikes me—sharp and terrifying.
