Page 70 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

I was still telling myself that when we rode out of the village, and the trees closed behind us like a wound sealing over something that would never heal quite right.

Every hoofbeat sent a trickle of blood down my side.

I’d swung into the saddle and felt the pull of torn stitches immediately. My haste to flee the rejection from the only thing I’d ever truly wanted had undone Luna’s careful work. The skin pulled and tore anew with each bump.

There was also a deeper ache I couldn’t reach. Like a splinter buried too deep to remove. I didn’t reach down to press the skin closed. It seemed only fair that something on the outside should match what was happening within.

I deserved it.

I had my horse again. My familiar saddle. My own clothes, my title, the privileges that came with it. I should’ve felt settled, comfortable. Yet all of it fitted the way a coffin did—tailored, dignified, and entirely without room to breathe.

No raiders tried to ambush us in the borderlands like I’d hoped. I told myself it was because I wanted to vent my grief on someone deserving. But the truth was that I wanted to break, to pour myself out in one wild rush so I didn’t have to feel.

While we’d frozen in the mountains, a sudden warmth had coaxed the midges from the earth, and they rose to tear at every inch of my exposed skin as I descended into the lowlands. I didn’t drive them off. I let them feed.

How easily my lungs opened to the thick, humid air of the plains felt almost like a betrayal. This was a place my body understood, even as my heart lagged behind in the mountains, still caught somewhere between Luna and the Tir—between a life I could never have and the reality of yet another failure about to crash back down on my head.

Cam spent half the journey filling me in on the caravan’s retreat and return to the Tir, the other half chattering endlessly with Nisien. Naturally, the two men got on effortlessly.

But I grew sick of it. Sick of being asked about my time away, tired of being asked about Luna. In my twenty-odd years of knowing Camrick, I’d never suspected how aggressively sentimental he was. The man commanded battalions and apparently believed in destiny.

It was my fault. He’d asked, and I, grieving a thing that had never had a genuine chance to start, had told him almost everything.

Yes, I’d been involved with my healer.

Yes, I’d lied to her about who I was.

Yes, it was fucking tearing me apart.

He suggested turning the men around no fewer than three times after that. By the fourth, I was considering leaving him behind. Said she’d been upset because she cared. Said leaving like that couldn’t be the end of it for us.

But… If I turned back now, I’d do more than beg. I’d demand. And I’d already taken enough from her. My absence was the only kindness I could give her now.

Throughout Cam’s haranguing, Nisien remained quiet—unusually so. He watched me with an expression that made me uneasy. Too contemplative, as if he were already planning something behind his smooth smiles and easy laughter.

After the fires were lit the second night, Cam began pestering me again about how love was worth the cost. How fear made fools of men. How some losses only became permanent when you chose them.

Except it was all a fairy tale dressed up as possibility.

It was the word chose that finally did me in.

As if I’d had a choice. As if love were a door a man simply walked through or didn’t. As if I hadn’t been standing on the wrong side of it my entire life.

Cam didn’t know when to stop. Usually it was a good thing. He would press until a man broke just to shut him up.

“If she felt half of what you did when you came out of that cabin, then this isn’t finished,” he said, softer this time, as if gentleness would make the words less unbearable.

Something inside me snapped.

I held my closest friend at the tip of a conjured dagger’s blade before I fully understood I’d moved. Numb, I watched the point bob where it was pressed to his throat as his breath sawed in and out. “One more word about the lady, and I swear…”

The threat had gone unspoken, but part of me feared I meant it.

My gaze drifted to the side. Nisien’s sword was out in one hand, point steady, with magic gathering in the air around the other, ready to defend Camrick. For one suspended moment, I saw myself as they must have: hollow-eyed, blood-soaked, and surrounded by untamed magic.

The realization cut through the fog cleanly.

I wasn’t even angry at Cam. I was terrified of the hope he kept trying to kindle because, in my experience, hope never materialized into happiness. It just made the dark that followed it darker. He hadn’t seen her eyes. Hadn’t seen the stubborn set of her jaw. Hadn’t seen how complete her no had been, even with tears in her eyes.