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She worried the uneven and wild cadence of his heart meant it was working too hard, but she was glad she could feel it. Elowynn focused on that because if she looked too closely at the rest of him, she thought she might break into a million tiny pieces.

Lora sat across from her on the floor with her back pressed against a crate, the stolen resonance crystals piled in a glowing cluster around her skirts. She had tucked her knees close to her chest and wrapped both arms around them, but her eyes kept drifting back to Caelyn.

Alyra stood near the door with the resonance blade in one hand, its silver-blue light dimmed but ready, her posture held with the kind of control Elowynn had only ever seen from trained soldiers.

Meanwhile, Korvel remained near the threshold. He neither spoke nor looked away from the corridor beyond.

The silence inside the chamber stretched until it became unbearable. Perhaps Lora reached that conclusion first, because she let out a breath through her nose and looked directly at Caelyn again, no longer bothering to pretend she was not studying him.

“So,” she said, and her voice sounded strained despite her attempt at levity. “You’re Caelyn.”

His lashes moved, and Elowynn’s breath caught before his eyes opened.

They were no longer fully black, though darkness still lingered beneath the green. It was like trying to see color through muddy water.

For a moment he looked disoriented. Then his gaze found Elowynn. She could feel his tension ease beneath her hands, his heart calming.

Caelyn turned his head a fraction toward Lora, and the effort cost him. Elowynn saw the way his jaw tensed against the pain before his mouth pulled into a faint, exhausted line.

“I’ve been told that’s my name,” he rasped.

Lora stared at him for another beat, then laughed once. The sound came out too thin to be amusement and too startled to be grief.

“I have spent five turnings hearing about you. It seems no one thought to mention the terrifying frost or… or…” she lifted a hand and wiggled her fingers before her eyes. “The eye thing.”

Caelyn blinked slowly, as though the sentence required more energy to interpret than he had available. “It rarely comes up in letters.”

Elowynn shut her eyes for one brief moment because he was still Caelyn. Beneath the blood and darkness, beneath whatever Blackwake had dragged closer to the surface inside him, he was still absurd enough to answer Lora as if this were merely an awkward introduction in a tea parlor.

Lora’s expression changed while she looked at him. The humor remained, but it sharpened around the edges into something more guarded. More wounded. Elowynn recognized that look because she had worn it often enough herself.

“You crossed half the continent for her,” Lora said.

The room seemed to draw inward around the words.

Caelyn’s gaze flickered to Elowynn. It stayed only a moment before dropping away again, but a moment was long enough. Long enough for fear and something achingly tender to move through her chest all at once.

“Yes,” he said.

That was all. No explanation. No defense. Nothing clever to soften the truth. Just…yes.

Lora absorbed the answer with contemplation, her fingers curling tighter into the fabric of her sleeping robe.

“Well, that was stupid,” she said, though the words came without bite.

“Yes,” Caelyn agreed.

“You could have died,” she pointed out.

A pause followed, filled by the distant sound of another collapse somewhere above them. Dust rained down from the ceiling and settled across his dark hair like ash.

“Worth it,” he sighed, his eyes closing.

The simplicity of his answer undid something in Elowynn.

She looked down at him and remembered the boy who had once brought her tea on the cliffs, who had opened library doors when her arms were full of books, who had handed her a journal stitched with constellations because he had wanted her to take some piece of Lumenshire with her.

She remembered the man from her chambers only bells ago, furious and heartsick and so close she could barely breathe, telling her she didn't get to pretend anymore, that these feelings didn't exist.