20. Kat
Kat
W e rode away from the rising sun, leaving the city behind. Although I still wore gloves because of the chilly air and the rub of the reins, I felt freer—like I could breathe now I was away from so many people and the risk of poisoning someone unintentionally.
And away from Elthea.
Nightmares had come for me in the night, and I’d woken bathed in sweat, breaths rasping through me.
Thank the gods I wouldn’t see her or anyone else from Dawn for a few days.
At least riding had always calmed me—perhaps it was the repetitive motion. Though my stag’s gait was different and his back wasn’t as flexible as a sabrecat’s, this didn’t feel so alien, and I found myself watching the rolling hills of Elfhame pass by.
It wasn’t as though I had conversation to occupy me.
Bastian might as well have been a solid lump of obsidian on his stag’s back for how still and quiet he was. Perhaps he was afraid I was going to try to (gasp) speak to him again.
After how he’d spoken to me about the note and the way he’d brushed me off yesterday? Why bother? He would only find another excuse. Besides, he was the one who needed to apologise to me.
I kept my mouth shut as I pulled my coat tight and fastened the top buttons. Out here, as the hum of magic dimmed, it grew colder. This had to be what Bastian meant about the concentration of magic affecting the climate.
Outside the city, autumn was nearly over, with most trees bare and amber and russet leaves coating the ground of this wooded valley. Trunks crowded close-by, but someone had cleared the lowest branches above the road, so they didn’t tangle in our stags’ antlers.
We ate in the saddle, not sharing a word, just passing the filled rolls between us, offering a pear, breaking a piece of cheese. Bastian’s silver eyes remained fixed on the road ahead, the overcast sky as cool as his gaze and as dark as the scowl he wore.
Off the road, we found a ring of boulders to camp within. Bastian disappeared for a while after setting up the tent, muttering something about “wards.” It was the first thing he’d said to me all day. I didn’t feel much like replying, and his gloom didn’t invite conversation.
We ate, we slept, we rose to another dull day.
If anything, this one was even darker, with grey clouds looming above.
The weather matched my terrible mood after a night where I woke at least half a dozen times from dreams about Elthea experimenting on me.
Travelling gave me no opportunity to sleep in.
When Bastian had sent instructions to pack, he’d told me the town was two days’ travel from the city. Halfway there. How much more painful could another day of this be?
Except… we weren’t even halfway through our ordeal, I realised as I buttoned my coat over my trousers and fresh shirt.
This marked only a quarter of the journey—two days there, two days back.
Great .
Biting back a groan, I mounted my stag.
As it passed noon, our breaths still steamed, drifting away like ghosts.
No matter what happens, remember all of this is real.
That damn phrase again. It haunted me, battling with my anger and hurt and the harsh words Bastian had given me. Even now, when I’d sworn I wouldn’t bother speaking to him, a question tugged on me, drawn by that inescapable phrase.
“What did you mean when you said…?” But it sounded silly as my words broke the silence. A foolish girl asking for something he couldn’t give. “Never mind.”
He finally looked at me for the first time in hours; it felt more like days. Not just a glance, either, but a long, deep look. “What were you going to say?”
I gritted my teeth, but it was out there now—or at least half out there. Fine. Better to get this done at last—and better speaking about this than accidentally spilling what Elthea had done. “When you said ‘remember all of this is real,’ what did you mean?”
His back straightened and the reins creaked in his grip as he turned to the road ahead.
Just when I thought he wasn’t going to respond, he opened his mouth. “It was the first time I realised you might some day find out what I was doing.”
That was a pretty way of putting it. “That you were using me.”
He winced, and I felt a little bad.
But sometimes the truth was less painful than skirting around it.
“It had never crossed my mind before that moment. But having you in my rooms, it hit me all the harder.”
“The fact you might get found out.”
He turned back to me, shifting in the saddle as though all his attention was on me and me alone. “The fact there was a vast, vast gulf between what we were supposed to be and what we really were.”
A shiver ran through me. What we really were . I couldn’t even summon some harsh truth to push back against him and everything those four words suggested.
“Kat…” He blasted a sigh. “In that moment, I wanted to tell you everything. Why I was there. My plans. How it had started one way, but that we had galloped off course and were out in the wilds with no map.”
His gaze might as well have been a grip around my throat for all I could summon any response.
I’d been so lost in my hurt, it had never crossed my mind that he had wanted to share the truth with me. I’d certainly never dreamed that his plans had been blown as drastically off-course as mine.
Our plans that were so similar.
Somewhere, the gods were laughing.
“I wanted to tell you how it scared me,” he murmured.
“And how it gave me something I’d never had before.
But I couldn’t.” The corner of his mouth rose, but there was nothing happy about it.
“I couldn’t risk revealing the truth just in case I was wrong about you and you revealed it to unCavendish.
And you… I couldn’t put that on you when you were in such a precarious condition.
” His gaze fell to my fingers as they squeezed the reins.
“So when I placed my orrery in your hand and told you to focus on the links, the feel of it, the reality of it… I wanted to help you ground yourself, but I also wanted— needed you to know that everything I did for you, everything I wanted for you, everything that happened between us was real, even if you found out the truth later.”
My eyes burned.
I didn’t want to believe him. I wanted to tell him it was a pretty story. I wanted to shove it back at him.
And yet I believed him.
Not because he couldn’t lie, but because it aligned with what I knew, like a constellation mapping out his shape in the sky.
Everything between us had felt real. His outrage on my behalf. His attempts to give me something bright in the bleak grey of my existence. His kindness when I’d been so lost.
Truth be told, I’d known those things were real. Always.
But I’d been in denial, drowning myself in it.
Because if that was all real—if what he’d told me was true… Well, I’d had something precious and beautiful, hadn’t I?
And I’d lost it.
They might say it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
But they were full of shit.
I had to drag my burning eyes away, pretending to scan the countryside for danger.
The only danger was here. Bastian. The fae who had been the biggest danger to me from the instant I’d met him.
Oh, he was a blade all right. A blade to cut my heart out.
“Why did you never come to me for help?” He said it softly, barely disturbing the still air, as though he was afraid of the answer.
Where did I start with a question like that?
“I’m not sure it crossed my mind.” There had never been anyone for me to go to before.
I wasn’t sure I even knew how to ask. “If I’d told you that I worked for the queen’s spymaster—or at least thought I did, it would’ve been treason. And I had enough crimes.”
“You could’ve told me. I’d have kept you safe.” He frowned down at his hands. “You had a choice.”
“And yet you judge me for something that wasn’t my choice?”
He twitched, eyes widening at me, and I knew he understood I meant my marriage. The muscle in his jaw flexed, and his neck corded.
“I didn’t want it, Bastian. I never wanted it.” Maybe it was my own guilt talking.
His lips paled as he pressed them together. Under this grey sky, it was like he too was becoming grey, like a ghost. His hair could’ve been the dark charcoal left after a fire. The scar cutting through his lips, silvery. His eyes, moonlight.
I’d have chosen him. If anyone had given me the choice. Hells, no one had and yet I’d still tried to. At that party, I’d tried to choose him.
Yet he looked furious at me for it.
“You fucking hypocrite.” It burst out of me.
I didn’t mean to, and yet the words kept spilling—if I kept silent, it would be tears spilling in their place.
“You talk so much about choice, and yet you only gave me an abridged one. Was it really a choice, when I didn’t know what you were doing?
Was it a choice when I didn’t know you were using me? ”
“You were using me too,” he rasped.
“Yes, but I never gave you grand speeches about how you deserved more and always had a choice. And”—my words cracked—“and I stopped using you. I tried to get out of the situation.” My chin trembled, because some foolish part of me had started believing his speeches.
Maybe I did deserve better. But if that was true, then I also deserved better than what he’d given me.
“You kept going to the bitter end.”
He worked his jaw side to side before he spoke. “This hasn’t ended yet.”
“Hasn’t it?” I rubbed my chest where my heart felt as raw as the edge to his voice.
“I’m bound to you by some horrible accident of magic.
But understand, that doesn’t mean I choose to be in Elfhame…
to be with you. I don’t have the luxury—the power of that choice.
Yet again .” I gave a bitter laugh, but there was no strength behind it.
After several minutes, he bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”
I made a low sound of acknowledgement, but I didn’t trust my voice to hold together. I’d already surreptitiously swiped away a tear that chilled my cheek.
We rode on in quiet for a long while, the sun setting ahead. Even that was muted by the blanketing cloud—a dull grey sunset.
Still, I felt better for speaking, like a wound had been purged of rot, leaving it clear to heal. At my side, Bastian was no longer wound up so tight, either, and the furrow of his brow was thoughtful rather than angry.
As if the sky had also relaxed its grip, it unleashed a torrent so sudden and absolute, I could barely see beyond my stag’s antlers.
I gasped as the chill rain snaked under my collar and down my back. Bastian bared his teeth, nose wrinkling like he could scare off the rain with a snarl.
“Come,” he shouted over the gushing deluge, and urged his stag into a canter. “There are caves in the foothills. We’ll make up the time tomorrow.”
I followed him off the path, barely daring to blink away the stinging rain in case I lost sight of him. A branch from a tree I didn’t even spot scraped my cheek, but I kept on his stag’s tail.
By the time we reached the great crack in the side of a granite rock face, I was drenched to my underwear—possibly to my soul. We rushed inside, dragging the deer, who didn’t seem so sure about the narrow passage. But it soon opened up to a space plenty big enough for the four of us.
Our panting breaths filled the cave as the frigid air bit through our wet clothes.
Water dripped from Bastian’s hair into his screwed up face, and a puddle formed at his feet. A particularly large droplet formed at the tip of his nose.
Maybe it was that, maybe it was the expression that I knew matched my own, but when I caught his eye, I laughed.
It started as a chuckle, but like the rain, it soon became a torrent.
And he laughed too.
I gave my body to it—a release after almost a month of uncertainty. He doubled over, as though the rain had washed away Business Bastian and the tense man I’d ridden out of the gate with.
Also…
“You look like a drowned rat,” I wheezed around my laughter, pointing at him, at the clothes stuck to his body and the hair plastered to his face.
He swept that hair back and cast an eye over me. “So do you. Albeit a very pretty rat.”
That only made me laugh harder. A few tears mingled with the rain on my face, but they were good tears. Gods, I hadn’t laughed this hard in…
I shook my head and wiped my cheeks as Bastian drew deep breaths, rubbing his belly. “I’m not used to working these muscles.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Maybe you should introduce laughter into your exercise regime.”
“Maybe you should not argue with trees next time you ride.” He bent close and swiped a stick from my hair.
“I was saving that for later.” I snatched it off him, like he was trying to steal my most prized possession. “Firewood, you know.”
“Ah, yes, that damp twig will warm us right up.”
We chuckled. Not the slightly unhinged laugh of moments earlier, but something calmer that lit up Bastian’s eyes as they held mine.
“Look, Kat. About earlier…” He shook his head and removed a wet lock of hair from my cheek.
The sun must not have yet reached the horizon, because no magic raced between us, but the way his expression softened and his skin upon mine still stole my breath.
“I truly am sorry.”
I didn’t want an apology of obligation. “You don’t have to say—”
“But I am sorry. I used you. It stopped being just that for me, though. I need you to believe me when I say that.” He leant in, gaze so intense it was like a grip on my soul.
“It was only when your husband appeared that I remembered what I was meant to be doing to you. And I felt sick to my stomach at that and everything I’d done as much as the fact you’d deceived me and were married. ”
My eyelids fluttered as everything came into new, sharp focus through that lens. He’d hurt himself as much as me. What a mess we were, inside as well as outside.
“And I’m sorry for what you said about taking away your choice.” He caught my chin, stopping me from looking away. “I never thought of it like that before. And this isn’t enough for that and for hurting you, but it’s a start.”
I swallowed, throat thick. “A fresh start.”
“Exac—”
Mid-word, he flinched, eyes widening. “Shit.”
A cold even deeper than the rain gnawed my bones. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“They aren’t meant to be this far east.” His gaze skipped side to side, distant, and I understood—his double had to be scouting ahead as it had in Riverton Palace.
I whispered past the lump in my throat, “Who?”
“Horrors.”