Chapter 6
Despite the warmth of his chambers, the sweat cooling over my body felt clammy and cold. I curled tighter into myself, but it made no difference. I couldn’t stop shivering.
Aedric pushed himself upright. Strands of golden hair had fallen loose across his forehead, shadowing eyes that still looked wrecked around the edges. His chest rose and fell unevenly, breath slow to settle.
“Are you…” He hesitated, his brow pulling tight. “Did I hurt you?”
My fingers drifted to my throat, my neck tender where his hand had squeezed.
“No,” I said, glancing at him over my shoulder. “It was—”
Good. The word died on my tongue.
The pleasure had been overwhelming, but it had carried an edge of violence that should have terrified me. Heat flooded my face as the truth settled over me. I'd welcomed his crushing grip. I'd wanted it. I didn’t know what to make of that.
He let my unfinished sentence fade, his gaze distant in a way I’d never seen before.
I reached for my discarded dress, gathering the ruined fabric to myself despite the blood and grime caked into it. It was little more than burned tatters, yet I clutched it tightly against my chest all the same.
Where I normally felt warm, settled, quietly happy after being with Aedric, instead I felt…
empty. Dazed. As though I were looking at us from very far away, unable to quite find my way back into the moment.
The silence that settled between us felt wrong somehow.
Heavy and unfamiliar, unlike anything I’d ever known with him.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he spoke.
“It’s gone.”
I didn’t ask what he meant. I knew.
“It’s where I grew up. The capital of this Court.” His voice thickened. “And it fell under my watch.”
There were no words that could help him. No words capable of healing his grief.
“They were under my protection. They trusted me.” His throat bobbed. “And in the end, I killed them all.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. Kyndralis…” His voice broke, despair threading through every syllable. “I gambled with their lives to appease my own selfish desires.”
He turned then, his gaze searching my face… as though he were reminding himself that what he'd sacrificed had been worth it. I hated that look.
“The worst part… is that I would do it again.”
Shame burned through me. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” he said softly. “I mourn for my city, for my people, but—”
“Aedric—”
“Listen.” His fingers closed around my wrist, anguish plain in every line of his face.
“I suffered for three hundred years severed from the bond that was rightfully mine—the bond I tried to save and lost. You can’t imagine what it was like.
To live incomplete.” His grip trembled. “If you’d died, I would have too—I couldn't survive that loss again. I know what that makes me.”
I couldn’t speak. Instead, I looked around the chamber, if only to hide the sting burning behind my eyes.
It was vast, a series of interconnected rooms wrapped in gilded warmth and impossible luxury.
Great towering panes stretched from floor to ceiling, revealing moonlit gardens beyond.
Silver fountains spilled into mirrored pools, while dark trees swayed gently in a nighttime breeze, their branches whispering beneath a velvet sky scattered with stars.
It was glamor. I could feel the faint hum of magic against my skin, subtle and effervescent, like carbonation prickling through the air.
The illusion shimmered faintly at its edges if I looked too long, the stars too still, the movement too perfect.
We were in a cave, or something like one.
Perhaps beneath a mountain. I’d understood that the moment I looked up and found no sky, only jagged rock hanging above us like the teeth of some great beast.
“Perhaps Calantha should lead after all.”
“No!” The word slipped out before I could stop it, edged with a sudden terror I couldn’t hide.
He looked up at me through damp lashes.
“Her magic is a terrible thing,” he said after a moment. “But it’s always been a great boon to this Court.”
“She enjoys it, Aedric,” I whispered. “Hurting people.”
His mouth tightened, though whether in disagreement or resignation, I couldn’t tell.
A cold, ugly feeling twisted in my stomach. Before I could bury it again, the words slipped free. “She hurt me.”
His expression didn’t shift. If anything, it smoothed suddenly—a mask sliding into place.
“There was nothing I could do,” he said, brittle. “The Full Circle—”
“You’re a High Lord.” Speaking felt strangely painful, my throat too tight around the rising bitterness. “You’re one of them. You had the power to stop it, didn’t you?”
“You left us no choice after what you’d done.” Not an answer.
His hands clenched once against his knees, white-knuckled as though forcing himself into steadiness. “You destroyed the Veil,” he said evenly, too calmly. “You released Rìan. That’s treason, Elowen. You were fortunate not to be executed on the spot. I intervened—I spared you from that.”
“You bound me in iron and threw me into a warded cell!”
Burning metal biting into my skin, darkness pressing in from every side, the helplessness of it so suffocating that even now my voice trembled beneath the memory of it.
“The Full Circle ordered it,” he said again, more firmly now, frustration beginning to bleed through his carefully composed exterior.
“You didn’t fight them. You didn’t stop them.
” The grief and betrayal I’d been holding back cracked me open.
“You said you loved me, and you let that happen. You didn’t come for me.
You didn’t even come to see me.” The bond throbbed between us, emotions moving through it in a tangled, muddy current, though outwardly he gave nothing away. It only fueled my anger.
“You let Calantha tear me apart. She ripped through my magic with her sight! How could you allow that? How could you do that to me?”
The hurt rose too fast to stop.
“You can’t let them lock me away whenever you’re afraid or angry! You can’t keep me in a cage if I defy you! I’m not my mother, Aedric!”
Silence stretched between us.
My hands knotted helplessly in the ruined dress as the shaking returned in earnest, harder this time.
For a long moment, he simply sat there, so still he might have been made of stone. Slowly, he rose to his feet.
“I’m going to bathe,” he said at last, his voice flat.
He crossed the room stiffly. The door opened, torches flaring to life in the adjoining chamber as he disappeared. Moments later, the sound of running water reached me.
I sat there alone, ears ringing, my breath still uneven. He hadn't admitted to it outright, but what had slipped silently through the bond was damning enough. Guilt. Misery. Something heavier, darker, simmering beneath rigid control.
I stared at the floor for a long moment, letting the impossible settle over me.
I could feel him.
Was I in shock? Imagining things that weren't there? Feeling things that couldn't possibly exist because my mind had finally splintered after everything I’d endured?
The cell. The torture. The collar. Dragonfire. Aedric nearly dying. Me nearly dying. Facing Rìan alone. Solmire burning to ash. And beneath everything the crushing certainty that all of this—all of it—had been my fault.
Trauma layered upon trauma.
I wasn't thinking clearly. I was doubting him. Questioning things that defied all reason. Why? So I could convince myself he deserved my anger? So I wouldn't have to shoulder all the blame myself?
Shame flooded me, swift and merciless.
His city had burned. Tens of thousands of his people had died because of me.
He was grieving, his heart already broken open by that horror—and I’d sat there twisting the knife deeper, accusing him of betrayal, of somehow having a hand in the terrible things I’d suffered.
Worse, I’d convinced myself I could feel his guilt.
Was I going mad? I wanted to scream.
How could I do that to him? How could I look at everything he’d lost and still make this about myself?
My dress slipped from my fingers and pooled at my feet. Naked, I crossed the chamber, pushed open the bathing room door, and stepped inside.
The floors and walls were fashioned from black stone polished to a mirror sheen, so smooth they caught and scattered the torchlight in shimmering reflections, turning the room into a deep and endless cavern.
At the center lay the bathing pool, smaller than the one I’d used in Solmire.
A steady stream of water poured from a darkened spout at one end, cascading with a soft, constant murmur.
Steam curled low over the surface, carrying the clean scent of soap and heated stone, touched by a faint hint of sulfur.
Aedric sat submerged to his waist, his back to me.
He scrubbed at himself with almost punishing force, the cloth dragging harshly over muscle and skin, as though he could scour something deeper than dirt away.
It struck me then that he was so undone he hadn’t even bothered to glamor himself, to hide the vicious web of scars lacing his body.
He didn’t hear me enter. Didn’t sense me at all until I slipped into the bath behind him.
He startled when the water displaced, shoulders tensing, breath hitching. I reached for his hand.
“Let me,” I murmured, the words a tremulous offering of peace.
His fingers loosened as I took the cloth from him. I pressed it to his back and began to wash him, slower than he had been, gentler. The tension bled out of him in stages. His shoulders sagged. His head bowed forward, and he dragged both hands over his face, elbows braced on his knees.
For a while, there was only the sound of water and the wet scrape of cloth.
“You didn’t forgive me.”
My heart splintered inside my chest as I watched the dried blood soften and run in thin rivulets down his ruined back, tracing the old lines of his scars before disappearing into the water.
Scars left by Eidrae magic. By the same magic that ran through my own veins.