Olwen
The guards asked their questions.
I answered them. Shaken bride, terrified wife, helpless human who had cowered while her monster husband dealt with the threat.
The last of the stolen life burned in my blood, painting my cheeks pink, making my hands tremble in a way that looked like fear instead of chemical overstimulation.
I performed shock. I performed gratitude. I performed the fluttering helplessness they expected from a woman who had nearly died.
Cador stood beside me through all of it, one hand resting on the small of my back. Warm through the ruined velvet of my gown.
Burning, even now, but I leaned into it anyway, stealing what I could from his touch.
The captain wrote everything down. The body was removed. The courtyard was swept for evidence of accomplices. And through it all, the ravens watched from their perches, eyes glittering, waiting.
They knew what I was.
They’d known since the moment I crossed the Veil.
When the last guard finally left and the heavy doors of the Keep swung shut behind us, Cador released me.
“Go to your chambers,” he said. “Rest. We’ll speak in the morning.”
I didn’t argue or ask questions. I didn’t do anything except climb the stairs to the east wing, one hand braced against the wall for balance, my legs already starting to feel distant and strange beneath me.
I felt the last of it draining out of my bloodstream. The simulated warmth receding, degree by degree. The frantic pulse slowing toward silence.
I made it to my chambers. Closed the door and locked it. A lock wouldn’t stop him, but the motion felt necessary, an illusion of safety. The pretense of control.
Then my knees buckled, and I went down.
The floor was cold.
Good cold. Proper cold. The kind that seeped up through the stones and into my bones and felt like coming home after a long journey through hostile country.
I pressed my cheek against the marble and let the chill spread through me, replacing the last traces of borrowed warmth with the temperature I was meant to be.
This was what I was. This cold thing. This creature that had crawled out of a grave three months ago and hadn’t had the decency to stay dead.
I lay there for a long time. Minutes. Maybe longer. Time moved strangely when you didn’t have a pulse to measure it by.
My breath stopped fogging in the cold air, because my breath had stopped being warm enough to fog.
I was fading.
Not dying; I’d already done that. This was something else. Something slower and more insidious.
The gradual erosion of whatever force kept me tethered to this body, this world, this existence I’d never asked for and couldn’t seem to escape.
The petals had been holding it back. The stolen heat from the assassin had bought me a few more hours. But now both were gone, and I could feel myself slipping away.
If I stayed here, I would stop.
It wouldn’t be dramatic, with pain or struggle or any of the theatrics the living associated with death. I would simply... cease.
When the servants found me in the morning, they would think I’d died in the night from shock or grief or some other convenient human weakness.
And Cador would know the truth.
He’d look at my corpse and see the void he’d been searching for since the Bride Market. He’d understand, finally, completely, what he’d brought into his home. What he’d claimed in the alcove. What he’d shielded with his own body when the crossbow bolt flew.
A dead thing. A monster worse than any he’d ever hunted.
I couldn’t let that happen.
The thought cut through the fog of fading. I couldn’t die here. Couldn’t let him find me like this, blue-lipped and hollow, all my secrets laid bare in the evidence of my corpse.
He deserved better than that. Deserved to remember the woman who’d danced with him at the banquet, who’d kissed him in the alcove, who’d burned bright and hot and alive in his arms.
Even if that woman had been a lie.
I forced myself up. My arms shook. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else, distant and unresponsive, but I made them move anyway.
I crawled to the wardrobe. Pulled myself up its carved frame until I was standing, swaying, gripping the wood hard enough to leave marks.
The travel bag was on the top shelf. I hadn’t touched it since arriving, hadn’t thought I’d need it, hadn’t planned beyond the market and the escape from Mabyn.
But it was there. I pulled it down, started filling it.
One dress. A spare shift. The bone box with its two remaining petals, tucked carefully into the bottom where it wouldn’t be crushed. I didn’t have much else. Hadn’t come here with much. A dead woman traveling light.
My hands were clumsy. Numb. The cold was spreading through me faster now, creeping up my arms and into my chest, and every motion felt like pushing through water.
I dropped the dress twice before I managed to fold it. Couldn’t get the clasp on the bag to close. My fingers wouldn’t bend right.
Paper.
I needed paper. Needed to leave something behind, some explanation, some excuse, some lie that would make sense of my disappearance without revealing what I was.
The writing desk by the window had what I needed. I stumbled toward it, knocked over the inkwell, cursed in a voice that came out thin and reedy and wrong.
Found a scrap of parchment. Found a quill.
My hand shook so badly the letters came out crooked, barely legible.
Three short lines. That was all. All I could manage.
I folded the note, left it on the pillow where he would find it if he came looking, and picked up the bag.
I made it halfway to the window before my legs gave out.
I didn’t feel the impact, just a vague awareness of my body collapsing, the bag spilling open and scattering its meager contents across the marble.
The window was three feet away. Might as well have been three miles.
I didn’t have a plan. Didn’t have anywhere to go. But staying meant being found, and being found meant watching him realize what I was.
I started crawling.
Inch by inch. Dragging myself across the cold stone, fingers scraping against marble.
The window was open. I always left it open, because the night air was cold and the cold was comfort.
If I could reach it. If I could pull myself over the sill. If I could disappear into the darkness before…
The bone box had rolled free from the scattered bag. It lay between me and the window, lid cracked open.
Two petals left. Two more performances. Two more chances to pretend I was something I wasn’t.
I reached for it. My fingers brushed the carved lid.
And I stopped.
What was the point?
He knew what I was.
Using a petal wouldn’t change that. It wouldn’t erase what he’d witnessed or transform me back into the warm, trembling bride he’d pulled onto the dance floor, the woman who’d kissed him like she meant it, the creature he might have been able to love if she’d been real.
She wasn’t real.
She had never been real.
I was real. The woman who clawed her way through six feet of dirt to breathe again. This was real. This was what death had made me.
And if I was going to stop existing, I wanted to do it as myself. Not as a performance. Not as a lie.
I pulled my hand back from the bone box.
Closed my eyes.
And waited.
I was done hiding, finished being something that existed in the spaces between categories and belonged nowhere.
Something was leaving me. Unmooring. And down the hall, through stone and distance, the death-speaker must have felt it, a soul beginning to slip its moorings. His domain. His to sense.
The door didn’t open.
It exploded.
Wood splintered inward, crashing against the wall, the lock tearing free from the frame in a shriek of tortured metal.
Cold air rushed in from the corridor, colder than my chambers, colder than my skin, cold enough that I registered it even through the numbness spreading through my limbs.
Cador stood in the doorway.
Not his raven form. Just a man, tall and dark and furious, his eyes taking in the scene with a single sweeping glance.
The scattered bag. The spilled contents. The bone box lying inches from my outstretched hand.
Me, sprawled on the floor halfway to the window.
The note on the pillow.
He crossed the room in three strides. Snatched up the parchment. Read it.
His expression shifted. The anger didn’t fade, but something else bled through beneath it. Rawer, more ragged, the kind of emotion that looked like it hurt.
“You were going to run.” His voice was quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded avalanches.
“You were going to crawl out that window and disappear into the night, and you thought…what? That I wouldn’t follow? That I wouldn’t find you?”
I couldn’t answer. My throat had frozen along with everything else, the muscles refusing to cooperate, my voice locked somewhere deep in my chest.
He crouched beside me. His hand cupped my jaw, lifting my face, forcing me to meet his eyes.
His palm was warm against my frozen cheek, and I couldn’t even flinch away from it anymore.
“You’re dying.” He could see it, the static consuming whatever was left of my borrowed existence.
“You’re lying here dying, and instead of calling for help, you wrote me a note.”
His thumb traced my cheekbone. The touch should have hurt. Should have burned. Instead it felt distant and muffled.
“I chose you because I thought you wouldn’t care,” he read aloud, his voice heavy with contempt, but not for me, I realized. For the words themselves. For the assumption behind them.
He released my face, stood, and paced to the window and back, his boots striking the marble with hard, angry sounds.
“You think death scares me?” He spun to face me, and his eyes were black pits in a pale face, void-dark and endless.
“I am the Raven King. I speak to the dead. I feel them passing, every single one, every soul that crosses through my lands on its way to whatever comes next. Death is my inheritance. My birthright. My currency.”
He crouched again. Closer this time. His face inches from mine, his breath warm on my frozen skin.
“And you,” he said, “have spent my coin without permission.”
I managed to make my lips move. Managed to force out a single word, thin and cracked and barely audible.
“Sorry.”
His laugh was not kind. “Sorry. She’s sorry.” He sat back on his heels, ran a hand through his dark hair.
“You’re not sorry. You’re terrified. You’re convinced I’m going to cast you out, or burn you, or do whatever it is humans think monsters do to things that shouldn’t exist.”
He reached past me and picked up the bone box. Turned it over in his hands, he examined the carved bone, the delicate hinges, the two dried petals visible through the gap in the lid.
“Two left,” he said. “One more dose of your poison. One more chance to deceive.” His eyes met mine. “Take it.”
I didn’t move.
“Take it,” he repeated. “Put on your mask. Show me the performance. I want to see what you’ve been hiding behind.”
I held his gaze. Let him see the gray creeping through my irises, the frost on my lashes, the blue tinge spreading across my lips.
“No.”
The word surprised me with its volume. Clearer. A sudden flare.
“No,” I said again. “I’m done performing. I’m done pretending. If you want to know what I am, look. This is it. This is what’s left when the petals run out and the stolen heat fades and there’s nothing left but the truth.”
I let my head fall back against the stone floor. Let my eyes drift closed. Let the cold take me, degree by degree, breath by breath.
“ At the market. I chose you because you were cold,” I whispered. “Because I thought you wouldn’t notice that I was colder.”
His hand found my throat. Pressed against the place where my pulse should have been and wasn’t.
“I noticed,” he said. “I noticed from the moment you stepped off that auction block. I noticed when the ravens called you sister. I noticed when the mirror cracked and you didn’t flinch.”
His voice dropped. “I noticed, little bride. I just didn’t care.”
The words didn’t make sense. Couldn’t make sense. I was fading. Slipping away into the void that had been calling me since I crawled out of that graveyard, and he was saying…
“You didn’t care,” I repeated.
“No.” His hand was still on my throat. Still pressing against the absence of a pulse.
“I didn’t care that you were wrong. I didn’t care that you were cold. I cared that you were running. I cared that you thought I was the kind of monster who would let his bride die alone on a stone floor while he slept down the hall.”
He gathered me up. Lifted me from the floor like I weighed nothing, cradled me against his chest, his arms warm bands around my frozen body.
“You chose the cold,” he said. “But you don’t get to choose to fade. Not yet. Not until I’ve had a chance to show you what the cold can offer.”
He carried me toward the door.
Toward whatever came next.