Aaron
Eric’s mansion is one corner of the Glen the rot still owns.
Ellie pushes the door open and we step into a ruin.
Dust lies thick over everything, the windows blown out, glass scattered across the floor in a glittering spray.
Books lie face-down where they fell, a chair tipped on its side.
The whole place has the stale stink of a room nobody’s loved in a long time.
“I take it my mother and my sisters didn’t come near this place,” I say.
Ellie goes quiet, and she shakes her head. Then she lifts her chin, and there’s something almost defiant in it. “For the record, my lord, I never cared for Eric either. He was a very selfish warlock.”
I laugh at that. “You’re not wrong. And you got stuck dealing with him more than me. That couldn’t have been easy.”
She folds her hands in front of her, careful. “I don’t mean to speak badly on your father.”
“He was never my father.” I cross to the middle of the study and crouch at the cold hearth. I picture flame. Flame answers, leaping up bright in the grate and throwing gold across the dead room. I straighten and look around at all of it. Then I turn the rest of the magic loose.
The glass lifts off the floor and drifts back up into the empty frames, a slow upward snow of it.
The wood knits itself whole, grain drawing back to grain, until the windows stand straight and new.
Around me, the books float back onto their shelves and the chair settles upright.
The last of the dust thins from the air until it’s gone.
I think about how stupid I was, all those years, hanging the word father on the empty space this man left, and turning it away from the one who earned it.
Jacob never once asked me to be anything but his.
He showed up to every cold morning of my life and stayed.
And the whole time, I was reaching past him toward a beautiful, rotten stranger.
I’d decided blood meant something it doesn’t.
“My lord.” Ellie’s voice has gone hushed. “I mean—Aaron.” She clears her throat, and her eyes are tracking my hands. “Eric hasn’t set foot in the Glen since the night he left.”
“Oh, I know exactly where he is.” I glance back at her and let her see me smile.
“You don’t even cast.” She watches the last of the broken wood seal itself smooth. “This magic is stronger than King Amir’s, my lord. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’m still learning to use it,” I tell her.
The study finishes itself around us, warm and whole. Firelight runs across the spines of a thousand books. Everything restored but the man it belonged to.
“Gather the people,” I say. “It’s time they met their king.”
“At the high tower, my lord?”
“If that’s where they gather, then yes.” I look up at the dark beams overhead. “But I’m not living in it.”
Ellie nods. She dips into a bow, and I frown at her for it. But she’s already out the door before I can fuss.
Once the room’s empty and quiet, I open my hand.
The realm peels back across it and goes clear.
I’m looking through it all the way across the dark between us to a cabin at Solaris Pride, to a narrow bed in a room she grew up in, to Mara.
She’s curled in on herself on top of the blankets, knees pulled to her chest, her tail wrapped tight around her own legs, crying.
She can’t see me, and she can’t hear me.
I’m a ghost in her room and she doesn’t know it.
Her ears come up. She lifts her head off her arms, pushes up to sitting, and turns to look right at the patch of empty air where I’m standing a whole realm away.
“Aaron?”
I don’t say anything—I can’t. I just look at her, swollen-eyed and wrecked and the most beautiful thing in any world I’ve walked through. I try to hold the tears back, but they come anyway, running down my face in the empty study.
She wraps her arms back around her knees and sobs into them. Every sound of it goes straight into me and stays. When she lifts her face again, it’s steadier.
“I know why you did it,” she says. “Why you left me here. You didn’t want me to give up the things I love.”
I watch every word leave her mouth.
“But will those things ever mean more to me than you do? I doubt that, Aaron. I doubt that so much.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist. “I know you can hear me. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I love you.”
I sink down onto the sofa. My legs won’t hold me.
“I love you too,” I tell my open hand. “God, Mara. I love you too.”
Her hand drifts down to the curve of her belly and rests there.
“You never even gave our son a name,” she says.
I wipe my face and keep watching. I can’t make myself do anything else.
“In six months,” she says, “if you don’t come, I’m going to take it as a rejection. The second one I’ve ever had from you.” She has to stop a moment before she can say the rest. “So come get me, Aaron. Don’t make me spend forever in this bed alone. Come back and get your son.”
She can’t hear me. The words come out of me anyway. “But what if you get here,” I ask, “and you decide you hate it?”
She smiles, certain, her hand spreading flat over the swell. “I won’t, Aaron. I choose you. I’ll always choose you. That was never the question.”
I sit up so fast the realm swims in my hand. “You can hear me?”
“Yes.” Her wet eyes find the exact place I’m standing. “Our son has magic, Aaron, and it’s so strong I can feel it moving in me. I think he’s the one carrying your voice to me.” Her mouth wobbles. “But I can’t see you. I wish I could.”
“Mara, I—“
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t make it harder. Just do what you have to do. Fix your realm, then come back and get us. I am not raising this boy without his father. Do you hear me?”
I clear my throat and push up off the sofa. She can’t see me, but she feels the change in me even across a realm, and she settles.
“I love you so much,” I tell her. “More than the throne, more than any of it.”
She lies back down on the bed and curls up small again, her tail coming around her, her eyes closing. “Then prove it,” she says. “Now go away, Aaron Blackwood, and give me the home I deserve.”
I’m smiling like a fool when I close my hand. The realm folds shut and her room winks out. I stand there alone in the firelight and laugh once, wet-faced and shocked she heard me at all.
Give me the home I deserve.
I laugh again. She’s grieving, gutted, and still bossing me around—and God, I love her for it. Her words are already in my magic, burning into the root of it. I’ll spend the rest of my life giving her the home she deserves.
I turn and walk to the far wall, to the painting. There he is, full-length in a frame of heavy gold, painted in some dead century when he still had a face worth the canvas. He stares down out of it, young and flawless and pleased with himself.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell it. “So handsome. Just gorgeous, Father.” I tilt my head at the painted version of the man. “Real shame I didn’t take after you in the looks department.”
I turn my back on it. A portal tears open black and bottomless in the middle of the study, no light in it anywhere.
I reach into the place I’ve been keeping him and pull.
Eric comes spilling out of the dark and lands hard on the sofa, gasping.
His face has knit back together some on its own, but only some.
The damage Josiah did won’t fully mend—not without somebody choosing to heal it.
It sits on him now in seams and dents, the cheekbone gone wrong, the once-perfect line of him broken for good.
I close the portal with a thought and walk toward him. He’s too weak to do more than drag himself up against the cushions.
“Damn.” I look him over. “Josiah really did a number on you.” The name pulls a flash of hate out of him, but he’s too wrung out to do anything with it.
“Why don’t you just kill me?” he rasps.
“I needed some time to decide what I wanted to do with you.” I look around the study, at the new glass and the fire. “My Mara wants me to turn this place into a home worthy of her and our son.”
“I don’t know why you’re telling me this.”
“A whole month I’ve shown you mercy, kept you fed in the dark instead of ending you, and you still can’t be bothered to give one single damn.”
He laughs, weak and wet, and it turns into a cough.
“When are you going to get it, boy? The council offered me a position. Your own bloodline came to me—the Blackwood witch Tabatha herself—and I didn’t give a single shit about any of it.
I wanted to live, enjoy myself, stay young.
” He wipes blood off his lip with the back of his hand and studies it.
“Not that making you wasn’t worth a pleasant evening.
I had some good times with your mother. Sweet little thing, eager to please her man, gave herself over so completely it scared me.
” His ruined mouth curls. “And the pussy was nothing special, but it did the job. You know how it is with men. We don’t have to love the woman.
We just have to want her enough to get there. ”
My hand curls at my side, but I don’t give him the rise he’s fishing for. He sits back into the cushions, laughing.
“So here we are,” he says. “Stuck in the Glen together, father and son. Now you get a front-row seat to exactly how little I care about you, your mother, or those other three bastards she keeps hoping I’ll come around for.”
“Oh, I stopped worrying about that a while ago.”
“Good.” His ruined mouth pulls into something that wants to be a smile.
“I’m tired of the game, frankly. It’s better that you finally know where we stand.
” He pushes himself up off the sofa on shaking arms. “Now get out of my house. I’m going to bed.
My mission may have failed, but I promise you it isn’t the end, not by a long way. ”