Chapter 18
Finnian
Kestra moves like she was born in this forest.
Which, given what I now know of her, is not entirely outside the realm of possibility. I file the observation next to approximately four hundred other things I’ve learned in the last month that I would have found academically fascinating under literally any other circumstances.
I follow three steps behind Ash.
Three steps. Precisely. Not two, which would suggest I’m trying to close distance.
Not four, which would suggest I’m trying to create it.
Three is the number of a man who has spent three centuries being very good at appearing to have no feelings about anything, and is currently applying that skill to the problem of being twelve feet from the person he’s been thinking about for thirty days straight while the Dark Forest tries to eat us.
The Dark Forest presses close on both sides.
Not the comfortable pressure of trees, the pressure of attention.
Something in here is awake and aware and has been since the moment we crossed the tree line.
The bioluminescent moss pulses blue-green along the older trunks, just enough light to navigate by.
Just enough to see the shadows moving between the roots in ways shadows shouldn’t move.
The path shifts.
Not dramatically. Just the space between two trees that was walkable a moment ago is now not, and Kestra adjusts without breaking stride, like she expected it. Like she’s been here before.
I file that away and keep moving.
Ash hasn’t looked at me since the castle.
I know this because I’ve been watching. Not in a way that would read as watching—I am, if nothing else, subtle—but in the way of a man cataloguing data he hasn’t decided what to do with yet.
The angle of her chin. The exact quality of the silence she’s maintaining.
The difference between someone who doesn’t know you’re there and someone working very hard to act like you aren’t.
Ash is working very hard.
Something drops from the canopy.
White. Wrong-limbed. Arms too long, dragging behind a body that moves like water over rocks.
Kestra’s blade is out before I finish flinching. The creature shrieks, a sound like tearing metal, and Ash’s thorns erupt in a wall between us and it, green-black and furious.
The creature recoils. Sniffs the air.
Those beady eyes find Ash and it goes very still. Not attacking. Not retreating. Just watching her with the specific attention of something that recognizes another.
Then it dips its head. Wrong-limbed and awful, but deliberate. Like a bow.
Then it’s gone.
Nobody speaks for a moment.
“Did that thing just—” Tiana starts.
“Yes,” Kestra says.
“Right.” Tiana nods. “Right, okay.”
Ash is already walking. Face forward. Jaw set. The face she uses when something confirms what she already suspects about herself and she’s not ready to deal with it yet.
I’ve catalogued that face. I know every version of it.
I file it and keep moving.
Kestra’s blade doesn’t go back in its sheath.
“They’re testing,” she murmurs. “Smelling what she is. They won’t be the last.”
I watch Ash’s thorns retract slowly. Watch her press her hands flat against her thighs before the tremor in them can register to anyone else.
She learned that from soldiers. The pressing flat. The preemptive containment of anything that might read as weakness. She taught it to herself so young she probably doesn’t remember learning it.
I know this about her.
I know a lot of things about her that I have carefully, methodically, never said out loud.
I should let it stay quiet.
I am, by any reasonable measure, extremely good at letting things stay quiet. Three centuries of choosing precision over confession. The careful word over the honest one. The perfectly constructed sentence over the one that actually means something.
“Ash.” I step up beside her.
She doesn’t look at me. She does, however, marginally not increase her pace, which I’m choosing to interpret as an invitation.
“I need to tell you something.” I watch my feet find the path.
“And I want to preface this by saying that I am aware this is terrible timing, and that I have rehearsed this conversation approximately forty times in the last few hours, and every version of it was more articulate than what’s about to come out of my mouth. ”
Four steps.
She still isn’t looking at me. But she isn’t telling me to stop.
“After he said yes.” Four words. The most efficient demolition I’ve managed. “You deserve to know what that means.”
The forest breathes around us.
“My parents were executed when I was young.” The same register I use while teaching stubborn seventy-something-year-old Fae younglings.
The only voice I have left that doesn’t shake.
“Treason. Fabricated, I know that now, I knew it then, if I’m honest, which I’m trying to be currently, with varying success.
” A branch moves ahead, Kestra redirecting us three degrees left without breaking stride.
“Amarantha appeared at the pyre. Soft words. Softer magic. She was family, cousin, and she made herself the only safe thing in a very unsafe world.”
Ash says nothing.
I take that as permission to keep digging.
“She made her interest clear.” My voice stays steady through what I can only describe as an act of significant personal will. “I was young and grieving and she had engineered the isolation with what I can now recognize as considerable skill. And then she offered.”
“And you said yes.”
Her voice. Flat. Eyes forward.
“No.” Harder than I intend. “I said no. Explicitly. In complete sentences, which felt like the least I could do.” I watch the path. “I refused her bed. Her claim. I refused and then I—”
“Finnian,” something calls my name from the left.
Not a creature. Not a dweller. A voice. It has the right cadence, the right warmth, the specific texture of someone who knew me before I knew what I was.
My mother’s voice.
I stop walking.
“Don’t.” Kestra’s hand on my arm. Immediate and firm. “It’s not her. Whatever you heard, it’s not her. The forest finds the thing you’d turn for. Don’t turn.”
My hands are not steady.
Ash doesn’t look back, but her pace slows. One beat. Two. Until we’re walking level again.
She heard something, too. I’d wager my entire archive on it. Whatever it called to her, she didn’t turn either.
Neither of us names it. We keep moving.
“Eyes forward,” Ash says. Quiet. Not to me specifically. To all of us. “Both things at once. The forest and the conversation.”
“Both,” I agree.
And somehow that’s how we keep going. Eyes up. Watching. Everything else still hanging in the air between us, unfinished, because the forest wants us distracted and we are refusing to be.
“I don’t know how she did it.” The words come out slower now.
Once I kept failing an experiment, not realizing the one ingredient was expired.
I feel like that again, I’m missing something just beneath my nose.
“I know it happened. I cannot deny the claim of the sword. But the mechanism—” I stop. Start again.
I reach for Kestra’s arm. Because though I know, maybe hearing a definition in another’s perspective will trigger something. “Can you tell me about glamour? True glamour. Not the surface kind.”
A beat.
“It changes what you want,” Kestra says. “Not just what you see. It reaches into your head and rearranges things.”
She’s not looking at me. She’s watching the tree line, the sharp angle of her jaw tilting as she reads the forest.
“Makes compliance feel like choice,” she continues, quieter. “Makes surrender feel like something you decided.”
There is a hidden truth in her voice where it speaks of a familiarness.
“The most dangerous glamour is that which goes unnoticed,” I say. “You cannot feel the magic. You cannot feel that truth beneath the mirage.”
My feet find the next step. My hands are steady. I have no idea how my hands are steady right now as I attempt to work through Amarantha’s claim.
“Most don’t realize glamour isn’t just about changing your appearance.” Kestra’s voice is soft and understanding as we walk over large roots. “It is in altering the state of those who perceive you. And that is a dangerous kind of magic because it fucks with your mind.”
The ground vanishes under Tiana’s foot.
Not a hole. A puddle that wasn’t there a second ago, black water, still as glass, and she goes in to the knee before Kestra hauls her back by the collar, both of them stumbling hard into a root system.
We all stop.
The puddle is gone. Solid ground where it was, like it was never there.
“It tests,” Kestra says, breathing hard. “It finds the distracted one.”
I look at Tiana. At Ash. At myself.
We’re all distracted. We’re walking through a death forest having the most honest conversation of my three-century life and none of us are watching the ground.
“Eyes down as well,” Ash says. Flat and monotone. The soldier clicking back into place over everything else; I miss the woman beneath. “We watch the ground and the canopy and the path. And we keep talking.”
“That’s three things,” Tiana says.
“Yes,” Ash agrees. “It is.”
We keep moving.
“So.” I pick up the thread because if I stop now I won’t start again. “Did I choose? If my yes was written for me before I opened my mouth, if the wanting was manufactured, was it ever mine?”
Did I in fact say yes to Amarantha, glamoured in a way that distorted my own thoughts? I don’t know.
The forest is loud now. Not creatures. Just sound. The creak of trees that aren’t moving in wind. Something dripping that isn’t rain. The distant scream that sounds like a child in pain.
It isn’t a child.
Ash looks at me for a long moment over her shoulder. Reading me the way she reads everything. Rapidly. Completely. Looking for the lie, the angle, the thing underneath the thing.
She doesn’t find a lie.
“You didn’t know,” she says.
Not you were her victim.
Not absolution wrapped in silk.