Chapter 20
Ash
I wake up with her name still in my mouth.
Curved walls of root and earth. Bioluminescent moss pulsing soft blue-green provides a cushioned mattress under me. The hollow breathes around me like something alive and patient and completely indifferent to the fact that I feel like I’ve been turned inside out.
Finnian’s heat at my back feels like a warmth I don’t deserve, and I don’t turn into it.
I also don’t wipe the tears when they come. I let them trail, one at a time, onto my hand below, and I watch them like they belong to someone else. Like if I don’t claim them, they don’t count.
I knew Pepper wouldn’t forgive me. I never expected her to. But I expected anger. I expected the magic whip and the shattered glass and the cold grey eyes cutting me down to size.
I didn’t expect her back.
Turned. Done. The door already closed before I finished knocking.
Heartache. I turn the word over. That’s the one. I’ve been shot twice, broken three ribs, and had my entire identity dismantled by ancient Fae magic, and a woman turning her back on me in a dream is what finally finds the soft spot.
Worse? The magic of the trial weaves around me, pulsing in time with my pain. Tasting it and finding me unworthy.
My heart burns. My throat. My chest. All of it.
Its disappointment settles over me like a second skin.
Fucking Faerie.
Easier to be angry at a forest than at myself. I know that. I do it anyway. I’ve been doing it my whole life, pick the thing you can fight and fight it, because the thing you can’t fight is the one that kills you.
The thing I can’t fight is the memory of Pepper’s back. Still and rigid and finished with me.
So I’m angry at a forest.
I sit up too quickly, the need to move overwhelming the sense to do it slowly.
My muscles itch. My body aches, the specific kind, deep and gritty, bone-level, the kind that lives in someone who hasn’t truly slept in weeks and keeps asking her body to perform anyway. My eyes feel like they’ve been sandpapered from the inside.
I’m a mess.
I get up anyway.
Behind me, Finnian shifts in his sleep. A small sound, not distress, just the restless movement of someone whose body hasn’t learned safety yet.
I know that sound. I made it for years. Still do, if I’m honest, which I’m trying to be, with varying success.
I don’t look back. If I look back I’ll want to go to him. And if I go to him I’ll have to feel something other than this, and I’m not ready to put Pepper down yet. I owe her this much. To sit with what I did until it stops feeling unmanageable.
I stumble toward the hollow’s entrance, where groundwater seeps through the roots in a thin trickle. I cup my hands beneath it and splash the cold water onto my face. It wakes me further.
Out of sight, I settle on the edge of a gnarled root and watch the Dark Forest through the gap in the moss curtain. My throat feels tight and raw and my hands won’t quite stay still in my lap.
Long ago, I learned the art of silent crying. Military barracks teach you that fast, cry loud and someone files a report. Cry quiet and it’s just weather.
Graves would call it an asset.
I almost don’t hear Kestra until she settles beside me, her head coming to rest on my shoulder like it’s done it a hundred times before in the last month..
She doesn’t ask. Doesn’t say anything at all. Just sits with me, her weight warm and solid and present in a way that bypasses every defense I’ve built and goes straight for the soft center.
That’s all it takes.
The tears come properly then. Not the quiet drip from before. The kind that means it. The kind I haven’t let happen in years because there was never anyone I trusted enough to fall apart in front of.
I trusted Pepper. And I threw that away.
And somehow Kestra, this Unseelie princess who chose me when she didn’t have to, is the one sitting in the dark with me while I pay for it.
Her fingers thread through mine. We sit there watching the twilight dawn settle across the canopy. The catcalls of the forest go quiet, like even the Dark Forest knows better than to interrupt this.
It won’t last. Nothing in this forest lasts.
But for now, Kestra’s hand is in mine, and I let myself have it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, sitting up and turning to me.
“Maybe a little.” I look over at where Finnian and Tiana are fast asleep, then back to Kestra. “I don’t really know how much I should be telling you,” I tease. “Knowing you’ll be dealing with this one day, too.”
“Who says I haven’t already?” she replies.
“The Trial of Survival,” I whisper.
“Oh.” That’s all she has to say to get it.
“The dreams and the fact that I have to face my demons. The ones projected to all of Faerie. I just—” I pause, shaking my head. “Two out of three cousins accepted my apology.”
“But not one?”
“Not Pepper.” I blow out a breath, my throat closing all over again. “And honestly, I don’t deserve her forgiveness.”
Kestra hums. “Do you forgive yourself?”
“No.” I say it fast. “Not at all. I was a fucking coward. I couldn’t face my demons and work through it. I ran. And I ran hard and I ran far. I wouldn’t forgive me.”
“Maybe you should start there.”
“Why do you have to come at me with logic, Kestra?” I bump her shoulder.
She laughs. Something in my chest eases a fraction.
Then I think about Pepper’s back. Still and rigid and done with me.
The fraction closes.
“Well, I do have a very helpful—”
The forest goes silent.
Not the comfortable quiet from before. Something else. The held-breath kind. The kind I’ve learned means something in this place has decided to move.
She pushes me out of the way just as pain detonates across my entire arm.
It comes through the moss curtain.
One second I’m watching dawn light filter through the hanging vines and the next something black and enormous tears through the entrance and my body is already moving before my brain finishes the thought.
It lands where I was sitting.
Horse-shaped but wrong. The neck too long. The legs bending at angles that make my stomach lurch. Jet-black coat that drinks the forest light whole. And its eyes, luminescent gold, burning with something that has no business being in an animal’s face.
It looks at me like it knows exactly who I am.
Not the size. Not the needle-sharp teeth.
That’s what sends ice down my spine.
I grab Kieran’s blade from my hip and get my body between the creature and the entrance.
It shifts.
One breath it’s a horse and the next it’s something between, half-standing, wrong-jointed, those gold eyes in a face that almost passes if you don’t look directly at it. It reaches for me with fingers too long for any hand.
I drop under the grab. Come up with the blade across its forearm.
Black blood. It screams, not animal, not human, something that splits the difference.
“ASH. DOWN.”
I drop.
Kestra’s magic hits first, a sharp crack, like winter seizing a river all at once. Then the light. Blue-white and sudden, condensing in her outstretched hand the same way I’ve seen Kieran pull shadow into solid form. Unseelie ice magic. She’s been hiding how much of it she has.
The blade hums at a frequency my back teeth feel.
She drives it into the creature’s shoulder.
The thing screams again. Staggers. The ice magic bites somewhere deep and the creature knows it, those gold eyes flare, recalculate.
It turns from her to me.
One more look. That recognition still burning in it.
Then it rakes my arm on its way out.
Pain detonates shoulder to wrist. Not a cut. A tear. Like something dipped in fire.
I clench my jaw and don’t make a sound.
The creature dissolves into the forest dark between one breath and the next.
Gone.
The hollow sounds obscene in the silence after.
My body hasn’t gotten the message. Heart slamming. Hands up. Eyes still tracking the entrance for a second wave because there’s always a second wave, that’s what they taught me, never assume the threat is over just because you can’t see it.
“Did it get you?” Kestra’s ice blade melts as she moves to my side.
“Yeah.” The word comes out steadier than I feel. I’m still scanning the entrance. Still counting exits. My arm is on fire and I haven’t looked at it yet because looking at it means stopping and I’m not ready to stop.
Finnian’s hand on my shoulder. “Ash. Let me see.”
The touch gets through where the voice didn’t.
I look down at my arm.
“What was that thing?”
“Púca.” Kestra takes my arm carefully, twisting it this way and that. “It tried to take you,” she whispers.
“It tried to kidnap me?” I look at Tiana and Finn, then Kestra. All of them stay silent. “Why?”
“Púca aren’t usually hostile,” Kestra says slowly. “They’re tricksters, sure. Forest dwellers. But not harmful.”
“Are they native to the Dark Forest?” I press my hand back to the scratch as it burns.
“Yes.” Kestra kneels before me, pulling my arm out and pressing her hands to the wound. Ice flows into it, easing the pain. “It won’t heal it. A púca scratch.” She shakes her head.
“Are they Unseelie?”
“Yes,” Kestra answers. “But they aren’t evil by nature. This is unusual.”
“We should get going.” Tiana looks around. “I’d prefer to be at a new hiding spot by evening.”
“I agree,” I tell her. “You have any other hiding places?”
Kestra frowns. “Yes.” She reaches for my hand, pressing our joined palms to the soil beneath us. “The forest knows you. I’m just asking on your behalf.”
She closes her eyes. Breathes slowly.
Around us the earth rumbles and I swear some trees shift, leaning away from a path that wasn’t there before.
The forest goes quiet. Waiting.
Kestra opens her eyes. “It answered.”
She wipes the dirt off her hands and stands. “There’s a location in the center of our journey. We have a while to get there. Maybe six hours on foot.”
She looks pointedly at my arm.
“It’s all right,” I try to assure her.
She hums, but it’s Tiana who speaks up. “If you feel off at all, speak up.”
That sounds like a problem, for future me.