Chapter 25
Ash
“Don’t rush.” Finnian pulls me closer as Kieran and Orion head back toward the others, their voices fading through the thick trees. “I want to hold onto this moment just a little longer.”
So I stay.
My head finds the hollow between his shoulder and throat like it already knows the way there, and the waterfall keeps working at the dirt on my skin, washing it away just as fast as the forest puts it back.
The tighter he holds me the more my shoulders drop. Not a decision, just gravity doing its thing.
His thumb traces across my knuckles, and I feel him go distant again—that particular stillness settling into his body like he’s listening to something I can’t hear.
“Where do you go?” I ask. “When you look like that.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The waterfall fills the silence.
“Everywhere.” His voice is careful, the way it gets when he’s deciding how much truth to hand over. “The Crown shows me paths. Possibilities. Every choice branching into a thousand outcomes, and all of them crashing back into the same handful of fixed points.”
I pull back enough to look at his face. “You see the future?”
“I see futures. Plural.” His mouth twists.
“None of them certain. All of them demanding to be accounted for.” He meets my eyes, and there’s something raw there that the truth venom cracked open and he hasn’t bothered to seal back up.
“Right now I can see forty-three ways this conversation could end. Twelve of them involve you being angry with me. Seven involve interruption. Three involve—” He stops himself.
“Involve what?”
“Things I’m not saying out loud because I’d like at least one of the good outcomes to remain possible.”
I snort. “That’s cheating.”
“It’s survival.” But he’s almost smiling.
“The Crown doesn’t let me turn it off. Every moment, every breath, I’m calculating.
Running scenarios. Watching the threads tangle and separate and tangle again.
” His hand finds my jaw, tilts my face up.
“Do you know how rare it is to find someone who makes the noise quiet?”
My chest does something I’m not examining. “I make it quiet?”
“You make it bearable.” His thumb brushes my cheekbone. “When I’m with you, the paths narrow. The chaos organizes itself around a fixed point. You.”
I don’t have words for that. So I kiss him instead—soft, unhurried, the kind of kiss that says things I’m not ready to say out loud.
He sighs into my mouth and pulls me closer, and for a moment there’s nothing but warmth and water and the specific weight of his body against mine.
Then an arrow punches through the waterfall and buries itself in the rock two inches from Finnian’s head.
I’m moving before the spray settles, yanking him down and under the water, my back to the stone, his body shielded by mine. Stupid. Probably. He’s the one with three centuries of Fae experience and I’m the one playing human shield, but my hands don’t care about logic right now.
Another arrow. Another. The waterfall shreds them into splinters but they keep coming, probing, searching for the gap in the cascade.
“We need to move,” Finnian says against my ear, his voice gone cold and tactical in a way that sends an inconvenient shiver down my spine.
“Working on it.”
I reach for the soil beneath the pool—there, under the silt and stone, roots threading through the bedrock like veins. I pull.
The earth answers.
Roots erupt from the bank in a wall of thorns and bark, blocking the arrow trajectory, buying us seconds. Finnian grabs my hand and we’re running, water streaming off our bodies, crashing through the moss curtain and into the grotto proper. We barely grab our clothes before arrows pierce our flesh.
Kieran meets us at the tree line.
His ice spear is already formed, his eyes sweeping the canopy with the flat assessment of someone who’s been killing things since before my grandmother was born. He takes in my bare feet, Finnian’s wet hair, the fact that we’re both flushed and breathing hard and very clearly just interrupted.
Not to mention naked. I slowly tug on my clothes that stick to me. He’s got to see they’re his clothes from his room at the castle.
He doesn’t react.
Not a flinch. Not a tightening of his jaw. Not even the subtle temperature drop I’ve learned to associate with his displeasure.
“Six archers,” Kieran says, like he’s reporting weather. “Eastern ridge. They stopped firing when you raised the root wall.”
“Stopped firing or repositioning?”
“Unknown.” He hands me a blade—his blade. “Orion’s circling north. Kestra and Tiana are holding the hollow.”
I take the blade. Our fingers brush. He doesn’t linger, but he doesn’t pull away either.
“Kieran—”
“Later.” His eyes meet mine, and for just a second the ice cracks and I see something underneath. Not anger. Not jealousy. Something older and quieter—the look of a man who has already made his peace with sharing and is choosing to prove it through action rather than words. “We survive this first.”
I nod. File it somewhere I can examine later, when arrows aren’t trying to find my spine.
The forest has gone quiet in the wrong way. Not peaceful. Waiting.
Then Kestra’s voice cuts through the trees: “DON’T SHOOT. ASH, TELL THEM NOT TO SHOOT.”
I’m running before I process the words, Kieran half a step behind me, Finnian covering our flank. The blade feels good in my hand—familiar in a way that probably says something unflattering about my psychology.
We burst into the hollow to find Kestra standing between our group and a ring of armed figures, her arms spread wide, her face desperate in a way I’ve never seen from her.
“Please.” She’s not talking to the figures. She’s talking to me. “Please don’t attack them.”
Orion has his fire ready, orange light licking up his forearms. Tiana is crouched low, hands full of shadows she borrowed from somewhere or someone. The armed figures—eight, no, ten of them—have bows drawn and blades raised and every weapon is pointed at Kieran.
Not me. Not Orion. Not even Finnian with his Seelie gold still flickering at his fingertips.
Kieran.
“This is not going well,” I say.
“Stand down.” Kestra’s voice has shifted—harder now, commanding, the princess showing through the spy. “All of you. Now.”
Nobody moves.
I have seconds before someone does something stupid.
“Kieran.” I don’t look at him. “Lower the Spear.”
The silence stretches.
“Kieran.”
“They’re aiming at my chest.”
“And you have approximately three seconds before I make that your smallest problem.” I step forward, putting myself between him and the arrows. Stupid. Definitely stupid. But it gets the reaction I want—his Spear lowers, just an inch, just enough.
I look at Kestra. “Talk fast.”
“They live here.” She’s breathing hard, unshed tears in her eyes, and Kestra doesn’t cry. Ever. “They’ve lived here for decades. Since before I was born. They know every path, every danger, every safe passage through the forest.”
“And they want to kill your brother because...?”
“Because his father drove them here.” A new voice—low, rough, belonging to the man stepping through the ring of armed figures.
He’s tall, broad, Unseelie in the way shadow clings to him like a second skin.
But there’s something else there, too. Something wilder.
The forest has gotten into him the way it gets into things that stay too long.
His eyes find Kestra and stay there.
Oh.
“Jadeve.” She says his name like a prayer. Like an apology. Like something she’s been holding in her mouth for years and finally gets to taste again.
He crosses to her in three strides, and his people part around him like water, and when he reaches her his hand cups her face with a gentleness that doesn’t match his size or his scars or the violence still humming in the air around us.
“You came back,” he says.
“I came back.”
The ring of weapons is still up. Still aimed at Kieran. But the energy has shifted—they’re watching Jadeve now, waiting for his signal, and Jadeve is looking at Kestra like she hung the moon and he’s been living in the dark ever since she left.
Kieran makes a sound beside me. Low. Strangled.
“Don’t,” I murmur.
“She never—”
“I know.” I grip his arm. “I know. But right now you’re going to shut up and let your sister have this, because those arrows are still pointed at you and the man holding her is the only thing standing between you and a very short reunion.”
His jaw works. The ice at his fingertips crackles and spits.
But he stays still.
Jadeve finally looks away from Kestra. His gaze finds me first—assessing, calculating, the look of someone who’s survived a long time by knowing which threats to take seriously. Then Kieran.
His expression doesn’t change, but his hand tightens on Kestra’s waist.
“The prince,” he says. Not a question.
“My brother,” Kestra corrects. “Who I would very much like to keep alive, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s not all the same to me.” But his voice has softened. Just a fraction. Just enough. “His father’s soldiers drove my people into this forest. His father’s laws made us exiles. His father’s cruelty—”
“Moros is not here.” Kestra’s hand covers his on her waist. “Kieran is not his father. And if you kill him, you kill any chance of the alliance she represents.” Her eyes cut to me. “The Wild Court queen. The one the prophecies talk about. The one who could change everything.”
Jadeve’s gaze swings back to me.
I feel the weight of it. The assessment. The decades of anger looking for a reason to aim itself somewhere else.
“You’re the queen,” he says.
“Apparently.”
“You don’t sound certain.”
“I’m certain about very few things right now. But I’m certain that I need to get out of this forest, and I’m certain that Kestra trusts you, and I’m certain that if you kill the man standing behind me, you’ll have to kill me, too.” I hold his gaze. “And I’m fairly certain that would upset her.”
Silence.
Then—impossibly—Jadeve laughs. Short, rough, surprised out of him against his will.
“She talks like you,” he says to Kestra.
“She’s worse than me.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
The weapons lower. Not all at once—there’s still tension, still distrust, still decades of blood between Jadeve’s people and anyone wearing an Unseelie face. But the immediate danger passes, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“We need safe passage,” Kestra says. “Through the forest. To the borderlands.”
“That’s three days of travel through territory that wants to eat you.”
“I know.”
“My people have no reason to help the Unseelie crown.”
“They have reason to help me.” Her voice is quiet. Certain. “And I’m asking.”
Something passes between them. Years of history I’m not privy to. Secrets Kestra kept even from her brother, and I understand now why she never talked about how she survived those years in the tower. She wasn’t just surviving. She was living a whole other life in the spaces between.
Jadeve exhales. Looks at his people. Nods once.
“We escort them,” he says. “Through the safe paths. No deviation, no delays, no contact with the deep forest dwellers.” His gaze settles on Kieran. “If he causes problems, we leave him for the trees.”
“Charming,” Kieran mutters.
I elbow him in the ribs.
“I appreciate you,” Kestra says, and the gratitude in her voice is raw enough that I have to look away.
Jadeve’s people begin to move, forming up around us in a protective formation that puts Kieran squarely in the center where they can watch him. Practical. Also pointed. I file it away and fall into step beside Kestra.
“You could have told me,” I say quietly.
“No.” She doesn’t look at me. “I couldn’t.”
There’s a story there. A long one, probably painful, definitely not something she’s going to share while we’re marching through a death forest with her secret lover’s militia.
I don’t push.
But I reach out and take her hand, and she lets me, and we walk like that for a while—two queens who don’t know how to be queens, holding onto each other because the alternative is falling apart.
“Wait,” I pause, looking all around us. “Where’s Whispen?”