Chapter 41 Lucian
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Lucian
The bird landed on my shoulder at dawn and I resisted the urge to throw it into a tree.
It had followed us through the portal. Uninvited, unannounced, launching itself through the archway in the final seconds before the crossing sealed. I’d turned to find it perched on a branch three feet from my head, feathers puffed, amber eyes blinking at me.
I’d been threatening this raven for months. It had delivered council messages I didn’t want and once stolen a piece of bread directly from my hand while I was reading a report. My relationship with this bird was adversarial at best.
But it was here. And unlike the council’s surveillance ravens, this one answered to no one. A rogue from the highland cliffs, too stubborn to be trained into the official network, too intelligent to be dismissed.
“You’re useless,” I told it. “You know that.”
The raven clicked its beak. Shifted on my shoulder, talons pricking through my jacket. Its amber eyes pulsed once, the low glow that meant it was recording, and I flicked its chest with my finger.
“Stop that. I’m not sending a message.”
It stopped. Settled. Waited with the patience of a creature that had learned exactly how far it could push me before I actually followed through on the dismemberment threats.
Percival and Solomon were running reconnaissance. Giselle had disappeared into the forest’s southern corridor to map sensor grids. I sat at the base camp with a raven on my shoulder and a compound half a mile south that held everything I’d ruined.
The bond ached. It had ached since the rejection, a constant low-grade agony that I’d learned to breathe around. But proximity had changed its texture. In Veyndral, the muted channel was silence. Here, it was static with shape, direction. A compass needle that pulled south and didn’t stop.
She was in there. Behind reinforced walls and armed guards and a father who’d built a fortress designed to keep creatures exactly what I was as far from his daughter as possible.
And I couldn’t go to her.
My face was known. Thiago had confirmed it back in Ashvale.
I was a king. I’d commanded armies, navigated centuries of politics, held a kingdom together through wars that should have ended it. None of that training had prepared me for helplessness.
The raven clicked again. Softer this time.
I looked at the bird. The bird looked at me. Its amber eyes held steady, unblinking, and for a moment the two of us sat in a silence that felt less hostile than usual.
“You can get in there,” I said.
The raven tilted its head.
“You’re a bird. You fly. Walls don’t apply to you.” I was talking to an animal and I was aware of how far I’d fallen. “Her window is on the second floor, east side. Percy confirmed the position.”
The raven’s feathers ruffled. Interest or irritation. Difficult to distinguish with this particular creature.
I stood. Crossed to where Giselle had stashed the supply packs and pulled out the items I’d been carrying since Veyndral. Things I’d packed in the quiet of my quarters.
A sprig of Glowwood moss, sealed in a cloth wrap to preserve the bioluminescence. It grew in the forest north of the palace, pulsing blue-green in the cold months. I’d cut it from the trail where I used to walk when the council sessions ran long and the crown sat too heavily on my skull.
The trail I’d imagined showing her someday, when all of this was over and the portal was stable and she didn’t hate me.
A small pouch of ground herbs. Compounds from Farmon’s medical stores, blended for bond deterioration.
Percy had described her symptoms: the nausea, the shaking hands, the weight loss.
The muted bond was eating her alive from the inside.
These wouldn’t fix it, nothing short of restoring the bond could fix it, but they’d slow the damage.
And a note. My handwriting, formal, because five centuries of penmanship training didn’t switch off even when writing to the woman I’d destroyed.
‘This grows in the forest where I will take you when this is over. The moss glows brighter in winter.’ - L
I’d written six versions, burned five. This one survived because it was the only version that didn’t beg, and she deserved better than begging on paper.
I bundled it all into a cloth wrap small enough for the raven to carry. Tied it to the bird’s leg with a leather cord. The raven tolerated the process.
“Her window. East side, second floor. You tap until she opens.” I held the bird’s gaze. “You don’t let anyone else see you. You don’t record anything for anyone but me. And if you lose that package, I will personally pluck every feather from your body and stuff a pillow with them.”
The raven squawked. Launched from my arm with a force that left talon marks through my sleeve. It banked east and disappeared over the tree line toward the compound.
I sat back down. Alone in the forest, hands on my knees.
Five centuries. In five centuries of ruling, I had never once sent a bird to do what I couldn’t do myself. The king doesn’t delegate his own survival.
But I was delegating my heart to a raven with an attitude problem because I couldn’t walk through that door myself. Not just because the compound would kill me. A king who abandons his post leaves a kingdom exposed, and an exposed kingdom means a council that votes to classify Mira as a threat.
My presence here protected her from one enemy. But my absence from Veyndral exposed her to another.
I could never be separated from the crown.
Yet beneath the duty I’d been hiding behind for centuries, sat the truth I couldn’t dress up in politics.
I was terrified she hated me.
Anger I could face. Anger meant she still cared enough to burn. But hatred was the flat silence of a woman who’d looked at what I offered and decided it wasn’t worth the cost. That fear lived in a place no enemy could reach.
Hunters could wound me. Silver could slow me. The council could strip my crown. But Mira looking at me with nothing in her eyes would end me faster than any weapon Thiago had engineered.
The guilt was more familiar. It lived in the space where the bond used to pulse, feeding on the memory of her face when I’d spoken the words that ended everything.
I’d chosen the rejection. The decision originated with me. A king’s calculation: sever the bond, protect the kingdom, contain the threat. The kind of decision I’d made a thousand times in council chambers and war rooms.
Except this time the collateral damage was a woman who’d never been chosen by anyone in her life, and I’d looked her in the eye and taught her she was right not to expect it.
An hour passed. Morning sounds filtered through the canopy.
Then the stupid raven finally returned.
It dropped from the canopy and landed on the branch above me. No package on its leg. The bird settled, tucked its wings, and its amber eyes pulsed with the particular brightness that meant it had recorded.
My chest tightened.
“Show me.”
The raven’s inner eyelids slid closed. The amber glow intensified, projecting outward, and the vision bloomed between us. This bird’s recordings were rougher, grainier, filtered through a mind that didn’t follow protocol. But clear enough.
Mira’s room. She stood at the window in a sleep shirt that hung loose on her frame, the neckline stretched wide enough to expose the curve of her throat and the top of her chest. Her hair was down, tangled from sleep, copper strands catching the faint light.
My wolf surged with a violence that buckled my composure.
After not seeing her, my body responded before my brain could intervene.
Blood rushed straight to my cock, my hands curled into fists against my knees, and every nerve ending locked onto the image of her with a hunger of the fact that I’d spent every night since the rejection aching to touch her again.
Goddammit. Damn me. Damn this whole fucking situation.
My dumb fucking brain finally worked and I noticed it.
Mira was not in a good condition. The mismatched irises I’d fallen into a hundred times were flat, guarded.
The raven’s perspective bobbed on the window ledge. She’d opened the glass and was staring at the bird with an expression caught somewhere between wanting to stab it and wanting to laugh.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
Her voice. My eyes burned.
She reached for the bundle on its leg. Untied the cord with fingers that trembled, and the trembling made my throat close because that was the rejection doing its work on her body. Damage I’d authored.
The Glowwood moss came out first. It pulsed in her palm, blue-green, reacting to her warmth.
She stared at it. Her lips parted and for one second the mask fell and wonder crossed her face, the same wonder I’d seen the first time she’d learned what we were, what the bond meant, what existed beyond her human world.
Then she found the note.
She read it. Her jaw clenched and her eyes glistened and she folded the paper with deliberate control and pressed it against her chest.
The herb pouch. She turned it over, her expression shifted. Softer for a fraction of a second. She opened the pouch, smelled the contents, and tucked it into her jacket pocket.
Then she looked at the raven.
“You work for him, don’t you? You poor bastard, I sympathize. He’s impossible.”
The raven clicked. In the recording, I could see its head tilt with the particular attitude this bird reserved for people it approved of.
“Listen to me.” She crouched to eye level with the bird.
“You go back and you tell Lucian Valdris that glowing moss and a pretty note don’t undo what he did.
You tell him that I wake up every morning nauseous and shaking because three alphas decided I wasn’t worth staying for, and a plant that glows in the dark doesn’t fix that. ”
Each word landed in my chest.
“You tell him that his handwriting is still annoyingly beautiful and I hate him for it.” Her voice cracked on the word hate.
Sealed itself immediately. “And you say that dosage instructions are appreciated but they can stop being helpful from a distance because helpful from a distance is what got us here.”
She straightened. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. The mask rebuilt itself in real time, and watching her assemble it was worse than watching it break.
“And if you ever come back here under his orders, I will turn you into a feather duster. Do you understand me? A feather duster. I’ll dust my entire room with you.”
The raven squawked in the recording. Mira’s mouth moved.
“Now get out before the cameras catch you.”
The vision faded. The raven’s eyes dimmed. It sat on the branch, feathers settled, watching me with what seemed to be pity if birds were capable of it.
Every word she’d said to that bird was a knife I’d earned.
She was right about every syllable. A king who couldn’t walk through her door was sending moss and notes and medicine through a raven because facing her required courage that my long life hadn’t built.
The raven dropped from the branch to my knee, settling there. I looked down at the bird. The bird looked up at me.
“Don’t get comfortable,” I said.
It got comfortable.
I reached into the supply pack.
My fingers found the book I’d carried through the portal, a volume of Veyndral’s collected histories that I’d kept in my quarters. Between its pages, pressed flat and preserved by the dry mountain air, a single Starveil bloom. Translucent petals, paper-thin, veined with gold.
The flower opened once every fifty years. I’d found this one on the palace grounds the night of my coronation and kept it without knowing why.
Now I knew why.
Carefully, I wrapped it. Tied it to the raven’s leg.
“Same window. Tomorrow night.”
It clicked its beak. Launched itself skyward.
From the tree line, the bird disappeared east and I started composing the next note in my head. Not an apology. She wouldn’t accept one, and I hadn’t earned the right to offer it yet.
Just a fact. One fact per delivery. Small enough to carry, true enough to keep.
‘The flower opens once every fifty years. I kept it for two hundred, waiting for someone worth giving it to.’ - L
Percival materialized from the tree line. Wolf form, shifting mid-stride, pulling on the spare clothes he’d stashed in a hollow log.
“Was that your bird?”
“It’s not my bird.”
“It lives on your shoulder and you just sent it to our mate’s window with a glowing present.” He dropped beside me at the fire. “That’s courting. Through a raven.”
“Go run the perimeter, Percival.”
He ignored me. Tore off a strip of meat we have stashed and chewed with enthusiasm. “I’m eating first. The perimeter can wait. My stomach has opinions.”
“Your stomach doesn’t outrank your king.”
“With respect, Your Majesty, my stomach hasn’t had a proper meal in days. It absolutely outranks you right now.” He tore off another strip. “Besides, I want to hear what she said when the bird showed up.”
“She threatened to turn it into a feather duster.”
Percy’s laugh cracked through the forest.
It was my turn to ignore him.
Tomorrow Mira will get the Starveil bloom. The night after, maybe the pressed leaf from the Alderthorn grove where Solomon had taught Percy to track. Small pieces of a world she’d never seen, delivered one at a time through a bird she’d threatened to turn into cleaning equipment.
I would court her through a raven if that was all I had. Through moss and notes and medicine and a bird with no name and worse manners.
Until she forgave us.
Whatever I have to do just to beg for a part in her life again.