Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
CAIRN
“I’m not going to stop asking.”
Her parting yell follows me down the hallway, and despite myself, I smile. But I keep walking before I do something foolish, like turn back.
It would be so easy.
Too easy.
My mouth still carries the taste of her, and my mind is no better. It keeps serving me pieces of last night in vicious little flashes. Her beneath me, above me, her lips wrapped around me, her fingers laced with mine.
I slow for half a step, then force myself on.
The keep is barely awake, and there is a full day between this moment and what needs to happen tonight. If I go back through that door, nothing gets done. Except her.
The thought nearly turns me around. I mutter a curse under my breath and let the hallway carry me out of her reach. It ends at the staircase. I set my hand on the rail and look down toward the lower hall, where the light thins and shadows gather.
I’ve been home less than a day, and it still doesn’t feel real.
Home.
I was certain I would never see Underhill again. Never return to Nightward, or walk these halls. It still feels like a lie. A cruel little trick of stone and memory.
Yet here I am and the keep hasn’t changed at all. I know every turn.
I know where the floor dips near the western reach because Therin once cracked the stone there with a training blade he swore was perfectly balanced.
I know the carved notch in the long table in the great hall where Brael drove a knife into it during an argument and refused to remove it for forty years.
I know the stretch of wall where Vel once pinned a Wild Court messenger by the throat and explained, with lethal calm, that no one summoned the Nightwild Guard like they were hunting dogs.
But memory has been a poor substitute for this.
The handrail is cool beneath my palm, smooth blackwood carved with old markings that shift under my touch.
The steps are wide enough for four fae to pass each other without turning sideways. Deep enough for armor, weapons, blood, and whatever mood the Guard has dragged in with them.
I have taken these stairs half-dead, furious, drunk, laughing, and once with Therin over my shoulder because he insisted he could outdrink a famhair.
As it turned out, he could not.
The memory almost gets a laugh out of me.
At the bottom of the staircase, the great hall stands silent and empty, a long table cutting the space in half. Violet morning light spills through the tall windows, catching on the banners covering the walls.
For one second, I see the Guard as we were back then, scattered around the room.
Vessara near the table. Kaelith by the hearth. Therin sprawled wherever he had decided would irritate the rest of the Guard the most.
It is so clear I almost expect one of them to call out to me.
Then I blink, and it’s empty again.
I cross it without slowing. The archway on the far side leads deeper into the keep, away from the main halls and down into the older parts of Nightward. The air changes almost as soon as I pass beneath it, turning cooler, touched with the mineral scent of the rock the keep was cut from.
The passage narrows slowly. The walls lose the clean lines of the upper halls, becoming rougher with every step. My boots strike against the descending steps, each footfall echoing back to me.
At the bottom, the passage ends at a black wooden door.
There is no handle. No visible hinges. It opens silently as I move toward it.
The room it reveals is small and cold. A table stands against one wall, and a wooden chest sits beneath it.
Above them both, the first oath of the Nightwild Guard is carved into the stone.
I step inside, and the door closes behind me. Sconce lights flicker to life above my head. I move across the floor and crouch in front of the chest, my eyes tracking over the patterns carved into the wood.
Lines of tide and foam coil through the wood, but when the sconce light catches them, they become something else. Script. Scales. The curve of a watching eye hidden inside a wave.
Nine silver inlays mark the center, each one worked so thinly into the wood that they seem to sink beneath the surface rather than sit on top of it.
I reach out and press my palm against the Sea Court marking at the center of the lid.
There’s a soft click and the sigil flares once before fading. When I lift my hand, the lid rises, and the scent of sea salt slips out. It’s faint, barely there but still enough to put the taste of Sorynmar in my mouth.
Inside lies a length of shimmering silk. I draw it free and spread it across the stone table. The silk is embroidered with an image of nine waves rising out of turquoise water.
The Sea Queen’s standard.
I rest my hand on the center of it and bow my head.
“I failed you.”
I am the Eldráfn of the Nightwild Guard. I am the male the four courts send for when they want something ended, found, or resolved.
And when the Sea Court called for me, I failed to bring its Queen home.
The standard lies cold beneath my hands. Heavy silk. Nine waves. A life I gave up long before the war began, yet never managed to leave behind as cleanly as I pretend.
The Palace of the Ninth Tide waits behind my closed eyes.
Pearlescent stone under my boots. Salt wind moving through open arches.
Court music drifting beneath voices that lowered as she entered the room.
Her hand at the side of my face for one brief second before she turned away and became Queen again.
My fingers curl, twisting the material in my grip.
I was supposed to bring her home.
Tonight, Alleria will stand before the Guard, and we will make a place for her. A once-human princess. A female with the blood of a hunter. A woman born under a crown that turned on her.
I look down at the standard.
I should be thinking of the rite.
Of the words that will strip that crown’s authority from her. Of the place we will offer that no bloodline can command.
Instead, I stand before the Sea Queen’s standard and wonder what it means to offer one woman a place when I failed to return another to hers.
I fold the standard and set it back inside the chest, my fingers lingering over it before I close the lid and seal it away again. I set the ward back into place, then rise to my feet and look at the oath carved into the wall.
We hold no court.
We kneel to no crown.
We answer to no bloodline.
We guard the boundary, the balance, and the debt.
I know every word. I have lived under their rule for longer than I haven’t. Yet they have never felt as heavy as they do now.
The first time I spoke them, I did so with Sea Court salt still on my skin, and too many titles at my back. I thought I understood what it meant to leave bloodline behind.
I understood less than I believed.
Bloodlines can make a cage look like freedom if it’s clever enough.
I wonder if Alleria understands that. Whether she will understand what the Guard offers instead. A place no crown can take from her.
The door opens behind me.
“I thought I’d find you here.” Therin steps inside and the door closes softly behind him.
His footsteps are quiet across the floor, and he gives the chest a small bow. “It wasn’t your failure.”
“It was.”
“It wasn’t yours alone.” His voice is firm.
“It was mine first.”
“No. No one could have succeeded. She was gone before we reached her, Cairn. The mages made sure of that.”
I turn away from the chest and face the fae warrior who has been at my side since the days before either of us were called to the Nightwild Guard.
“I led the charge, Therin. If I had moved sooner—”
“The mages would have killed you. They were waiting for us. They had the salt circles drawn and the iron forged. We walked right into a trap.”
I know it’s the truth. But knowing does not wash the failure from my hands.
“I gave my word to the Sea Court the day we discovered she was stolen. I swore I would bring the Queen home.”
“And you fought to keep it. We all did. We paid for that failure in blood and iron.”
He crosses the small space, and stops in front of the wall where the first oath is carved. He traces a finger along the grooves of the lettering.
“We have a new twelfth to accept tonight. A halfling who has bled for this Guard. For you.” His fingers still against the oath. “We need our Eldráfn focused on the rite, not drowning in the tides of the past.”
I look at Therin, at the faint silver marks tracing his skin that show him as Sea Court-born, just like me. He understands the pull of the Ninth Tide better than anyone else, yet he refuses to let me sink into it.
“Do you think she’s ready?”
The question pulls me away from the chest. From the standard. From the Queen I failed to bring home.
“To stand before the Guard and accept her place?” His mouth curves into a familiar, half-knowing smile. “If I know you, she doesn’t even know it’s coming.”
“She doesn’t.”
“Then she’ll be confused, and furious unless you charm her afterward.” His smile deepens. “But she’ll hold her ground. She always does.”
He steps back toward the door, clasping my shoulder as he passes.
“Leave the ghosts in the chest, Cairn.” His tone turns serious. “The living are waiting. And one of them needs you to give her a home.”
I’m leaning against the wall in the shadows of the courtyard, watching Therin, Kaelith, and Iorel position a chair I have not seen in centuries. Dark stone. High-backed. Worked with thorns that mirror the armor beneath my skin.
“It’s a strange thing, Brother.” Brael’s voice pulls my attention as he stops beside me in the dim light.
“What’s that?”
“I thought if we ever returned home, it would be to mourn our dead and the end of the Guard. I didn’t think it would be to bring a new one into our fold. A halfling, of all things.”
My jaw tightens, the need to defend her rising before I can stop it. “It doesn’t make her any less—”
“Stand down. I never said it does. But it is still strange.”
I give him a flat look, but don’t answer. Instead, I push away from the wall. “It’s time.”