Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Aurelia
The Aine warrior smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Hello, Aurelia.”
My bare feet slapped against the rug, my pulse louder than the fire crackling, and then I was in her arms. My cheek pressed to her shoulder, my fingers digging into the coarse weave of her tunic.
Gods, she was so much thinner than I remembered.
For a terrifying heartbeat, I thought she might vanish.
That she was some phantom conjured by the drugs still crawling through my veins. But she was solid. Warm. Alive.
And then her arm came up—the one that wasn’t bound in a sling—and wrapped around me. Hesitant at first, then steadier. The scent of her as she hugged me—earth and sky and something faintly sweet, like resin, or the sap of trees—was familiar in a way that cracked something raw and aching inside me.
“Amanti,” I whispered into the fabric at her neck. Grief poured through me like water. She smelled like home. Like Sonoma. My mother—
No, I couldn’t think about her now.
“You’re alive,” I said, joy brimming just as full as my grief.
“Barely,” she said dryly.
I pulled back just enough to look at her, but my hands stayed braced on her arms, unwilling to let go completely.
Her face was sharper than before, cheekbones cut like blades, skin stretched taut.
Her hair—once a long, shiny black curtain—had been hacked short on one side.
The longer side was braided and tucked over her shoulder.
But the worst was her wings… My throat closed at the sight.
Torn. One hanging off-kilter, the other stiffly tucked at her back, scarred and broken.
I swallowed hard. “I thought you were—”
“Dead?” She gave the faintest tilt of her mouth, not a smile but the shadow of one. “Close enough.”
Her eyes flicked past me to the fae warrior still lingering near the door, hand resting on his blade. Was Amanti their prisoner too? Is this where she’d been all this time?
“What happened?” I asked.
“I went south like we discussed. For weeks, I searched for any sign of the Verdant healers, but there was nothing left of their old tribe.” She frowned and added, “There was nothing left of any tribe, in fact.”
“What do you mean?”
“The southern outposts were emptied. The nomadic tribes who still make their home in Vorinthia’s rainforests were nowhere to be found.”
“What happened to them all?”
“I don’t know. There was no evidence of a battle, but… if they’re still alive, they clearly don’t want to be found.” Her voice dipped lower, roughened by something deeper than injury. “Despite that, it turns out I wasn’t the only creature roaming the southern forests. A Brindalorn attacked me—”
“A Brindalorn?” I echoed in disbelief. “Impossible. They’ve been extinct for centuries.”
“Apparently not,” she said. “The blasted thing nearly made me extinct, though.”
“And Lesha? Did she find you?”
“Lesha?” She frowned. “No, I thought—” Confusion flickered, turning to concern. “Is she not at Sunspire, holding the wards with Sonoma?”
My shoulders fell. I shook my head. “She went to look for you. We hadn’t heard any news from her before…” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what had happened to Sonoma. What she’d given up to protect Sevanwinds for me.
“We’ll find her,” Amanti said, voice firm.
I nodded, borrowing her confidence. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”
A shadow passed over her features, highlighting the dark circles beneath her eyes. The paleness in her complexion. “The healing process has been slow. My wounds were … substantial.”
No wonder. Brindalorns were vicious by all historical accounts—striped hide sharpened to points along its back, patches of its body armored in stone-like plates.
Its eyes were pits of pale fire, its jaws wide enough to snap its prey in half.
Nearly unkillable, born of cursed magic and a corrupted line of glimfangs, it hunted anything warm-blooded, and it never stopped once it picked up a scent.
“How did you defeat it?” I asked.
“It took every last drop of my Aine magic,” she said quietly, and I could feel her sadness at the loss. “Draining myself that way nearly killed me. I was almost gone when Rydian found me.”
“Wait. Did you say Rydian?” My hands tightened on her arms. “Rydian Nytherra saved you?”
She nodded. “He brought me here a few months ago.”
Her words stunned me. The idea that she’d been a prisoner here while Rydian pretended to care about me was a rage heating my blood, but I couldn’t let myself think about Rydian right now. Not when we needed to find a way out of here.
“I’m so glad we found one another,” I told her. “So much has happened that I have to tell you. And I want to hear more about your time in the south.” I dropped my voice low, leaning in so our captor couldn’t hear. “But first, we need to find a way out of here.”
“Out?” Amanti’s brows knitted. “Why would we do that?”
“You can fly us out and then we can—”
Her expression fell so far that I stopped, bracing for what she was going to say. “My wings… They don’t carry me anymore,” she said quietly. “They might again, with time. But not yet.”
My chest caved. My mouth filled with bitter ash. Amanti—my Amanti, warrior of the Aine, chosen by the Fates, fierce, indomitable, untouchable—was earthbound.
“It’s okay.” I swallowed back my own panic at the idea of how helpless she was, how trapped we both were.
I kept my voice low, hoping like Hel the midnight fae in the corner couldn’t hear me.
“We’ll run. South, east—wherever it takes to get out of this gods-forsaken court.
They’ve taken my swords, but I’ll find another weapon. I won’t leave you here.”
Her voice cut through my rush of words. “Aurelia.”
Something about the way she said my name made me stop.
Her hand, warm and soft, closed over mine. Her gaze didn’t waver as she said, “I’m here willingly.”
The floor seemed to tilt beneath me. My mouth opened, but no words came out. For a long, stuttering moment, I thought I’d misheard.
“What?”
Her tone was patient, calm, infuriatingly level. “I’m not a prisoner here. The Midnight Court is our friend.”
“No.” I shook my head so hard that strands of hair fell into my face. “You can’t mean that. Amanti, they drugged me. Locked me in. I— Why?” The word tore out of me, thin and broken. “Why would you want to stay here with these monsters?”
Her expression softened, and that terrified me most of all. She had never looked at me with pity. And now, she’d done it twice in the last two minutes. “Because Rydian Nytherra is my nephew.”
I blinked at her, stunned into silence. “Your…what?”
“My sister’s son,” she said evenly.
“That’s insane.” My laugh was brittle, too sharp. “That’s not—you never said—you never told me you had family—”
“There are things,” Amanti said carefully, “that could not be spoken of until the time was right.”
The words transported me back to another confession. In another castle. Another time. I’d survived Heliconia’s curse on my people—leaving them all perpetually slumbering while I carried on with only the Aine to keep me company.
Seven years later, as she was dying, Sonoma had admitted the truth: that I was not the Summer fae daughter I’d been raised to believe.
I was the product of a forbidden romance between an Aine warrior and a Furiosity. With the blood of a Fairy and a demon god running in my veins. But more than that, I was the answer to an ancient prophecy, one which promised a darkness that would blot out the light. Heliconia.
Her obsession with power had been foretold Ages ago.
And when she’d come—and so had I—the Fates saw their chance to balance the scales.
And I became their Chosen One. Fates-blessed and deemed their own personal savior.
Destined to destroy the Dark Queen. If and when I ever got around to figuring out how that was supposed to work.
I’d spent the first seven years of the curse protecting my sleeping kingdom from within Sunspire’s walls.
Sonoma and the other Aine had provided a ward of protection, using their Fated-gifted magic, and for a time, it had been enough to keep us safe.
But then that magic had begun to fail. The Fates had vanished from Menryth altogether, and their power waned in their chosen warriors.
I’d spent the last several weeks banished outside my home after Sonoma’s death, and her bargain with my uncles, the gods of Hel, had sealed the wards around the place.
This time, more powerful and unbreakable than before.
Until I found a way to break the curse, there would be nothing and no one in or out.
I’d been so foolishly convinced I could find a way to break the curse and wake them all through an alliance of marriage to Callan Ashfall, Autumn Prince. Now, Autumn’s king.
But my pitiful effort had been doomed from the start.
Not only that, but I was the last to know it.
The last to know who my parents were. The last to know what kind of male Callan really was, which didn’t even begin to cover the fact that he possessed compulsion—a magic long gone from bloodlines in this realm.
And the last to know Amanti was still alive—thanks to her secret family.
A blood relation to the male who betrayed me most.
“Was it all a lie then?” I asked, nearly choking on the words as I looked at her now. “Some ruse to spy for the Midnight Court. To learn our weaknesses. To bring us down.”
“Of course not,” Amanti insisted, eyes flashing. “I am an Aine, by vow and by choice.” Her indignation softened to affection. “And I love you, Aurelia. As I always have. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
Her words were genuine, but I couldn’t find an answer inside me. Not after so much failure and loss. So many secrets hidden away.
“Rydian and Slade found me when I was injured and near dying. They brought me back here. Keres has been healing me.”
Rydian had found her? Saved her? When? Certainly before he’d come to Grey Oak with me, where, all along, he’d known she was alive and hadn’t bothered to mention it. The truth of it choked me.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to hug her until her bones protested and make the world small enough to fit my hands. I did neither.
“Why didn’t you send word?” I asked.
“Communication was too dangerous. Heliconia’s spies are everywhere. Aurelia, my loyalty and love for you are true.”
The silence stretched between us, taut as a bowstring.
And rather than break it with anything so futile as words, I turned and walked away. Back to my room where I shut the door with a firm click.
A prison cell after all.