Chapter 12 #2
His eyes found mine, and something in them made my pulse quicken. “There was never any scenario where I would have let you walk out that door without me, Furious.”
His words, the utter conviction in them, sent shudders through me.
Amanti nodded approvingly. “When do we leave?”
“You’re coming too?” I asked.
“It’s Lesha,” she said as if that explained everything.
For me, it did.
“At first light,” Rydian said. “In the meantime, we’ll gather supplies. And I’ll send Shade and Thorne to scout ahead.”
“What about horses?” I asked, remembering belatedly I had none of my own here—and I wasn’t exactly interested in getting back in that carriage.
“I’ll have Daegel and Keres bring horses up for all of us,” Rydian said.
I wanted to ask up from where, but I swallowed the question. For now. At some point, I needed to learn all I could about the Midnight Court and its magically sealed gates. If Rydian thought I was going to simply bow under his command, he was going to be sorely disappointed.
“Horses will draw attention,” Amanti warned him.
“Without them, we’ll travel too slowly, and that makes us a target too,” Rydian said. “We’ll take the merchant road. It’s less traveled and hopefully not being used by Heliconia’s scouts.”
The merchant road.
I’d used it often enough in the last seven years, mostly to sneak through the Broadlands in search of a way to break the curse.
None of those trips had yielded anything remotely close to an answer—including the last one.
The day I killed an Obsidian in a crumbling cabin. The day Rydian found me again.
He’d chased me right back into my engagement with Callan.
All along, I’d thought he hated me for breaking my word to his half-brother. But now I wondered if he’d only been testing me. To make me decide once and for all where I stood. Not just with Callan but with Heliconia. As the Chosen One of the realm.
The Furiosities’ champion.
My father’s daughter.
“Aurelia?” Amanti’s voice pulled me back. “You good with that?”
“Yes.” I forced the past aside. And did my best to ignore whatever feelings I still had for Rydian. He hadn’t cared if I’d married Callan. I needed to remember that.
“Then I suggest we all get some rest.” Amanti moved toward the door, then paused. “For what it’s worth, I think this is the right call. The naiad have stayed neutral too long. It’s time they fought for the fate of Menryth.”
After she left, silence stretched between Rydian and me.
Outside, the late afternoon sun had already dipped behind the trees. Inside, the torches burned lower, casting longer shadows. I should have left too, should have retreated to my chambers to prepare. Instead, I found myself frozen, unable to look away from him.
“You were right,” he said finally. “Earlier. I don’t get to decide what you’re ready for. That wasn’t fair.”
The admission surprised me, but I kept my arms crossed. “You’re trying to protect me. I understand that.”
“Understanding it doesn’t make it acceptable.
” He moved around the table slowly, maintaining distance.
“I sent you here because I thought I knew better. I thought I was protecting you. Instead, I just...” He stopped, jaw clenching.
“I hurt you. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to navigate this ever since. ”
My throat tightened, but I forced the words out.
“Navigate what, exactly? Because we haven’t actually talked about any of it, have we?
Not about you coming to my room that night in Grey Oak, sharing my bed.
Not about how you lied to me for seven years about who you really were that night or why you introduced yourself.
Not about—” I stopped, hating how my voice wavered.
“Not about you shoving me into that carriage.”
The muscle in his jaw ticked. “You would have died if I hadn’t.”
“That was my choice to make." The anger felt good, safer than the confusion underneath it. “Just like it was my choice who I shared a bed with. Or it should have been. If I’d known the truth about who you were, what you wanted from me, I might have chosen differently.”
“Aurelia—”
“Was I just a job?” The question burst out before I could stop it. “Track down the Chosen One, get her to trust you, open the gates to your precious kingdom? Was that all it was?”
Silence stretched between us, heavy and suffocating.
“At first?” His voice was rough. “Yes.”
The honesty shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. I’d known, hadn’t I? Deep down. From the moment he’d told me of their bargain with the gods.
“That night we met at the solstice celebration,” he continued, “I came to see if you were worthy of your destiny. If the girl everyone whispered about could actually be what the prophecies claimed.”
“And?” I prompted, anger heating my face. “What changed?”
“At first, nothing.” His grey eyes met mine, unflinching. “You were a spoiled princess marrying a spoiled prince.”
“As I recall, you seemed to have already made up your mind by the time you opened your mouth.” I turned toward the door, done with this conversation.
“You asked me what changed.”
I stopped but didn’t turn around.
“I did,” he said quietly. “Meeting you…what I felt… it has made me question everything I thought I knew about worthiness. About destiny. About what I was willing to sacrifice for duty.”
“And yet you still lied.”
“I couldn’t have told you these truths if I wanted to. And gods, I wanted to.”
The desperation in his tone made me study him.
“Koraz asked if I knew the truth,” I said, remembering the way Duron’s advisor had taunted Rydian that night in the garden. “He called Duron your master. What did he mean?”
I watched the shadows play across Rydian’s face as he leaned against the war table, his fingers gripping the edge hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
“A blood oath,” he said finally, each word dragged from somewhere deep. “To Duron.”
“Like the one your people made with the Furiosities?”
He barked out a laugh, humorless and bleak.
“No, this was nothing like that.” His jaw tightened, but he went on quietly, and I waited, giving him space, “I made it when I was seventeen. An oath of loyalty, he called it. It prevented me from lying to him or raising a hand against him, no matter what he commanded.”
“Sounds like enslavement.”
“I did it willingly.” The desolation in those words hollowed me out.
The air between us felt too thin. “Why would you—?”
“My mother.” His jaw tightened. “Duron discovered her lineage. What she was. He would have used her, kept her locked away in Autumn as leverage against me forever.” His eyes met mine, dark and raw to their depths. “The blood vow was the only way to keep her beyond his reach.”
Rydian might have saved his mother from that abuse, but in doing so, he’d subjected himself. My heart broke for the seventeen-year-old who’d had to make that awful choice.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
Something shuttered in his expression, that familiar wall sliding back into place. He straightened, putting distance between us with nothing more than a shift in his posture. “She’s safe.”
“Rydian—”
“That’s all you need to know.” Not cruel but absolute.
The silence stretched between us like spider silk—fragile, nearly invisible, but there nonetheless.
I could have pressed. Could have demanded more after everything he’d kept from me.
But I recognized the fortress he’d built around this one thing, this one person he’d sacrificed everything to protect.
He'd wanted to protect me too. And the only way he knew how was to take the entire burden on his own shoulders. Even though I understood it now, I still couldn’t let him think it was okay.
“I’m not her,” I said as gently as I could.
His gaze whipped to mine.
“I am going to put myself in danger,” I went on before he could argue. “And I’m asking you to stand beside me while I do it. To fight with me. Not fight in my place. And not send me away or arrange things behind my back.”
He swallowed hard. “All right.”
The words were raw but firm.
“And the oath you swore to Duron is broken now?”
“Yes.” The word came out rough. He looked away, toward the darkened windows. “I’m free.”
I wasn’t sure if freedom was supposed to look so haunted. But I only looked at him, this warrior prince with shadows in his eyes and scars on his soul.
“And now?” I asked quietly. “Where do we go from here?”
“Now we go to the river people. We forge this alliance. We save Lesha.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” He sighed. “But it’s the only answer I can give you.” Something dark flickered in his eyes. More secrets, I realized.
No matter how many truths he gave me, there were still more he kept for himself. The fact was, I trusted Rydian Nytherra with my life—but I couldn’t trust him with my heart.
“I should prepare for tomorrow,” I said, my voice flat. “Good night.”
I turned to go.
“Aurelia.” My name was rough in his throat. “We’re going to save her. Lesha, your people, all of them. I swear it.”
I nodded once, not trusting myself to speak. Despite everything—despite the betrayal and the hurt and the complicated mess between us—I believed him. Maybe that made me a fool.
I made it to the door before his voice stopped me one more time.
“You weren’t just a job,” he said hoarsely. “Not for a long time.”
I didn’t look back. Didn’t let him see how those words affected me. “See you in the morning.”
I slipped into the corridor before he could say anything else. Before I could do something stupid like ask him to define “a long time.” Before I could forget that I had bigger things to focus on than whatever this thing between us was or wasn’t.
Tomorrow, we’d go to the river people.
Tonight, I’d remind myself that hope was dangerous. Especially when it came to males who dealt in shadows and secrets.