Chapter Thirty
Six Months Later
I awake in a pool of blood.
“Godsdammit,” I mutter, careful not to wake Ronan. I slide out of bed, cringing at the terrible wet feeling between my legs. Thank the gods Taran left us some water in the washbasin. If I had to trudge out into the yard to draw water up from the well right now, I might actually scream.
My cycle has come early again.
I soak my soiled undergarments and my nightgown in the basin, cleaning myself and putting on fresh underwear, this time pinning in the pad I should have been wearing just in case. I’ve just started scrubbing out the stains when Ronan slips in the kitchen behind me.
“Don’t look,” I say. “It’s gross.”
“Oh, darling. I think I can handle a little blood.”
He must have seen the sheets.
He wraps his arms around me, kissing my shoulder and then pressing his hands to my belly, warmth and light spreading from his fingertips.
“Mm,” I moan as my cramps subside. “Gods, that feels amazing.”
“I’ll get the sheets,” he says. “Go back to bed.”
“It’s alright. I’m feeling better now that you’re here.”
With his help, the washing goes quickly. He takes the clean linens from me as I finish scrubbing, hanging them on a clothesline by the fire.
It’s cramped in the cottage at the best of times, and even more so with the clothesline out, but with spring being stubbornly slow to start, it’s better than hanging them outside to get snowed on.
To be honest, the cottage is a mess even without the clothesline up.
Neither of us had spent much time without servants before we moved in here, and it has taken some getting used to.
Our bedroom is covered in clothes, furs, and armor for our days training out in the freezing fields with the soldiers.
Our small dining table is littered with journals, scrolls, and notes from our nights spent poring over my mother’s notes and the apocrypha concealed beneath.
Our kitchen is clean but tarnished—not by Ronan’s generally decent camp cooking, but by my culinary experiments. They haven’t always ended in total disaster, but on more than one occasion they’ve required Taran to extinguish a small fire or two.
The roof leaks snowmelt into the bath, one of the windows doesn’t open, and I’m fairly certain there’s a family of mice hiding behind the baseboards.
And on top of it all, we’re merely steps away from my brother and Taran in the other cottage, who are constantly fighting, which is terrible, except for when they’re not fighting, which is worse.
I love it with my whole heart, and I’ve never been happier in my life.
“Are you heading into town after training?” I ask Ronan as he makes us some eggs and oatmeal for breakfast.
“No training today. I had something else in mind. If you’re feeling up for it, that is.”
Ronan has been posing as a commander under Taran, taking orders from him while they help train the Orsan soldiers along with refugees from Selara.
I have joined one of the legions primarily composed of Selarans.
Even Seth has offered some help of the strategic variety, on days when it doesn’t interfere with his other plans.
The Orsa are still suspicious of the two of us, though we’ve managed to avoid outright hostility for a few months now.
There’s been little movement from Adria, who has spent most of the time rebuilding the city she destroyed and getting the gold alchemy up and running again.
The word from the refugees is that she’s sending Selarans into the forest to harvest the phoenix cypress ash.
Seth and Taran are there now, attempting to recruit more Selarans to our cause.
And searching for a certain magical sickle.
Our research has led to a few discoveries. None of them are exactly what we were searching for—the wording of the Shadowbound Prophecy or even what it implies—but we’ve pieced together a few ideas from the work my mother did.
First, we discovered that Mother was aware of the relics Cyrus told Zara about, although she was only concerned with the torch and the sickle.
She never managed to locate the torch, even though she traveled to Brakkar in search of it during one of her trips away that I thought related to the war effort, but she did find the sickle in a temple in Minar.
Then she stole it and buried it somewhere.
We’ve been searching the graveyards near Pyka, our home at the time, but either it doesn’t have the same sort of magical draw to it that the torch did, or she found a different hiding place.
Hopefully, Seth and Taran manage to find it on this trip, although I’m not optimistic.
They seem to have produced little from their various trips across Nithyria other than a handful of traumatized refugees.
Whether their trauma was from the war or having to spend days traveling with my brother, I couldn’t say.
Our second revelation was that the Selaran Queen Julia, the queen who reunited Selara and Nithyria following the first civil war, had been married to a shadow-born who was formerly her guard.
Her name appeared in both the scrap of parchment Seth had stolen and the letter Cyrus sent to Ronan when the city fell, and my mother’s notes had speculated that Queen Julia and King Leander, her consort, had been assassinated late in life, possibly by the church for “shadowbound heresy,” although there was no indication of what they’d actually done.
Cyrus’s note indicated we should find their tomb, but my mother hadn’t reached the same conclusion, and none of the remaining books in the Pyka library offered any clues to where it could be.
The third revelation was that all references to the Prophecy itself have been stripped, even from the palimpsests.
We’ve tried a dozen different elixirs and every type of magic available to us to reveal it in the five different places we’ve found reference to it, but it’s as if it was struck from every record in the world by something far more powerful and permanent than anything we’ve seen.
The best plan we have now is to retrieve the sickle and take both the sickle and the torch to the location of the temple in Avaris and hope whatever connection we have to the Prophecy is revealed to us there.
Either way, we’ve exhausted what we can learn here. And the only other places that might have answers are in Faros: the Alchemists’ Guild and the Great Library.
Which means that we’ll have to retake Faros to find out.
The retaking Faros plan is further along than our prophecy plan, which has firmly become Plan B.
Typhon managed to secure us support from Brakkar after a long negotiation, and Larus has enlisted his mother’s fleet to transport soldiers to Pyka and Minar for our siege and to engage Felix’s patrol ships at sea.
It’s essentially the same siege tactics my sister used to take Faros in the first place, but with fewer escape routes and a winter-starved city half filled with a populace that wants to see their king restored.
We’re hopeful we’ll succeed in even less time and with far fewer casualties.
But all of that is a few weeks out. The mountains are still treacherous with snow, and the soldiers have a long way to travel to reach Faros.
“What did you have in mind?” I ask Ronan as he serves me my eggs.
“You’ll see,” he says with a wink. “Dress for warm weather. It’s a beautiful day.”
After breakfast, I put on a blue Nithyrian sundress and follow Ronan from the cottage along a forest path.
We visit the home Kira has made for herself on a rock outcropping, bringing her a bucket of her favorite fish and some fresh hay for her nest. She has loved the freedom of being here in Nithyria after being confined during the war.
It took some time for the residents of Pyka to get used to her, but she’s become something of a mascot to them now.
Ronan frequently has to disguise himself on the spot as the village children come to bring her treats.
Our path leads back into the woods, which are finally thawing and coming to life with green.
Pairs of birds land on branches filled with tiny buds, their songs filling the air as we step over creeks swelling with clear snowmelt waters.
The forest is bright at this time of year, but it’s still lovely.
I regret that we won’t be here when the canopy is full.
I’d love to kiss Ronan in the forest shadows, the place where I feel most at home.
Or where I felt most at home until I met him.
Finally, we reach a clearing, and I realize immediately why he’s brought me here.
The ground is carpeted in a thick blanket of bluebells, their nodding flowers spreading over the forest floor and filling the edges of the meadow, except for a spot just in the middle where Ronan lays down a thick blanket with blue and green stripes.
He takes my hand and helps me to the ground. He lays back on the blanket, and I lay beside him, draping my arm over his stomach and my head on his chest.
“This is so beautiful, Ronan.” I lean up and kiss him on the cheek.
“I wanted to have just one day to ourselves before everything begins,” he says, his voice soft and low. “Just one day where we can just be us. No plans, no training, no research.”
“No Seth.”
Ronan laughs. “No Seth. Just us, and these beautiful woods you love.”
“It’s perfect.”
But it isn’t, quite. There’s been something on my mind, something that I haven’t found the courage to say yet, but here, on the first beautiful day of the year, I can’t wait any longer.
“Ronan,” I say, propping myself up on my elbow. “Let’s get married.”
His eyes widen in genuine shock. He may be able to read my feelings, but he certainly still can’t read my mind. “What?”
I feel his heart racing under my palm as I rub his chest. “I want to marry you. Now, while we’re still here.”
“Sylvie,” he says, sitting up and holding my hands. “Do you mean it? Are you sure? I don’t have anything to offer you. The home we’re staying in isn’t mine. I have no land. I have no crown—”
“I don’t care about any of that.” I pull his hands up to my lips, looking up at him through my lashes. “I just want you.” I feel the conflict in his feelings. His elation is tinged with doubt and fear. Maybe I’ve misread this. “Unless you don’t want to—”
“No,” he says with some force. “No, of course I want to. I had thought, once we retook the city…You’d really marry me with nothing? You won’t be queen. I can’t even promise you that any of what we have planned will work. You may never be queen—”
“I don’t want to be queen. I want to be your wife.”
“Wait here,” he says, rising suddenly. He senses my concern and leans back down, kissing me hard and weaving his hands into my hair until I’m breathless when he breaks away. “Just wait here a minute. Trust me.”
My heart fills with nervous excitement. I lean back on the blanket, adjusting my dress and using the light magic I’m still able to use with Ronan nearby to ease my cramps once more.
The sky draws me in with its deep, dreamy blue and impossibly fluffy clouds.
For a moment, I have a sensation of falling into it, but then I’m grounded once more by a breeze blowing through the trees, which lifts the sweet fragrance of the bluebells into the air and shifts the shadows and the dappled light in a serene dance.
I don’t wait long. Ronan returns in less than half the time it took us to get here, but he cheated—he took Kira.
He lands her near the blanket, and she stomps around happily, chasing a rabbit into the woods.
Ronan kneels down, and he pulls from his pocket a small wooden box. The secret box he took from the palace on the day we fled. I’ve seen it by his bedside, but I never opened it. I know the value of secrets better than almost anyone.
“You said you’d need that,” I say, remembering. “What is it?”
He winks and flips the lid open.
It’s a ring.
And it’s stunning. A single large sapphire is set in gold so old it must be antique, judging by the intricate style of the engravings. They’re similar to the markings on my mother’s signet ring, the ring I wear on my right hand.
“This was my mother’s,” he says quietly. “The gold predates alchemy. It’s an heirloom of House Paulla, my mother’s House.”
“It’s beautiful, Ronan.”
“I knew I wanted you to have it before we even left. I knew I didn’t want to take the chance of losing it when Adria took the palace.
I want to give this to you.” He takes a deep, stilling breath.
“But I’m not certain I’m worthy of you. This version of me isn’t my best. It’s not even close.
I have never had so little, and you deserve so much.
You deserve the world. If I give this to you now, it comes with a promise.
A promise that I’ll do everything in my power to become a man worthy of your love once more.
I swear I’ll do it.” He looks up at me where I sit, his eyes filled with tears.
“Gods, Ronan,” I say, taking the box from his hand and setting it aside.
“How can you be so wonderful and yet so wrong? This is absolutely the best version of you. This is the version that has lost everything but that won’t stop fighting.
This is the version that feels his worst but that doesn’t give up.
This is the version that wakes up with me every day and makes me so blissfully happy in spite of everything that I can’t imagine a single day without you.
I don’t want your crown. I don’t want your power.
I don’t want only the best moments of your life.
I want every moment.” I wipe away a tear.
“I love you. Your best, your worst, and everything in between. I love you.” I lean forward and wipe the tears from his eyes, kissing him softly until he leans forward to hold me.
“Sylvie. You are already everything to me. I love you with everything that I am and will ever be.” He picks up the box once more. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice choked with happy tears. “Yes, Ronan.”
He reaches a shaking hand into the box and slips the ring onto my finger.
Then he kisses me, and I swear the sun could have fallen from the sky, and I never would have known it.
Who needs the sun when I have him?