48. Fen
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
FEN
I’d spent thirty years being afraid of the wrong things. My mother’s disappointment. The council’s judgment. Failure.
This was different.
I rolled the fabric tight, shoving it into my pack. The decision had already been made. The moment Eradin’s mouth had opened under mine, and I’d tasted her need and recognized it as the mirror of my own, I’d crossed a line I couldn’t uncross.
I wasn’t going back.
I grabbed my bedroll from where servants had laid it out, the fabric still carrying the scent of whatever herbs they used to keep it smelling fresh. It wouldn’t matter where I was sleeping tonight.
My shoulder pulled when I hefted the pack, the wound protesting.
I ignored it. Pain was just information, and right now it was telling me I was alive enough to make choices that were the best decisions of my life but would probably destroy me.
It would be worth it.
I’d spent thirty years doing what I was supposed to do. Performing the role I’d been cast in before I could walk. Crown prince. Perfect heir. The golden son who never stumbled.
I was done with all of it.
It was time I lived for me.
The tent flap shifted to the side, and Vella stood in the entrance, backlit by firelight. Her eyes held fury she was too well-bred to voice.
“You’re making a mistake,” she said, her gaze on the pack.
I kept stuffing things inside. Medical supplies Eradin could use on my shoulder. Water flasks. Food. I lifted the knife I’d worn for a very long time and stared down at it in my hand.
A Lancifer blade for a Lancifer champion, my mother had said, the day I won my first real competition. I was sixteen. Her pride had felt like sunlight after years of night, and I’d spent years doing everything I could to earn that feeling again.
She hadn’t given me the knife because she loved me. She’d given it to me because I’d performed to her expectations once.
I looked at it for a long moment. Then I tossed it onto the empty bed, and the ache I felt wasn’t grief. It was the pain of finally putting something down that had been cutting your hands open the entire time you’d been carrying it.
She could keep her gifts. I was done begging for scraps of approval.
“She’s commons.” Vella’s voice bit harder. “This will destroy you. Your reputation. Your standing. Everything you’ve built.”
I cinched the pack closed and straightened. “Then let it.”
I knew exactly what this would cost. I’d spent the last hour calculating consequences the way I’d been trained. Political fallout. Social exile. My mother’s fury.
Her potential for revenge.
I was doing it anyway.
“You can’t be serious,” Vella stuttered out.
“I act for myself.” I picked up my pack, my bedroll tucked under my bad arm.
“And what do you want?” Her question came out sharp. Mocking. “To play with the commons? To pretend the stable girl sees anything in you beyond a crown and a way out of Shaleside?”
Heat flared in my chest, but I kept my voice level. “Don’t.”
“Don’t tell you the truth?” She stepped closer, her voice dropping to something sounding much like pity.
“I’ve known you since we were children. I know what you’re doing.
You think if you save her, fix her, give her everything, she’ll make you feel real.
Like you’re more than what you were made to be. ”
My jaw locked.
“But she’s not your redemption. She’s a commons in the Scorching who got lucky enough to catch your attention. And the moment this is over and she realizes what being with you actually costs…” Her smile cut. “She’ll run. Just like she ran from your tent tonight.”
The words found their mark. My lungs locked around them for the space of two steps before I could breathe again.
Because there was a version of me, the one I’d been three weeks ago, who might’ve wondered the same thing. But I’d been inside the trial magic with Eradin. I’d felt her stripped down to the bone. And what I’d felt wasn’t strategy.
“She’s not using me,” I said.
“Wake up, Fen.” My nickname in her mouth sounded like a weapon she’d been saving for exactly this moment. “Everyone uses you. At least with me, you knew what you were getting. Alliance. A future that made sense.”
“I don’t want sense.”
“No.” A chill came through in her voice. “You want to feel something. And you’ve decided this commons girl with her illegal magic and her desperation is the answer. But when this destroys you, and it will destroy you, don’t expect me to be there to gather up your pieces and put you back together.”
I thought about Eradin’s hands shaking when she’d pulled me closer.
The sound she’d made when I’d kissed her.
The way she’d run from my tent like what we’d done had terrified her.
That wasn’t someone executing a plan. She hadn’t planned for this at all and because of that, she didn’t know what to do with it.
She was as lost as I was.
“Are you finished?” I asked.
Vella’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “I’m trying to save you from yourself.”
“I don’t want saving. Not anymore.”
I walked past her, out into the night air that bit cold against my face.
The elite camp spread around me, servants moving between tents with supplies, food, and wine. Fires burned clean and smokeless, spelled to provide heat without mess. Everything was organized. Perfect. Controlled.
I’d lived with this my entire life.
“Terrant,” I said.
He emerged from the shadows, stopping at my side. “Your Highness?”
“You’ve attended me well. Tell her that, word for word, the way you tell her everything else.”
Even in this, nothing showed on his face.
He was very good. She’d have accepted nothing less.
“And tell her she can try to strike tonight from the kingdom’s records.” I shouldered my pack. “It will still have happened.”
The weight of thirty years pressed down on my shoulders as I turned away from it all.
Lord Blair’s cousin stood beside his tent. Our eyes met as I passed. His mouth opened, but he closed it, his face shifting between pity and contempt.
He turned his back on me.
The gesture hit harder than words could. I was not worth acknowledging. I was already gone.
As I walked, the conversations didn’t stop. That would’ve required showing I still mattered. Instead they continued speaking, voices pitched to carry just enough.
“He’s throwing everything away.”
“I always knew there was something wrong with him.”
“Contaminated, all of it.”
My boots compressed the dew-soaked grass. Each step shed weight I’d carried so long I’d forgotten it wasn’t a part of me. Or maybe it was adding weight. I couldn’t tell anymore.
I could still turn around. That option existed. It would continue to exist until Eradin saw me cross the boundary, and maybe even after that. I could claim I’d come to have her check on my shoulder or to discuss tomorrow’s trial. I could manufacture plausibility for anything.
I kept walking because I wanted to. That distinction mattered more than I had words for.
The boundary between elite and commons was just grass and firelight, nothing physical marking where one world ended and another began.
But everyone knew where it was. That invisible line drawn by class and custom and centuries of people who’d learned not to mix themselves with what they saw as taint.
My foot touched down on the commons side.
The grass felt no different, the same cold, damp give beneath my boots. I’d half-expected the world to register what I’d done with a shift in air pressure or a sign that I’d crossed something real.
Nothing changed.
Everything changed.
I kept walking.
Vella’s voice carried across the distance, pitched loud enough for everyone to hear. “This is how you throw everything away? For her?”
Yes. For her. For Aristus. For the parts of myself I’d buried so deep I’d forgotten they existed.
For the chance to be something other than what I’d been made to be.
Elite eyes watched, waiting to see if I’d turn back.
I didn’t.
The commons fire burned lower than elite flames, its light weaker but somehow warmer. Smoky, but not magically confined.
Eradin stood beside it, her body rigid with tension I could read from twenty feet away.
She’d seen me coming.
She didn’t move toward me, but she did not move away. She stood there, holding her ground, watching me close the distance between us.
Fifteen feet. Ten.
I slowed. Some part of me braced for the moment she’d lift her hand and tell me to go back where I belonged.
She didn’t.
Five feet.
Her exhale was barely audible.
I stopped at the fire’s edge, my pack heavy on my shoulder, my bedroll under my arm.
I didn’t ask permission or try to explain myself.
We didn’t need justifications for why I was here instead of where the rest of the world thought I belonged.
I knelt and started unrolling my bedding on the ground beside their fire, placing it between the commons tents and the elite camp.
I’d face the direction any trouble would come from.
My shoulder screamed as I smoothed it flat. I kept going anyway, straightening edges that didn’t need straightening, pressing out creases that didn’t matter, aware that I was doing a very thorough job on a task that required no skill whatsoever.
My hands needed something to do besides reach for her.
I arranged my pack beside the bedroll.
She hadn’t said anything yet, but I could feel her watching.
I wanted to be here. With her. In this space that wasn’t about pretending or politics or anything except people trying to survive together.
Two tent flaps rustled.
Reece and Lyndie emerged, their faces shadowed but readable in the firelight. They stood outside their tents, watching the disaster unfold. Lyndie’s gaze found Eradin’s. A whole conversation happened in a glance I wasn’t meant to understand.
Eradin’s chin lifted a fraction, an acknowledgment that she knew exactly how bad an idea this was and was accepting it anyway.
Lyndie’s mouth curved with resignation mixed with respect.
They retreated back inside their tents. The flaps fell closed, giving Eradin and me privacy.
I sat on my bedroll, bracing my hands on my knees.
The fire crackled between us, shedding enough light to paint her face in orange and shadow.
Eradin stood across from me, her body held with the careful stillness I’d started recognizing as her version of armor. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. The fire caught it, turning brown to gold in places where the light hit.
Her mouth was still slightly swollen from my kisses.
I made myself look away before I did something stupid like stride around the fire and kiss her again. My gaze dropped to my hands instead. The tremor had returned, barely visible but there.
She’d see it. She noticed everything.
Sounds from the elite camp’s carried on the cold air, distant enough it felt like a different world. Maybe it was.
I should explain. Tell her this wasn’t about strategy or using her for advantage. That I’d walked away from everything because I was tired of performing and what I felt for her was the first real thing I’d felt in thirty years.
But words felt inadequate for what was happening between us.
The fire sent sparks spiraling up into the dark. One fell, landing near my boot. I watched it glow for a moment before dying.
Her breathing had changed. I suspected she was fighting to keep it even.
“What is this supposed to be?” she asked. “You, sleeping on dirt six feet from my tent. What does it change?”
“Nothing about you. Everything about me.” I looked at the fire, not at her. “I didn’t cross that line to claim you. I did it so you’d never have to be the one who crosses. Whatever I am tomorrow, I’m it on this side of the grass. And if a blade comes for this camp tonight, it finds me first.”
“You can’t stay here.” When her voice croaked, she cleared her throat. “They’ll—”
“I know what they’ll do.”
“Yet you came anyway.”
“I used to think survival was the only thing that mattered. Then you ran to me barefoot in the mud while I was bleeding. Now I know survival is nothing without you.”
She deflated, sitting down across from me, her legs giving out before she fell. Her arms wrapped around her knees, mirroring me.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” she whispered.
“I will when they’re true.”
We stared at each other across the flames.
“This is a bad idea,” she whispered.
“The worst.”
“Your mother will be furious.”
“I don’t care.”
“The council will press her to choose a new heir.”
“I don’t care.”
“Fen.” My name came out broken. “Everyone will—”
“I. Don’t. Care.” I leaned forward, the fire heating my face. “I’ve spent my entire life worrying about what everyone thinks. Begging for approval I’ll never get. And I’m not doing it any longer.”
Her arms loosened on her knees, her fingers spreading wide before curling tight again. “Why?”
“You know why.”
“Say it.”
“Because when I’m with you, I’m not—” I shook my head. “I’m not the crown prince. My mother’s heir. The council’s symbol.” My voice roughened. “I’m none of it. And I don’t know what’s left when you strip all that away, but for the first time in my life, I want to find out.”
I stopped talking before I said the rest. The rest was too much. It was you’re the only real thing I’ve touched in my entire life, and I couldn’t say it without scaring her away.
The fire burned lower between us, shadows growing longer.
Neither of us moved.
We didn’t need to.
And she stayed.
I’d burn everything else down before I gave this up.
Sitting with her in the dark, with the warmth of the fire on my face and the cold of everything I’d walked away from at my back, I let this be enough.
Her hands had loosened on her knees, her fingers uncurling the way I’d watched Aristus release tension he’d held for years.
Not trusting yet.
Just choosing not to guard quite so hard.
That was everything.