Chapter 5
Violet
I didn’t move. I wasn’t sure my body remembered how.
Alastor moved closer to him. “Theron is Sun fae. He was an Advisor for your father. One of the last who survived the fall of our realm.”
Theron nodded, his gaze never leaving mine.
“After our realm was destroyed, those of us who lived scattered. Most were hunted down within months.” His jaw tightened.
“I knew I had to disappear—or follow them into the grave. So I found a healer. I had every identifier altered. My hair turned silver. My skin porcelain. My eyes gray.”
“And the Ice Realm took you in,” I said slowly, the pieces clicking together.
A thin, humorless smile crossed his mouth. “The Ice Realm takes in no one. But with my knowledge of the council, I made myself useful. I rose carefully. And I became one of their Advisors.”
Sebastian went very still.
Adar’s gaze sharpened, calculation flickering behind his eyes.
“I listened. Learned. Waited. For anything—anything at all—that hinted my people were not entirely gone. And then…” Theron paused. “Celine contacted her brother.”
Ice slid down my spine.
Of course she had.
“She told the Ice Sovereign everything,” he continued. “That a girl from the Mountain Realm burst into flames. That her hair turned to living gold. That her eyes shone with light.” His voice dropped. “And that her body did not burn.”
The air left my lungs.
“She said,” he added, “‘The Sun has returned.’”
Silence swallowed the room.
Adar looked at me like I had become a weapon.
Sebastian’s shadows climbed higher, responding to something primal and dangerous stirring in his chest.
And Alastor—
Alastor watched me with something fierce and unyielding in his eyes.
Theron stepped forward slowly, before kneeling.
“I have waited for the Sun to rise again,” he said.
My pulse roared in my ears.
We didn’t have time to hesitate.
The Sun Realm was waking.
And the world already knew.
* * *
By the time the clocks chimed past ten, I had already been at it for hours.
The library’s high windows poured their usual starlight light across the tables. The Night Realm never changed its face—no sun, no shadow of one—just that same steady blue and distant stars. Predictable.
Not like me.
Books lay in open stacks around me. Whoever had organized this place before had been a sadist. Poetry shoved beside plague records. Herbals mixed with histories. Multiple copies of the same chronicle shelved under different titles because a scribe centuries ago thought himself clever.
I’d dragged ladders from one end of the room to the other. Chalked notes on slate tiles. Tied silk ribbons around sections I’d already conquered.
It was the only thing I could make obey.
I was elbow-deep in a stack of misbound atlases when the door opened without a sound.
The air shifted, but I didn’t look up until a gloved hand appeared beside mine and lifted three atlases from the wrong pile and set them onto the right one.
Sebastian worked the way he lived: precise, economical, faintly insulting in its efficiency. He scanned spines, marginalia, and stamped seals from dead courts, and somehow made chaos line up. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. He knew what I was doing.
We let the hour fill with the rustle of vellum and the dull thunk of leather bindings. Every so often, his shadows stirred, lifting a volume from the top rung of a ladder and floating it down like a well-trained animal. I pretended not to watch.
He pretended not to notice.
When the last atlas slid into a neat, obedient row, I tucked the chalk behind my ear and let my shoulders drop.
“I found three copies of The Sea’s Law filed under botany,” I said. “I’m declaring war.”
His mouth tilted. “On the dead.”
“On incompetence.” I nudged a folio toward him. “Someone shelved the entire history of the Forest Realm under miscellaneous.”
“Sounds right,” he said, and when I glared at him, the corner of his mouth betrayed him. He set the folio down and rested his palms on the table. “You’ve been here since morning.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” I tightened a ribbon around Herbal—Venoms until it nearly snapped. “And if I sat still, I’d hear it all again.”
The name.
The vows.
The way Theron’s eyes had looked when he called me Sovereign.
The way Alastor looked at me with such pride.
The only reprieve I had was that it was the middle of the week when Adar was traveling to villages to look for recruits for the Guard, and I didn’t have to train.
“I keep thinking,” I said, “that if I put every book where it belongs, the rest will follow. Borders. People. The part of me that knows what I am—and the part that still can’t say it out loud without feeling like I’ll crack.”
He was silent for a long breath.
“You won’t crack,” he said at last. “You burn.”
I huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “That’s the problem.”
He didn’t argue. He unrolled a map, checked the legend, and slid it into place. When he turned back, his eyes were darker. His shadows curled loosely around his wrists, attentive.
“Violet. Yesterday changed things. I know that. And I know you’re waiting for me to tell you what I expect.” He paused. “I won’t. If you take your throne, I stand with you. If you walk away from it, I stand with you.”
I hadn’t realized how tight my jaw was until it loosened.
“But,” he added, “the realms will hear about this. Celine didn’t speak for the pleasure of gossip. They will decide what to fear.”
I tapped the edge of the table once. “They may not know what I am. Not at first. As far as history is concerned, no one survived the Phoenix Massacre—and no one knew the Sun Sovereign had a faeling.”
His shadows around his hands lifted a fraction.
“And,” I went on, forcing calm into my voice, “I’m mated to you.” I met his eyes. “Even if they guess, they won’t move openly. Not when it means provoking the most powerful Sovereign in Alentara.”
That earned me a smirk. “Go on,” he murmured.
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t make me flatter you. You’ll be unbearable for a week.”
“Two weeks,” he said, then sobered. “Power makes them cautious. Fear makes them reckless. I can plan for the first.”
“And the second?”
His shadows tightened.
“They’ll be stopped before they get to you.”
“The Ice Sovereign won’t move unless Celine arranges the pieces for him.
He’s weary of conflict when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
” I spoke as I thought, sorting possibilities the way I’d sorted shelves.
“The Mountain Realm is brittle, but predictable—we know where they’ll stand.
Forest will wait and weigh, though they’re not exactly fond of you at the moment. ”
He didn’t hide his smile.
“Ocean hates fire stories, but they hate coups more. Flower follows whoever brings the better trade routes. And the Night Realm—”
“—answers to me,” he said, simple and final.
I nodded, my gaze drifting past him to a stack of books from the human realms I still hadn’t decided where to shelve. No system fits them. Maybe that was the point.
He moved then, circling the table at last. He stopped close and planted his hands on either side of me, caging me in against the edge of the table.
“Tell me what you fear,” he said.
“Losing myself,” I answered, because it came too easily to be a lie. “Or… worse. Not being what they need me to be. Not being strong enough.”
His eyes tracked my face, steady and intent, catching every flicker. “You were never small, love.”
“I was hidden.”
“Yes.” The word landed heavy. Certain. “And I will never ask you to be again.”
I drew in a breath. “You said you’d support me no matter what. Does that still hold if I decide to wait? To find more of them before I step into a throne I don’t understand?”
“Yes.” No pause. “We move when you choose. Not when rumor does.”
I reached for a book just to anchor myself—and found, of course, the one copy of A History of the Sun: Untitled Fragments that had been rotting under miscellaneous.
The leather was worn, a phoenix pressed into the cover in gold leaf rubbed nearly bare.
I traced the faint lines of its wings with my thumb, then looked up at him through my lashes.
“Theron said he isn’t the only one,” I said. “If he’s right, there are families surviving in hiding. I don’t want to arrive and crown myself before I’ve even learned how to protect them.”
“Then you learn,” Sebastian said. “We work harder on your gifts, and Adar… Adar will continue training you.”
We fell into a soft silence.
He righted the ink bottle I’d knocked askew without noticing. I untied the ribbon I’d pulled too tight and retied it, looser. His shadow plucked a fallen feather from the floor and set it on the sill.
He brushed his thumb over the edge of the phoenix book. “Do you want me to read it to you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, because saying no would’ve been a lie.
We took the settee beneath the windows where the light looked muted and pearled, not bright—just present. I tucked my legs beneath me. He sat close enough that his coat brushed my knee. I leaned into his shoulder.
He opened to a page written in cramped, spidery script. Even I had to squint. He leaned in as he read, cool breath at my temple, voice steady, controlled.
“‘Rebirth is not a moment,’” he read. “‘It is a season that looks like ruin until the first feather remembers its shape.’”
I swallowed. “Poets are exhausting.”
“Annoying,” he agreed.
He read on, most of it cryptic—phrases that might have made sense once, in another age, to another kind of mind. Now they felt like fragments of a myth I hadn’t lived yet. Somewhere along the way, the words faded into background noise, replaced by the steady beat of his heart beneath my ear.
I watched his mouth as he spoke. The subtle flex of his jaw. The way his voice stayed even no matter what he read.
My fingers lifted of their own accord, tracing the clean line of his jaw, the familiar cool of his skin grounding me.
Mine.
He turned and pressed a kiss to the inside of my wrist—right where my pulse betrayed me.
I took the book from his hands and set it carefully on the table beside us. “Bash.”
“Mm?”
“Thank you.”
His smile this time was small. He leaned in until his forehead rested against mine, cool against my warmth, his breath steady.
I kissed him softly.
Then again.
I shifted, swung one leg over his lap, settling there. His hands came to my waist.
“Violet,” he murmured against my mouth.
“I’m stressed,” I said. “Fix it.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “Very commanding.”
“Learning from the best.”