Chapter 56
Chapter Fifty-Six
The words don’t land all at once.
They strike—and then there is nothing.
Cold floods me, sudden and absolute, as if the warmth has been ripped straight from my blood. My knees give without warning. The room tilts violently, the edges blurring, sound collapsing into a high, merciless ringing.
I cannot breathe.
Not because I’m crying—because my body has forgotten how.
Hands catch me before I hit the floor. Soria. I register the pressure of her arms, the familiar scent of her skin, but it’s distant—wrong—like sensation arriving through water.
Someone is saying my name.
I can’t answer.
My heart hammers once, hard enough to hurt, then stutters—misfiring, searching for a rhythm that no longer exists. My fingers curl into the fabric at Soria’s side, desperate, instinctive, as if holding on might pull the world back into alignment.
It doesn’t.
The ringing grows louder. The floor feels too far away. The air tastes sharp and thin, like iron.
Ace.
The name doesn’t come with words. It isn’t a thought. It’s a wound—open and sudden and everywhere at once.
My mouth opens.
No sound comes out.
The room shifts. Or maybe I do. I can’t tell. Time stretches, thins, snaps. Somewhere far away, something crashes—perhaps a chair, perhaps my own knees hitting the floor—but it sounds wrong, like it belongs to someone else.
Then a weight settles at my side. Solid. Familiar.
Vale.
I know him the way I know gravity. Not by sight. By pull.
He’s saying something. His voice reaches me in fragments—edges only. The shape of it. The roughness. He’s trying to steady me, to anchor me, but nothing holds. The world has lost its rules.
Life makes no sense.
Death makes even less.
I clutch at him, fingers locking into fabric, into skin, needing proof that something is still real. His voice finally breaks through—not words, not meaning—just cadence. The same rhythm he used when the pyre collapsed and I couldn’t breathe.
In.
Out.
With me.
I latch onto that sound. That pattern. It’s the only thing that hasn’t shattered.
Then his voice changes. Steel slides beneath the tenderness.
“Odrin—deal with that guard at once before I have reason to do so.” The command cuts cleanly through the haze.
Sharp enough to sting. Sharp enough to wake me a fraction of an inch.
Just enough.
“Mira,” he says again, closer now. “Darling. It’s alright.” The word snaps something in me.
“Alright?” I rasp. The sound is torn raw. “How can it be—Ace—”
The name collapses in my throat. I can’t finish it. Saying it would make it real, and I don’t think I can survive that yet.
“Ace is alive,” Vale says. Not gentle. Certain. The room lurches again—but this time, not away. Toward. I force my eyes to his face. Really look. Anger is there. Fear. Control held too tightly. But not the hollow devastation clawing through me.
“The guard—” My breath stutters. “He said—”
“The guard brought word of Fenloris,” Vale says, disgust thick in every syllable. “He is dead. How remains to be seen.”
He stops himself. Refocuses.
“Ace is still with the healers,” he continues. “I’ve sent someone to him now. This—” He gestures vaguely, like he can’t bear to give Fenloris more shape than necessary. “—this was about the traitor. Not our friend.”
Something in me doesn’t heal. But it loosens. Just enough air returns to burn my lungs. I allow myself to fall—not into Vale or Soria, but backward. The edge of the settee catches me, props me up as I collapse under the weight of everything I’ve just felt.
Still broken. Still folded in on myself.
And yet the world begins to grow edges again. The floor beneath me becomes real. The furniture becomes something solid to brace against. And the people I love begin to come back into focus, as if emerging through smoke.
I draw in a slow breath, release it even slower. My singular anchor. The devastating tremor hasn’t left my chest. My fingers shake as I take the handkerchief Soria offers. Even the small movement sends another aftershock through me.
Time loses shape. I have no sense of how long we sit like this before another knock sounds at the door.
A healer enters.
For a moment, panic surges—sharp, blinding—until instinct tells me the purpose of his visit is not urgent intervention for me but the delivery of something final. Something decided. Soria helps me rise.
I turn toward the healer, and feel a vague recognition—not the junior apprentice who’d come hours before, but the senior among them.
The same man who stood at my bedside when fever nearly took me.
The sight of him alone is enough to send me back onto that razor’s edge where breath and hope both feel unbearably fragile.
If he is here… then Ace is no longer receiving life-or-death care. For better or worse.
When he finally speaks, the room holds its breath with me. “I believe he will pull through.” My knees nearly give. A fresh rush of tears comes—relief and grief tangling together, indistinguishable.
The healer continues speaking, offering details, prognosis, warnings—but they wash over me without form. I cannot take in anything beyond the most essential truth:
Ace is alive.
Vale listens for both of us, absorbing every word with the sharp, focused attention of a commander reclaiming ground after a devastating blow. The tension in his shoulders loosens—just barely—but enough for me to feel it.
Soria presses a glass of water into my hands, her own tear-streaked smile trembling with the same exhausted gratitude that floods through me.
I drink. I breathe. And for the first time since the blade fell, the world lets in something that isn’t pain. Something like light.
Time remains a blur.
Odrin returns, hair a wild, disheveled mess, and for a brief moment my heart aches for the foolish guard whose poorly delivered message shattered me. I can only imagine Odrin’s fury. I will care about that later. Not now.
Food arrives. We try. We fail. We make the motions of survival with hands still trembling from the earlier blow.
Silence settles over the room like ash—thick, clinging, impossible to breathe through.
None of us have enough strength left to speak.
Even thinking feels like dragging stone through sand.
It’s Odrin, the steady commander with the ginger beard, who finds a way to shift us forward.
“We’ll be no use to him like this,” he mutters, slumping into a chair.
“Sorry-looking lot we are.” His attempt at humor—muted, raw—cracks something open in me.
Not laughter. But the smallest loosening of the tightness in my ribs.
The acknowledgment that we are all barely holding on.
He’s right. Ace will need us. But not like this.
A soft, humorless breath escapes me at the thought of Ace’s reaction to all this melodrama. He would be thrilled to learn how thoroughly our hearts had been wrung on his behalf. He will have notes on our performances when he’s well enough recovered to give them.
Gods, Ace.
The thought of him steals the ground from under me again. Numbness creeps in—a hollow, suspended state. And as much as numbness feels like its own death, I fear it may be the only way I survive until dawn.
Odrin and Soria retire to their quarters. I know they will return at first light—or earlier—unable to keep themselves away.
Vale and I move through the room like wraiths. Slow. Exhausted. Untethered.
The body lags behind reason, still braced for every shadow, every sound. I know we need rest. I know it with certainty. But knowing does not quiet the part of me still listening for a knock at the door that could unravel me all over again.
We lie atop the bed without bothering to undress. Still in the clothes we pulled on after scrubbing the blood from our skin. Vale drapes a throw over me, though it barely chases away the shiver clinging to my spine.
He dims the lanterns — not all the way. No one here trusts the dark tonight.
The weight of him settling beside me, usually a balm, feels almost unbearable. Not because he is unwelcome. But because every ordinary gesture, every familiar ritual, feels like a lie compared to the terror still clawing at the inside of my chest.
I glance at him. Shadows cling to his face in ways I’ve never seen. The firelight dances, but the darkness in him does not retreat. Fresh tears sting behind my eyes at the sight—the king who has carried the world now crushed beneath a night that will mark us all.
I inch closer. Our bodies share warmth. Shared breath.
Shared vigil. The smallest unraveling of the pain.
He opens a book. It doesn’t matter which one.
The words swim shapelessly on the page, but his voice—the rise and fall of it—anchors me.
Quiet. Steady. A lifeline as vital as the one he offered when I clawed my way back from death.
I feel him sag under the weight of it all. The exhaustion. The fear. The responsibility. I shift upright, closer, trying now—finally—to be the one who steadies him. The book rests open in his lap, his thumb holding the page. I reach for it, then pause.
A thought strikes me—sharp and terrifying.
A risk.
But I need to know.
Stretching across the bed, I reach for the tome on my bedside table. It’s crooked spine just wrong enough in my hands to feel right. I brace myself.
What if the magic is too distant now? What if I lost more than I realized? What if the blade—or the trauma—severed something I cannot reclaim?
I open to the ribboned page. The words bloom before me. Clear. Immediate. Meant for me alone. Relief floods me so suddenly it nearly knocks the breath from my lungs. The ink lives. The prophecy speaks. Magic remains.
I clutch the book to my chest for a moment, letting the truth settle.
If the magic is still here, somewhere beneath the rubble of this night, then maybe… maybe everything will be alright.
I begin to read aloud.
The images rise effortlessly. The tone light.
Almost frivolous. A small mercy after a day carved by grief.
The fate of a farmer blessed after a brutal storm—a story soft enough to carry us.
Vale drifts lower against the pillows, his eyes fluttering closed, his breathing evening out at the sound of my voice.
I thread my fingers gently through a curl of his hair.
A promise. A tether. A reminder that we are alive.
That the night hasn’t claimed us whole. And in that fragile, flickering quiet…
For the first time since the attack, hope—small and trembling—finds its way back to us.
Perhaps prophecy can carry promise after all.