Chapter 21 #2
There was enough power in him to make this entire room afraid of him. But he stood in the middle of the sanctuary and let them question his intentions instead.
After every doubt I had carried about him, every truth he had given me too late, I knew what that restraint cost him now.
“I did not come back to save Asterra by destroying your home.”
Maren studied him. “And yet you came back.”
“Yes.”
Her gaze moved to me. “Both of you did.”
The anger inside me shifted.
It wasn’t gone; I could still feel it stretched tight beneath my ribs, tied to Cedarstone and my parents and every decision made around me before I was old enough to know there had been a decision at all.
But this was not the fight I had expected. I opened my right hand.
The gold star caught the amber light beneath the Mother Tree.
Maren’s gaze cut to the star immediately.
“The roads are waking whether we touch them or not. We know more about them than we did before I left, and we know enough now to stop pretending the only choices are to open everything or bury it all again.”
Griffin shifted irritably in his seat. I turned toward him before he could answer.
“I’m not asking you to trust Asterra.”
The elder’s brows drew together.
“I’m just asking you to trust what we’ve seen.” My pulse beat hard against my throat. “We already knew opening the road helped ease some of the indigo corruption before. Now we know why. The Veil stayed closed while the indigo kept spreading. None of that changes because we dislike the answer.”
Griffin’s grip shifted over his staff. “And none of it guarantees the next thing you try will not kill half this forest.”
“No.”
The word tasted bitter.
I wished I could give him more than that.
I wished I had come home with something clean enough to lay at their feet and end all of this.
Instead, I had an infirmary full of Druids and fae who had improved because of what Xandros and I had learned, the memory of roads scattered across the Deepwood, and a prince beside me who had already walked away from one kingdom rather than let it feed on another.
“It doesn’t.”
The sanctuary went still.
My heartbeat slammed hard behind my ribs. “But it is enough that I think we have to keep looking.”
Elder Maren’s attention stayed on me while water moved somewhere beneath the sanctuary floor, its quiet rush filling the silence no one seemed very eager to break.
Then she looked toward Caelan.
“The patrol reports.”
His brow creased. “Three since sunrise.”
I shifted toward him. “Three what?”
“New concentrations of Marred activity. They all came from separate patrol regions.” He reached for the folded reports beside his chair.
“None of the patrols found an opening like the one you two described, but two reported their Wild behaving strangely near the sightings. Stretches of dying ground that animals refused to cross.”
The archive returned in flashes of brittle parchment beneath my fingers. Roads branching across a faded drawing. Thin lines joining one to another. The warning that Marred gathered wherever those old passages were weakest.
“Show me where.”
Caelan’s eyes lifted from the reports.
“On a map,” I said. “The records in Asterra showed the old roads. We couldn’t bring the drawings with us, but I remember enough of their positions to see whether any of these sightings are close.”
Maren and Caelan exchanged a glance, and I hated how quickly I noticed it now.
Every look between them carried the possibility of a thousand secrets they kept buried between them.
Finally, Maren nodded once. “Then we begin there.”
The answer pulled me up short.
Griffin shifted heavily beside her. “Maren.”
“We have already lost Thornwardens to creatures we did not understand.” She turned toward him. “I will not send more of them out blind. If we know where the danger is gathering, we can arm them for it.”
His mouth flattened into a thin line.
I stared at her.
I had come into the sanctuary expecting to fight for every inch. Instead, she was already deciding how to use what we knew.
It did not feel like trust, though. I was no longer foolish enough to mistake her cooperation for that.
Still, my shoulders had eased before I could stop them, and Bramble gave a comforting chitter near my ear as he nuzzled my cheek.
Maren’s attention settled on me. “You were a Thornwarden before you learned what the Cedarstones were.”
My fingers curled at my sides. “I still am.”
“I know.” Her expression softened by a fraction. “Whatever else has changed, I know what you will protect.”
The ache from everything they had hidden pressed beneath my breastbone.
My vows had never been the lie.
I had meant every word beneath the Mother Tree. I would mean them if I stood there and spoke them again today.
What hurt was knowing how much everyone around me had understood while I said them.
I glanced toward Caelan.
He had gone very still beside the Circle.
His hands clenched into fists at his sides, and memory supplied their weight without permission: his palm closing around my forearm when I lost my footing in training, his fingers correcting the angle of my sword, the hard shove between my shoulders when I hesitated at the edge of my first patrol.
I had always known why he trained me so hard. Or at least, I thought I had.
Bramble shifted across my shoulders, one paw catching against my collar as the tension climbed through me.
Caelan saw it.
“Verena, I'd like a chance?—"
I turned away before whatever sat behind his eyes could pull anything else loose inside me.
Maren’s attention moved between us before settling on me again.
“The scribes will need time to find the old maps, and reports are still coming in from the patrols.” She rested both hands over the head of her staff. “When we have everything gathered, I will send for you.”
I glanced toward Caelan. “And until then?”
“Until then, you eat. Wash. Rest.” Her gaze passed over Xandros and returned to me. “Neither of you will be useful to anyone if you collapse before we begin.”
As if her words had summoned it, hunger pangs clawed at my stomach, and if the sounds coming from Bramble’s were anything to go by, he was hungry, too.
I had entered the sanctuary expecting another command, another truth dragged loose only after I fought for it. Instead, the Circle had listened.
Not completely, and certainly not on anyone’s terms but their own, but they had listened.
They had still decided which pieces of my own history I was allowed to have. They had still given Caelan orders about my life without ever giving me the truth behind them.
None of that had changed.
But something else had, something that felt a lot like hope.
And for the next few hours, no one needed anything from Xandros or me.
Bramble resettled against the back of my neck as I turned toward the sanctuary entrance, his warm body slipping lower across my shoulders.
Caelan did not follow us.
I felt his attention between my shoulder blades until the living arch curved between us. I was grateful for every step we took where we didn’t hear the sound of his boots behind us, because I wasn’t ready to talk to him about any of it yet. There would be time to lay all of our demons bare later.
Time .
The concept was delightful.
Morning air cooled my face as we stepped outside.
Sunlight filtered through the canopy in broken shafts, catching on the moss-covered paths and the people moving between the great roots.
The Grove had fully woken while we were inside.
Voices carried from the lower terraces, joined by the rush of water running through the channels beneath the Mother Tree.
My stomach grumbled hard enough to remind me that half a loaf of bread did not qualify as breakfast.
Xandros stepped out beside me.
For several paces, neither of us spoke.
Soon there would be maps spread across a table and patrol reports waiting to be compared against whatever we could remember from Asterra. There would be roads to find, danger to prepare for, and questions neither of us knew how to answer yet.
But right now, none of it required us.
Xandros' fingers brushed mine.
I looked down.
He left his hand beside me, close enough that the warmth of his skin touched my knuckles without closing the distance himself.
I turned my palm and threaded my fingers through his.
His hand closed around mine.
For now, that was enough.