CHAPTER SIX #2
She turned her face up to his, and the kiss that followed started slow, comforting, before deepening into something hungrier, both of them needing, after a day that had stripped away so much certainty, to hold on to the one thing that still felt real.
His hands found the hem of her shirt, and she helped him pull it over her head, breath already uneven.
They came together slower this time, deliberate and unhurried despite the urgency thrumming beneath both their skins, every touch a quiet reassurance neither of them could have put into words — that whatever the court decided, whatever ancient magic was stirring behind the Veil, this, at least, remained entirely theirs.
Afterward, tangled together in the dark, Briar rested her head against his chest and listened to the steady, banked rhythm of his heartbeat.
"There's something else," Kade said quietly, into the dark. "Something I haven't told you yet."
Briar went still. "What?"
"Malric's threat. In the archive." His arms tightened around her, some old guilt bleeding into his voice. "He knows about us, Briar. Properly knows, not just suspects. And he's made it clear he intends to use that knowledge against me, the moment it serves him best."
"Kade—"
"I should have told you sooner." He exhaled slowly, the fire-light catching the tension still etched into his jaw. "But you deserve to know exactly what we're facing."
Briar closed her eyes, feeling the weight of it settle alongside everything else — the prophecy, the blackmail, her mother's silence — and, for the first time all day, the quiet comfort of knowing she wasn't facing any of it entirely alone.
Somewhere down the hall, she suspected, Wren Alder was probably still awake gossiping with the kitchen staff about honey cakes and terrible court fashion, blissfully unaware of how much her easy, unguarded friendship had mattered today.
"Then we'll face that too," Briar said finally, quiet but certain. "Together. Same as everything else."
A letter arrived for Briar three days later, carried by a Duskmere courier-hawk that nearly got shot out of the sky by a jumpy Ember Reaches border guard before Ophira intervened and vouched for its passage.
Briar didn't recognize the handwriting at first — cramped, careful, clearly someone unused to writing much at all — but the moment she unfolded the worn parchment and saw the signature, her chest tightened with an ache she hadn't expected.
Rhys.
Her cousin. The only person left in Duskmere who'd argued against her exile at the equinox gathering, shouted down by Corrin and the rest of the pack council for his trouble, and quietly punished for it ever since with reduced standing and menial duties.
Briar, the letter read, *word reached us weeks ago that you were alive and sheltered somewhere in the Ember Reaches, though no one would say more than that.
I've spent every spare moment since trying to learn what I could.
I need you to know something before it reaches you secondhand and twisted into something crueler than the truth.
Corrin did not cast you out because he thought you were dangerous, not entirely.
Old Mirren, our pack's healer, came to him three days before the equinox gathering with a warning from a dream she refused to fully explain — something about a root that would wake and shake the whole world loose from its foundations, and a wolf strong enough to carry that root who was already living among us, unaware.
Corrin panicked. He convinced himself that whoever this wolf turned out to be would draw danger down on all of Duskmere the moment her power surfaced, and when it turned out to be you, standing right there with the ground cracked open at your feet, he chose the pack's safety over yours without a second thought.
I am not defending him. What he did to you was a coward's cruelty dressed up as leadership, and I have told him so more than once since, for whatever good it's done me.
But I thought you should know the fear came first, and the cruelty came after — because I think it might matter, someday, when you decide what kind of person you want to become in response to how you were treated.
Come home, if you ever can. Not to Corrin's pack. To me. There will always be a door open for you here, whatever else this world decides you are.
— Rhys*
Briar sat with the letter for a long time after reading it, feeling old grief and new understanding tangle together in a way she didn't quite know how to hold.
It didn't excuse Corrin. It didn't erase the humiliation of that night, or the years of quiet dismissal that had come before it.
But it gave the wound a shape she hadn't expected — not simple hatred, but fear, ordinary and cowardly and achingly human, dressed up in an alpha's authority.
"Bad news?" Wren asked, finding her still sitting with the letter an hour later, folding linens forgotten in her arms.
"Complicated news." Briar folded the parchment carefully, tucking it away. "Turns out the man who exiled me for nearly destroying my whole pack's gathering circle did it because a healer had a dream about a prophecy, and he panicked instead of asking questions."
Wren winced sympathetically, setting the linens aside to sit beside her properly.
"That's somehow worse and better at the same time, isn't it.
Worse, because it means he could have handled it like a decent person and simply chose not to.
Better, because at least it wasn't really about you being unlovable. It was about him being afraid."
"I hadn't thought about it that way." Briar looked over at her, something warm and grateful settling in her chest. "You have a gift for making terrible things sound almost bearable, you know that?"
"It's the fourth-born-of-a-minor-house special skill," Wren said, with a crooked grin.
"Nobody expects anything from you, so you get very good at making the best of whatever life actually hands you instead.
" Her expression softened, more serious now.
"For what it's worth, Briar — whatever Corrin's reasons were, you ended up here.
With Kade. With people who are actually starting to see what you're worth, myself very much included.
I don't think that's nothing, even if the road to get here was cruel. "
Word of Briar's possible Rootborn bloodline did not stay contained for long despite Master Endrick's caution, and by the time it reached Torin secondhand through Stormreach's own scholars, his reaction was not what Briar expected.
"Rootborn." He said the word slowly, pacing the length of Briar's room with restless, crackling energy. "Briar, do you understand what that actually means? Every clan in Aetherfell has some stake in what happens to you now, whether they realize it yet or not."
"I'm aware," Briar said, tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "I've had rather a lot of time to sit with that particular weight the last few days. Along with a letter from home explaining exactly why I was exiled in the first place, if you'd like to add that to the pile."
That gave Torin visible pause. "What letter?"
She told him, briefly, and watched something complicated move behind his eyes — old anger at Corrin warring with something that looked, uncomfortably, like guilt of his own.
"I should have written to you sooner," he said quietly. "I let my own father convince me it was better not to reach out, that it would only complicate things for you if Duskmere thought Stormreach was harboring you. I've regretted that more than I've said."
"You're here now." Briar softened slightly, old affection winning out over the tension of the last several weeks. "That counts for something."
"Does it?" Torin's expression sharpened again, some of the earlier gentleness giving way to the same restless urgency she'd come to recognize.
"Because from where I'm standing, Briar, everyone in this story keeps discovering new reasons you're important — a bloodline, a prophecy, an ancient danger stirring behind the Veil — and somehow that only ever seems to deepen your ties to Kade Ashgrove, never to the people who loved you before any of this started. "
"That's not fair, Torin."
"Maybe not." He ran a hand through his hair, frustration bleeding into something rawer.
"I watched Kade's father sentence the man who assaulted you to a year's inconvenience.
I've watched you carry secret after secret about threats against him, discovered days late, apparently, every time.
I love you, Briar. I am not going to simply stand aside and pretend that doesn't matter, just because you've decided the harder, more complicated love is somehow more real than the one that's actually safe. "
He stepped closer, and for one suspended moment Briar felt the old, familiar pull of him again — comfort, history, the aching simplicity of everything he offered — before she stepped back, putting careful distance between them.
"I need you to hear me, Torin. Clearly, this time.
" Her voice was steady despite the ache in her chest. "I love you.
I will always love you, as my oldest friend, as someone whose family stood beside mine when no one else would.
But I am in love with Kade. That isn't confusion, and it isn't me choosing complicated over easy just to prove something. It's simply true."
Torin's expression went through something complicated and painful before settling into careful, controlled composure.
"Alright," he said finally, quiet. "I hear you.
" He didn't sound like he fully believed it, but he stepped back all the same.
"I'll stop pushing. But I'm not leaving Pyrhollow, Briar.
Whatever you decide about your heart, I still intend to keep you safe. "
Kade found out about the conversation before the day was through, dragon senses picking up on the lingering tension whether anyone wanted them to or not.