Chapter 62
DIEM
Even with my vision obscured by Luther’s shadows, I knew where we were.
The moment my lungs filled with the scent of sweet pine and damp, earthy moss, cut by the crisp brine of a seaborne wind, a tension I’d been holding on to for weeks, or months—almost a year, if I was really counting—instantly unspooled.
In this beloved forest I’d grown up in, the worries of the world felt fenced off, waiting at the gate with gnashing teeth but unable to reach me as long as I stayed right here.
It felt like some cosmic riddle finally found its answer.
It felt the way Luther’s skin felt against mine.
Home.
Just as he’d promised.
The forest was loud with the chirps and croaks of a cool summer night.
I’d spent thousands of evenings sitting outside on our family’s front stoop, listening to their song.
When my feet hit the soft, peaty soil, their calls grew louder, as if to welcome me back.
Why did you leave? they seemed to ask. Don’t you know this is where you’re meant to be?
Sorae nudged my palm with a whine. Though we no longer shared emotions through a bond, I was sure she understood my conflicted feelings. She’d been here the day my father died, and she’d felt my pain firsthand in the weeks after.
Luther gave her an order to leave, and she sniffed a resistant response. “The best way to help Diem tonight is to be her eyes on the south,” he told her.
Her scales brushed against my hand one last time, then her wings ruffled and faded into the distance. He was right, as usual—knowing Sorae was watching for Vance and his men from the sky was the only thing keeping me from running to the border and doing the same thing myself.
He took me by the shoulders and guided me forward. “You know where we are?”
“My family’s old home.”
“Close, but not exactly.”
I rubbed at the shadows shielding my eyes, wishing I could absorb them away. Normally I adored the touch of Luther’s magic, but the darkness reminded me too much of things I was trying to forget.
My feet came down on something hard and solid, and I paused in surprise until he urged me on. With my vision obscured, my mind homed in on every sound. Creaking wood beneath my feet. A soft ripple of water.
“A bridge?” I asked, and he hummed to confirm it.
Odd. There were no bridges in this part of the forest. No one but my family lived this far out.
Luther stopped. His hands left my arms, though tendrils of his magic clung to me, keeping us tethered in the absence of his touch. I heard his heavy footsteps on the soil and the rustle of his suit as he moved, then a nearby crackling joined the burn of smoke in my nose. A campfire, I guessed.
Tightness snaked around my chest. He’d planned a night away, just for the two of us, in the woods he knew I loved. In another life, nothing would have made me happier.
“Luther . . . I appreciate this, truly I do, but we should—”
“Five minutes,” he said. “Give me five minutes, and then we’ll go wherever you want.”
The soft plea in his voice, and the delicate way he lifted my hand and wove his fingers through mine, caught me off guard.
Luther could be gentle, but there had always been a strength that underpinned it, an assurance that he knew exactly what he was doing.
Tonight, that confidence was trembling. I felt it in the emotions seeping across the bond, too.
Whatever he’d brought me here for, it scared him.
I swallowed down my protests and gave an encouraging nod. I wanted to be strong for him, in the way he’d always been for me.
I felt him shift to stand behind me and lean in close.
I shivered at the caress of his breath on my shoulder, and my body tingled in response.
Luther mistook it for a chill, and after a moment of rustling, I felt him set his jacket on my shoulders.
Though it was much too heavy for the balmy summer air, I took the lapels and pulled it tighter.
With him this close, the mating mark was getting dangerously difficult to hide.
“When we fought in Fortos, you told me there needed to be a Luther without Diem,” he said. “I’ve thought about that a lot. All I’ve ever been is a Corbois prince. I want to be something more.”
“I see the effort you’re putting in with the Guardians and the half-mortals,” I said. “Mother says you’ve been spending time in Mortal City, too.”
I felt his nod in the prickle of his bearded jaw against the curve of my neck. It sent energy sparking through my blood, and his body pressed closer.
“I could have been part of those groups myself, if the laws hadn’t forced me to hide,” he said. “I’m worried they’ll only ever see me as an outsider now.”
“They elected you to lead the council. That means you’ve earned their trust. That’s not something any of them give lightly.”
He was quiet for a while. “When I see the mortals singing songs or celebrating holidays I know nothing of, sometimes I feel guilty for wanting to join them. They’ve suffered in so many ways I never will. It feels wrong to share only their happy moments and not their pain.”
I turned my head toward his voice, grieving the sadness in it. The unjust system we all lived within had caused Luther his fair share of pain, too. He was right, though, that the privilege he’d grown up with would always make him different, and I would not lie to him and say otherwise.
We’d teased each other once while eating apples.
I had been sloppy and brutal, gnawing messily with my teeth to get the job done fast. He had been delicate, meticulous, slicing slowly with a sharpened blade to ensure not a single drop of juice went astray.
Seemingly trivial, but it was a symbol of something that merely eating an apple differently would not change.
Food for me was a tool to survive, and one my family rarely had in excess.
For Luther, food was an indulgence, something to be experienced, not simply consumed.
I cared little for the mess my apple left behind because life itself was a mess.
Fresh clothes and clean hands were luxuries.
For Luther, they were the standard—so commonplace that he couldn’t imagine them otherwise, even for a harmless piece of fruit.
His upbringing affected the way he moved through the world in a thousand ways like this, subtle and perhaps unimportant on their own, and yet huge in their collective impact, just as the mortals’ hard-fought lives shaped them.
But the bridge wasn’t uncrossable. Luther and I had found common ground.
So had the army we’d cobbled together. It had taken time, patience, countless hard conversations, a willingness to forgive and even stronger willingness to change, and, most of all, compassion for those whose suffering was not our own.
For all of Luther’s gruff claims that mine was the only life he cared to save, I knew my mate, and those were values he had in endless supply.
“The mortals don’t need you to share their suffering, they need you to end it,” I told him. “I know how hard you’re working to do that. The more they see that commitment, the more they’ll embrace you.” I leaned my head against his. “I’m proud of you.”
His answering swell of emotions had me smiling despite myself.
“Yes, well, about that commitment . . .” A hand swept my jaw, and the shadows over my eyes started swirling.
A soft amber light began to peek through, though the details were hazy.
“Taran suggested I imagine the life I would choose if I wasn’t serving the Crown.
I knew I wanted to get away from Lumnos City.
I wanted a home I felt welcome in, somewhere peaceful and quiet.
I wanted things to do in my spare hours—simple things that life and death did not depend on.
A picture appeared in my head . . . but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine that picture without you in it.
” A shape took form in the darkness, boxy and large and glowing from within. “So I imagined it for us both.”
His thumb grazed a tender path along my cheek, and the curtain of shadows parted, revealing a simple wooden home tucked into a thick copse of trees. A blazing fireplace was visible through its open front door, a golden heart shining in the ink-blue night.
My entire body locked. Frozen. Unmoving as stone.
“It’s not finished yet,” he added quickly. “When you told me you planned to visit your father’s grave tomorrow, I feared you might see it and spoil the surprise.”
He fished a folded scrap of paper from his pocket and smoothed it open—a sketch of a house, modest but refined, with large wooden beams and a steep-pitched roof.
A porch wrapped around one side, with a pair of shaded figures seated close together on a long wooden bench.
The unfinished structure in front of me was no more than a few empty rooms, but I could see the sketch in its bones—the large opening that would become a window, the beginnings of a stoop where we might sit.
“I hired a crew from Mortal City,” he went on.
“The chief served with Andrei in the army. He let me pay his workers, but he wouldn’t take my gold.
He said he owed it to the Commander to make sure his little girl had a home.
” Luther hesitated, awaiting my response.
I could barely blink, let alone form a coherent sentence.
“I wanted to have a hand in building it, too, though I thought better of interfering with the house. We’d end up with the roof crashing down while we slept. ”
He gave a short, huffed laugh that I met with silence. Behind me, I heard him swallow. He folded the paper up and tucked it away, then pointed at a fence bordering a nearby patch of grass.
“I built that instead, for the animals. Some chickens would be nice, I think.” I heard a smile creep into his voice. “And our goat, of course. Taran Junior.”