Epilogue
AVELINE
Six months.
That was how long it had taken to dismantle a kingdom built on fear and rebuild something that didn’t require it as a foundation.
Malric would say it had taken considerably less time than he’d projected, and then he would qualify that by listing every variable he’d failed to take into consideration, because that was how Malric was built.
Thane would say it felt longer.
I stood at the window of what had been the king’s war room and was now something else, something we hadn’t finished naming yet, and watched the morning come up over the eastern forest. From this height, the Wyrdwood was a dark continuous mass at the horizon, broken only by the pale thread of the road that ran through it toward the tower.
The castle had not been far from the tower, to my surprise, but access to the tower had been problematic due to the protections of the Wyrdwood.
Now things were a little simpler now that the tower was at peace.
The tower was still standing. That had been one of the first questions, in the days after, when we’d walked out of the Wyrdwood and into the beginning of the world rearranging itself around the absence of the king.
I had asked Malric whether the damage was structural, whether the cracks the tower had made in its own walls during the fight would compromise it.
He had gone back in and spent two days with his hands on the stone, then he had come out and said the tower had known what it was doing.
The damage was superficial. The foundation was unchanged.
My mother’s foundations held.
I had not been surprised.
The omegas had started arriving four months ago.
The first one was a girl of perhaps sixteen who had walked forty miles through autumn cold after someone told her there was a place in the Wyrdwood that would take her in—that had wards that recognized omega distress and responded to it—and was run by people who understood what it was to have your nature used against you.
She had arrived at the thorn barrier in the middle of the night and the thorns had opened for her the way they had never opened for anyone but us.
We’d expanded the upper floors to receive her.
Now there were eleven, with more coming.
Malric’s network had been quietly spreading the information through the provincial territories, the rebellion’s infrastructure repurposed for something that didn’t require a war to run.
Each one who arrived settled something in my chest that I was still trying to understand.
Grief for what they’d been through. Something fiercer than gladness that the tower existed to receive them.
My mother had not built it only for me.
I understood that now. She had built a sanctuary, and I was the first person it had been built to protect, and the work of the past six months had been learning how to extend that protection outward.
Malric had named the people training as wardens with his characteristic precision, had developed a protocol for their education that was thorough enough to have been a military curriculum in a previous life, which it essentially was.
He was in the tower now, probably. He split his time between the castle and the Wyrdwood with an efficiency that impressed everyone who watched it, and that I recognized as Malric simply being incapable of doing anything at less than full capacity.
The new council took most of his mornings.
The tower took his afternoons. I took whatever was left and he gave it without reservation, which was more than it had been at the beginning.
Thane was in the forest.
He had claimed the Wyrdwood in the quiet territorial way of a weather mage who had found a landscape that suited him, which was to say he walked its paths every morning and knew every tree in it.
The forest had responded to him. The Wyrdwood was calmer than it had been in the memories of the oldest people in the nearest village.
Yet nobody who meant harm had made it past the tree line in six months.
I could feel him out there now, through the bond.
The warm frequency of Thane in the morning, at ease, unhurried, the weather magic running at its natural level rather than suppressed or weaponized or burning itself out against impossible odds.
He had been sleeping through the night for two months.
That had not been true, he’d told me once, in the past three years.
I turned from the window.
The old war room had been partially converted.
The map table was still there. Malric had kept it, argued persuasively that it was a useful piece of furniture, and that its history didn’t determine its function.
But the maps on it now were different. Provincial territories marked not for military deployment but for resource distribution.
The locations of safe houses, sanctuary towers in the planning stages, the network of people who had fought a war and were now learning how to build something new.
On the smaller table near the window, a book.
Not A History of Omegas, which I had read so many times that the pages had gone soft at the corners.
This was a blank book, or had been. I had been filling it for three months with everything I remembered from my mother’s memory spell and everything I had learned since, and everything I was still learning about what my omega power was and what it could be when it wasn’t being suppressed or siphoned or controlled by someone else.
Future reference. For the girls arriving at the tower who deserved to know who they were before someone else decided for them.
I would not let that happen again.
The door behind me opened and the bond shifted before I heard him. Malric’s focus with warmth underneath it, the combination I had learned to recognize as him moving between his working mind and his present one.
“The morning council finished early,” he said.
“That never happens.”
“Caerwyn’s representative finally agreed on the eastern territorial boundary.” A pause. “It turns out agreeing is faster than arguing.”
“A revelation.”
He came to stand beside me at the window, and his hand found the small of my back in the easy way it did now, without cautiousness of the early days, and I leaned into it without thinking about it, which was its own kind of milestone.
We looked at the forest together.
“Thane found another path through the northwestern section,” Malric said. “He says it cuts two hours off the route from the second village.”
“He was up before dawn again.”
“He always is.”
The bond carried Thane’s warmth from the tree line, steady and unhurried, and Malric recognized it at the same moment I did, the slight easing in him that happened when all three of us were present and accounted for. He would not admit that this was something he checked. He checked it continuously.
I pressed my hand against the windowpane.
The morning light was coming up cool over the forest, the cool winter sky turning toward spring, the same light I had watched from the other side of glass my entire life. Different from here. The same sky, different because I was choosing to stand under it.
I was choosing everything now.
The thought hadn’t gotten old. I had expected it to become ordinary—it hadn’t. Thane said it was because I’d been without choice for so long that I would probably appreciate it longer than most. Malric said I appreciated it because I was paying attention. They were both probably right.
I was the Unseelie Queen, which I was still adjusting to.
It carried significance, a past, and implications I was trying to understand, while those anticipating a repeat of the former administration struggled to maintain that belief.
Malric managed most of that friction with his own understanding of how courts worked and how I preferred to be.
Thane managed the rest by existing in the physical space and being in the background as much as possible.
I managed my part by being consistently, deliberately, unmistakably myself.
It was working better than any of us had projected.
Below the window, the castle was waking up. Voices in the courtyard, the sounds of a morning in a place where people were going about the ordinary business of their lives without the fear that had run through everything in the previous reign.
The tower was quiet this morning. I was still connected to it, even though I didn’t live there any longer. I could sense it and those who lived there.
The omegas were sleeping, or the early risers were in the garden, or they were in the library with the books the tower had been providing with its characteristic attentiveness to what was needed.
The wardens Malric was training were taking their morning instruction.
The thorns stood at their posts. The Wyrdwood held its peace.
My mother’s sanctuary was doing what she built it to do.
I touched the bond—both of them, the familiar warmth of each—and they responded with a wave of love.
Malric’s arm came around my waist.
Thane’s warmth from the forest pressed forward through the bond, deliberate, the way he said good morning when he was too far away to say it.
I smiled at the window.
Outside, the sun finished coming up over the Wyrdwood and the light went from cool gray to ordinary white, and the day continued, unhurried.
I stood in it.
Free.
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