Chapter 25 Everly
Everly
The sun hadn’t yet risen the next time I woke.
Instead, the bright shimmer of the auroras danced along the sloped ceiling, shifting from one color to the next in slow soothing ribbons. They wove across the stones, glinting faintly along the chandelier, as if mocking the idea that sleep was a thing mortals were ever meant to fully experience.
My veins still hummed with the echo of my mana, like the aftertaste of ice and shadows, along with the lingering sting of the little lightning strike from Batty.
The memory made me rub absently at my sternum, trying to coax a steady breath into lungs that still hadn’t decided if they wanted to rebel.
My fingertips brushed against a tiny foot.
Batty let out a soft, half-hearted hiss to let me know exactly how she felt about my daring to disturb her beauty sleep.
I hadn’t even noticed she’d returned to the bed, her small wings wrapped loosely around my neck, her head burrowed into the hollow of my throat like a living frost scarf. As if she were still holding my mana still. As if she didn’t trust it, or me, to behave without her supervision.
Had she always been able to body-slam my mana into submission?
Or was that some new evolution of whatever strange connection was forming between us?
My gaze drifted toward the door to the queen’s suites and the small library in the study. To the old leather-bound book Isren had given me for light reading.
Perhaps it was time that became a priority.
I slipped carefully from beneath the blankets, mindful of both Draven’s sleep and Batty’s temper, and pulled on the plush robe Mirelda had left by the bed. After coaxing Batty into one of the deep pockets, I eased open the door and stepped into my suites.
The room was dim, moonlight and auroras spilling through the balcony doors in pale ribbons. Wynnie was sprawled sideways across my old bed.
She’d insisted on staying close, something I was grateful for. I paused, taking in the sight of her chest rising and falling in steady, blissfully uncomplicated sleep.
This had been my room not that long ago.
Had been. Past tense.
It was funny how quickly a space could shift. How her familiar scent of honey and snowdrops already permeated the air and how the walls felt warmer, somehow, just with her in it.
Then there were the small tinctures on the bedside table, and the carefully tended potted herbs in the windowsills. All of it made the room feel more hers than it ever had mine.
Had I even tried to make it mine at all? Or had I been too busy surviving to put down so much as a root? Other than the nest of blankets I’d built in the chair by the fire, of course, but those were gone now.
I hadn’t done that to the adjoining suites, either, still unable to wrap my head around the concept of home, still not sure that I wouldn’t wind up back here, alone, one day.
So, I shoved the thoughts aside, quietly lifting the forgotten lantern from Wynnie’s nightstand, and padded silently to the study.
The faelight cast a cool azure glow along the shelves, highlighting the spines of both new and familiar tomes. Ones on Winter law. Ancient frostbeast records. A few volumes on Court diplomacy whose presence I tried not to take too personally.
And then there was the one I reached for now with its thin, worn leather and gold lettering faded into near-oblivion.
Once I was back in Draven’s bed, I opened to the first page. Isren’s neat handwriting was scrawled across the first page just above the title.
A Skathryn bond is not merely a link, but a reflection. One cannot be forged without recognition from both sides.
I arched an eyebrow at the skathryn who was now sleepily blinking up at me from my lap.
Recognition from both sides… Surely Batty was the exception to this rule. I thought back to the nights I’d spent terrified as she scratched at my window, and then when she’d flung herself at me and refused to leave…
She yawned with a small, innocent-sounding squeak, and I rolled my eyes.
I flipped the page.
Skathryns choose only one—not through obedience, but resonance. A recognition of a bond not yet claimed.
What bond? What resonance?
Had Batty sensed my trapped mana? Had the warring sides of it called to the inherent chaos in her?
I read the passage again, searching for an answer between the lines, for something I might have missed, but the words remained infuriatingly vague.
Was the book implying some deeper connection? A bond I hadn’t agreed to? One I didn’t understand? Or didn’t want to understand?
As if in answer, the skathryn burrowed her face against my hand, wrapping her little wings around my wrist.
Skathryns choose…
Batty wasn’t just attached to me. She’d chosen me.
But… why?
I kept reading until my eyes snagged on another passage.
A Skathryn is drawn to souls already intertwined. Where its loyalty settles, know that fate has spoken.
Next to it, in the margin, was the Archmage’s neat script.
‘Such creatures linger only where a greater bond—one of fate’s making—has already begun its weaving.’
I stared at the words until they blurred.
Souls intertwined.
Fate.
A greater bond already weaving.
The meaning settled over me like frost spreading over glass. I glanced from the book to Batty and then slowly over to Draven’s sleeping form.
Batty hadn’t simply attached herself to me. She hadn’t chosen me at random. She had been drawn, summoned even. Not by my bound mana or my misery, but by a bond that predated her entirely.
The one between Draven and me.
My hands trembled slightly as I turned another page to find inked diagrams of skathryns perched on the shoulders of ancient bonded rulers, annotations about how they stabilized the mana of entwined pairs, and handwritten notes about their tendency to remain only when two destinies collided.
I swallowed, thinking back to that day at the Sanctum when the Archmage handed me the book. Light reading, my ass.
He’d known. That frostbitten bastard had known. This whole time? From the moment he saw Batty? Or was it before that? Had he recognized the bond between Draven and me while we were so sure we still hated each other?
Shards-damned cryptic-ass Archmage.
And he couldn’t have just told me the truth then? Saved me the frost-forsaken trouble and heartache, and all the terrified and sleepless nights and raging against what I thought was a blood-vow while worrying Draven would kill me when he learned what I really was?
I rubbed at the ache building in my temple.
Would I have even listened to Isren if he’d been open with me then? Would I have even believed him? Would knowing sooner have changed anything?
Or would I have found a way to run? Or just broken entirely beneath the weight of yet another thing neither of us had chosen?
My throat tightened painfully, and my gaze slid back to my husband, to the male who had once felt like my enemy, had once been my enemy… but now was something far closer to the air I needed to breathe.
My thoughts drifted through every moment since I first arrived at the palace—every interaction, every slow unraveling, every subtle tug of that strange thread between Draven Ashwynter and me.
From the moment the Visionary had named me his fate-chosen bride.
I let out a quiet, breathy laugh. Maybe we should have known then.
Hells, maybe Nevara had known… and simply kept it tucked away with the rest of the secrets she carried like another layer of armor. But thinking of her now, all still and quiet and suspended in that awful in-between, made something in my chest clench.
Until she woke up, there would be no asking her. Not about this, or about the future of the kingdom. Not about anything.
I forced my attention back on the book in my lap, anchoring myself in anything that didn’t involve adding another impossible question to the list already gnawing at my sanity. I kept reading, filling my mind with anything that might help prepare us for whatever waited in the days ahead.
But I couldn’t manage to prepare myself for the moment I got word from Amias, just as the sun crested over the horizon.
My father was lucid, and he was asking to see me.