Chapter 17
Ash
The sky is lying to me.
It’s still purple. Dark enough that the shadows pool between the castle’s towers like something living. Still technically night.
Despite the fact that Faerie is endless twilight. It’s just shades of pink, purple, and deep magenta.
But even so, the horizon has that quality. That pale smear along the eastern edge that means we have twenty minutes before dawn decides to show up and ruin everything.
I count the distance between the hidden passage exit and the tree line.
Too far.
Fifty meters of open ground. Maybe sixty. The courtyard cobblestones give way to a garden that’s more gravel than cover, and beyond that, a stretch of flat earth that Moros’s sentries cross on a rotation. I’ve been watching them for four minutes.
Four minutes is not enough data.
And the tree line taunts me with how close and yet how far away. Not to mention the brightening twilight.
“Ash.” Kestra’s voice at my shoulder. Barely a breath.
“I see it.”
“The rotation—”
“I know.”
Six seconds between the eastern sentry’s turn and the moment his back faces us. Six seconds to move four people across open ground without a sound, without a light.
I glance back at Finnian.
He’s standing against the passage wall, arms wrapped around himself.
Not cold. I watched him walk through Amarantha’s rooms without flinching at the temperature.
This is something else. But I can’t ask him right now what happened, or what he’s thinking.
No matter how much I desperately want to know.
“Can you run?” I ask instead.
“I can run.” He answers before I finish asking. No pause, no warmth, no the-thing-Finnian-does where he makes even a simple question feel like a conversation. Just the words. Clean and efficient.
And nothing like the Finnian I know or his warm, soothing voice.
It’s the voice you use when you’ve decided the person asking doesn’t get to know how you really are.
It’s also not what I asked. He’s deflecting so he doesn’t have to lie to me. And I get it. I do. I’m fluent in don’t ask me how I am because I wrote that language.
But hearing it come out of his mouth instead of mine makes me feel he doesn’t want to tell me. Instead of the logical reason, of now is just not the damn time for it.
I turn back to the sentry count.
I pull air through my nose. Slow. Pause. Exhale even slower. The thorns beneath my skin pulse once in protest, each one coming alive and stretching because let’s face it, I haven’t used them. And now is the first time in a month I’m close to the roots beneath my feet.
“We move on my mark. Single file. Kestra, you’re behind me. Finnian, center. Tiana, rear.”
“If the eastern sentry turns before we clear the garde,” Kestra starts.
“Then we move faster.”
She doesn’t argue. But I can tell she wants to.
I watch the eastern sentry complete his turn. I mark the time in my head, six seconds. Six seconds, fifty meters, four people, and a sky that’s getting pinker by the minute.
Easy.
I’ve done harder extractions with worse odds and a broken collarbone.
I’ve never done one where my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
I press them flat. Count the sentry’s steps. Watch the western patrol disappear around the far tower.
“Now.”
We move.
The gravel is the problem. The gravel is always the problem.
I’ve been in enough night ops to know that gravel has a personal vendetta against stealth missions, and Moros’s courtyard gravel is no different. Every footfall is a negotiation, weight forward, heel last, distribute and release. The way Graves taught me.
Graves. Nope. I do not have the time or the energy to let that man in my head, wherever the fuck he ended up.
The garden is halfway done. Kestra is a ghost behind me, light as water. Tiana’s footsteps are careful, controlled. Finnian—
Finnian is struggling. I can hear his breath behind me, heaving, and when I look over my shoulder, I almost stumble. That is new.
He’s glowing. A faint amber warmth radiating from his hands where they’re pressed against his sides, like sunlight trying to get out through the cracks.
Tiana runs beside him, her hands hovering over his, stealing the light until it dissipates.
I turn away before he catches me watching him. Focusing on my breath, on the steady bunch and contract of my legs as I hurdle toward the forest.
Twenty meters.
The tree line is close enough now that I can see individual branches against the purple sky. The Dark Forest doesn’t invite entry. It stands there like a wall, like a held breath, like something that’s been waiting for its next meal.
For a moment adrenaline flushes through me, steady, itchy. It looks like we’ll hit it like a wall. It’s that dense, that...
Doesn’t matter. We need the cover.
Fifteen meters.
The eastern sentry completes his rotation. Back facing us. Ten seconds until he turns again.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Finnian stumbles, gasps. Tiana grabs one side of him, me the other.
His hand finds my arm as he goes down, his grip lands right at that spot just above my elbow. The gold bond flares hot against my wrist. Not faint this time. Bright and desperate. Like whatever Amarantha broke in him didn’t touch this part. Like his magic is screaming what his mouth won’t say.
He doesn’t look at me.
Even holding onto me. Even with his legs gone and his magic blazing through Tiana’s suppression like paper. He looks at the tree line. He looks at Tiana. He looks at the gravel.
Not at me.
But his hand doesn’t let go either.
Fae can’t lie. Which means both things are true. He can’t look at me and he can’t let go of me. And I don’t know which is worse. The truth that he’s pulling away or the truth that he still can’t.
I count the meters.
Then his legs go out from under him and he begins to vibrate.
I hear it before I see it, a low harmonic pulse that rises from the gravel beneath his feet, and then the burst of Seelie gold that blooms across his skin. What the fuck did she do to him?
The eastern sentry turns.
“Run.” My voice isn’t a whisper anymore. “Run.”
I grab Finn the best I can, Tiana on his other side. We run, half-carrying and half-dragging Finnian behind us.
The gravel screams under our boots. The sentry shouts something I can’t fully hear.
But I catch the shape of it, the sharp consonants of an alarm call, and behind us I hear the deeper resonance of a response.
Two more sentries, three, and the distant sound of metal on stone as someone draws a weapon.
Kestra passes me.
I don’t process the moment of it, just the blur of her moving ahead, her arm sweeping back in a sharp arc, and then the sound of something shattering behind us.
It’s like she’s thrown us into a snow globe.
Shouts behind us echo over the vast space.
“Where’d they go?”
“Do you see them?”
“Just disappeared.”
The tree line is ten meters.
Finnian is running beside me now and his breath is ragged. He’s leaning on me heavily, barely holding his own weight. We are so damn close.
Five meters.
An arrow cuts the air. Not close. Close enough.
Three.
The first branch catches my shoulder and I don’t slow down. I go through it, through the tree line, through the wall of shadow and root and ancient Fae dark that swallows us whole.
Behind me I hear Kestra. Tiana. Finnian holds onto me tightly.
Four sets of footsteps.
Four sets of ragged breathing.
The Dark Forest closes over us like a fist, and the castle’s shouts go distant, and then strange, and then quiet.
I run for another thirty seconds before I stop, unceremoniously dropping Finnian.
My back hits a tree. I press against it, hands braced, and drag air into my lungs like I can store it.
The thorns are rioting under my skin, full defensive display, every instinct screaming threat, threat, threat.
And I let them scream for a moment. Let the magic read the situation and find no immediate target and begin to settle.
The adrenaline doesn’t settle with it. My hands are still shaking. I press them harder against the bark until the tremor moves up into my arms instead, somewhere I can ignore it, and breathe through my nose until my pulse drops below usable.
It takes longer than it should.
The Dark Forest doesn’t feel like safety.
It feels like one nightmare replacing another.
Finnian slides to the Dark Forest floor, his head on his knees, as I look around us.
The trees are wrong here. Old wrong, not sinister wrong.
Ancient in a way that Moros’s castle could never be, rooted so deep they’re more stone than wood, and the dark isn’t the comfortable dark of shadow magic.
It’s a different kind. Something that predates courts.
Something that doesn’t know to be afraid of kings.
I’m not afraid of it.
But I’m aware of it, every hair on my body aware of it, just as I know the forest is now aware of us.
“We’re in.” Kestra leans against the neighboring tree. Her voice is even. Her hands aren’t. I notice it and don’t mention it.
“We’re in,” I confirm.
Tiana slides down a root until she’s crouching, forearms on knees. She looks at Kestra. A communication passes between them in the way that it does with people who’ve been surviving in proximity long enough to develop their own language. Then Tiana looks at me.
Not like an enemy. Not exactly like an ally. More like she’s running her own version of the same math I’ve been doing all night. Can I trust this person? Will she get me killed?
Fair enough. I’d be doing the same thing if I were her.
Hell, I am doing the same thing.
I look at Finnian.
He catches me staring at him. My eyes rolling over every inch of him, hoping I can see beneath his skin to the root of why he won’t meet my gaze anymore.
Something moves across his face. Too fast to name.
He looks away.
A month ago I knew every expression he owned. The armor. The flash when it broke. He used to look at me like I was something worth studying. Like I was a language he wanted to spend centuries learning.
Now he looks at me like he’s forgotten the alphabet.
And the worst part is I know why. Not the details. Those will come later and I’m not sure I’ll survive hearing them. But the shape of it. He was in a castle with the woman who made him watch his parents burn. I was under the same roof and I couldn’t get to him.
And there is no telling what Amarantha did to him.
“Moros will send trackers.” Kestra breathes. “We have maybe an hour before they reach the tree line. The forest will slow them. It’ll slow us, too.”
“My mother.”
“Is safe.” Kestra’s voice is careful. The kind of careful people use when safe means alive and nothing more.
I know this. I made this call. I left my mom in a castle full of Fae who call human women nursemaids and don’t see the cage in the word. I left her because getting four people out alive was the only version of this that worked.
Doesn’t mean my hands agree with the decision. They haven’t stopped shaking since we moved.
“Now what?”
“I know a place.” She turns to the forest, and I swear dark bits of magic float in the air. “It’s not far, but if we can get there within the hour, we can rest there and gather our bearings.” She turns back to us. “Find a way out to the borderlands.”
“Then we move.” My voice comes out even. “Kestra, you know the paths. You’re in front.”
She nods.
Orion’s bond hasn’t pulsed once since we left the castle. Just silence where his fire should be. He’s either too far away or too hurt and I can’t think about which one right now because I’ll stop moving.
Kieran’s silver-blue hums low against my wrist. Steady. Stubborn. Still here. Same thing it’s been saying for a month.
And Finnian’s partial gold burns against my skin like a bruise you keep pressing because at least the pain means it’s real.
Three bonds. Three men. Three different ways I wasn’t there when they needed me to be.