Chapter 22
Ash
The creatures start running twenty minutes before the spiders arrive.
I notice it the way I notice most things, sideways, while I’m tracking something else. A flash of movement in the undergrowth to my left. Then another. Small things, fast, moving with the specific energy of animals that have made a collective decision about being somewhere else.
“Kestra.”
“I see it.”
She’s already slowed. Her hand up, the rest of us stalling behind her as she reads the forest the way she reads everything, quietly, completely, like it’s telling her something in a language the rest of us don’t have ears for.
The trees go very still.
Then Finnian says quietly, “Above.”
I look up.
The canopy is moving. Not with wind. Something in it. Multiple somethings, the branches bowing in sequence, a ripple moving through the high dark toward us in a way that has a specific, horrible logic to it.
“Run?” Tiana asks.
“No.” Kestra’s voice has changed. Gone flat and certain, the steel beneath the silk that I’ve been watching surface more and more since the root hollow. “Stand together. Don’t separate.”
The first spider drops.
Spider is doing a lot of work as a word for what lands six feet from me on the forest floor.
It’s the shape of one, eight legs, the general architecture, but ancient in the way the trees here are ancient, built for a world that preceded courts, the body the size of a hunting dog and the legs spanning wider than my arms can reach.
It’s the color of the forest floor, which is the first problem, and it’s fast, which is the second.
There are four more behind it.
My thorns erupt before I consciously call them.
Blue-green fire spiraling up my forearms, vines cracking from the earth in defensive sprawl, not elegant, not controlled, just the wild magic reading the threat level and deciding this qualified as a full response situation. The nearest spider hits the vine wall and recoils. I move forward.
“LIGHT. NOW.” Kestra’s voice, aimed at Finnian.
He hesitates. Just a breath.
Then the Seelie gold blooms from his hands, not his magic, I know that now, but the binding Amarantha seared into him.
The Summer Sword’s light.
He’s channeling her claim on him like a weapon, and the expression on his face as he does it is the expression of a man swallowing poison to save someone else.
It works. The light floods the canopy, noon-bright and brutal. The spiders freeze. They’re built for shadows. The light hits them like a physical force.
I file that away.
Kestra’s ice sword is in her hand.
Tiana is—
I almost lose my footing watching Tiana.
Thirty years hiding in the borderlands. Thirty years surviving without a throne, without an army, without anything but Kestra and her own two hands.
It shows.
She moves through the spiders the way water moves through rock. No magic that I can see, just her hands and her body and a viciousness so practiced it’s gone past violence into something almost technical.
She takes the second spider’s leg off at the joint and uses the momentum to redirect herself toward the third without stopping, and her expression throughout is the same patient focused look she uses when she’s reading a map.
I file it under things I am not asking about right now and handle the fourth.
My knife. The thorns wrapping my forearm as reinforcement. The spider is fast but I’ve been fighting things faster than me since I was twenty-two and the mechanics aren’t so different, find the center of mass, control the legs, go for something vital when you get the opening.
I get the opening.
The fifth spider breaks for the trees when the fourth drops.
Silence.
Real silence, not the teeth-silence Whispen warned about. Just the forest processing what happened, the undergrowth settling, my own breathing too loud in the aftermath.
“Everyone.” I turn. “Sound off.”
“Here.” Tiana. Already cleaning her hands on the moss.
“Here.” Kestra. Ice sword melting, shoulders dropping an inch.
“Here.” Finnian.
Except his voice is wrong.
My arm throbs where the púca raked it. Kestra’s ice treatment dulled the burn but didn’t kill it. The scratch is still there, still angry, still reminding me with every movement that something in this forest marked me and I don’t know what that means yet.
But I’m standing. I’m functional. That’s enough for now.
I turn to find Finnian standing three meters back, one hand braced against a tree trunk, the other pressed to the side of his neck. His face has gone a particular color that has no business on someone with his complexion, grey underneath the gold.
My stomach drops.
“Finnian.”
“It’s nothing.” He lies. I’ve never seen him lie and as he does his face twists in the pain of the lie.
I cross to him in four steps and pull his hand from his neck.
The bite is small. Smaller than it should be for how wrong it looks, a pair of marks, already darkening at the edges, the skin around them flushing outward in a bruise-pattern that moves too fast.
“Kestra.” My voice comes out flat. “Talk to me.”
She’s already there. She looks at the bite and then she looks at me, and Kestra’s face is not a face that goes white easily.
It goes white.
“Truth venom,” she says. “Dark Forest spiders. The old ones.” She’s already looking at the trees. “We need cold water. Moving water, a falls, a spring, anything. Now.”
“How long does he have before—”
“Before the walls come down? Twenty minutes.” She meets my eyes. “Before it becomes dangerous? Longer. But the walls—” She shakes her head. “We need to move.”
Finnian straightens. “I’m fine to walk.”
“You’re fine to walk now,” Kestra says, with the particular gentleness of someone delivering bad news to a person who isn’t ready for it. “In ten minutes that changes. We need to be at water by then.”
He looks at me.
I look at him.
“Then let’s move,” I say.
We move fast.
Kestra ahead, reading the forest floor for the path toward water. Tiana behind, watching our rear. Finnian beside me, walking steadily, which lasts about seven minutes.
I feel it before I see it, the slight change in his gait, the way his weight shifts from controlled to compensating. I get my arm around his waist before he asks.
He doesn’t ask.
His hand finds my shoulder where he grips onto me. The movement pulls at the púca scratch on my arm, still raw, still burning low despite Kestra’s ice, but I don’t shift away. Some pains are worth carrying.
He’s warm. Not the ambient warmth of someone running exertion, but heat radiating through his shirt in a way that reads as fever.
“Thank—” he starts.
“Don’t.” The debt-system still lives in my head. “Don’t say it like that.”
A breath. Something that might be a laugh. “You’re right.”
We walk.
“Tell me something,” I say. Keeping him focused. Keeping him here.
“Like what.”
“Anything. Talk to me.”
A pause. Then, slowly, “The binding has a sound.” His voice is different already.
Still Finnian, still precise, still the words chosen carefully, but something underneath that has loosened.
“Low. Constant. I noticed it as I tried to fall asleep on the floor. Like tinnitus. Like living beside a river so long you stop hearing the water.”
I tighten my arm around him.
“I noticed it when I met you.” His weight is heavier now, leaning. “It changed. The sound. It shifted pitch when you were near, and I didn’t understand why for weeks.” A breath. “Now I do.”
“Finnian—”
“Amarantha.” The word comes out like something spat.
Not his usual careful neutrality. The venom is working and a fucked up part of me hopes he keeps talking.
“She knew. She had to have known. The way she watched me with you, that particular expression she wears when she’s found a pressure point.
” He stumbles and I catch him. “I’m sorry. I know you—”
“It’s fine. Keep talking.”
“She made me—” He stops. Something working in his throat. “The things she made me see. The floor. You saw me on the floor, Ash. You saw—”
“I know.”
“I was on the floor and I thought—” His voice has cracked.
Open. Wrong in the way deeply private things are wrong when they come out without permission.
“I thought if I could just survive until you…if I could just…she kept saying you weren’t coming.
She kept saying you’d agreed to the Unseelie terms, that you were safe, that you’d simply decided—”
“I didn’t decide anything.” My voice comes out harder than I mean. “I was trying to keep Kieran alive.”
Because he has the Spear, is what I don’t say. Does he even know?
“I know.” A pause. “I know that now. Then I just—” He exhales. “I believed her. And that’s the part I can’t—” His hand tightens on my shoulder. “That’s the part I can’t find the edges of. That I believed her over you.”
The forest moves around us. Kestra is still ahead. Still moving.
Finnian is burning up.
“Every time you look at me.” The words come slower now. More effort behind each one, like he’s pushing through water. “I wonder if you see her. When you look at me. Whether you see what she made me or whether you see—”
“Finnian.”
“I need to say it,” he rushes out, spittle flying. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “The venom is going to say it anyway and I would rather, I would rather you hear it from me. What’s left of me. Before it just starts—”
“Then say it.”
A long breath.
“I loved you.” He says it the way you say something you’ve been not saying so long the shape of it has worn grooves.
“Before Amarantha dropped her inheritance trap in that room. Before the trials. Before I understood what you were or what you’d mean to the courts.
I loved you when you looked up at me in the dining hall and was tasting our foods for the first time. ”
Before I knew what you were.
“She ordered me to bond with you.” The words spill now, the walls fully down, the venom finding every crack and pulling.
“That’s true. She wanted the intelligence, wanted the access, wanted a way in.
And I went to you intending to do exactly what she asked because I didn’t know how not to.
I had unknowingly been doing what she asked for years, I didn’t have another setting.
” His breath shudders. “And then there you were. Ash, I was so undone by you.”
I keep us moving. One step. Another.
He stumbles hard. Both of us go sideways against a tree, his full weight coming down, and I take it.
“I’ve got you.”
“Don’t leave.” His voice has gone strange. Distant, like he’s hearing himself from underwater. “Please. When this is over, when the venom, please don’t—”
The part of me that runs clocks the exit. Force of habit. Twenty-eight years of muscle memory pointing toward the door.
I don’t take it.
I don’t know what that means yet. But I don’t take it.
“There’s more.” He stumbles over the words. “I tortured Davis. With the same truth stone they used on you. Well, another piece of it.”
I grunt. Davis probably had it coming.
“I hold the crown,” he whispers.
This time I stop on the path, my jaw working open and closed.
“WATER.” Kestra’s voice shatters the moment and the questions building inside me. “I hear it. Fifty meters.”
“We’re almost there.” I get him moving again. His feet finding the pattern, muscle memory carrying what his mind can’t right now. “Fifty meters. Walk with me.”
“Don’t leave me.” He’s burning up. His hand comes up to my jaw, palm flat against my cheek, fever-hot. His eyes find my face and they’re amber and ruined and terrifyingly open. “Please. Don’t—”
“I’m here.” I keep us moving. One step. Another. The sound of water getting louder. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I mean it.
That’s the part that gets me.
The part of me that runs is still there. I can feel it in my legs, the old readiness, twenty-eight years of knowing exactly how to make myself light and mobile and gone.
I feel it.
I keep walking toward the water anyway.
Pepper’s voice somewhere in the back of my head, I stopped leaving the light on for you a long time ago —
I know.
I mean it anyway.