Chapter 23
Ash
The grotto finds us.
That’s what it feels like, not that Kestra leads us to it, but that the forest decides we’ve earned it and moves aside.
The path opens through a curtain of hanging moss and there it is.
A waterfall falling into a natural pool, the rocks around it thick with bioluminescent growth, every surface breathing soft blue-green light.
Wild Court magic. Old and ambient and completely indifferent to courts or politics or anything that happened in the last three hundred years.
It just is. The way living things simply are.
Finnian is barely with me by the time we get there.
His weight has been increasing for the last twenty minutes, the body’s honesty asserting itself, the venom doing what it does. He’s still upright. Still moving. But his eyes have that waterlogged quality of someone fighting to stay present while something pulls them under.
“Into the water.” Kestra is already moving. “As cold as he can stand.”
I get him to the edge. His hands find my arms, and grip without looking.
“I’ve got you.” Same words as before. I mean them the same.
We go in together.
The cold hits like a verdict, immediate, total, pulling a sharp sound from somewhere in Finnian’s chest that’s equal parts pain and relief. The púca scratch on my arm screams at the temperature change, then settles into something almost numb.
I’ll take numb.
He goes under for one second. Two. I haul him back to the surface and he comes up gasping, hands finding me, eyes finally there again instead of the fever-distance they’ve had for the last hour.
The water is chest-deep where we’re standing. The bioluminescent moss reflects off the surface, casting everything in shifting blue-green, and Finnian’s face in this light is—
I look at the waterfall.
Not because I don’t know what his face is. Because I know exactly what it is and finishing that sentence means admitting something I’m not ready to say out loud yet. The waterfall is easier. The waterfall doesn’t look back.
“The venom’s flushing.” Kestra, from the rocks above.
Her voice carries the particular careful neutrality of someone who has been listening to things people would not have said with their walls up and is choosing not to make it a thing.
“Keep him in as long as he can stand it. The cold does the work.”
Finnian’s hands are still on my arms. The grip loosening now as the cold does its job, the fever breaking in increments, his breathing steadying from the ragged quality it’s had.
“Kestra.” Tiana’s voice, quiet.
A pause.
Then footsteps moving away from the rocks.
I don’t look up to catch whatever look Kestra gives me on her way past. I feel it anyway. Don’t waste this.
We’re alone.
The waterfall is loud enough to swallow anything we say.
The bioluminescence pulses slow and steady.
The forest breathes around the grotto the way it’s been breathing around us since the root hollow, with the patient recognition of something ancient that has been waiting for this specific moment for longer than either of us has been alive.
Finnian’s fever breaks, one final shudder moving through him from shoulders to spine, and then the heat against my hands drops to something almost normal and he exhales.
Just exhales.
His forehead drops to my shoulder.
I hold him there.
My hands find his back without deciding to.
He’s still warm underneath the cold water, that steady specific warmth that hasn’t left even through the fever, even through everything the last hour tried to strip away.
The warmth that stays. I don’t know when I learned to identify it as his specifically.
His breathing against my neck slows. Steadies. Becomes the breathing of someone who is finally, finally just present.
I don’t move.
“I remember.”
Two words. Very quiet.
“What you heard.” He straightens. Not far, just enough to look at me, the waterfall throwing light across his face in patterns that make his amber eyes unreadable. “Everything I said. I remember all of it.”
I wait.
“I need you to know—” He stops, something working in his jaw. “I need you to know that I’m aware of what the venom does. That I understand if those words land differently now that I’m…that I had no control over—”
“Finnian.”
He goes quiet.
“You told me you counted my heartbeats.” I say it simply. “Back at the Academy. When we still thought we had time. With your walls fully up. You told me you’d memorized the exact pitch of my voice.”
A beat.
“The venom didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about you.”
Something moves through his expression. The horror of exposure slowly changing shape into something else. Something more fragile and more real.
He’s waiting for me to pull away.
I can feel it, the held-breath quality of him, three centuries of having things taken, standing in cold water after the worst kind of vulnerability and bracing for the cost of it.
I know that feeling. I’ve been standing in it for twenty-eight years.
The bracing. The waiting for the thing you said out loud to be used against you.
I put my hands on his face.
He flinches. Not away, just the involuntary response of someone braced for something that doesn’t come.
“I heard you.” My thumbs on his jaw. Making him look at me. “All of it.”
“Ash—”
“I’m still here.”
The waterfall drowns the sound he makes as I close the distance.
But his hands come up to meet me before I get there, cupping my face with the specific reverence I remember from the Academy, like I’m something worth memorizing. Like he’s already taking notes.
His mouth finds mine.
It’s different from the first time.
The first time was desperate. Controlled for exactly two seconds and then not, walls down, three centuries of want detonating all at once.
This is the opposite, slow, deliberate, the kiss of someone who has already said everything and is choosing this with his eyes open.
He kisses me the way he reads. Thoroughly.
Like there’s no detail too small to catalog.
His thumb traces my cheekbone, the line of my jaw, the corner of my mouth, like he’s cross-referencing against something he already memorized and finding it accurate.
It undoes me more than the desperate kind did. I wasn’t braced for careful. I don’t know what to do with being handled like something worth taking time over.
“You’re doing that thing,” I say against his mouth.
He pulls back half an inch. “What thing.”
“The cataloguing thing. I can feel you taking notes.”
Something shifts in his expression. The composure cracks into something that’s almost a smile but isn’t quite, warmer than that, more private than that. “Would you like me to stop?”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “Just wanted you to know I know.”
The almost-smile becomes something else entirely. “Noted.”
“Show me,” I whisper. “The crown. Just where it is.”
His smirk is partial, sad. But he brushes the curls back from his face, and there along his hair line—thorns that crisscross all the way back to the back of his head.
All this time.
My mouth crushes back to his. His hands slide from my face to my hair, the grip shifting from reverent to something with considerably more intent, and I feel the precise moment he stops cataloguing and starts just wanting, the exhale against my mouth, the way his body comes fully into the space between us like it’s been waiting for permission.
I give it.
His warmth moves through the water toward me. The specific warmth of someone who’s been holding back for a very long time and has finally, finally decided not to.
I pull him closer.
His mouth finds my jaw. My throat. The spot below my ear that makes my brain go genuinely offline—which he’s clearly already catalogued because he goes back to it twice, deliberate and unhurried, and the sound that escapes me is embarrassing in the best possible way.
“Still taking notes?” My voice has gone somewhere I don’t recognize.
“Comprehensive research.” His lips move against my skin. “Very thorough methodology.”
“I hate you.”
“Mm.” He doesn’t sound remotely concerned. “Your heartbeat says otherwise.”
I grab his shirt. Pull. He comes willingly, and the waterfall drowns whatever either of us might have said, and that’s fine because I’m done talking and from the way his hands are moving, he is, too.
The water is cold. He is warm. The contrast becomes its own kind of sensation as his hands trace up my spine—steady and specific and nothing like accident. The bioluminescent light shifts blue-green across his face, and I think, distantly, that this is the kind of thing you can’t unfeel.
The specific careful attention of someone who treats everything he loves like a primary source.
I’ve been touched before. That’s not what this is.
This is being studied. And I didn’t know until right now that there was a difference, or that I would fall apart at the seams over it.
“Finnian.”
“Here.”
“I need—” My brain is offline. My vocabulary has apparently gone with it.
“I know.” He does. He always does. That’s the part that’s going to wreck me later—how completely he already knows. His hands find my hips under the water, grip certain and unhurried, drawing me closer until there’s no more water between us. Until I can feel every point of contact.
Until I can feel exactly how much he wants this.
“For the record,” I manage, “this is incredibly inconvenient.”
A startled laugh escapes him—the genuine, surprised kind that gets out before he can stop it. “The timing is not ideal.”
“Dark Forest. Truth venom aftermath. Cold water.”
“Would you like me to stop?”
“I will end you.”
“Also noted.” His mouth finds my collarbone.
My shoulder. The warmth of his breath against my skin is a specific and targeted form of destruction.
“I’ve been wanting to do this,” he says against my throat, not quite steady, “since you argued with me about the Moonshadow mistranslation. For the record.”