Chapter 25 Zeidan
ZEIDAN
Morning in Nytheria never arrives cleanly.
It seeps in through stone and root, filtered by canopy and ward-light, turning the room a soft green-gold that makes everything feel older than it is.
The hearth has burned down to a bed of coals.
The air still smells faintly of smoke and rain-wet leaves, and somewhere beyond the walls the Wildspont keeps breathing, uneven, stubborn, alive.
Amelia is warm against me.
That fact lands in my awareness with a kind of stunned simplicity that I don’t know what to do with.
She is curled into my side as though the shape of her belongs there, her cheek pressed to my chest, her arm thrown over my ribs in careless possession.
Her hair spills across my skin in loose copper waves, and when she exhales it brushes the sensitive place just below my collarbone, making my body react as if I am still half in the heat of last night.
I do not move for a long time.
I have lived most of my life trained to wake alert, armored from the first breath, to inventory threats and exits and intentions.
This morning I wake up… held. The difference is disorienting.
It makes me feel young in the worst possible way, like my body has forgotten the rules and is choosing comfort anyway.
Amelia stirs, a small shift of her hip, a soft sound in her throat that is not quite a word.
Her fingers flex once against my side as if checking that I remain real, then settle again.
Her lashes flutter but she doesn’t wake yet, drifting deeper into sleep with the trust of someone who believes the room will still be safe when she opens her eyes.
I should be proud that she trusts me. Instead it terrifies me.
Because beneath the quiet, beneath the fragile peace we have bought for ourselves with choice instead of desperation, something else sits in my chest, clear and unmistakable, bright as a blade held to sunlight.
I am in love with her.
The realization arrives without fanfare, without argument, without the usual internal debate that accompanies any shifting priority in my life. It simply… is. Like waking to find the sky has changed color and knowing it had always been possible but never permitted.
I turn my head slightly, just enough to look at her face.
In sleep her features soften, the constant defensive tension eased from her brow, her mouth parted just a fraction.
The mark at her throat is visible where the sheet has slipped, faintly flushed, proof of what we chose together.
My instinct responds with fierce satisfaction and something dangerously close to reverence.
Love is not efficient. Love is not safe. Love is an exposed artery.
I feel myself flush with the ridiculousness of it anyway, heat rising up my neck like some embarrassed boy who has been caught staring.
It is absurd. I have led armies. I have stood in front of Councils and Matrons and gods.
I have killed without shaking. And here I am, unable to decide what to do with my own hands because she is sleeping against me.
Amelia shifts again, more awake this time, her face tilting upward. Her eyes open slowly, unfocused at first, then finding mine.
For a heartbeat we only look at each other.
She blinks once, then her mouth curves faintly. “You’re watching me.”
“I’m awake,” I answer, and the excuse sounds weak even to my own ears.
She hums softly and drags her fingertips up my chest, lazily tracing over scar tissue as if mapping old stories. “You look like you’re thinking too hard.”
“I always think,” I reply.
“Yes,” she says, and there is mild triumph in her tone, as if she has proven a private theory. “But this is the kind of thinking that makes your jaw tighten.”
Her observation should irritate me. Instead it makes something inside me loosen, the way it does when she notices what everyone else misses. She knows me in small ways now, tiny tells and habits and silences, and that knowledge feels both intimate and inevitable.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Amelia’s brow lifts. “That sounded convincing.”
I exhale, then let my hand settle at her waist, fingers curving around her as if I have always done this. She relaxes immediately, tucking closer, and the contentment on her face is so open it is almost painful to witness.
“You’re safe?” I ask quietly.
She studies me as if she hears the other meaning underneath it and chooses not to mock it. “I’m here.”
It is not an answer. It is something better.
We stay like that for a while, the world outside our room continuing without us, the weight of councils and rot and betrayal held at the edge of awareness like a storm on the horizon.
Amelia’s hand drifts over my wrist, then down to my fingers, interlacing them with hers.
The gesture is unconscious, thoughtless, and it lands in me with the certainty of a vow.
She lets out a long breath and shifts onto her back, squinting at the morning light. “We can’t stay in bed forever.”
“We could,” I say.
She turns her head, surprised. “Was that a suggestion?”
It is the closest I will come, this morning, to admitting anything out loud. I give her a look that is meant to be dry and controlled. It fails. Something about her face softens, and she smiles as if she understands what I am not saying.
“Tempting,” she murmurs. “But Nytheria is still trying to die.”
My hand tightens briefly at her waist. “And Vira is still trying to help it.”
The name shifts the air in the room. Amelia’s expression sharpens, the heir returning behind her eyes. She props herself up on her elbows, hair falling around her shoulders in loose disarray that would scandalize half the coven if they saw it.
“We need proof,” she says. “Not suspicion. Not half-heard conversations. Not your instincts, even if they’re inconveniently accurate.”
“My instincts keep you alive,” I say.
“So do mine,” she counters, and there it is, her stubborn pride, the part of her I both admire and want to shake.
I shift closer, forearm braced on the mattress, our faces only a handspan apart. “Then we use both.”
She watches me for a moment longer than necessary. The intimacy of last night has not vanished with morning; it lingers in the way her gaze drops to my mouth briefly before she forces it back to my eyes. I pretend not to notice.
“Fine,” she says, voice deliberately brisk. “We use both.”
We talk quietly, plans shaped in the soft hour where no one is listening.
Amelia’s mind runs fast when she is focused, leaping from threat to solution with the precision of someone who has been trained for leadership since childhood.
She outlines the coven’s hierarchy, the access points, the way Vira moves through the compound with legitimate authority.
She tells me which junior Purnas worship her, which elders are swayed by tradition, which guards are likely compromised or simply afraid.
“And I will get into her quarters,” Amelia says, as if discussing a minor inconvenience rather than breaking into an elder’s private chambers. “There will be ledgers. Correspondence. A ritual journal. Something.”
I narrow my eyes. “You are not going in alone.”
She gives me a look that I recognize as warning. “Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting,” I say calmly. “I’m finishing. If Vira is meeting someone, if she has wards or traps—”
“Then I’m careful,” she interrupts. “And I don’t trigger them.”
“Amelia.”
She sighs, exasperated. “Zeidan, you can’t shadow me every time I move.”
The instinctive response is immediate: I want to. The thought is as possessive as it is honest, and I hate that my first impulse is still containment.
I force myself to breathe and choose the method that has served me better than force ever has: negotiation.
“Then we divide the work,” I say. “You take her quarters and the council chambers. I take the tunnels.”
Amelia’s gaze sharpens with interest. “The root tunnels?”
“Not the ones under the grove,” I say. “The older network. The caverns that predate the current coven grounds. If she is moving poison into the ley lines, she needs access and a supply route. Supply routes leave residue.”
She bites her lower lip as she considers it, and I have to look away because my mind insists on remembering what her mouth felt like last night.
“You’re thinking about tunnels,” Amelia says, amused.
I meet her gaze, expression blank. “I am thinking about evidence.”
Her smile deepens, clearly not fooled. “Sure.”
I clear my throat, ignoring the warmth in my cheeks that is infuriatingly human. “I will go after you eat.”
She lifts a brow. “After I eat?”
“Yes.”
I can already hear Ron’s voice from yesterday, stop martyring yourself, stop trying to win wars alone, and I have no intention of giving Amelia another reason to accuse me of making decisions without her.
She nods slowly. “Fine. After I eat. After you eat too.”
I should argue. I do not.
Because she says it like a command and a care all at once, and the sensation that gives me is dangerously close to happiness.
The tunnels under Nytheria do not feel like the rest of Nytheria.
Above ground, the land breathes through leaves and moss and soft earth, its magic threaded through living roots. Below, everything changes. Stone replaces soil. Moisture clings to the air. The magic is older, less wild, more stubborn, like a sealed archive that resents being opened.
I move alone, because despite Amelia’s insistence, this is a place where one mistake can become burial. I do not bring a lantern. I do not need one. Shadow is native to me, and in these narrow corridors it curls around my senses like an old language.