Chapter 48 Percival
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Percival
Solomon came back smelling of her.
Sunset was reflecting through the canopy when I caught the scent from fifty yards out. My wolf registered it before my brain did: Solomon’s scent. And Mira’s. Woven together in an intensity that only came from sustained, full-body contact.
Oh well, I guess Solomon had not simply checked on our mate. He had checked on our mate thoroughly.
He emerged from the tree line at the western edge of Farmon’s camp, tactical vest unzipped, hair out of its usual discipline.
A scratch ran down the side of his neck that wasn’t a combat wound.
Combat wounds didn’t come in sets of four, evenly spaced, consistent with fingernails dragging across skin.
Giselle saw him first. She was changing Lucian’s dressing by the fire, hands steady, and her gaze tracked Solomon’s approach. Her eyebrows rose a fraction.
Farmon looked up from the map he’d been studying. Those pale silver eyes swept his son from head to boot and then returned to the scratch on his neck. His mouth briefly twitched.
I waited until Solomon was close enough.
“So,” I said. “How’s Mira?”
“Alive. Safe. Running her own operation.”
“Oh, we know she’s okay.” I let the grin spread across my face. “We can smell exactly how okay she is.”
Solomon’s stride didn’t falter. His expression didn’t change. But his ears went red. Not pink, not flushed. Red. The kind of color that started at the tips and crept downward, betraying the man behind the mask with all the subtlety of a signal flare.
Giselle’s hands paused on Lucian’s bandage. She stared at Solomon’s ears, then at me, then back at Solomon, and her lips pressed together with the effort of not reacting. Farmon coughed into his fist and returned to his map with renewed interest.
“Report,” Solomon said flatly.
“I’m just saying. The compound must have a shower.” I crossed my arms and leaned against the nearest tree. “Or did you two skip that step?”
“The diversion held for ninety-three minutes. Patrols were redirected east as planned. Father’s schematics were accurate.” Solomon addressed this to the camp at large. His ears were still red. “She wasn’t in her room. I followed the bond to the sublevels and intercepted her in a corridor.”
“And then you intercepted her some more.”
“Percival.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how intercepted are we talking?”
His glare could have stripped paint. I held up both hands, grinning.
The briefing was short. Solomon updated us with what Mira knows by now. The sublevels, the triplets, and apparently she’d threatened to kill all three of us. He also told us about a journal in the archives that she has.
Mira is putting her all to fight, despite what happened. Despite us trying to protect her and shield her from the danger. Yet here she is, taking actions for herself and getting results.
She was really amazing. God, I loved her.
“Mira wants to meet. All four of us. Two days.” Solomon crouched beside Lucian on the cot, checking his wound. The black veining had stopped spreading but the silver compound was still eating at tissue that should have healed overnight. “Can he move?”
Farmon glanced at his king. “The compound on that blade was their highest grade. They upgrade constantly. He’ll be mobile by tomorrow but the wound itself could take weeks.”
“He’ll make it,” I said. Wasn’t a question.
“Percival.” Farmon’s voice again, different now.
I looked up. He was standing near the stream, the map gone. Expression carrying the weight of a man approaching a conversation he’d been building toward.
“Walk with me,” he said.
We went deeper into the forest. Away from the camp, away from Giselle’s quiet efficiency and Solomon’s guilt and Lucian’s labored breathing. Farmon led me to a fallen log beside a stream where the water ran clear over flat stones. He sat on one end and waited.
I sat on the other.
Farmon reached into his jacket and pulled out a pendant. Bronze, old, the chain broken at the midpoint, the metal darkened with age. Engraved on the face was a symbol I didn’t recognize: two crossed blades beneath a star.
“I found this twenty years ago,” Farmon said. “Six miles from the primary portal site. Beside a collapsed gateway. The portal had been destroyed from this side, the structural matrix shattered deliberately by someone channeling their remaining energy into the collapse.”
A chill moved through my chest.
“Sorry I’m confused, sir. You’re telling me this for what reason?”
“Because I spent thirteen years in a ravine with nothing but time and questions.” Farmon turned the pendant in his fingers.
“The collapsed portal I went through was secondary. The primary had been sealed two hundred years ago after the first expedition failed to return. When I found the pendant beside a second destroyed gateway, I recognized the crest.”
“Kaelwyn. A warrior family. Commander Rowson Kaelwyn and his mate Lady Diera were assigned to that expedition.” His silver eyes found mine.
“She was pregnant when they left Veyndral. The timeline matched. The crest matched. And when I remembered you, the foundling the palace had taken in, the boy who appeared in the Glowwood as an infant, I knew.”
“The symbol on this pendant is the crest of your family. Your father was Commander Rowson Kaelwyn, one of the finest tactical minds Veyndral produced. Your mother was Lady Diera Kaelwyn, a researcher with an intellect that saw connections where others saw chaos.”
Kaelwyn.
The name dropped into a space inside me that I hadn’t known was hollow.
Two hundred years of being just Percival, the orphan with a locket and no explanation. Centuries of watching Solomon say Theron and Lucian say Valdris and wondering what it felt to carry a name that connected you to people who’d existed before you did.
“Two hundred years ago,” Farmon continued, “King Altun sent your parents to the human realm on a reconnaissance mission. Just to inspect the realm, perhaps send a message if ever The Order is found.”
“They didn’t come back.” My voice came out flat.
“No.” Farmon reached into his jacket again and pulled out a second object. A small book, water-warped and sun-bleached, the leather cover cracked with age. “I found this beside the pendant. Your mother’s field journal. She documented everything, right up to the end.”
He held it out. I didn’t take it. Not yet.
“Her entries tell the story. They confirmed the Order’s reformation, gathered intelligence, mapped compound locations.
But the Order discovered them before extraction or a signal to Veyndral.
” Farmon opened the journal to a page near the back.
“Your father engaged a twelve-man hunting team single-handedly to buy your mother time to run.”
Twelve men. My father had fought them.
“He died protecting his pregnant wife. The last thing he did was give her enough time to escape.” The respect those words carried was audible, a soldier honoring a soldier.
She’d been pregnant with me.
“Your mother was injured during the escape. A silver compound wound.” Farmon turned the page. The handwriting deteriorated, ink smeared in places where blood had dripped onto the paper. “She ran six miles to the portal, bleeding, dying. And when she got there...”
His silver eyes found mine. “She gave birth. Alone. In hiding. With hunters closing on her position.”
The sound of the stream filled the silence between us. Water over stones.
“The last entry is about that plan. Your birth and the portal.” His voice almost held steady. “The entry ends mid-sentence.”
“And after?”
“The journal can’t tell me that part. But the portal was destroyed from this side. Only a lycan of significant rank would know how to bring down a gateway.”
Farmon’s gaze dropped to the pendant in his hands. “When I found the site, the destruction pattern was consistent. The forest would have changed given the centuries gap of my arrival but what’s left is enough for assumption.”
She’d pushed me through and then burned the door behind her. Dying, alone, with hunters closing in, and her last act wasn’t running.
It was making sure they couldn’t follow her son.
“She died,” I said.
“She died. Having given birth and sent her son to safety and collapsed the only path that could have saved her.”
Farmon closed the journal carefully.
“Her research survived. The earlier entries contain detailed analysis. It’s how I’ve stayed alive in hiding. Her work on counteracting silver toxicity is the foundation of every treatment I’ve developed, including the paste keeping your king breathing right now.”
My mother’s research was saving Lucian’s life.
Two hundred years after her death, Lady Diera Kaelwyn was still protecting the people of Veyndral.
My hand went to my chest. The locket hung where it always did now, tucked beneath my shirt on a chain I’d bought in Ashvale the time I went rogue.
I pulled it out. Tarnished bronze, the clasp worn smooth from two hundred years of handling. The hinge protested when I opened it, then yielded.
Inside: a pressed forget-me-not flower, the petals faded to pale blue. And a piece of paper, folded twice, the edges soft from a thousand openings.
You are loved. Find your way home.
I’d read those words as a homeless child who goes from family to family, whoever pitied me, under thin blankets, tracing the letters with fingers too small to understand what they meant.
I’d read them in the training yards. In my palace quarters, holding the only artifact of an origin I couldn’t remember, asking the locket who I was and getting the same six words every time.
Now I had names.
Rowson and Diera Kaelwyn.
My parents. Who discovered the same organization that was currently holding Mira and spent everything they had trying to stop it.
The tears came.
Not the kind I could redirect with a joke or deflect with a grin. These came from the place I’d spent two hundred years building walls around, the hollow space where parents should have been, where the knowledge of being wanted should have lived.
Farmon sat on his end of the log and let me cry. Didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t offer comfort. Just sat there, a man who’d lost his own home for twenty-four years, keeping quiet company with a boy who’d never had one.
The sound wasn’t dignified. Wasn’t the kind of crying you could hide behind your hands.
It was the two-hundred-year-old grief of an orphan finally learning that he hadn’t been abandoned. That the silence from his parents wasn’t neglect or indifference but sacrifice. My mother’s last act on earth had been wrapping him in a cloak and telling him he was loved.
When the tears stopped, the forest was brighter. Morning had arrived while I was breaking, the light filtering through the canopy.
I closed the locket. Held it in my fist.
“Kaelwyn,” I said. Testing the weight of it in my mouth.
“Kaelwyn,” Farmon confirmed.
I put the locket back around my neck.
Farmon and I walked back to camp in silence. Solomon was awake, sitting beside the fire, watching us return with eyes that saw everything and asked nothing. He’d know, eventually. They both would. But right now the names were mine, and I needed to hold them a little longer before I shared them.
I sat down against my oak tree and pressed my back into the bark and let the two truths sit beside each other.
The Order had killed Commander Rowson and Lady Diera Kaelwyn two hundred years ago. The organization that Mira’s father now led had inherited the infrastructure built by the hunters who’d murdered my parents before I could ever know them. That was one truth.
The other truth was that Mira was inside that building. Carrying my children. Fighting a war she hadn’t started against the legacy that had destroyed my family before it destroyed hers.
I didn’t blame her. The thought didn’t form. Blaming Mira for her father’s organization made about as much sense as blaming me for being born in a forest while my mother bled out six miles from safety.
We were both products of a war older than either of us, both orphaned by the same machine.
But the grief was enormous.
And sitting beneath the oak with the locket in my pocket and the names Rowson and Diera carved fresh into my chest, I understood Solomon’s anger at the rejection in a way I hadn’t before.
The Order had taken my parents. It had taken Solomon’s father for twenty-four years. It had buried Lucian under a crown he couldn’t set down.. It had shaped the three of us into men who carried loss.
Find your way home.
The locket burned against my thigh.
Mira was my home. Those three heartbeats were my home. My brothers were my home. And the Order had its hands around all of them.
I will never let them take away my home. Not again. I swear in my life.