Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
We walked to the castle and entered through a side door while the chant was still rolling through the city. Long live the true wolf king. The words eased when the walls closed around us and became a hum in the stone.
Kaelric looked nostalgically around the hallway as he weaved in and out of it like he remembered every passageway.
He probably did.
His men were making quick work of removing Harrow’s artifacts and old staff, replacing them with trusted members of Kaelric’s household.
He got to a certain spot and frowned. “They cut down the fig tree my father planted for my mother inside this alcove.” His fingers brushed the empty space as if he could still grasp a piece of fruit, and my heart pinched.
There was a wall-to-ceiling window letting in a ton of light, which I imagined acted like a greenhouse.
‘Plant a new one. Start fresh,’ Val said, and I could feel the tenderness in her voice for her son.
“Your mother says to plant a new one,” I told him, and slipped my hand into his, squeezing tightly.
He nodded, but looked like he was in a dream. “Do you like figs?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “Food is food.”
He shook his head. “No. You have a favorite fruit. Tell me.”
I loved all fruit, especially since it was so hard to get in the Dregs, but since living in Hildreth, I had fallen in love with one particular one.
“Peaches,” I smiled.
Kaelric looked back at the empty alcove, probably remembering a hundred things. “We’ll plant a peach tree.”
My heart warmed at the romantic gesture, and he tugged me farther down the corridor, moving on.
We climbed a narrow stair that curved like a shell. At the top, Kaelric paused before an oak door carved with a running wolf whose head had been worn smooth long ago.
“This was my room,” he said, almost apologetic.
“I wonder…” He didn’t finish the sentence, just pushed open the door.
The room beyond was clean. Not scrubbed, but cared for.
The hearth was swept; the four-poster bed was made with a gray blanket.
On a high shelf, a carving of a wooden hawk faced out the window. Blue curtains framed it.
“It’s untouched,” Kaelric said with surprise.
He walked over to the dresser and opened the top drawer. Clothes and a small journal lay inside, and Kaelric took a shuddering breath. “I didn’t expect it to be clean and untouched.”
“I don’t think Harrow had much use for twenty rooms as a single man with no children,” I said, and felt the knot in my chest tighten when Kaelric’s mouth pursed in anger.
“He killed my parents in their bed. I want to seal that room and never go inside,” he told me.
I nodded, slipping my arms around his neck and pulling him into a hug. He held on to me tightly for many minutes before pulling back.
“Would it be weird for us to live in this room? I know it’s not big, and you can redecorate—”
I cut him off: “I would sleep anywhere with you, and this room is bigger than my entire house growing up.” He chuckled, nuzzling his nose along my neck and inhaling my scent.
“I love you so much it hurts,” he confessed, and I knew exactly what he meant.
He pulled back and cupped my cheek with one hand. His thumb found a streak of dried blood and wiped it away with care. His gaze searched my face as if memorizing every freckle.
“Where are you hurt?” he asked.
“Everywhere and nowhere,” I said honestly. My physical cuts were already healing. They were no big deal. But my heart hurt for him. Over a decade, he’d been waiting for this, and now he was in an empty house with no family but me.
His jaw eased at my admission. “Harrow is dead,” he said softly, as if the room needed to hear it said, as if his childhood walls deserved the truth out loud.
“He is,” I said.
“Good.” He let out a breath that seemed to empty him of ten years. “Thank you.”
I set Valkaryn on the small table by the bed.
‘Rest,’ Val murmured. ‘I can keep watch.’
I eyed the adjoining bathroom. “I want to wash up,” I told him.
Without a word, he led me inside, drew me a hot bath, and added lavender castile soap that an attendant brought. Perks of being an alpha, he could mentally speak to any of his wolves at any time.
“I’ll leave,” he said, giving me his back.
“Stay,” I told him, and he spun around, eyebrows raised.
I undid the buckle of my pants and shimmied them to my knees, then my ankles, slowly kicking them off. Kaelric’s eyes burned yellow at the sight of the cut on my thigh.
“I’m okay,” I said, slipping out of the rest of my clothes, not caring to hide my nakedness.
Kaelric stopped breathing when I dropped my underclothes on the floor and slipped into the bath, his eyes tracking me the entire way.
When I was under the bubbles, he kneeled beside my bath and cleaned my wounds with water and soap.
I made quick work of getting clean, using two fresh pitchers of water to rinse my hair.
All the while, Kaelric watched me with a look of fascination.
When I was done, I wrapped myself in a linen and didn’t bother with clothes.
I wanted to bed my mate. I’d been patient. So had he. It was time. We walked out to the bedroom, and Kaelric stared at the sword on the nightstand.
“That’s going to need to go in the bathroom,” he said, and I burst into laughter.
Little did he know, his mother could see through my eyes. But I knew she would give us privacy. I already felt her retreating.
Once Val was tucked safely in the bathroom with the door shut, he lifted my hand and kissed the bruised knuckles.
“My little wolf,” he said, but it was not a tease. It was reverent and a little tired.
I touched a lock of his dark hair. “My little alpha,” I said back, which caused him to tip his head back with a throaty laugh.
When his laughter died, his eyes went half-lidded. We undressed each other slowly, his hands at my shoulder. “If you want to sleep, we sleep,” he said.
“I want you,” I said.
He kissed my scars as if the mere act could erase them from my body, as I traced the lines of his ab muscles and we kissed passionately.
The bond between us hummed until it felt like the very air was charged with it.
When the world went soft at the edges, and energy slid down my spine, I let it.
We spoke no words, but he taught me a new language, one of kisses and breath and touch.
When we lay still, he pulled the gray blanket up and tucked it around my shoulders tenderly to keep the cold out, and we looked out the same window at a city he once loved as a child.
His heartbeat slowed under my ear as I rested on his chest, soaking in the peace that had finally been gifted to us after everything we’d been through.
But as much as I wanted peace, there was something lingering at the back of my mind. Unfinished business.
My promise to the Creator.
‘Are you going to tell him?’ Val whispered.
I should have. I wanted to, but I was scared.
I didn’t want to tarnish the beautiful moment we just shared.
I wanted him to remember that moment forever without the crushing news I’d given him after.
The corner of the room where the wooden hawk kept watch held its breath as if waiting for my decision.
Kaelric’s breathing went even. The bond between us quieted into a sweet, heavy hum.
The chant outside faded into drunken songs.
I stared at the ceiling and counted the boards. I followed the seam where two planks met and set my palm flat on Kaelric’s chest.
I had not told him that our peace would be short-lived. That my journey was not yet over.
‘You can choose not to do as the Creator has asked,’ she said gently.
But I sensed that would not be wise, not to mention the Creator gave me a second chance at life. I wasn’t going to go back on any word I’d given him.
‘I will help you end it. Together we will end magic.’
We hadn’t talked about it, but there it was out in the open between us.
It sounded cruel to take something so precious from an entire population.
But just thinking of the Elites and how they looked down on those of us without magic, had a rightness sitting in my chest that I would remove that very magic from them.
Who was I to question the Creator’s will? What He gave, he could take away.
Elites had been given great power and abused it. Now, Valkaryn and I were going to set it right.
‘Then we will find the Creation Stone,’ Val said. ‘And we will pay what it asks.’
‘The Creation Stone?’
‘The birthplace of magic. At the Steel Mountain. Where I was forged.’
I gasped. Where her blade was forged? Or where the Creator placed her soul inside of it?
Pay what it asks…
I thought of the shards of Mind Render on the hall floor. I thought of the way Valkaryn’s light had broken them. The Creation Stone, a fitting word for a place older than both Valkaryn and Mind Render.
Kaelric stirred and made a small sound. I froze as guilt washed over me. He didn’t wake, but turned his face into my hair and breathed me like he wanted to permanently imprint my scent into him.
“I will tell him,” I said into the quiet room. “Not today. But before I go.”
It would be cruel not to. I had no idea what the cost would be for ending magic.
My life?
‘Good,’ Val said.
I fell asleep on his chest and woke a few hours later, restless. It was still bright out, but considering both Kaelric and I hadn’t slept the night before, I was grateful for the nap.
Kaelric slept with his arm around my waist, the gray blanket pulled to my shoulders. His breath warmed the back of my neck and rose in a slow rhythm.
In the brightness of the afternoon, I slid my fingers over his wrist and lifted gently until his arm loosened.
He murmured and shifted. I held my breath.
When he settled again, I eased out from under the blanket and sat on the edge of the bed.
The floor was cold. The room smelled like wood smoke and lavender.
Valkaryn waited in the bathroom, perched against the tub where Kaelric had left her.
I strapped her across my back and pulled on my trousers and boots.
My thigh throbbed where Mind Render had cut it, but it was nearly healed.
I stepped out of the room as the setting sunlight reached into the room and bathed Kaelric’s face in a golden glow.
The mere act had him looking like a small boy.
A boy in his childhood room. A small smile graced his face, even in sleep, and suddenly I was grief-stricken.
How could I tell him I was leaving on a dangerous quest the mere night after all of his dreams had come true?
‘He will understand you have to follow your heart,’ Val coached me.
‘He will try to stop me, or come with us,’ I told her.
Silence. Because she knew it was true.
I stood at the door and looked once more at him. What good would telling him do? What if the Creation Stone required my life in order to end magic? What if the Creator just gave me a little bit more time, not a lot? What if last night, in all its beauty, could be the way Kaelric remembered me?
‘If you want to change your mind and stay, I will understand,’ Val said, very quietly.
I remembered the sweet way in which the Creator had asked me for a favor.
How he’d asked me to help Valkaryn fulfill her destiny.
Without me, she had no legs. Without me, magic would live on, and the Elites would keep lording it over the magicless, and in another hundred years, there would be a new Dregs with a new population of people they could lord over.
‘I’m going,’ I whispered.
I opened the door and stepped into the hall quietly before I could lose my nerve.
The corridor was long. The air held a stale cold that had me rubbing my hands together to warm them. A wolf lazily curled up by the stairs with his head on his paws. He lifted it when he saw me. His ears tipped forward. His nose tested the air around me.
“Sleep,” I said softly. “I’m just getting a snack from the kitchen.”
He blinked once, then tucked his muzzle back under his tail. I passed him and moved down the steps with care, avoiding any loud noises.
The main hall was a mess of victory. Someone had dragged benches together to make a bed for a man with his arm in a sling.
Mugs of tipped-over mead littered the floor, and two people slept back-to-back under a single cloak.
It was dinnertime, and it seemed the entire city was asleep with exhaustion after Harrow had kept them up all night to look for me, and then having joined in the revelry of welcoming Kaelric.
I did not take the front door, but a side one that I knew would spit me out in the direction I intended to go.
I slipped outside, and the grass sank when I stepped onto it. The bonfires from the morning had gone to ash that still glowed at the center when the wind breathed on it. A few men still stood watch on the wall, though it felt like a formality.
I went out through the servants’ gate and made my way to the center most point of the city, where the market was, and the secret tunnel that led out.
I was able to heave open the trap door and make my way through the dark tunnel alone.
I slid Valkaryn across my back and strapped it tightly.
When I popped out on the other side of the tunnel, I shifted into my wolf form, knowing I could cover more ground faster this way.
Then I set off east for the Steel Mountains to find the Creation Stone and end magic forever.
Creator willing.