14. Kaedryn
Kaedryn
We follow her into the trees.
The forest swallows sound almost immediately.
The pines grow too close for flight, their branches knitting overhead until the sky shows only in broken strips of night.
Snow dampens our steps, and the air tastes of resin, cold earth, and the faint metallic promise of more weather coming in.
Soren moves ahead, slower now, crouching often, reading signs I’d miss if I were moving on anger alone.
A bent reed near a frozen seep.
A smear of mud on the underside of a root.
A scrape on stone where a boot slipped.
She is careful, but exhaustion makes anyone honest. Each mark tells us the same thing. She’s moving. She’s tired. She’s trying not to leave a trail, but she’s losing strength. Too many terrible possibilities rush through me.
Wild animal. Physical collapse. Hypothermia. A fall off a cliff’s edge.
The thread in my chest tightens with every step. I hate it, but I need it to find her.
By late afternoon, the light thins beneath the canopy, though true night is still hours away.
The trail becomes difficult to read as the ground turns harder, the snow broken by patches of exposed rock and old pine needles.
More than once, we lose the marks entirely, and Soren has to circle back, quiet and patient, until some tiny disturbance gives her back to us.
Then the trail reaches water.
A narrow stream cuts through the trees, half-frozen and hidden beneath a lace of ice. Adelina crossed it. One print slides at the edge, deep enough that her boot must have gone through the crust. On the far side, her steps become more uneven.
“She’s cold now,” Soren says.
“She’s been cold all night,” Rowan answers.
“Colder,” Soren says. “Wet foot. Maybe both. She’ll need to stop again soon.”
Kellan stares at the broken ice, worry plain on his face before he can hide it. “She’s really doing this on foot?”
“Now she is,” Merritt says quietly. “She must be scared out of her mind.”
I stare across the stream, anger pressing against my ribs until it feels too large for my body.
She is alone in the cold because she chose a dangerous road over the duty that binds us both. She is alone in the cold because she believed every road behind her was worse. Both truths are knives, and I can’t decide which one cuts deeper.
Sylas steps beside me, voice low. “You’re thinking too loudly.”
“Then stop listening!” I snap.
“Difficult. You brood with your whole body.”
I shoot him a look.
He doesn’t smile this time. “We’re close.”
“I know.”
“Close enough that if we come on her too fast, we may lose her.”
“I know that too.”
“And if she thinks we’re Varek’s men...”
“She’ll panic,” I finish for him.
The warning settles between us.
Adelina’s magic may be low-level, according to every report Dravaryn has ever offered, but Dravaryn’s reports have not earned my trust. Besides, fear has a way of turning small magic dangerous.
A plant can trip a horse. Frost can slick stone.
A frightened flyer can throw herself off a cliff and trust the air before she trusts the man calling her name.
I look at the stream again. “No one draws a weapon unless I command it. No shadows either.” The last I say mostly to myself. In a dark forest, with her already frightened, shadow work would look like something hunting her.
Sylas nods.
We cross carefully. The trail climbs after that, weaving through pines toward a narrow ridge that runs southwest. The land drops away on one side into a deep ravine filled with snow-laden branches and dark stone.
On the other side, the forest thickens into a tangle of black trunks and low brush.
A dangerous place to chase. A worse place to fall.
Which means she will use it.
The Astral Stone at my bracer warms. I stop beneath a bent pine and touch the crystal. Light flickers, weak beneath the heavy branches.
Vael’s voice comes through. “Your Highness, Dravaryn’s riders are converging near the old west road. Another civilian report placed the princess there less than an hour ago.”
“False,” I say.
“We suspected,” Vael responds.
“Hold them there if you can. Feed them uncertainty. Nothing direct,” I command.
There’s a pause. “You found something?” Vael asks.
“Yes.”
Vael doesn’t ask what. Good man.
“Keep Varek looking west,” I say. “And keep your men away from Dravaryn’s blades.”
“Yes, Your Highness.” The stone dims.
Sylas lifts a brow. “Feed them uncertainty?”
“They are already choking on it.”
Rowan gives a soft laugh. “You sound almost appreciative.”
“I am,” I answer.
“Of treason?” Rowan asks.
“Of competence.”
These people have had this plan in place for months, perhaps years. This kingdom is kindling waiting to be lit, and Adelina may be the spark. Whether that is a good thing, I have yet to decide.
Several paces ahead, Soren raises one hand. Every man goes still. The forest seems to stop with us. No wind. No birdcall. Only the faint sound of running water behind us and the slow pulse of blood in my ears.
Soren points.
At first, I see nothing. Then the trees shift ahead, and a figure moves between them. Small. Cloaked. Half-hidden by gray wool and shadow.
Adelina!
She is separated by uneven ground, fallen branches, and the narrow slope of the ridge.
Her hood covers her hair, but a few pale strands have escaped near her cheek, silver-white against the dark fabric.
Her pack sits unevenly on one shoulder. She moves carefully, one hand braced against the trunks as she traverses the uneven terrain, her steps measured in a way that tells me every motion costs her.
She is alive and she is closer than she has been since she took my hand in the dining hall.
Then she pauses, because the thread between us pulls taut enough to become pain. Her head turns slowly. She looks back through the trees.
Her eyes find mine.
The world narrows to that single point.
Fear crosses her face first, sharp and absolute. Then recognition. Then something worse than either. Betrayal.
I lift a hand before anyone can move. “Adelina.” Her name leaves my lips harsher than I intended.
She flinches.
“Princess,” I correct, because perhaps that is safer, though I know at once it isn’t. “Stop, please. I won’t hurt you.”
Her mouth parts, but no sound reaches me.
Kellan shifts behind me, one careful step for a better angle, but the snow gives under his boot with a soft crunch.
Adelina’s gaze snaps toward the movement.
“No!” I say sharply, without looking back. “No one moves.”
Everyone freezes. Kellan’s face goes pale. Adelina takes one step back. The ground behind her slopes toward the ravine.
“Don’t,” I order.
Her eyes return to mine. She is shaking.
Even from here, I can see it. Exhaustion, cold, fear, all of it running through her faster than she can hide.
Her face is too pale and her lips have lost color.
Her wide eyes and rapid breath make me think of a cornered animal, and something in me hates that I’m the wall closing in front of her.
“I need you to listen to me,” I say.
She laughs once, breathless and broken, and the sound is so unlike the woman at dinner that it stops me. “I’ve listened my whole life.”
I go still. The words hang between us, fragile and furious.
Sylas shifts behind me, no more than a breath, but she sees it.
Her wings appear. They flicker first, struggling to break free, silver light trailing behind her shoulders, opal and moonlit through the trees.
Then they unfurl, unsteady but brilliant, filling the dark forest with something too beautiful for the cold around it.
She sways when they form.
Soren’s voice is low behind me. “She can’t fly far.”
Adelina hears enough. Her fear sharpens.
I curse under my breath and take another step, slower this time. “I’m not taking you back to him.”
I don’t know if that is true. Not politically. Not with my father, Varek, the treaty, and Zerath all waiting beyond this forest.
But in this moment, with her standing so close to the ravine and trembling beneath the weight of her own wings, I want it to be true badly enough that it feels like an oath.
She searches my face, desperate for something she can trust.
Then the Astral Stone in my bracer glows. Her eyes drop to it. Silver-blue light stirs beneath the crystal.
No. Not now!
The stone brightens, and whatever fragile thread of trust might have formed between us snaps before my father’s voice even reaches me.
“Kaedryn,” Sylas warns quietly.
The stone burns against my wrist, demanding an answer, demanding attention. A command connection. Royal priority.
My father.
I don’t open it. I can’t. If I open that connection now, if King Rhaegar speaks through the stone while Adelina stands there watching me, she won’t hear politics. She won’t hear strategy or treaty law or the careful reasons kings use to make cruelty sound temporary.
She’ll see another man claim my obedience.
And she’ll run.
The stone pulses again, harder. Adelina takes another step back.
“Adelina,” I say, dropping all formality now because it’s already too late for caution. “Look at me.”
She looks at the stone, then at me. “I knew it,” she whispers.
“No.”
“You’re going to take me back!”
“I said I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“That isn’t the same thing!” she screams.
The words crack between us. She is shaking so hard I can see it from here, every breath ragged, her wings still trembling at her back.
The air around us shifts. A beam of light breaks through the canopy at the cliff’s edge, old and cold and wrong. Normal moonlight should not glimmer like that.
Adelina seems to feel it too. Her wings tremble, catching the strange light, and she turns toward the ravine as if something there has called her name.
Soren takes a step. “Princess, wait.”
Everything happens at once.
She turns and launches herself along the ridge, half-running, half-lifting, her wings beating hard enough to scatter snow from the branches.
It isn’t true flight. She doesn’t have the strength for that.
I move after her, my own wings snapping open in the cramped space, branches breaking against them as I drive forward.
Adelina slips between two pines, stumbles, catches herself on one hand, and keeps going. Her wings flash ahead of me, silver through dark trunks, each beat uneven but desperate. The ravine widens beside us. The ridge narrows. She is heading toward a break in the trees, toward a beam of light.
Adelina reaches the rock face at the end of the ridge and nearly falls against it, one hand braced on the stone. Moonlight spills through a gap in the clouds, faint at first, then brightening.
She looks back. I’m close enough now to see the tears frozen along her lashes. “Don’t make me go back,” she begs.
I slow because if I rush her, she’ll throw herself into whatever magic is waking around her. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“You don’t know what alive means there.”
The Astral Stone at my bracer flares again, my father’s command pressing against the unopened connection. The light around Adelina brightens in answer. Old magic recognizes the terrified young fae standing at its edges.
The air bends. Adelina gasps.
I leap for her. “Adelina!”
Time seems to slow.
For one impossible second, my fingers brush the edge of her cloak.
The contact sends the thread between us blazing hot, and through it, for half a breath, something of her power bleeds into me.
Not the small green magic Dravaryn described in its reports.
This is vast and old, cold as starlight and patient as stone, a magic that feels older than the kingdoms themselves.
It does not answer to her any more than it would answer to me. It only wakes.
Her eyes widen. Mine do too. Then she turns fully toward the light and the ledge.
“No!” I command. “Don’t move!”
The words leave me before I can temper them, threaded with my magic that has stopped soldiers mid-strike and bent stronger wills than hers back from the edge of ruin.
Adelina freezes.
For a second, I think it has worked. She sucks in a breath, and her body jerks like she’s been released from beneath water.
My power recoils completely.
She looks at me over her shoulder. There is no triumph in her face. Only fear, and beneath it, something that might be grief. I don’t know if she understands what she just did. I barely understand it myself.
She throws her body toward the light, toward the cliff edge. Her cloak slips through my fingers. The moonlight swallows her soft and violent at once, bright and soundless.
There is no door. No passage. No spell I know how to counter.
One moment she is there, breathless and trembling, her wings half-open. The next, the world folds around her. The thread in my chest pulls so hard I nearly stagger forward into the glow after her.
Then it snaps loose.
Adelina is gone.
My hand passes through the fading glow as I catch myself before I fall off the ledge. I stand at the edge of the broken arc, one hand still outstretched, the cold air empty where she had been.
“FUCK!” I yell, slamming my hand against the stone. I should have used my shadows. Why didn’t I use my shadows?
Behind me, Sylas lands hard in the snow, followed by Soren and Rowan. Kellan and Merritt reach us soon after, both breathing hard, both staring at the space where she disappeared. No one speaks for several breaths.
The Astral Stone in my bracer dims to a dull, ordinary white. My father’s command connection breaks with it.
Soren moves first. “What the fuck was that?”
“Where did it take her?” Rowan asks at the same time.
My jaw tightens. “Old magic. I felt it through the bond when I caught her cloak, older than anything Dravaryn ever taught her to fear. Whatever it was, it took her far.”
Kellan looks toward me. “Can it be followed?”
“Not by force,” Merritt says quietly.
I stare at the place where she disappeared. The thread beneath my ribs is still there. Faint. Frayed. Alive.
But for the first time since she ran, it no longer points through the trees.
It points west.
Toward the sea.