18. Kaedryn
Kaedryn
For three days after the moonlight takes her, Adelina becomes a ghost.
She’s still alive. I can tell that much. If she were gone, the pull would’ve vanished with her. It would’ve gone quiet or snapped clean, releasing whatever impossible thread tied itself beneath my ribs the moment she walked into that meeting chamber.
It doesn’t release. It stays, which means she is alive.
That’s all I have.
No trail or witness I trust. No print in snow or mud, no scrap of fabric.
No frightened old couple with a hidden room and eyes full of defiance.
The moonlight left no path I can follow, no residue strong enough for Soren to read, no opening for my power to force.
It takes her from the northern ridge in one violent breath of silver light and gives nothing back but silence.
By the end of the first day, I hate the word nothing.
By the end of the third, my anger has had more time to brew, and I hate her a little for leaving me with it. Then I hate myself more for that.
The anger isn’t clean anymore. Maybe it never was.
It tangles with too many other things, with the memory of her face when she begged me not to take her back, with the warmth of her cloak slipping through my fingers, with the sight of her leaping from the cliff into the light that took her out of our reach.
I tell myself it matters because it affects the treaty. Because hidden magic around a royal betrothed changes the conditions of any political arrangement. Because a princess fleeing with magic strong enough to resist Elyrion command magic is not a minor complication.
All of that is true.
None of it is the whole truth.
The whole truth is that she looked back at me, and the fear in her eyes still won’t leave me alone.
We chase reports across half the northern kingdom, and every one of them is a lie.
They come through the Astral Stones in broken bursts until I resent the glow: silver hair on a grain road, gray wings above a quarry, a girl with pale blue eyes buying boots in a market.
Then, absurdly, sightings from Maralis itself, the last claiming she was seen near a fish market disguised as a boy, cursing like a dockhand and punching a soldier in the mouth.
Sylas enjoys that one.
I would if I wasn’t so fucking mad and concerned for her safety.
The reports don’t tell us where she is; they tell us everywhere she isn’t, scattering Varek’s men west, south, north, anywhere but the quiet roads that matter. His search parties grow more violent with every failure. Questioning, according to Merritt’s contacts, is now a generous word.
The farther we go, the more certain I become that Dravaryn is not a kingdom at peace beneath a firm ruler. It is a kingdom holding its breath. And Adelina’s flight has given it an excuse to exhale.
That should make me more patient with her.
It does not.
By the third night, we camp in a wind-bent hollow near the border ridges, too far west for comfort and not far enough to matter.
Rain replaces snow sometime after sunset, cold and needling, turning the world to black mud and slick stone.
We shelter beneath a broken overhang, wings folded away, cloaks steaming near a heat ward Merritt sets low enough not to be seen from the road.
No one speaks much.
Rowan sharpens a blade that does not need sharpening.
Kellan cleans mud from his boots with tense concentration.
Merritt keeps one eye on the dark beyond the ward, as if expecting half of Dravaryn to come crawling out of the rain.
Soren studies the maps until the edges curl from damp.
Sylas sits across from me, one knee raised, watching me with that irritating patience that means he has decided silence will do more damage than speech.
It does.
Finally, I look at him. “Say it.”
His brow lifts. “I was enjoying the peace.”
“You have never enjoyed peace in your life.”
“True.” He leans back against the rock. “You tried to be decent,” Sylas says. “And she still ran.”
My jaw tightens. “She did more than run from me.”
“Yes. She ran from a contract, an alliance, a war balance, and every neat little solution two kingdoms wanted to build on her back.”
“This alliance matters.”
“I know.”
“Zerath won’t stop expanding because a princess had a difficult evening,” I snap.
Kellan goes still. Soren looks up slowly.
The moment the words leave my mouth, I hear them as they sound. Cold. Dismissive. Too much like every man I hate at court who uses cruel words to make people smaller.
I rise before I decide to, stepping beyond the edge of the heat ward into the rain.
Cold water strikes my face, my neck, the back of my hands, and I do nothing to protect myself against it.
The night beyond the shelter is all wind and mud and the distant sound of a swollen stream cutting through rock.
I stare into it until the camp’s quiet weighs heavier than the storm.
Behind me, Merritt mutters, “Damn.”
No one answers him.
I stand there long enough for the cold to calm the raging fire in my mind.
I did not mean it that way. But perhaps I did.
If only she had told me, talked to me, anything besides simply disappearing.
Even as those thoughts cross my mind, I know how utterly ridiculous they are.
I’ve seen how people fear the king and queen.
Fear either makes people talk or shuts them down completely.
Perhaps anger has found the easiest story because the harder one demands too much.
If Adelina ran because she was selfish, because she was sheltered and frightened of duty, because she preferred sanctuary to sacrifice, then I can chase her without questioning the hand that reaches.
I can bring her back, put the treaty right, and call it necessity.
If she ran because the castle was unbearable, because every path behind her was worse than the wilderness ahead, then every step I take toward her becomes something else.
The pull beneath my ribs tightens toward the west. I turn back to the camp. “We move before dawn.”
Soren folds the map. “We’re already moving before dawn.”
“Then we move sooner.”
“That would be now,” Rowan says.
“Then now.”
Sylas exhales. “Kaedryn.”
“We’ve lost three days,” I bite back. I need to do something, anything besides sit here and think about Adelina.
“We didn’t lose them. She vanished through magic no one knew of.” Sylas stands adjusts his cloak.
“And reappeared somewhere. She didn’t just evaporate,” I reply.
“Yes,” Soren says, more sharply than usual. “And if she reappeared near the sea, she may have needed recovery. Magic like that can be draining, especially if it’s a new or unknown power for her. If she was already exhausted, she could’ve been unconscious for a day, maybe more.”
It only adds another horrifying image to the others in my head. Adelina lying somewhere beyond my reach, pale and unconscious, while strangers decide what to do with the woman every crown in the realm is hunting.
“She had help,” I say.
“Yes,” Sylas agrees.
“She still has help,” Kellan adds.
“Likely.” Soren nods.
“Then someone knows where she is.” I stretch my neck and prepare to call my wings again.
Merritt looks toward the rain. “And that someone would rather swallow a knife than tell us.”
“Then we stop asking the ones who want to lie.”
Sylas tilts his head. “And ask who? The people with real answers would rather bleed than give them to us.”
I look west. Not toward a tree or a road. Not a trail I can draw on parchment. A pressure, a tide, west and south, beyond the last Dravaryn villages, toward the coast where Maralis becomes sacred.
“Fishermen,” I say. “Pilgrims. Harbor men. People who don’t care what Varek calls treason if helping her serves something greater. We make them believe we are different from Varek.”
“For once,” Sylas says with a grin, “I approve of your strategy.”
Rowan sheathes his blade and grumbles. “Varek has ruled for forty years. People don’t forget fear because we ask politely. It won’t be easy.”
“Nothing ever is,” I say.
I don’t finish the thought. Somewhere west of here, she is either running toward sanctuary or lying in a stranger’s house trying to recover from power she didn’t know she had. Either way, she is not waiting for me to arrive and call it rescue.
“We move as soon as the rain breaks.”
?
The next day is worse.
Rain follows us across the borderlands, cold and relentless, until the sky itself seems determined to grind every living thing into gray.
The last stretch of Dravaryn clings to us like a curse.
Black pines. Wet stone. Breath fogging in front of our faces.
Mud frozen hard in shadow and slick where the rain has softened it.
The closer we draw to the western sea-boundary, the more the land seems to resist being crossed.
Then we pass through the climate line. There is no wall. No visible seam in our world.
Only one breath that belongs to Dravaryn, sharp and cold enough to cut the lungs, and the next that does not.
Warmth rolls over the air so suddenly Kellan swears behind me. “Fucking humidity!”
Merritt gives a low laugh. “Welcome to Maralis.”
The rain changes first, becoming softer, the needles of bitter cold giving way to warm drops that bead along my neck and slide beneath my collar.
The wind loses its bite and turns warm, wet, fragrant with salt, green leaves, and flowers blooming somewhere beyond the ridges.
Beneath us, the sea shifts from dark iron to a deep blue-green that looks almost impossible after days of northern gray.
The cliffs ahead are no longer black and snow bitten.
They are dark volcanic stone wrapped in vines, their faces streaked with rain and bright moss.
Broad-leafed trees crowd the slopes where pines would be in Elyrion or Dravaryn.
Flowers climb along rock shelves in bursts of red, gold, and violet.
Maralis. The western kingdom.