21. Adelina #2
Cold dread settles in my gut. The guard knows what Varek plans to do.
Kaedryn looks at me. He expects fear now.
Perhaps refusal. Perhaps another attempt to run.
But there is nowhere to go. I can’t fight the inevitable, so I step toward the coach.
His hand catches my wrist. I look down at where his fingers touch my skin.
It warms and tingles. If I weren’t so exhausted and scared, I would think more of it.
After a second, he releases me. “You will not leave my sight when we reach the castle,” he says.
He believes that. The poor fool believes that.
I climb into the coach because begging did not save me at the temple. Fighting did not save me in the square, and hope has become the most dangerous thing I own.
The ride from the harbor lasts long enough for true darkness to fall, then keeps going.
Kaedryn sits across from me with Sylas beside him.
Rowan and Soren ride outside with the guards, and Kellan and Merritt flank the coach on wings for as long as the weather allows.
I hear movement above and around us, the beat of wings, the creak of harness, the low calls of guards changing formation, but I do not turn to check.
Inside the coach, no one speaks for the first stretch. The wheels grind over frozen road. Wind lashes sleet and snow against the windows. A lantern sways from the ceiling, casting gold over Kaedryn’s face and leaving mine reflected dimly in the glass.
I look like my mother. Freya said so once. I wonder if my mother would be ashamed that I came so close and failed. Freya would scold me for that thought. My mother might have too.
But neither of them is here.
Sylas tries again when the coastal road begins to climb. “Princess Adelina,” he says softly.
I keep my gaze on the window.
“We will not let anyone harm you.”
The words enter me and disappear into a place too tired to answer. Words are useless against the will of a king.
Kaedryn says nothing. Maybe he agrees. Maybe he thinks his brother is promising too much. Maybe he is simply waiting for me to become useful.
I can feel him watching me. His silence fills the coach more than words would have. Cold prince. Ruthless. Controlled. A man who can bind me in shadows, call me selfish, and still look unsettled when I stop crying.
I want to hate him cleanly. I almost do.
But there is a small, foolish part of me that remembers his hand stopping Selvara from touching my wings.
His voice demanding I know what I signed.
His face in the forest when he said he would not take me back to him, before the Astral Stone flared and duty swallowed whatever else might have existed.
The sensation in my chest pulling me toward him.
That small part of me is dangerous.
I bury it beside everything else.
The night stretches.
The coach does not stop except to change horses at guarded posts where Dravaryn men wait with torches and expressionless faces.
Each time the door opens, cold knifes into the carriage, bringing the smell of snow, leather, and smoke.
When Kaedryn steps out, he speaks in a voice too low for me to hear.
I remain inside, still enough that no one has to remind me where I belong.
At some point, Soren climbs in long enough to press a cup of warm tea into my hands. “You need to drink,” he says.
I drink because it is easier than refusing. The tea tastes of bitter herbs and honey, but the warmth barely reaches my stomach before the cold inside me swallows it.
“Have you slept?” he asks.
I look at him. He has his answer.
His mouth tightens, but he lets the question die. “Try to close your eyes for a little while.”
I do, because obedience asks less of me than conversation.
Darkness waits behind my eyelids, but it is not rest. It is another room with no windows. The coach rocks beneath me. Wheels bite through ice and frozen mud. Voices rise and fall outside. Once, Sylas says my name softly, but I do not open my eyes.
I let myself slip to a place beneath thought, fear, and the shape of the road and the men around me and the castle waiting at the end of it.
My body remains in the coach, wrapped in blankets, hands folded in my lap, but I leave it as much as I can.
I drift somewhere empty where pain cannot quite follow because I do not give it enough of myself to hold.
Morning comes without me.
Gray light seeps through the windows. Frost feathers the edges of the glass. The coach keeps moving. My neck aches from sitting too still. My hands are numb despite the blanket. Someone has placed another cloak over my knees, heavier and warmer than the one I brought from Maralis.
Kaedryn’s cloak. I know because it smells faintly of rain, leather, and that shadowed cedar scent that clings to him. I leave it where it is because I don’t have the energy to push it away.
The road climbs higher as the day passes.
Pines crowd close on both sides, heavy with snow, their branches bowing beneath the weight.
Ravines open beyond the windows, white and gray and bottomless.
The coach slows over stone bridges rimmed with ice, then lurches onward through wind that hits so hard the whole carriage groans.
At midday, they try to make me eat. Bread.
Cheese. A slice of cold meat wrapped in waxed cloth.
Fruit gone slightly soft from the warmth of the carriage.
I take the bread and chew because Soren watches me with healer’s eyes, because Sylas looks as if he might start talking again if I refuse, because Kaedryn’s silence has sharpened into something that feels too much like guilt.
The bread turns to ash in my mouth. I swallow it with tea and keep my gaze on the window.
No one asks me to eat more.
My mind slips before the castle appears.
It has to. There are some things the body knows before the mind can survive them, and mine knows this road.
It remembers being taken from one wing of the castle to another with my eyes lowered.
It remembers Selvara’s perfume. Varek’s quiet voice.
The particular kind of silence that fills a corridor when servants pretend not to hear.
The hiss and bite of the whip against my skin.
So I go away inside myself.
When the castle finally appears through the snow near evening, I can look at it without making a sound or outwardly reacting.
Black towers, gold banners, fire-lit windows, and stone walls rise from the mountain as if they were grown there instead of built. I used to look at those walls and think they were the edge of the world. Now I know they are only the edge of mine.
The coach rolls beneath the outer arch and into the central courtyard. Guards line the steps. Too many. Servants stand beyond them, heads bowed, faces pale.
Freya is not there.
The coach door opens. Cold air rushes in. Kaedryn steps out first, then turns toward me. This time, he does offer his hand.