Chapter 5
JASSYN
You will never raise a hand against yourself or others.
You will serve.
You will stay devoted.
Elashor’s commands looped without sound as Jassyn stared at the ceiling of Farine’s chambers. Dawn still hung hours beyond the high windows, and sleep had never bothered to claim him.
One night had passed since the Vallende estate had devoured him again. Their manor overlooked Kyansari, the capital’s glass spires visible from every southern window. Even here, the kingdom kept him in its sightline.
He lay on his back, wings trapped, the membranes cramped and numb where they drowned in the silk-covered mattress. Farine had insisted he remain partially shifted with his scales arranged as the Vallende trillium on his forehead. A display piece, kept ready and admired.
He held still, listening. The estate’s sounds were safer than the ones inside his skull.
The mansion breathed around him—fountains murmuring in the gardens, the faint chime of crystal stirred by a breeze somewhere below. Beneath it all, silence gathered weight.
The coercion hooked through his mind, barbs waiting under every thought. A leash, slack for now. Farine hadn’t yanked on it since the moons rose. Four hours, perhaps five. The longest interval yet. He cataloged the number and knew it meant nothing.
Jassyn eased himself upright, and the pillows whispered under him with a traitorous sigh. The movement drew a murmur from Farine. She rolled beside him in the dark, golden hair spread across the sheets, her perfume still cloying enough to choke.
Jassyn clenched his jaw and breathed through the seal of his teeth, thinning the air until her scent couldn’t follow.
An urge raced unbidden—to lock his hands around her throat, crush cartilage with his thumbs.
Elashor’s coercion sheared it away before his fingers could twitch. Jassyn reached for the impulse again and found only absence—the knowledge that violence had risen, its shape already erased.
His body hadn’t moved. Hadn’t even tensed.
I need to get out.
The thought rose stripped of panic, all calculation and necessity. Elashor had severed the bond with Vesryn and obliterated any trail that might lead the prince here. No one would even know where to look.
Farine reached for him, her fingers sliding across the sheets.
Jassyn’s mind moved before hesitation could intervene.
He kept both hands flat to the mattress, obeying the letter of Elashor’s commands while his awareness slipped through the space in the coercion.
He cast a thread of telepathy outward into the crevices of Farine’s dreaming mind.
“Sleep.”
He twisted the magic gently, a key easing a lock. Her breathing deepened, fingers going slack against the bed.
Jassyn’s pulse hammered against his ears as he counted the seconds.
Nothing seized him.
An exhale scraped out. He hadn’t harmed her, only shoved her further into sleep. And Elashor’s coercion had allowed it.
Hours remained before sunrise dragged the estate awake and returned every gaze to him. Guards would still patrol, and servants would still drift between rooms, but he could test the reach of the leash with fewer witnesses.
Jassyn drew his legs over the edge of the bed and rose. A chill bit into the soles of his feet, the jolt restoring his focus. He found his trousers where Farine had torn them off, crumpled at the side of the bed, and hauled them on.
The tunic proved harder—cut with slits for his wings, tailored at her command to display more than it clothed.
He wrestled the fabric over one wing, talons snagging the stitching, maroon membranes bunching where they refused to fold flat. He would’ve dispelled them, but Farine’s order held them fixed to his body.
Jassyn stopped.
The tunic hung twisted in his fists, as useless as dignity.
He let it fall.
Bare-chested, he crossed to a window. Even the garment had been designed to remind him what he was. Even dressing had become another place for her fingers to touch.
Flying had been denied too, the estate’s authority reaching past stone and into air. He’d learned that on the first night, standing in the dark of an empty courtyard with his wings spread under the stars, muscles straining but unable to move.
Still, the corridors remained open.
He’d wandered them in stolen hours like this—portrait galleries watched by generations of Vallende faces, gardens clipped into obedience, kitchens where servants looked through him and guards let him pass because the estate itself had already decided how far he was allowed to go.
No locks barred his path within its bounds.
Freedom shaped like permission.
But every other hour belonged to Farine.
Jassyn’s stomach clenched, bile climbing the back of his throat. He pressed a palm to his sternum, sealing the burn behind bone until it receded.
He wouldn’t follow that thought. His mind knew the fracture waiting at the end of it. What she might take next. What she might permit others to do.
He pressed his forehead to the window, his breath clouding the pane. Beyond the hedges and marble, the world moved without him.
Lykor was out there.
The glass was cold where warmth should’ve been. Jassyn rested his brow against it and traced the scar cutting past his cheek, then closed his eyes, imagining Lykor’s forehead against his own.
If he ever made it out, if they ever stood face to face again, Lykor would see the wreckage. What had been done to him. What his own mind had already begun trying to rename as allowance.
And Jassyn didn’t know whether Lykor would find anything left worth wanting.
A murmur stirred behind him. Farine turned in her sleep, fingers curling into the sheets as though claiming him even in dreams.
Jassyn straightened. Stillness draped over him before he chose it, a reflex older than the coercion.
He’d already found the gaps in the commands, redefined serve and devoted until they pointed at his own private war. But here, with her perfume clinging to his skin, those definitions blurred. Two nights, and the loopholes already felt thinner.
He had to move while he still remembered the shape of defiance.
Every command had seams. He kept touching them with thought, learning where they might yield and where they would close around him.
He slipped from Farine’s chambers, the door sealing behind him with a soft click.
The corridor stretched long and dim, silence weighted with the drugged haze of Stardust. Servants stirred behind lacquered doors, some indulged enough that their minds had loosened before sleep took them.
He couldn’t coerce them all. But Farine had folded with a single thread of telepathy, her unconscious mind too slack to resist.
That was worth testing again.
Jassyn turned the corner and found a servant alone, arms full of linens, her steps dragging on the long walk toward the kitchens. She hadn’t seen him yet.
He reached with his mind before indecision could calcify into conscience.
Telepathy slipped from him in a whisper, precise as a suture, sliding into her skull the moment their eyes locked.
“Forget you saw me. Keep walking.”
The servant blinked, her stride faltering for half a step. Then she continued past him, gaze empty, linens clutched to her chest.
Jassyn’s wings shook. His hands trembled at his sides, and he closed them into fists, burying the tremor in his knuckles.
It worked.
Farine’s dreaming mind hadn’t been the exception. Elashor’s command permitted the coercion itself, so long as Jassyn didn’t raise a hand.
That should’ve sickened him, but relief had already risen, cold and practical, to take the shape of usefulness.
Jassyn filed the discovery away and kept walking. These hours before dawn were his.
The only ones that were.
The gardens drew him next. Not only the open sky where he could regenerate with starlight on his skin, but the familiar pulse of the earth. The Vallendes had clipped and paved and manicured every surface, but roots still breathed under marble and stone.
Feet bare on the garden path, Jassyn felt the buried life hum through his soles. Flowers he’d never seen opened to the dark around him, pale blooms unfolding beneath the moons.
He turned inward as he walked, splitting his awareness the way he did in Farine’s bed—one layer left behind to steer the body, another tracing the structure of what imprisoned him.
Never raise a hand. Serve. Stay devoted.
The words assumed a simplicity in obedience. They hadn’t accounted for a mind trained to parse.
He couldn’t fly when his thoughts tilted toward escape, his wings locking before the first downstroke. He couldn’t cross beyond the estate walls without his legs seizing.
Those limits had shape now, borders he could measure. Other restrictions lay deeper, waiting beneath intentions he hadn’t yet dared to follow.
He needed to map the cage so he could break it from within.
An idea took root.
He’d loosened coercion before, bent definitions until obedience pointed elsewhere. But loosening wasn’t destroying the magic, and from inside his own mind, every attempt to dismantle the commands snagged on the desire to be free.
Perhaps another mind could move where his could not.
He could coerce someone else to do it. See through borrowed eyes. Steer another set of hands to untangle the knots.
The thought would’ve repulsed him once.
Jassyn walked on, sunk so deep inside the logic of his captivity that he missed the moment the garden began to change.
The manicured hedges and murmuring fountains had fallen behind. In their place stood an inner courtyard abandoned by the estate’s obsessive order. Ivy choked the marble arches, left to crumble where no noble would wander.
The air pressed differently here, damp with loam and wet stone, thick enough to settle in his lungs.
The ground rumbled.
Jassyn went still.
Scales erupted across his forearms and his pupils narrowed to dragonsight, his beastblood responding first.
His mind flew to Farine—that she’d woken, that she was yanking him back to her rooms.
Leaves shivered overhead, though no wind crossed the courtyard. A long exhale moved through the arches, damp and earthen, and the ground began to part.
A massive head lifted from the ivy.
Fungus and lichen sheathed the creature’s skull, crusted thick over obsidian scales. Moss draped the ridges above its brow, and its neck bowed beneath the weight of itself, dragging its snout toward the soil.
A tail uncoiled through the underbrush like a fallen pillar. At its end, root-fused bone knotted into a brutal club made to shatter stone. Viridian wings lay furled tight against its flanks, their edges stiff with thorns.
Eyes glittered in the moonlight, crystalline and unblinking.
Like Rimeclaw’s.
A dragon shackled by a Heart of Stars.
Jassyn’s breath stalled in his chest. The beastblood that had plated him with scales now locked every muscle, pinning him like prey before a predator still deciding whether to strike. His instincts supplied one certainty about the dragon.
Her.
Silence settled between them as she watched.
Some primal part of Jassyn recognized her stillness, the obedience trained into her posture. He’d worn it himself in Farine’s courtyard, kneeling on marble with his jaw forced open for figs he couldn’t refuse.
The dragon tracked him with a patience that made his wings pull tight against his spine. The truth assembled in pieces as he took in the breadth of her body, the way the garden seemed to curve around her bulk, roots and ivy arranged like a second cage.
A Bramblemaw, forged to tunnel through root and stone.
She dwarfed Skylash, but carried none of the Stormstrike’s sleek menace. This creature hunched low to the ground, squat and massive, shaped for earth rather than flight.
A dragon at the Vallende estate.
What better vault for a weapon than the grounds of the realm’s most powerful family? Buried beneath ivy. Forgotten until needed. Maintained the way they maintained everything else—with the certainty that what they possessed would never leave.
Smoke curled faintly from the scales at her neck, rising from a crescent-shaped wound carved deep into the base of her skull. The flesh had blistered and split, still burning under the raw seam. Sap-thick blood wept down her jaw, gleaming dark in the moonlight.
Jassyn stepped forward and held his hands low and open where she could see them.
The same offering of peace he’d given Daeryn’s people in the druid jungle, though none of them had been a dragon with jaws wide enough to swallow him whole.
“I could mend your wound,” he said.
Her crystalline stare never left him.
Jassyn ignited Essence at his fingertips.
A snarl tore from the dragon’s throat, and the garden heaved. Vines erupted from the soil, thorns splitting along their lengths, every tendril poised to strike.
The dragon lunged.