Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ASHLYN
Vibrant hues seized the sky as the sun slipped. Soren’s kiss still felt like it clung to my lips.
I couldn’t escape it. I needed to escape it.
“I looked everywhere for you,” Fyn said.
“You found me.” My shoulders ached with resistance.
His brow arched unnaturally high. “Are congratulations in order?”
“You left me.” It was the worst thing I could have said to him.
His glare could have cut through me. “That happened because I left you? I can only imagine—”
“Where were you?” He should have been here. I needed him there.
Fyn looked over me. “Did he do something else to you? If he—"
“Is it too hard to believe he’d want to kiss me?” Nothing with Soren was straightforward. I knew the kiss wasn’t either.
“It’s hard to believe you’d let him.” His tone sharpened, his eyes falling from mine.
“The fae are free to do as they please. This isn’t Bailoc,” I said. “Why does it matter to you, Fyn?”
He paused slowly, assessing me again. “So you wanted him to kiss you?”
If I so much as uttered my truth, Fyn’s rage would burn from it. “I don’t wish to talk about it.” Everything felt unmanageable.
Fyn’s gaze held mine. It was his quiet reminder that he was still here. No matter how much I prodded, or said the things I shouldn’t have, he was still there.
That overwhelmed me too. “I should go back to my chambers.” I didn’t wait for his reply before I turned to head back.
A jutting stem of a shrub scraped my hip. When my gown caught on it, I carefully tugged it free.
The halls narrowed as Fyn kept a steady pace behind me.
“You should go back to Nythrel.” My words were sharp and short, my mouth barely moving as I uttered them.
“I will not leave you until you tell me it’s final.” His hand fell as soon as he reached toward me. “Until…” The muscles in his jaw pulled tightly. “You tell me you’re choosing to pledge yourself to him.”
An aching pull wound deeply around my heart, tugging on it. Fyn would not stop until he knew I had what I needed. His selflessness was too much to bear.
“Lioran will never think twice about it,” I said.
“You’re doing a poor job convincing me.”
I looked back at him again before pressing my fist against the chamber door.
“Why did you ask about magic in the marketplace?” he asked. “Your word is the only thing they need to move this marriage pact forward. Once you give it, there will be nothing I can do to get you out of it. Whatever inspired that question… I need to know.”
It was a reminder I didn’t need.
“Let me help you. I want to help you,” he pleaded.
There was so much I wanted to tell him, but the constant shadows that roamed these halls allowed for little conversation to be had about any of it.
“In a little while.” My voice was a low buzz. “I will go for a walk by myself down the hall. Wait for me to knock on the wall between our chambers.”
The starlight terrified me. I had done everything I could to not think about it.
Telling him would probably do nothing, but if I stayed, there would never be another soul I could safely admit it to.
Without another word from him, he entered his chambers as I entered mine.
There were so many secrets I would keep if I kept this life—ones that could alter everything.
I needed strength I couldn’t give myself.
I stuck my hand in the sliver of space beside the wardrobe. It was where I stored my sword when I arrived.
The sword was gone.
Desperately, I searched my things for my satchel. The coarse leather flap slipped from my fingertips. I caught it again, prying it back.
The vials remained.
Glowing purple liquid still swirled inside.
My hair and my clothes could be curated, but the vials were a choice they couldn’t make for me.
Even if the potion’s effect was only temporary at best.
A slender crescent moon lit the night sky. Eva had given me time to rest while Soren was occupied.
When I asked her where the sword had gone, she assured me it was stored safely until it would be needed again—as if they hadn’t just hidden it from me.
They stole it from me.
One moment I was choosing originality, and the next, I was being stripped of it.
I never let myself imagine a future other than my father’s design. When the trajectory of my life changed, it was all ripped from me.
Despair tangled with grief.
Once it took hold, I struggled to break free. When I wielded the sword, I felt alive again.
It didn’t matter how many times I fell. Each time I wound up bruised, I enjoyed the ache.
It was better than being numb.
Maybe Fyn knew it. He always seemed to name the things he shouldn’t.
I needed to find him. We would have one quiet conversation that would hopefully calm the rage that was building inside of me.
When Eva was long gone, I slammed my hand into the wall between us three times.
A single knock replied.
I peered out into the quiet hall. When a guard turned toward another at the end of the corridor, I took off in the opposite direction. Fyn’s door creaked open just before I reached the corner.
Each step I took I remembered every moment that still held me.
Fyn wouldn’t let me utter whatever stupid truth I would have said. I couldn’t even remember what I was going to say, but it didn’t make me fear it any less.
He was full of honor and loyalty.
He respected me fully.
As I turned the corner, I found a quiet alcove that held a single window. The stone wall was a welcome chill on my back as I looked up at the moon.
“The blue,” Fyn’s voice carried behind me. “It suits you.”
“Careful, Fyn. That almost sounded like a compliment.” I couldn’t handle him complimenting me.
“You didn’t choose what he wanted, did you?” A hint of mockery lingered in his voice, but when I turned to look at him, the lines around his eyes softened.
“It was my choice. This color was the one I wanted before I came here,” I said.
A flicker of a smile flashed on his face before it faded. “Promise me you will never stop choosing, Ashlyn.” He looked at me as if he feared someday I would. “Your passion illuminates you. It is everything that brings you to life.”
“And yet, for some, it is too much.” My brother condemned it. Maybe Soren hated it too. “Perhaps he will learn to navigate it.” I didn’t want to have this conversation with Fyn. We came here to discuss the starlight—to talk about what it was doing to me.
And instead of the starlight’s heat, I was feeling things I didn’t want to.
“Learning to would require choosing to.” He cleared his throat.
“He doesn’t have to.” That wasn’t a part of a royal marriage pact. “It’s the life I was meant to live.”
“So you will simply accept it?” He pressed his hands into the side of his neck as his chest swelled. “Just because you were raised for it doesn’t mean it is what’s best for you.”
“Marrying him would give me a path I could name.”
He stepped closer to me. “And what if you could have that life somewhere else? A different certainty?”
I clamped my hands tightly together in front of me until they throbbed. “The one that exists in Bailoc may be more terrifying than this.”
“What if that certainty existed in Nythrel?” he asked.
I couldn’t entertain whatever version of the future he implied. If I did, everything I sought when I came here would be gone.
“My mother once thought she could have a life in Nythrel. It took everything from her.”
“Your mother?” He repeated it as if he couldn’t have heard me correctly. “She chose love.”
Everyone in Nythrel knew the story. They knew she fell in love with a fae lord when she was married to my father.
Fyn couldn’t understand the pain she caused by choosing it.
“What did she have to show for it?” I tried not to raise my voice, but it was growing harder to resist the urge.
“You and your sister.”
She wanted Aelira. She stayed for her and then slipped from us moments after she held me.
I wasn’t the daughter born out of love. No, I was born from hatred that followed her choice.
My father forced her to resume her role as his wife.
“And if that didn’t destroy her and my family enough…
her choice caused an entire war—not one—but two.
All of that hatred stemmed from something she could have resisted. ”
“She was not responsible for what your father chose to do with his anger,” Fyn said. “Anyone could understand his fury, but what he did with it was beyond reason.”
“Some of us don’t easily get to choose love, Fyn. There is always a cost. And I don’t wish to pay it.”
“Why do you feel that forcing yourself into this life will spare you? It sounds like a similar fate to me—a life of duty and consequence.”
A single tear rolled down my cheek before I could stop it. I hated anyone seeing me cry. “No one is forcing me.”
“I promised myself I wouldn’t intervene, but being here—seeing you like this I can’t stay quiet anymore.” His voice became a gentle hum. “He doesn’t even look at you like he wants you. You deserve to have someone look at you that way.”
“No one has ever looked at me that way.” Maybe no one ever would.
His eyes slipped closed and a low scoff escaped him. When I waited for his normal jab, it didn’t come.
I glanced down the hall as far-off footsteps sounded, holding still until they faded. “What, you’re not going to make a joke at my expense?”
“Do you think that is all I am capable of?” Annoyance sharpened his words.
Every word he uttered felt as though there was something hidden beneath it.
I needed to see it for myself. “If it’s not all you’re capable of, you can show me what it looks like to be looked at that way.”
“Ashlyn.” Fyn struggled to say my name.
When he spoke it I only wanted to hear it again. “Show me what it looks like, Fyn. Pretend it, if you must.”
“Don’t ask me to do that.”
“I need to know.”
“Stars above,” he grumbled as he scanned the hall.
He stepped closer to me, guiding his hand over my head against the stone wall. The heat from him clung to me, even when he didn’t touch me.
He looked down at me with such intensity—the jade in his eyes seemingly brighter than before.
My stare held his.
It tugged at something too familiar.
It felt like a life I could never be granted, full of laughter shared in a room that was too small.
It made me wish I had stayed when I awoke in the inn instead of running.
I blinked the water out of my eyes.
Everything I hadn’t allowed myself to want was staring back at me.
For months I looked at him without ever allowing him to look back at me.
When he pulled himself back, his gaze slipped from mine.
“For a moment there.” I forced myself to look up at the moon as it clung to the starlit sky. It was a tiny silver anchor when I felt I couldn’t say the rest. “I almost thought you meant it.” It was dangerous that I wanted him to mean it. It would be better if he didn’t. “Tell me you didn’t, Fyn.”
“I didn’t.” His chest heaved.
The starlight flared within me.
I turned toward the wall, shielding him from my reaction.
Sensing his truth—feeling mine—it shattered me.
“Ashlyn?” His hand pressed into my wrist, tenderly cradling it. “Are you ill?”
I didn’t pull back from him. “I asked you about magic because the starlight altered me and now I’m terrified of what I know.”
“Altered you how?” His eyes dulled as he looked me over. “You can tell me.”
“It burned when I drank it. There are times I still feel its heat.”
“You feel magic?” he whispered. “The starlight altered you with it?”
“It flares when a lie is told.” I wouldn’t keep it from him. It felt terrible that I knew his truth without his permission. “I know you just lied to me.”
He shook his head, finally dropping his hold on my wrist.
“I was hoping…” A ragged breath escaped me.
All this time I had run from it. I had let it be a feeling I refused to name, because it was easier.
I was human. He was fae.
He shouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me.
I shouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him.
“Tell me what you need from me.” His jaw twitched as he reached for me.
“I need…” I needed him. Wanted him.
“I meant it.” His words quaked. “I—”
“Don’t say anything else.” It was too dangerous for him to say another word.
“You need to know I never wanted to push you or make you uncomfortable around me.” His hand reached for mine as I stepped back. “I was only ever trying to be what you needed.”
I blinked until the water in my eyes subsided as folded my quaking hands in front of me. “I...” I wanted a life no one would give me. “Someone will notice I’m missing. I should go.”
I turned from him and didn’t look back as I made my way down the hall.