21. Chapter 21
Owain
I drifted into the clearing, barely aware of my own steps, sounds reduced to a dull haze behind the high ringing in my ears.
Somehow the world had continued on. Men were calling out orders while readying horses to leave.
But I still floated in some liminal space, stuck in a living body, but dead of spirit.
I couldn’t look back, if I did I might see her and fall to my knees again. So I kept walking. Pain spread beneath my bandage, sharp and accusing.
Camrick took one look at my face and had the good grace not to say a single word about it.
Instead, he fell into step beside me and remarked, perfectly conversationally, “Most men come back from near-death experiences with a scar and a good story. You’ve somehow managed to also acquire a diplomatic crisis and a broken door. ”
He was trying to make me react. On another day I might’ve been able to find a smile for him. He’d dragged me out of darker places with worse jokes and better timing. But part of me had gone silent when I stepped foot over that threshold.
He glanced at me again, covertly studying my face. Whatever he saw made the humor drain from his expression, though he was kind enough to look away before it became pity.
Ahead, voices sharpened. It seemed I was walking into a fraternal fight. At first, I could not make sense of what they were saying, only individual words. Gelida. Princess.
Isca stood apart, fingers steepled before her mouth, watching as her husband and brother-in-law squared off like men looking for an excuse to draw blood. Sun and Curse strained toward violence.
Nisien’s gauntleted fist knocked into his brother’s armored chest with a sharp clang.
Never one to back down from a fight, he still managed to instill his words with grace as he roughly shoved his twin.
“With Darreth’s king and queen visiting their princess, Gelida’s court won’t care that I’m not there. ”
“Not there?” I asked. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Nisien needed to be in Gelida. We had forged this peace plan together.
I had only been granted a reprieve because I’d nearly died—a delay that had led me straight to Lunette.
But Lunette had just rejected me and Anwen hadn’t accepted Nisien yet.
If Nisien shirked his duty or delayed, the pressure to secure the island’s peace could fall right back on my shoulders.
“Seems like a fair trade,” Camrick said lightly, traitorously, though his eyes cut briefly to me, checking. “After all, Owain crossed the island to secure our mutual defense alliance with Darreth. It’s only right we return the hospitality.”
That made Isca lower her hands. “He has a point,” she said, projecting calm. “Gelida’s court left Anwen alone for a month after we departed their capital.”
“I wasn’t even crowned at that point,” Emrys muttered, shoulders relaxing under his wife’s influence.
“Exactly, now you’re a more valuable guest,” Nisien replied, bright as ever. “So, I’ll visit our friends in Larethia, reinforce that alliance, then continue to Gelida as an even more attractive suitor for their princess—and for peace.”
Isca rolled her eyes at Nisien then fixed me with a look sharp enough to peel skin. Damn. There was no hiding it from her. She knew I was a breath away from collapsing. I might’ve looked like I was standing on two feet, but only stubbornness and pride kept me upright.
So I straightened and put my mask back on. But the movement pulled sharply at my side. Warmth slid beneath the bandage again. The part of me that had, for such a short period, remembered how to want things had gone quiet again.
Unfortunately, everyone around me seemed to hear the silence.
Isca gave the faintest nod, decision settling into place. “If Owain agrees,” she said quietly, and the noise in the clearing thinned around her words, “I think Nisien should go.”
“Why?” Emrys asked, his growl lacking its usual force.
“Because Nisien is being Nisien,” she answered cryptically.
Because Nisien sees an empty shell standing where the Shadowborn Prince should be, I realized with a sick lurch.
Nisien wasn’t just playing politics; he was using the Larethia detour as an excuse to ensure I didn't fall apart on the road.
And maybe, by dragging his feet, he was protecting me from being called up to take his place while my chest was still ripped open.
Emrys’s brow furrowed in confusion as Nisien’s lips curved into a smile.
“The true ruler of Darreth has spoken,” Nisien declared, clapping his brother’s shoulder with unnecessary enthusiasm.
“Fine,” I grumbled. If Nisien was around, everyone would be too focused on him to notice my mood. “Whatever. He can come.”
“I’ll be ready to ride out as soon as I’ve dropped off Isca’s parting gifts to Lady Lunette,” Nisien said.
It hurt to hear her name again. I turned away, but not quickly enough to miss Camrick pressing a heavy bag of gold into Nisien’s hands. Secret payment he hoped I wouldn’t see.
I wanted to say she wasn’t a debt to be settled. Not just any old healer to be compensated and left behind with gratitude. But I had no right to object, so I shut my mouth and found my horse.
On the way out, Camrick rode close on my left flank, as he had since we were boys. He didn’t say a word even as he saw me falling apart in front of his eyes. I was more grateful for that than I could say.
I hoped she’d taken the gold. I told myself that was enough.
I was still telling myself that when we rode out of the village, and the trees closed behind us like a wound sealing over something that would never heal quite right.
Every hoofbeat sent a trickle of blood down my side.
I’d swung into the saddle and felt the pull of torn stitches immediately. My haste to flee the rejection from the only thing I’d ever truly wanted had undone Luna’s careful work. The skin pulled and tore anew with each bump.
There was also a deeper ache I couldn’t reach. Like a splinter buried too deep to remove. I didn’t reach down to press the skin closed. It seemed only fair that something on the outside should match what was happening within.
I deserved it.
I had my horse again. My familiar saddle. My own clothes, my title, the privileges that came with it. I should’ve felt settled, comfortable. Yet all of it fitted the way a coffin did—tailored, dignified, and entirely without room to breathe.
No raiders tried to ambush us in the borderlands like I’d hoped. I told myself it was because I wanted to vent my grief on someone deserving. But the truth was that I wanted to break, to pour myself out in one wild rush so I didn’t have to feel.
While we’d frozen in the mountains, a sudden warmth had coaxed the midges from the earth, and they rose to tear at every inch of my exposed skin as I descended into the lowlands. I didn’t drive them off. I let them feed.
How easily my lungs opened to the thick, humid air of the plains felt almost like a betrayal.
This was a place my body understood, even as my heart lagged behind in the mountains, still caught somewhere between Luna and the Tir—between a life I could never have and the reality of yet another failure about to crash back down on my head.
Cam spent half the journey filling me in on the caravan’s retreat and return to the Tir, the other half chattering endlessly with Nisien. Naturally, the two men got on effortlessly.
But I grew sick of it. Sick of being asked about my time away, tired of being asked about Luna. In my twenty-odd years of knowing Camrick, I’d never suspected how aggressively sentimental he was. The man commanded battalions and apparently believed in destiny.
It was my fault. He’d asked, and I, grieving a thing that had never had a genuine chance to start, had told him almost everything.
Yes, I’d been involved with my healer.
Yes, I’d lied to her about who I was.
Yes, it was fucking tearing me apart.
He suggested turning the men around no fewer than three times after that. By the fourth, I was considering leaving him behind. Said she’d been upset because she cared. Said leaving like that couldn’t be the end of it for us.
But… If I turned back now, I’d do more than beg. I’d demand. And I’d already taken enough from her. My absence was the only kindness I could give her now.
Throughout Cam’s haranguing, Nisien remained quiet—unusually so. He watched me with an expression that made me uneasy. Too contemplative, as if he were already planning something behind his smooth smiles and easy laughter.
After the fires were lit the second night, Cam began pestering me again about how love was worth the cost. How fear made fools of men. How some losses only became permanent when you chose them.
Except it was all a fairy tale dressed up as possibility.
It was the word chose that finally did me in.
As if I’d had a choice. As if love were a door a man simply walked through or didn’t. As if I hadn’t been standing on the wrong side of it my entire life.
Cam didn’t know when to stop. Usually it was a good thing. He would press until a man broke just to shut him up.
“If she felt half of what you did when you came out of that cabin, then this isn’t finished,” he said, softer this time, as if gentleness would make the words less unbearable.
Something inside me snapped.
I held my closest friend at the tip of a conjured dagger’s blade before I fully understood I’d moved. Numb, I watched the point bob where it was pressed to his throat as his breath sawed in and out. “One more word about the lady, and I swear…”
The threat had gone unspoken, but part of me feared I meant it.
My gaze drifted to the side. Nisien’s sword was out in one hand, point steady, with magic gathering in the air around the other, ready to defend Camrick. For one suspended moment, I saw myself as they must have: hollow-eyed, blood-soaked, and surrounded by untamed magic.
The realization cut through the fog cleanly.