23. Chapter 23 #2
In the dream, she approached me as a phantom molded by my guilt. Her fiery red hair danced in the breeze, mingling with the scattered red, orange, and yellow leaves around her cabin. She stood just out of reach, watching me with those infuriatingly perceptive lilac eyes.
I walked toward her, arms outstretched, spurred on by the almost frantic belief that everything would be all right if I could just hold her hand, feel her warmth beside me, know that she was breathing.
But she said nothing, only shook her head once, slow and sorrowful, as I failed to reach her again and again.
When I woke this time, it was with a frustrated snarl on my lips and my heart trying to claw its way out of my chest. Dawn was just beginning to paint the sky with faint hues of pink and orange.
I dressed without calling for my valet. My shadows had been restless since I’d woken, pressing against the edges of my skin like something testing a seam.
I worried they’d lash out at anyone touching me.
I was mostly healed, but pain was an old companion—one I hoped would keep me on my best behavior.
I pulled on my boots and went looking for something other than myself to break. The training yard was empty when I arrived, the ground still slick with heavy frost. Skin prickling with chill, I conjured a war hammer.
I didn’t have the finesse in me for blade work. Hammers didn’t require you to think—just to mean it. And I needed to fucking hit things.
I drove myself until my breath burned and sweat soaked through my clothes despite the cold.
My strikes were powerful, vicious even, but off.
My eager swings went too wide. The first few were almost clean, but the conjuration slipped like a knot falling loose.
Twice, my grip on the hammer’s shape went soft, like I was gripping wet clay.
So I drove harder. If I stopped, I’d have to feel it.
The war hammer’s shaft turned into a second blade as I thrust. It sliced right through the heavy oak practice target, shattering it into a thousand splinters.
I swore, and what was left of my control fled me completely. Magic devoured the light around me as sweat dripped onto the straw underfoot. With a roar that never seemed to end, I beat the stump left behind into pulp.
My chest heaved. The rage emptied out of me, and something far more dangerous rushed in to take its place. It started with imagining her face, the dusting of freckles on her cheeks. This, as it always did, spurred my magic to rise to the surface of my skin.
She could help him.
The thought arrived wrapped in something that almost felt like reason.
Her power is unparalleled, and Berian is very sick.
These were simply facts, laid side by side.
I could send a carefully worded letter along with an escort. Give her a choice and all the help she needed to come…
Except she wouldn’t.
Yet the part of me that had stopped sleeping, that had been dragging the hammer too wide all morning, didn’t care. That part had already moved past letters.
The thought slithered up my spine like a snake, its fangs leaking venom into my mind with horrifying ease. Though at the time, I only saw it as strategy.
I could send for her.
Just a small detachment. An escort, really—men who would kill or die to protect her on the road.
For Berian. Of course it would be for Berian. A perfectly legal royal decree that conveyed how grave his condition was. She was a Larethian citizen. It was her duty to serve when called. And if I got to see her again, what was the harm in that?
Compassion guided Lunette. She couldn’t bear to see others suffer when she had the power to make a difference. Once she understood the stakes, she would come willingly. There was no reason to imagine otherwise.
I didn’t dwell on what would happen if she refused.
Berian wasn’t dying yet. I didn’t have to decide anything today.
The thought sat patiently waiting in the back of my mind while I drove the hammer down hard enough to split the frost-crusted earth.
Muscles trembling with exhaustion, I turned toward the lake just south of the stables.
The water was covered with a thin sheet of ice, tendrils of mist gracefully curling up from its frigid surface.
I didn’t hesitate. I stripped down and plunged in.
The cold stole my breath instantly. It sank into muscle and bone until my thoughts scattered.
Let it scour me clean. Let it punish the weakness I couldn’t seem to excise any other way.
This would only be for Berian. Her wanting one night with you doesn’t grant you any claim on her, Owain.
Acknowledging that didn’t make me want it any less.
I stayed until my teeth chattered and my limbs went numb. Even my shadows recoiled, pulling in as the cold swallowed me. Only then did I drag myself out and dress with clumsy fingers, skin aching, shadows subdued at last into a sullen, exhausted quiet.
By the time I reached the warriors’ hall for luncheon, I had changed, but I was still half-frozen and barely holding myself together.
The hall was loud with conversation and the clatter of plates.
Familiar faces greeted me with nods and murmured respect as I crossed to the raised dais.
Berian’s chair sat empty beside mine, a cup of mulled wine already poured and waiting at its place by habit, long gone cold.
It was a reminder of everything pressing down on my shoulders—of the man I was supposed to be while their king lay insensate.
Camrick was already there, eating with one elbow braced on the table. Nisien beside him. Both glanced up as I sat, eyes sharpening briefly before anyone else could notice.
“You look like shit,” Cam said quietly as I took my seat.
Nisien used a napkin to cover his laugh.
I huffed something that might’ve been a derisive growl if it hadn’t caused me to cough uncontrollably.
A servant appeared as soon as I regained control of my lungs, setting down a tray piled high with spiced muffins. The scent hit me harder than a sucker punch—warm, sweet, threaded with citrus and cloves.
For a fleeting, unguarded moment, my body and magic went still. For the first time since leaving the mountains, I felt something other than grief, shame, or anger. It was something so close to peace that I nearly slumped in my seat.
Then my conscious mind caught up, and I recognized it.
Fuck.
My magic surged, shadows prickling under my skin, along the edges of my vision. I stiffened, fingers squeezing the wood of my chair until it creaked. Over food. I didn’t know whether to laugh or put my fist through the table.
“Take them away. Now!” I ordered. No explanation.
The servant flinched then scrambled backward.
I just terrorized a servant over a smell.
The thought surfaced briefly before vanishing, because I didn’t have the energy to feel shame about it.
Leave, a sensible voice inside my mind urged. They’ll see that the rumors about you are correct.
I wouldn’t be ruled by this. I couldn’t be. I had to stay because Berian was absent. So while I felt like another piece of my soul had been brutally cut away by a dull knife, I locked myself in place, spine rigid, face carefully blank.
Or so I thought. I wasn’t convincing everyone.
Nisien stepped up and started loudly engaging the nearest warriors about their training session that morning, drawing attention to himself.
Part of me wanted to tell him to stop. I didn’t need managing.
Except I clearly did. I felt a flash of unfair loathing for him, simply because he’d seen how far I’d fallen.
And yet I owed him a king’s ransom.
Camrick’s gaze flicked to Nisien then landed on me and narrowed. He hissed, “You’re hiding something, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said automatically. I hadn’t yet gotten the weighty secret I kept in my pocket examined, so I’d avoided worrying him prematurely. Only Emrys and Nisien knew about it, and with me being holed up in my room for so long, it hadn’t come up.
“Liar,” he said quietly. “Your face is streaked with black. You look like a bloody nightmare.”
He slid off the dais without another word and jogged down a few steps, speaking briefly to one of his captains. Then he turned back and stopped directly in front of me, blocking me from the view of the hall.
“We’re going to have a meeting in my office,” he said quietly. There was steel in his tone I rarely experienced pointed at me. “Now. This has gone too far.”
Something in me jolted. It was enough to cut through the haze of wrath, longing, and self-recrimination. I met his eyes. For a moment, I saw myself reflected in them—half the man I should’ve been.
I stood. The ring pressed against my thigh like an accusation—proof that they were already sharpening knives behind my back. As Regent, I no longer had to ask for permission to act. And it was past time to do something about it.
Camrick had seen enough to be afraid of what I was becoming. The trouble was, so had I.
***
Lunette,
My mind has become a cage, and thinking of you is the only window out of it. I cannot speak to you, so I write these words to keep from losing my mind entirely.
Yesterday they named me Regent and threw a feast to make it look like a good thing.
Candles burned until dawn. Lords drank to my future. Women I do not know smiled at me like they were already measuring a crown for their own heads. And all the while, my brother lay upstairs too weak to lift his own goblet.
I endured the feast because duty demanded it, but I spent the entire evening thinking of your cabin. It shames me how desperately I miss a life that was never truly mine to keep.
If I were a stronger man, I would stop writing these letters.
If I were a better one, I would send them.
But I’m neither. So I will sit in the dark, destroying myself with memories of you, because even the agony of your absence is better than a world where I never met you.
- Owain