41. Chapter 41
Chapter forty-one
“You are already on thin ice, Gav, but I’m really going to kill you now,” he growled as his friend approached. His muscles rippled and flexed around me as he restrained himself.
Kaed angled to Gavrin with predatory stillness.
I was still tangled in Kaed’s arms. The pulse of his body beat against mine as he leashed whatever violence he wanted to hurl at Gavrin.
All light drained from the sky when we saw Gavrin’s face drawn and hardened. Kaed’s entire body went stone still.
“Tymon is back. He’s at the house.” Gavrin’s face was grave. “Whatever it is, he won’t tell anyone until you’re there.”
We flew to the house.
Rather, Kaed flew. I panicked. He gave me no warning before he scooped me up and jumped from the city walls.
His wings of shadow and smoke snatched us mid-air as he caught an updraft. We weren’t falling but soaring upwards.
And all the while, I couldn’t stop looking at the wings that beat and pushed us through the air. Like storm clouds that came and went with clashes of lightning.
But they held us until Kaed landed us in the orange grove of the Alabaster Palace, a fountain bubbling behind us.
He said nothing when we landed, but his hand wove into mine. My heart crashed in my chest from the flight but also from the nearness of Kaed. The familiarity in his touch. And the fact that I didn’t want to let go of it.
For a moment, we didn’t leave the grove.
Kaed looked torn. Like he didn’t want to face whatever might be within the house.
If he didn’t, maybe we could just stay here.
And I felt that too. I wanted it. I needed it.
Heat still sang in me beneath my skin, like a symphony of emotions and chemicals culminating in a melody that had awoken inside of me.
After a single deep inhale, Kaed led me through to the white walls of the house, leaving the moment behind.
Thick curtains blotted out the evening sun in the room so that only the soft bobbing fae lights illuminated us.
Denora and Tymon were waiting, their backs stiff as we entered.
Tight nods were exchanged, but no one spoke.
The room was dotted with inkings of places and islands I’d never seen, tilted drafting tables held maps and parchment, and it was an effort to draw my focus back to the company around me.
A few moments after we arrived, Gavrin crashed through the doors, panting from running back.
When asked if it was safe to speak, Gavrin flexed his fingers and then gripped them into a fist. He threw up a green glow that coated the entire room with a shimmer, the lustre flickering and fading away with a soft pop.
“It is now,” he said, inclining his head to Kaed.
Gavrin’s defensive magic skill sat opposite his innate sense of violence. I wondered at the juxtaposition of the two sides of him—the perfect complement to each other or warring sides?
“What is it, Tymon?” Kaed’s voice was strained.
“I’m sorry, I am only back now. I didn’t know about …” Tymon paused, his throat bobbing. “About the Cage. Kaedian, I am sorry. If I had known … I’d have come sooner.”
Tymon looked stricken at what had befallen Kaed in his absence. He’d only been gone a few weeks, but it had been enough to twist everything around him.
Kaed plastered a false grin on. “Don’t worry, Eryk Selldayne was good enough to be my sponsor.” The grin fell away instantly.
Tymon’s face went grave, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it apparently. “Sapphine tried to keep what was happening from me,” he said with bared teeth.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s Sapphine,” Gavrin said with a roll of his eyes.
“Because she wanted my attention at home in Gallen. On the mines.” The breath in the room stilled. “We finally hit something.” Tymon paused as he looked to Kaed. “After over a hundred years, we finally hit something.”
Kaed’s eyes fixed on Tymon.
“We think we’ve hit a cache of faebane.”
No hint of shock pinched Kaed’s features at Tymon’s admission.
My heart sank and soared on that one sentence.
There was faebane. It existed. But it belonged to Tymon.
What were the chances that there was another source of it in the Four Corners that no one knew about, that wasn’t going to take another century, if not more, to find?
And from what Audrie had said, Tymon would need the faebane to fund his region.
He’d only married Sapphine to save his people from ruination.
And she must know that. So she would want repayment for her years of marriage.
Kaed hadn’t flinched. He had barely taken a breath.
“Why are you telling us this?” Gavrin folded his arms, chest inappropriately peeking through his shirt in the tense room.
Tymon looked at him, then spoke to Kaed. “Because I trust you. And I don’t trust Sapphine and her father.”
“His father is far worse than Sapphine’s.” Gavrin jerked a thumb at Kaed. He really had no filter.
Denora tilted her head to him as if to say Watch it.
“Gavrin is right.” Kaed’s eyes were unreadable as he held them downcast from all of us. “My father is far worse than Sapphine’s. Why would you tell us this?”
“Because you’re not your father.”
Unease seemed to knot in Kaed at the words, but he looked to Tymon. Disquiet rumbled through him, through his magic.
“I would ask you to defend Gallen should it come to it,” Tymon declared as he clasped his hands behind his back, shoulders stiff and waiting.
Silence.
“I understand the burden of this request,” he continued, “but I will not see my people suffer.”
Denora shifted on her feet, but it was Kaed who spoke. “We cannot defend your people.”
I thought I might hit him for that. But his next words might as well have collapsed me.
“Because we will be fighting a front on two sides then. Sapphine and my father. He already knows there is a new source of faebane in the Four Corners, and if he comes to believe it is in Gallen, he will not stop until it is his.”
“How could he possibly know? I barely knew until recently.” Tymon glanced at all of us in turn.
A muscle flexed in Kaed’s jaw, and he briefly closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were laced with something I couldn’t place, but it was hard and unyielding.
“Imogen”—he tilted his head to me—“has also found faebane and refuses to give me its location.”
After that, everything came out. The kidnapping. The false betrothal. The reason Hart was moving through the Four Corners searching for faebane.
And how Kaed was not willing to give me to his father for his conquest.
Kaed’s body angled in front of me as he spoke.
I wasn’t even sure he knew he was doing it, an innate part of him moving his limbs until I was behind him.
The crest of his wings even broke through the confines of his back as he declared his father’s claim to me was nothing he would allow to manifest.
I think up until that point, up until he said it aloud to Tymon, to everyone, I’d still feared I would be given to the king.
Hart was already searching the Corners, according to the information Denora had gleaned in Hayden. And Kaed had been receiving letters from Hart at the Alabaster Palace with updates on his progress, their contents growing more demanding with each delivery.
And Kaed was now standing between what his father and brother both wanted and me.
I didn’t want to be the cause of war or pain for anyone.
“Maybe there’s another way—”
“No.” Kaed’s tone left no room for argument.
And yet. “You just said you’d be fighting on two fronts for faebane. Maybe we can reason with your father?”
Kaed whirled on me. But it wasn’t hardness that clouded his features. It was something that made his eyes go wide and pleading as they darted over me, as though he expected to find an injury on me. Like I was some fragile thing.
“My father will not touch you.” His hand didn’t reach for me, but I felt a coil of shadows wind around my wrist and through my fingers.
Denora and Gavrin didn’t say anything in response to Kaed’s declaration of his protection of me over his father’s demands. They didn’t even look fazed.
I didn’t have any words.
Kaed kept talking to the others as I tried to make sense of what he’d proclaimed.
We weren’t going to Hayden, not even if Kaed could leave tomorrow.
He wasn’t going to hand me over to his father, his Crown.
What did that even mean? I was under no illusion that things could have gone entirely differently the day Kaed took me.
I could have been subject to torture, to brutal treatment.
And maybe that’s what awaited me in Hayden if he gave me to his father.
But Kaed hadn’t told his father who the source was. Was he possessive to the detriment of his Crown loyalty?
And now Tymon was asking for his support should Gallen call.
Gallen was in the intersection of the Southern and Western Corners.
Far more south than Shadowfall and the Banes.
But the Silmore River flowed from the tip of the Banes right down to Gallen and beyond.
It connected the two, and after the extensive hours spent in the library with Audrie, my knowledge of how river runoff and mineral deposits formed had vastly improved.
It wasn’t a stretch to consider that the minerals that grew the faebane crystals in the Banes might have travelled downstream over the years to the mines of Gallen.
Tymon took the knowledge of his friend kidnapping the female who stood in front of him rather well.
He somehow managed to be unperturbed, or at the very least, unsurprised that Kaed would have forcibly taken a female with him somewhere.
What that said about Tymon and Kaed’s relationship and what they knew about each other, I wasn’t sure.
Tymon offered me a place to stay in Gallen should I ever tire of being Kaed’s prisoner.
Tymon was easy to like before, but I loved this male now, partially because his offer had Kaed squirming.
“Thank you for the offer.” I smiled at Tymon and took a step closer to Kaed. I felt his magic test the air around us, and a shadow wove its way through my side braid. A tiny flutter rippled through me, and I fought the urge to play with the wisp as if it were a lock of hair.
“But how do we stop Sapphine from moving on Gallen?” Gavrin’s voice cut through the flutters in my stomach, unease replacing the air in my lungs.
“We can’t.” Denora took a step and folded her arms as she paced.
“If we move Hayden’s armies to defend Gallen from Sapphine and Gloriya, then Tir will know there is something worth his while in Gallen.
He doesn’t know where the faebane is or who can lead him to it.
All he knows for sure now is that we found some in the Western Corner.
” She looked to me and gave a weak smile.
Tymon’s face was tight, but he nodded.
“But once Gloriya moves on Gallen, surely, Tir will know then?” Gavrin could be rational at times, I supposed.
“Gloriya may not send an army,” Kaed said. “They’ve no reason to”—he speared Gavrin with a look that shut him up before he could protest—“unless we move in first.”
With a half-swallowed retort, Gavrin quieted himself.
“But, if it comes to it, we”—he looked between Denora and Gavrin, and then to Tymon—“will defend Gallen ourselves.” It was a promise without conditions or price.
I wanted to offer to defend it too, for Tymon, but I had nothing to give.
“It is because of me that my father knows about the faebane resurfacing in the Western Corner. I believed it would offer me some peace from his—I was thinking I—” It was strange to see Kaed lost for words. But speaking about his father brought a different side of him to the surface.
“You were thinking differently than now?” Tymon supplied, a glint of a smile somewhere in his eyes.
Kaed shifted beside me. “Faebane resurfacing in Gallen will put a target on your people as soon as anyone gets wind of it. And Hart is searching for any hint of it in the Four Corners. Tir wouldn’t have known had I not been so blinded by my own self-interest.” Kaed’s jaw was locked as though there was a bolt through it.
I looked to Kaed. To Tymon. To all of them.
I felt I was on the precipice of a great wave that was coming to crash into the land and wash away everything. Everything I’d come to feel and know.
It felt more vital than ever to protect my knowledge of the faebane now. With it, anyone could leverage it to start a war. To change the face of the Four Corners, shape it to their will, their decree. Did the king even really need it?
It was obvious why Tymon wanted it. He wanted to protect and provide for his people. Sapphine wanted it for the repayment of her marriage to Tymon. It felt so cold to see it that way, but there was no other way to read it. And Gloriya had an army if they chose to use it.
Kaed … He’d wanted to give it to his father. Whatever history was between him and Tir, it was painful enough to have taken me in the hopes of ending whatever he endured under his father.
My worry was that this news, the faebane, could only be contained for so long.
And there would be more who would lay claim to the buried power. Buried, for now. I felt my secret thrum with power as I held it close in my hands.
Green magic rippled as Gavrin removed the barrier.
Before leaving, Tymon said he would speak to the council on Kaed’s behalf.
“I should have been there.” Tymon shook his head.
And I wondered at the damage Sapphine had done.
It wasn’t her fault Kaed had ended up in the Cage, but I couldn’t picture her being the slightest bit perturbed by the event.
And I didn’t think she would be pleased to learn that her husband would now take Eryk’s place as Kaed’s representative in the city.
“Has anyone seen Audrie?” I glanced between everyone.
“I’ll find her.” Gavrin and Denora spoke at the same time, and the tension was worse than everything that came before.
And then I was alone with Kaed.
A hum of something powerful and dark swirled in the air between us. But Kaed’s darkness wasn’t anything like that which was encroaching from the Corners. His felt beautiful and comforting like the night sky. And entirely too vast to understand.
Whether Hart decided to check Viverna in search of Kaed’s source was still up for debate.
The world had gotten far more complicated than my own problems. And I was in the middle of a swirling mass of fae agendas.