Chapter 28 #2
My mind offers images unbidden, cruel in their plausibility: Wren in his lands again at the end of this war. Wren in his arms and whispering his name with that reverent tone I’ve hoarded for myself. His ears hear her soft, breathy moans as pleasure comes over her from his touch.
I swallow hard against the bitter taste of the thoughts.
“You’re certain,” I begin, trying to find the words, because I need one more chance for him to take it back, to tell me this is his spirits’ just being territorial.
I need it to be an exaggeration and not the universe deciding it hasn’t gutted me quite enough yet.
“You’re certain she is your true, lifelong mate? ”
If he says yes, not only will it confirm their soul bond, but it will confirm that he’s relished in the feeling of her body entirely to seal it.
Torryn meets my eyes fully this time. There’s no apology there, yet there’s also no gloating either, just a steady conviction as he says, “I’m certain.
My spirits have been telling me that since she stepped foot in my lands, and we’ve sealed the bond recently. The pathway between our souls is open.”
Sealed the bond.
Recently.
I keep my expression carefully blank as I process those words.
Here I’ve been, starving myself to stay away since we made that treaty. Yet it would seem that since then, he’s visited her and sealed himself to be a permanent part of her life.
“You should have told us earlier,” Azyric says sharply, seizing on the information like it’s a weapon he can turn outward instead of inward like I am. “That bond is a tactical advantage. If you know where she is, we can use that.”
Torryn’s eyes narrow as his tone drops to a dangerous warning. “Use it how, exactly?”
“To know where the humans have taken her so you can take her out of there,” Azyric shoots back. “If that’s the only reason you all are holding me back from launching a counterattack, I demand you go get her now.”
It’s such a weak, feeble attempt to act like we are the only ones that want her out of there, and not him. I can’t help but scoff at him. “What an interesting demand.”
The shadows at his feet surge higher once more. “Do you honestly expect me to stand here and wait three and a half weeks while humans leverage this ceasefire to strike my borders and test our defenses? She can’t expect that.”
“She expects us to stick to our word,” Sylvin says quietly, speaking for the first time since Torryn’s announcement.
His chest rises and falls with a deep breath, like he’s trying to steady a rage within himself that I can relate to.
“She expects us to not drag her around to meet the demands of what we want.”
“What I want,” Azyric says through clenched teeth, his tone dropping and causing a chill to snake down my spine, “is to make sure my people do not die while we stand by turning ourselves into idle observers over the feelings of a woman who walked away from all of us.”
He turns his attention back to the distant line of the shore, the previous venom gone from his tone as he whispers into the night, “She shouldn’t have left the only territory where we had any say over what happened to her. She shouldn’t have put us in this impossible situation.”
The words are meant to sting, and they do.
It is an impossible situation, torn between duty, and dare I say, love.
But they also ignore the way she looked at him on that wall—at all of us—as if leaving was the last thing she wanted and the only thing she could possibly do, for the good of the world.
“She walked toward what she thought might save more than just us,” I say, surprise flickering through me when I hear the certainty in my own voice, despite the utter shock still rolling through me at Torryn’s admission. “You know that.”
Azyric’s jaw flexes, but he doesn’t contradict me. He doesn’t agree, either.
“I will not keep my shadows sheathed while she falls deeper into their lies,” he says instead. “I won’t watch more bodies dragged out of the water. I can’t tell their families it happened because we made a promise to a woman who isn’t even here to see the consequences.”
He steps back from the parapet, and the shadows shiver in response, gathering tightly around his boots. They’re restless and rippling up his legs like they can’t wait for the command to carry him elsewhere.
“If none of you will dare to break your promise to her, I will,” he announces. “I’ll drag her out of their hands myself and bring her where she can’t be used as leverage against us. Then we can give the humans what they’ve been begging for since their little rebellion took over.”
“You can’t,” Torryn snaps, the word rough with more than just anger.
I can sense the fear in his words, along with his quickened heart rate.
“If you storm that city with the intent of ripping her away, you’ll break the one thing she’s asked of us.
She trusted us to keep our people in check for a month. You’d shatter that in mere days.”
“One thing she’s asked of us?” Azyric repeats, voice flattening as he takes a step closer to him. “She’s asked us to let her go. She’s asked us to not hurt the humans. She’s asked us to let them slaughter us without retribution for a month.”
Torryn’s mouth tightens as the shadows climb higher on Azyric, reaching his waist. The tips of his shadows begin to wrap around his body to conceal him entirely, which means he’s a breath away from letting them take him.
“Az,” Sylvin warns, frost creeping up the parapet behind him as his eyes widen. “Think this through.”
“I have thought this through!” Azyric snaps while his shadows stop below his neck, leaving only that and his face exposed.
“Every hour since we left her on that wall, I’ve thought about what happens when humans realize what she is.
When they decide to cut her open to see what makes her different.
When they march her onto a battlefield with a collar around her throat and see if they can point her at us. ”
The shadows surge with his words, flaring outward before snapping tight again, like they’re testing the boundaries of his control.
We all stand there in what feels like stunned shock. The cold wraith king who has clung desperately to his supposed suspicion of, and borderline hatred for, Wren is admitting openly to us all the ways he fears for her now.
“I won’t wait for that,” he finishes, jaw clenching tightly for a moment.
He’s not wrong about what humans are capable of, or how little our honor will mean if they decide to treat her like a weapon, or if they find her too dangerous to keep alive.
He’s not wrong that the ceasefire is lopsided and brittle, held together by nothing but our collective stubbornness and the memory of her tears.
But he’s wrong in this being his only option.
Just as the tendrils lick up his neck to consume the final piece of him, my body flashes forward. My hand wraps tightly against his throat as I slam him back into the nearest pillar, shocking him out of teleporting through the shadows.
Stone cracks behind his body and his breath leaves him in a quiet hiss of surprise that turns into a gasp as my fingers tighten.
His shadows rear up instantly, a snarling wave that stops just shy of my skin, as if held back by some instinct for self-preservation, or perhaps the cold certainty of his death in my gaze as I lean in.
“You will do nothing that puts her in harm’s way,” I say, low and very clear. “I don’t care how justified you feel, or how angry you are. We made an agreement, and we keep our word as kings. If we don’t, we are no better than the humans we claim to despise.”
“You would put her safety above your people’s?” he rasps, as his hand comes up to claw at mine, testing the strength of the iron band of my fingers around his throat. “Again?”
I know he says that to rile me, to remind me of what I too, have lost.
My fangs ache, pressing against my bottom lip, hungry for the easy answer violence always offers.
Drawing his blood would be such a simple language to fall back into.
I could tear his throat out for even suggesting I’ve failed my people, bathe this rooftop of his castle in red, and for a little while it would feel like control.
But Wren’s voice threads through the roar of bloodlust in my head, stubborn and soothing all at once.
I’m trying to save us all.
I ease my grip just enough for Azyric to draw a fuller breath, but I don’t let him go.
“I am not choosing her instead of them,” I say, each word deliberate.
“I am choosing to believe that keeping our promise to her is the path to what we seek. Safety for our people en masse. You want to gamble with what she’s trying to accomplish, fine, but do it after the month she asked for. Not before.”
Torryn steps closer, heat rolling off him as he nears, always the furnace in comparison to my and Sylvin’s cold.
“She’d never forgive us if we broke our promise and took her away from what she’s given up her own desires to seek out,” he adds in warning. “You know that, Azyric, and I know you care for her despite what you say otherwise.”
The wraith’s eyes narrow as he swallows harshly beneath my grip.
I’m aware that he could have transported us both through his shadows by now, but he hasn’t. It gives me hope that he is truly hearing our words and letting them seep into his hardened heart.
Sylvin comes to my other side, the temperature dropping as he moves, frost crackling under his boots. “And if we become the kind of men who can break a promise to the woman we all claim to care for?” he murmurs softly before his tone turns glacial. “Then we deserve whatever ruin comes for us all.”
The four of us stand there, a tangle of opposing magic but shared desperation.
His shadows seethe, rising high enough now that they lick at my hands.
There’s a span of two heart beats when I can feel the precarious balance of his decision.
Then, slowly, he drops his hand from mine and his shadows subside by half, curling more tightly around his boots again instead of clawing up my arms.
“You’re all so confident,” he says quietly, and the vulnerability in his voice makes my grip loosen another fraction as he looks between us all.
“I hope, for all our sakes, that you’re right.
Because if you’re wrong and that month runs out, we may find ourselves so disadvantaged with what the humans have accomplished in that span that we can’t win a war that is ripe for our taking at this moment. ”
I drop my hand and step back to form a solid line with Sylvin and Torryn. From Azyric’s tone and the slowing of his heart, I feel the depths of his rage morphing into fear for his people, which we can work with.
None of us speak for a moment as his final words sink into us, taking root in their possibility.
I stand there, fingers still tingling from the feel of Azyric’s pulse hammering under my hand as his gaze turns sharp and wholly focused on me.
His hand lifts to rub at the red marks across his neck, and for a brief moment I have to fight the urge to smirk, thinking about how good it felt to do the same to that human colonel.
As the bloodlust surges back into my mind, I think of the way she begged us for time with tears in her eyes. Torryn may have claimed her as his mate, but I’m not backing down from ensuring she knows exactly the lengths I’m willing to go for her.
There will never be a future in which I relinquish my claim to her heart, no matter who else tries to own a piece of it.
“We hold the line,” I say, reminding them and myself of our promise. “For thirty days. No matter what they throw at us.”
Azyric’s chuckle is a brittle thing, but he doesn’t contradict me.
The decision hangs between us all, fragile as glass.