51. Ryewood
Ryewood
The thoughts circled all night without reprieve. I paced my room, wearing the same path back and forth, unable to do anything but think about her in there alone. Then, first light finally came.
The sky is barely pink when we gather at the entrance. The three Davrik siblings stand in a tight cluster, Belinda in polished armor that’s never seen combat, with her brothers flanking her like they’re posing for a portrait. Six guards surround them.
They have no idea what’s waiting for them in there. Though neither do I, not really. But I don’t care about the trials. I only care about her.
Father arrives to see us off. His face is a mask of benevolent pride, the loving king sending his son into the sacred tradition. It makes my stomach turn.
He clasps my shoulder and leans close.
“Rye. Don’t forget what I said.”
I force myself to nod. He releases me, steps back, and smiles for the gathered nobles.
“May the trials reveal your true strength.” The same words he’s spoken at every trial send-off for centuries. The rest of the contenders will follow later, only once the nobility has had their head start.
Hayes is at the edge of the gathering, separate from the nobles, like he doesn’t know where else to put himself.
When our eyes meet, it’s the look of a broken man who’s given up trying to hide it, who knows exactly what he’s done.
He made a choice he can’t take back, and he knows it, and I know him well enough to know this will cost him for longer than today.
I hold his gaze as the horn sounds. There’s nothing I can do with it now, and everything I need to do is in there.
I turn and step through the archway first, with Finn and Grier on my heels. The fog closes around us instantly, cold and damp against my skin, swallowing everything behind us, like it never existed.
I turn back just long enough to confirm they’re through. Finn meets my eyes with a single nod, and Grier is already scanning the trees.
I don’t wait. My feet are already moving.
“Rye!” I hear Finn’s voice somewhere behind me.
I don’t stop. Can’t stop. The safe house is half a mile north. The forest pushes back, roots catching my boots, branches grabbing at my arms. I cut hard around a cluster of trees and keep pushing.
Please be there. Please be safe. Please.
The ravine opens up ahead, and I don’t slow, scrambling down the slope, with my boots skidding on loose rock.
I barely catch myself before I go down. I’m already scanning the boulder face before I hit the bottom.
The moment my boots land, my hands find the wall, fingers scraping across stone, searching, until I find it.
A knot in the rock, almost invisible. I press the knot in, turn it left twice, right once, and hold. It gives with a click.
The air goes out of me all at once.
“Ella?” I step inside. “Ella, it’s me—”
The safe house is empty. There’s no bedroll disturbed, no pack, no sign that anyone has been here at all.
No. No, no, no—
“Rye?” Finn appears at the entrance with Grier right behind him.
“She’s not here.” The words come out strangled. “She’s not here—she was supposed to be here—”
I push past them, scrambling back up the ravine. My heart is slamming against my ribs so hard I can barely breathe.
“GEMMA!”
My voice tears through the trees and comes back empty, birds scattering in its wake, but nothing else answers.
“GEMMA!”
I’m already moving, crashing back through the underbrush. A branch catches my face. I turn left, then right, then left again. Every direction looks the same. The trees close in, the fog rolling at my ankles, swallowing any sense of where I came from or where I’m going.
“ELLA!” My throat is already raw with it. “ELLA!”
“What did you just say—” Finn’s voice cuts off mid-sentence behind me. I hear him stumble.
“ELLA!”
Nothing. The forest swallows my voice and gives me nothing back.
I cut left, then right, pushing harder, scanning every shadow, every gap between the trees. She has to be here.
“ELLA! PLEASE!”
“Rye!” Finn is closer now, footsteps pounding behind me. “Rye, stop!”
His voice doesn’t reach me. Nothing does.
“ELLA!”
A hand closes around my arm, wrenching me back so hard I stumble. Finn spins me around, gripping my shoulders.
“Rye, STOP.” His face is flushed with his chest still heaving. “You’re going to get us killed. You need to stop.”
“She’s not here, Finn.” My voice cracks. “She wasn’t in the safe house. I don’t know where she is. I don’t—”
“I know.” His grip tightens. “I know. But running blind through the Weeping Woods, screaming at the top of your lungs, is how we all die. We need to think. We need to—”
He goes completely still, and his expression empties out in a way that makes my stomach drop.
Then I hear the footsteps, closing in from all directions.
Figures emerge from the trees. One. Two. Five. Ten.
They’re not nobles or contenders. They’re dressed in rags, their eyes promising violence, and weapons clutched in scarred hands. They’re the criminals Father throws into the trials to thin the herd. Murderers and thieves offered a choice between execution and the Weeping Woods.
Then my focus snags on a face I recognize.
Tommin.
Our eyes meet for half a heartbeat, and understanding slams into place.
When Father pressed me about the lockpick outside his chambers, I gave him a name.
Tommin’s name. I provided a name that wasn’t hers.
I told myself it was protection, a delay, a harmless misdirection, and nothing would come of it.
Father turned it into a death sentence.
The nausea hits so fast I nearly double over. I made a choice, and a man is here dying for it, and there’s nothing I can do to take it back.
I don’t get time to sit with it; they’re spreading out, surrounding us. Grier and Finn move to flank me with their hands on their weapons.
“Well, well.” The leader steps forward. He’s built like a wall, with a scar running from his temple to his jaw. “Look what we found, boys. The little prince himself.”
“We don’t want trouble,” Grier says, keeping his voice even.
“Trouble?” He laughs, circling me with the ease of a man who knows he has the numbers. “No trouble at all. Just a little justice.” He spits at my feet. “The King sent us in here to die. Seems only fair we take his son with us.”
“I’m not my father.” I keep my voice calm, even though everything inside me is screaming to find her, to keep searching, to get away from this.
“No? You wear his face, live in his castle.” He draws his blade. “Close enough for me.”
They move all at once, and the world erupts. Grier takes two down before a third catches him from behind. Finn is a blur of steel, but there are too many, and we weren’t ready, weren’t prepared, weren’t paying attention—
Someone kicks my legs out from under me, and the ground slams into me all at once. A boot finds my ribs before I can roll away, then my face, and the world whites out for a heartbeat, copper flooding my mouth.
“Hold him.”
Hands wrench my arms back and force me to my knees. Through blurred vision, Finn and Grier come into focus, and they’re both restrained with blades pressed to their throats.
“He’s different!” Finn shouts, struggling against the men holding him. “He’s not like the King. He’s been fighting against him—”
His gaze snaps past me and finds Tommin, and his face fractures. “Tommin, please—”
“SHUT UP!” The leader backhands him so hard his head snaps to the side. “One more word, and we slit your throats too.”
Finn goes silent with blood dripping from his lip, but his eyes find mine, terrified.
The leader turns back to me and raises his blade.
“Any last words, little prince?”
I stare up at him. At the sword that’s about to end my life.
And all I can think is how I’m never going to see her again or hear her laugh.
The thought swallows me whole, drowning out the blade and the men and the cold ground beneath my knees.
Somewhere far away, the leader says something, but it’s muffled and distant, like I’m underwater.
I didn’t find her. I promised I’d find her, and I didn’t. The tears come before I can stop them. I should have gone with her. I should have never let her go in alone.
Something heavy hits the ground beside me. There’s screaming and blades singing through the air, but all of it is dampened.
Hands grab me and shake me, but I’m frozen, pulled under by a grief I can’t surface from.
I’m never going to see her again. The thought spirals mercilessly in my head. I go somewhere no one can reach me. I fall into the memory of her in the gardens, her asking me to call her Ella, asking me to find her. It settles the noise in my head. Then I realize there’s actually silence around me.
The world comes back in pieces. Sound returns first, strangled and faint. Then the blurred shapes slowly sharpen. I see Finn’s mouth moving, and Grier bent over, gasping.
I blink, trying to remember how to exist in my body.
There are bodies everywhere.
I look up.
She’s standing at the edge of the clearing, chest heaving, blades still in her hands, blood splattered across her face. Alive. Whole.
My chest unlocks all at once, breath tearing back into me so sharp it’s painful, like I’ve been holding it since the moment she disappeared into that fog.
Beside her stands another woman, with the same dark hair, same golden skin, same impossible eyes with rings of amber, violet, teal, and green.
The air punches out of me. The world reduces itself to their two faces. The edges of my vision blur, and I can’t tell if it’s been a heartbeat or an hour. There is a pull in my chest toward her. Fear slices through me and roots me in place. What if I’m wrong?
She steps forward, and the certainty arrives before thought does.
There could be a hundred women with her face, and I would find her every time.
It’s the way she steps forward, and I feel it in my chest before I see it with my eyes, the way her body orients toward mine like it doesn’t know how not to.
Her eyes find mine, and the distance between us does what it always does, it becomes unbearable.
“Ella—” I say as I stand.
Her eyes are wet, and her hands are shaking.
“Ryewood.” Her voice cracks. “I can explain.”
I stare at her. At them.
“You’re a twin,” I breathe.
Ella, my Ella, nods, tears spilling down her cheeks. Rage moves through me so hot and all-consuming that I have to close my eyes and breathe through it. At my father, at the prophecy, at every piece of this realm that made hiding who she was the only option she had.
“This is Gem.” She hesitates, glancing at her sister. “Wren,” she corrects softly. “This is Wren.”
Gem.
The name lands differently now. It wasn’t a nickname.
It was a different person entirely, and I feel it land in my chest like a key turning.
My mind races so fast I can’t hold a single thought, nothing making sense and somehow everything making sense all at once, the moments that never quite added up, the times she felt like a different person entirely, and I told myself I was imagining it.
“Ryewood, if this changes things—” I see the fear creeping back in, the walls trying to rebuild themselves.
I don’t let her finish. I close the distance between us in two steps, cup her face in my hands, and kiss her hard and fiercely. I pour everything I have into it, every ounce of love, every promise I’ve ever made her, every future for us I refuse to let go of.
When will this woman learn she is never going to lose me?
There is nothing that will change that, not her twin, not her secrets, not my father and everything he’s willing to do.
She has never once understood how completely she has me.
She could unravel every truth I’ve ever held, and I would still come back to her. I will always come back to her.
When I pull back, we’re both breathing hard. Her eyes are wet, searching mine.
“Nothing could ever change this, Ella.” I brush my thumb across her cheek, wiping away her tears. “I love you, and there is no truth you could hand me that would make me choose differently. I meant what I said under that willow tree.”
I press my forehead to hers. “I am fully and completely yours. Nothing will ever change that.”