Chapter 5 The Admission
The Admission
“I’m starting to regret ever saving you,” he said, his voice cutting through the last remnants of sleep. “You’re clearly determined to kill yourself. I should’ve saved myself the effort.”
My eyes were still closed, but I managed, “Fuck you,” before forcing them open.
The world came back wrong. I couldn’t understand why my body felt so light, why there was nothing beneath me, why the air seemed to move around me instead of past me.
Then the realization struck all at once and my breath caught as I looked down and saw nothing beneath me at all.
I was suspended in the air. “Put me down.”
“A thank you would be nice,” Teorin muttered, as though this were nothing more than an inconvenience.
The air shifted around me as he lowered me back onto the bed, slow and controlled, the mattress rising to meet me in a way that felt almost unreal after the absence of it. I braced my hands against it instinctively, grounding myself before I could think too much about what he had just done.
A tray had been set beside me. “Eat your replacement meal, Ashen,” he said. “We have places to be, and clearly without food you’re going to pass out.”
My hands were still trembling, but I reached for the bowl anyway, the weakness in my arms making the motion slower than it should have been.
The smell was different this time, not the sour rot of Fraisah but something milder, something I could tolerate if I forced myself not to think too much about it.
“Do you need help?” he asked, quieter now.
“No.” I steadied the bowl and lifted the spoon, forcing myself to eat even as my grip threatened to give way. It took effort to keep it from spilling, more effort to swallow, but I kept going, one slow movement after another until the worst of the shaking eased.
When I finally looked up, the breath I had just taken caught in my throat.
He did not look like the man I had met in the forest.
His eyes were not the usual dark, but something else entirely.
The color had vanished, replaced by a depth of black so complete it swallowed the shape of his pupils, leaving nothing behind but a surface that gave no sense of where he was looking or what he was thinking.
It was the black they had been when he yelled at the weaver, or when he fought.
Never for a normal conversation. This was. ..different.
Gone were the plain clothes. What he wore now was chosen to be seen. But none of that held me the way the circlet did. It rested against his head as though it had never been absent, as though everything I had seen before had been something less than the truth.
“Why do you look like this?” I asked, the words quieter than I intended.
Something tightened in my chest, a mix of confusion and something that felt too close to betrayal to ignore.
“Who the fuck are you?” I said, more firmly now, setting the bowl aside before my hands could betray me again. “I’m tired of this. Tell me the truth.”
He exhaled, and whatever sat behind his expression pulled further away instead of forward. “That’s exactly what I’m here to do.”
The difference in him was unmistakable. Not just in how he looked, but in how he sounded, in the way the words came from him without the roughness I had come to expect. He did not sound like Arven. He sounded like someone else entirely.
“Why are your eyes like that?” I asked.
“Like what?” he said. “The way they’re supposed to be?”
He let out a short, humorless laugh that didn’t reach anything else about him.
“I simply glamoured myself,” he continued, as though explaining something obvious. “The same way you did when you went to the tavern at night so your golden eyes wouldn't make others feel uncomfortable.”
There was a faint edge to the word, like he was testing whether I would deny it.
“This is who I truly am, Ashen.” His voice had changed again.
Colder now. Removed in a way that made it feel like he had stepped further away rather than closer.
“My mother was the sister of the Thren King.” He paused, just long enough for the weight of it to settle.
“She was also the wife of the former King of Veynar.”
“Under Thren law, not Veynar law,” I said, the words coming easily, pulled from something Colsar had told me once.
Something moved in Teorin’s face then, brief and contained, as though he had almost reacted before deciding not to. “None of that is what’s important,” he said after a moment. “Or relevant.”
I lifted the spoon again, taking another slow sip of the soup, more to give myself time than because I wanted it.
“What is relevant?” I asked. My voice felt worn now, the earlier edge gone from it, leaving something quieter in its place.
“I’ve been patient,” I said. “I haven’t questioned you.
That ends now. Tell me the fucking truth.
Why have you been helping me? Why were you in the woods to begin with? What are you after?"
“The protector bond is…predecided,” he said.
I waited.
He didn’t continue.
"Finish it."
His jaw tightened. “It’s determined by bloodline. Among the Threns, it is always one of the royal bloodline.”
I didn’t move.
“I knew early on what I was meant for,” he continued. “I was born into it. There was never another outcome.”
His voice did not carry pride or reluctance. It was simply fact.
“But the heir of Alarna was missing,” he went on. “And because of that, there was no bond to form. No formal alliance between the Threns and Alarna.”
I drew in a breath, the pieces beginning to shift into place. “So Alarna has been neutral this whole time—”
“Because they can,” he cut in.
I stared at him. This was too much at once. Too many pieces shifting too quickly.
“Because there is no bond forcing the alliance. Because many of them do not see the value in it. And because others have always preferred isolation.”
His attention moved past me then, as if he were seeing something far beyond the walls of the room. “Alarna has always trusted its wards,” he said. “They do not want to fight a war they do not have to.”
“And you?”
His attention shifts to me, just briefly. “I don’t have that luxury.”
The answer comes too fast, like he’s said it before.
He exhales quietly. “The country has become divided over it. Some still believe in the bond, since it means the wards finally loosen. Others would rather it never happens again.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“They like the isolation, the independence that it allows."
“Those that do not want it are called the Lights. They are the ones who are most likely to kill you. They will do anything to keep you from bonding with me."
They don't have to do anything, because I am not bonding with you, I think to myself.
"Both groups present a danger to Alarna's found princess."
I stared at him. “I am not an Alarnan princess.”
He looked at me then, something tightening in his expression.
“We both know that isn’t true,” he said quietly. “You are.”
My hand shifted slightly against the blanket without thinking.
I said nothing. Then, a thought occurred to me. "You are not the King of Veynar right now, so why do you wear a crown?"
"I was always a prince," he said. "My uncle formally adopted me after my mother's death." A pause. "Then, just before the war, he named me Prince Protectorate."
"And what does that mean?"
"For now, very little," he said. "But once the bond is complete, the title becomes King Protectorate."
"And that?"
"King Protectorates deal in matters of war and territory," he said. "Every conflict that threatens the realm passes through us first. Every border, every treaty, every blade raised in anger." A pause. "We do not sit on thrones, Ashen. We decide who does."
"Doesn't he have fourteen children of his own?" I said. "Why give that to you?"
“Seventeen,” he corrects. And he gives it to me because I am stronger than any of them," he said simply.
"The Protectorate does not follow the usual succession pattern.
It is not inherited. It is earned." A pause.
"Moreover, if I secure Veynar, he has a King Protectorate with two kingdoms at his back. He loses nothing. He gains everything."
A pause.
"And you?" I say. "What do you gain?"
He looks at me for a long moment without answering.
"Everything," he says finally. "Or nothing. Depending on what you decide."