Chapter 51 Wings
Wings
Ido not know how much time has passed. There is no light at first, no sense of my body, only sound.
Fire crackles somewhere outside, not the warmth of a hearth but something hungrier, devouring wood until nothing remains to prove it ever stood. Boots pound past, many of them, running.
A voice shouts, “Identify the dead.”
Another answers, hoarse and horrified, “They’re all dead. They’re all fucking dead.”
The scrape of metal. The drag of bodies.
Pain comes next. It rolls in slowly, like a tide finding shore. My ribs, my side, the back of my skull. I am not fully here, yet I am not gone.
Someone retches. Someone wails.
I try to pull air deeper into my lungs and it catches, shallow and uneven, like my ribs have forgotten how to lift.
Then the room changes. No one announces him, but I feel his presence the moment he arrives. A weight at the center of the world that makes every other man in the room become smaller without realizing it.
Voices dim around him.
He speaks, and the calm in it scares me more than shouting. “This is her blood.”
Silence.
“Someone stabbed her.”
A strained voice, Sevrin’s, too careful. “Colsar, we searched the main room. We have moved the bodies. We have not found her.”
I hear Colsar inhale. Slow. Measured. “Where is her body?"
No one answers quickly enough.
He says it again, still quiet. “Where is my wife?"
Someone stammers a name. “Prince Colsar, we were following her. We were, I swear. Pysan and Asamor and I, we were just outside and the blast happened so fast and we thought she would not have come yet and then the Threns were already inside and”
Colsar’s voice stays even. “Pysan. Asamor.”
Footsteps shuffle closer.
“You were supposed to be following her,” Colsar says, and now there is something threaded beneath the calm, something that makes the hairs along my arms rise even though I cannot lift them. “Tell me where she is.”
More stammering follows, more excuses, fear leaking into every syllable until it breaks into a sound like an animal tearing free of its cage.
The roar that follows is not human, too large for court rooms or diplomacy, hitting the walls hard enough to shake dust from the beams. A wet crack follows, then another, and two bodies drop with dull finality.
Someone sobs. Someone whispers, “No.”
I taste bile in the back of my throat. My heart tries to kick itself out of my chest. Still my body will not move.
Sevrin’s voice returns, raw with forced calm. “Her body isn’t here. That means they may have taken her. They may have wanted a prisoner.” He continues, and the sound of him hurts. He is holding himself together by force alone. “The prison wagon was blown up.”
The fire outside answers him, popping and hissing, as if it enjoys being named. Silence swallows everything.
Then Colsar, and the calm is gone. “She isn’t dead.” He says it like a vow. “She isn’t dead. I know she isn’t.”
A sound escapes the king that is almost a sob and almost a command. “If there is a chance, we keep looking. I already have soldiers on the ground. I will not return to the palace until she is found.”
He pauses. “But Colsar—”
Colsar cuts through him. “I will shift now.”
A ripple of fear moves through the room. Boots retreat without anyone ordering it.
“And until I find her,” Colsar says, “everyone is in danger.”
His voice deepens, roughening into something that does not belong in a man. “I will kill anything that gets in my way. Anything that bears responsibility.”
He turns that fury toward the King without even raising his voice.
“And then, dear brother, I will kill you for not quelling this Thren problem to begin with.”
Someone gasps.
The King does not answer right away.
Colsar continues, softer now, which is worse. “If my wife is truly gone, then I feel sorry for everyone.” A bitter laugh. “Because I will have nothing to lose.”
Sevrin tries to speak quickly, to steer the room away from the cliff.
“We have searched the tavern. We have removed the bodies. We have checked the upper rooms.”
“The bodies must be burned,” the King says, his voice stripped of rank and reduced to command. “When a Thren takes a soul, what remains does not stay empty.”
No one moves.
“You have all seen what happened in the high passes,” he continues. “You have heard what surrounds Alarna, that it must stay warded because it is surrounded by undead. Thren creations.”
A soldier swallows.
“If we leave them here,” the King finishes, “they will rise as undead.”
Colsar makes a sound that is not a word. It is warning. “Nobody burns anything,” he says.
The King does not back away. “Colsar, listen to me.”
“Their leader might return,” the King presses, and I can hear him trying to save lives, trying to be king instead of grieving. “If Asharin is not here, if they took her, if--”
“She wore my ring,” Colsar says, and the way he says it makes my throat tighten around nothing. “They saw the sigil.”
A voice near the King, maybe one of the captains, says quietly, “That may have made her more likely to be hurt.”
Colscar’s answer snaps. “No.” The word cuts. “If they took her,” he continues, voice low, “she would have left me something.”
The King speaks softly now. “Colsar, she may not have had time.”
“She would have left something,” Colsar repeats, and I can hear it, the certainty built from devotion and arrogance and terror. “Even if she had to pull out her own hair and scatter it in the street.”
My chest aches.
“Asha is smart,” he says, and the sound of my name in his mouth is almost unbearable. “She knows I would come for her.” His voice is firm, confident. “She would have left something. So I know she is here.”
The King starts, “Colsar, she may not have thought anyone would come. It was a contrac—”
The air changes instantly. A violent shove, and the King hits a wall hard enough that the room jerks into motion.
Guards surge. Steel clears sheaths.
The King’s voice cuts through, strained but commanding. “Stand down.”
Everything freezes.
Colsar’s voice is ragged now, full of grief. “It was not a contract marriage,” he says. “It—”
Then silence, as if something has just aligned in his mind.
Colsar releases him with a shove that is half restraint, half contempt, and the familiar sound of him shifting follows, bone and form giving way to something larger.
Movement crosses the tavern with sudden purpose, fast enough that the others fall back without being told.
I hear him move near the hearth. A scrape. The faint disturbance of ash.
Something in me gives.
For a moment there is nothing. Then the sound comes again, quicker this time, as he returns to himself. When he speaks, his voice is rough, strained in a way I have never heard it. “She was here.”
No one answers.
“She was conscious.” When he speaks again, it breaks despite him. “She knew I would come.”
Sevrin speaks. “Colsar—”
“We destroyed the contract today,” Colsar cuts in suddenly.
“You what?”
“It was a marriage,” Colsar says, something raw breaking through, “to the only thing I have ever learned how to—” He stops himself. “The only thing I fucking care about.”
For a moment there is silence. Then the King, quieter. “I did not know.” The King straightens, swallowing whatever is in his throat. “And you are not the only one who cared for her,” the King says, his voice is quiet. Pained.
A low sound answers him. A growl. Boots begin to move again, but away, giving space, clearing corridors, because everyone understands what he is about to become again.
My ears ring. My vision stays black. I can only hear it, though some part of me knows he will not return to human form until he finds me.
The shift. The stretch of skin over something larger. A howl tears through the tavern, huge and furious, and people scramble back as if the sound itself has teeth.
Then the slow, heavy steps begin, followed by the sound of him scenting and the scrape of claws against wood. I try to force air into my lungs so I can signal I am alive, but my body refuses. The steps pass near me, then away, then back again, circling. Hunting. Closer.
The growl deepens, vibrating through the wall behind my skull.
I want to call his name. I cannot. Then the steps stop. Right outside the back chamber.
A long inhale. A pause. He has smelled something. The door gives.
Light spills in, harsh after darkness. A shape fills the doorway, massive, furred, wrong for a tavern, right for a nightmare.
And then a sound I recognize even through the animal.
My name. “Asha.”
The next sounds come too fast. Claws scraping closer.
A rush. A shift back, skin and breath and bone returning to man.
Then arms under my shoulders. Careful, impossibly careful, as if I am glass.
As if I am the only fragile thing left in the world.
I feel his mouth against my hair once, once only, trembling.
“I have you,” he says into my skin, and his voice is not prince anymore.
It is only him. He lifts me fully and I feel the night air hit my face as he carries me out. Voices surge around us, shouting orders, calling for healers, clearing a path.
The King says his name once, urgent. “Colsar.”
Colsar does not stop. He does not look back. His voice is low enough that I almost think it is only for me.
I try to move my mouth. Anything. I find the smallest breath.
The faintest whisper. And I give it to him.
“Wings.”
His entire body jolts.
He makes a sound that tears out of him, half laugh, half grief, and he bends his head to mine as he keeps walking, as if he cannot stop touching me for fear I will vanish.
“I heard you,” he whispers.
And then the dark takes me again, but this time it takes me in his arms.