Chapter 74 The Rabbit
The Rabbit
Iam still staring at the rabbit when the thought finally catches up to me. “The two Threns that were with you tonight,” I say slowly, “They weren’t trying to kill me.”
Arven crouches across from me, examining the animal with clinical detachment before slicing into it with clean efficiency. “Not immediately.”
“They held back.”
He does not look up. “They were told to.”
I start to remember with sick, belated clarity. The first lunge too direct. The second circling instead of finishing. Openings left where there should have been none.
“You set them on me.”
“I arranged an exercise,” he replies, peeling back skin as though this is the most ordinary thing in the forest. “You performed better than expected.”
My hands curl uselessly against my knees. “You could have told me.”
“And ruined the authenticity?” His tone is dry. “Fear sharpens instinct. You needed it.”
The blade slides through tendon with a quiet, wet sound. “They understood the risk.”
“They’re dead.”
“Yes.” He shrugs nonchalantly. “They knew I had a bad temper before they befriended me."
I glance at the bodies. “They’re not getting back up, are they?”
“No,” he says. “Their souls weren’t taken.”
I almost ask what that means, whether there is something left to take, but think better of it.
The clearing smells like blood and damp leaves and something electric that still lingers in the air from what he did. My stomach twists hard enough to make me sway.
He sighs. “I bore easily. Cook the fucking rabbit.”
Too tired to argue, I crouch and force my fingers to move.
The ground is littered with fallen branches, most of them too damp, but I gather what I can anyway, snapping thinner pieces over my knee and stacking them in a small, shaky pile.
My hands will not cooperate. They tremble with hunger and the aftershock of adrenaline.
I strike the flint once, then again, the spark catching briefly before dying.
Behind me, he exhales. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”
I refuse to look at him as I try again, but my fingers slip and the flint skitters across the dirt. The dizziness comes in a wave, heavy and sudden, and I sink back onto my heels before the trees can start to spin.
He moves past me without asking permission. He kneels, adjusts the wood with efficient irritation, and with a small flex of his hand the kindling ignites as though the air itself has decided to obey him. Flame climbs upward in slow tongues.
I swallow and look away.
“Pathetic,” he mutters, though there is no real heat behind it, only annoyance.
“I didn’t ask for help.”
“And yet here you are,” he replies, already cutting into the rabbit with smooth, practiced motions. “Half-starved and barely upright.”
I lie back against the cool earth because standing feels suddenly impossible. The sky above the canopy is dark enough now that only thin shards of night peek through. My limbs feel distant from me, heavy and unreliable.
He skins the rabbit with quick, precise movements, each motion economical and without hesitation.
“Why are you helping me?” I manage.
“If I leave you here,” he says flatly, not looking up, “they will most certainly eat you.”
“Eat me how?” I ask before I can stop myself. “I only ever see Threns kill people. Yet everyone calls you soul-eaters. Do Threns even eat real food?”
He glances up, faintly amused. “Yes. We eat food.”
The blade moves cleanly through the meat in his hands. “But we prefer souls.”
My stomach tightens. “Then how does that work?”
“The kill,” he says simply. “When a Thren takes a life, the soul is taken with it. Automatically.”
I stare at him.
“There is nothing for you to see,” he adds. “No sign. To you, it looks like any other death.”
Something cold presses into my chest. “And that… feeds you?”
“It strengthens us,” he replies. “Every kill.”
I hesitate. “Then the undead—”
“A byproduct,” he says. “When we take a soul, we leave behind a trace of our magic. Usually it fades. Lately…”
He pauses. “It hasn’t been.”
I frown, confused. “Because of the war?”
“Because we have been killing too much,” he says. “The stronger we are, the more we leave behind. Enough of it…”
He shrugs lightly. “And the body gets back up.”
I think of Colsar. “How does one kill the undead?”
Arven rolls his eyes. “Again, I’m neither an archivist nor a library nor a teacher. Find one.”
Bastard.
“Anyway, you already killed your Thren friends.”
“I killed two,” he corrects. “The forest holds more.”
He tears free a strip of hide and tosses it aside.
“Which would not be my problem,” he continues. “Except they are sloppy and rude, not unlike you. They would leave your corpse where it fell, and I'd have to smell it as you roamed my forest as an undead.”
His forest.
“And since I am living in these woods for the next few weeks, I do not particularly feel like breathing in the rot of an Alarnan princess decomposing in my territory.”
My eyes open. “I’m not—”
“You are,” he cuts in calmly. “Do not insult me by pretending otherwise.”
“So that is my incentive, Ashen.”
He glances at me once, assessing.
“Do not pass out,” he says. “I am not carrying you.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
The fire crackles softly between us.
“No,” he agrees mildly. “You wouldn’t.”
The rabbit hisses as fat begins to drip into the flames.
“You carry it in your blood,” he goes on, finally glancing at me. “The line. The way your magic moves. It is not palace trained. It is older. Alarnan.”
I swallow. “You don’t know that.”
“I know enough,” he replies. “You smell like it when you use your power.”
Irritation rises in me. “That makes no sense.”
“It does to me.”
He turns the meat with two fingers, unfazed by the heat.
I study him through the haze of fatigue.
“Why are you helping me?” I say again.
“Ashen,” he replies, not looking at me this time, "Your questions are becoming burdensome."
He lifts the rabbit from the flame and tosses it toward me.
“Eat,” he says. “Alarnan blood or not, you look like you might collapse.”
The meat is hot enough to burn my fingers, but I do not wait for it to cool.
I tear into it with more urgency than dignity, grease slicking my hands, salt and smoke filling my mouth until the dizziness begins to ease.
The first swallow hurts. The second steadies.
By the third I can feel my pulse begin to settle into something that resembles strength instead of collapse.
Across the fire, he drags one of the bodies into the center of the clearing as though it weighs nothing.
As I eat, the realization comes quietly.
When I forced my magic earlier, when I reached too far and too violently, I had felt my vision blur and warmth spill from my nose. I remember the taste of copper, the weakness that followed.
Now there is no fresh blood.
I lift my hand to my face and wipe beneath my nose out of habit.
Nothing.
He glances at me once and understands without being told.
“Congratulations,” he says dryly, already pulling the second corpse closer to the first. “You did not hemorrhage yourself to death this time.”
I glare at him, though relief curls low in my stomach alongside the food.
“You modulated,” he continues, bending to gather branches. “You did not rip it through your body like a tantrum. Small progress.”
He stacks wood over the bodies with clinical indifference.
Colsar’s voice echoes in my memory, low and certain.
Whatever is necessary to be safe.
Right now I am caged inside a palace that is not mine, ruled by a king who measures my obedience in humiliations. I nearly died last week in an ambush I did not see coming. I bleed when I reach too far.
Safety is not a luxury I can afford to define too narrowly. If the enemy is the only one offering me strength, then I will take it.
He strikes something unseen again, and the wood over the corpses catches without flint. Flame licks upward, consuming fabric and hair first, then flesh.
“Would you teach me?” I ask. The words taste wrong. Necessary, but wrong.
He does not turn immediately. He adjusts the bodies with the tip of his boot so the fire takes evenly.
“How to make a proper pyre for corpses?” he replies lightly. “It is fairly simple, darling. Dry wood, decent airflow—”
“No.” I cut him off. “How to use my magic. Alarnan magic.”
The name feels heavier in my mouth now.
He looks at me then, truly looks, the light from the fire carving planes across his face. “How do you know I can help?” he asks.
“Because you just did,” I say, forcing myself not to look away. “And to be honest… I am desperate.”
The fire crackles behind him, the smell of burning flesh thickening the air.
He does not answer immediately. Instead he rises from his crouch and walks toward me with unhurried precision, boots pressing softly into damp earth, firelight trailing along the lines of his face.
He stops just short of where I sit and looks down at me as though I am a contradiction he intends to unravel.
“I find it hard to believe,” he says at last, voice smooth and faintly mocking, “that Prince Colsar’s blushing bride would have need of fighting skills.”
I say nothing. He studies my silence with open curiosity, as though the absence of denial confirms more than any protest could.
“Ah,” he says softly. “The Prince must be gone.”
I say nothing.
“Everyone knows the story,” he continues with a low, amused breath. “The King arranges a marriage for his brother to a deformed, veiled woman, a quiet embarrassment to tuck away. Instead he binds him to a noble, fertile lineage and the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.”
My jaw tightens.
“While he remains without wife or heir,” Arven adds, as if reciting court gossip rather than something capable of toppling dynasties.
He does not need confirmation from me. He has already decided he is correct.
“They say Prince Colsar is cold. Cruel, yet noble,” he goes on, circling the dying fire as though we are seated at court instead of in damp forest soil.
“I imagine he has gone to do something suitably heroic. Something sacrificial. Something that allows him to believe he has earned the right to you.”
Heat flares in my chest. “How do you know this?” I demand, incredulous despite myself.
“It isn’t difficult to piece together, Ashen.
” He rolls one shoulder in a motion that looks casual but carries calculation beneath it.
“Why else would a princess wander a Thren ridden forest half starved, seeking instruction from the same kind of creatures she was just fighting? The kind of creatures who attacked her in a tavern?”
“Did you know?” I ask before I can stop myself.
He pauses. “Know what?”
“The tavern,” I say, my voice tightening. “Did you know what was going to happen there? When you pulled me out… was that luck, or were you part of it?”
For a moment, he only looks at me. Then he smiles faintly. “If I had been part of it,” he says, “you would not have walked out at all.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No,” he agrees lightly. “It isn’t.”
“You are a Thren,” I say. “Not an ordinary one, or they would not have let you take me from that wagon.”
I catch the hint of surprise on his face before it disappears.
“Yet you did not attack me. You saved me.”
“Did I?” he asks lightly, as though the distinction amuses him.
I push to my feet, brushing dirt from my skirts, suddenly aware of how absurd this entire exchange is. “This is ridiculous. Thank you for your help tonight.”
His expression shifts into something faintly entertained. “I have already done you several favors without asking for anything in return. If you want lessons, you will have to pay. You are out of free indulgences, Ashen.”
“Fine,” I say tightly. “However much coin you—”
His hand lifts before I finish. Not hurried. Not hesitant. His fingers close around the pendant at my throat, drawing it gently away from my skin. The chain tightens, cool against the back of my neck, and for a suspended moment neither of us moves.
His knuckles brush the hollow beneath my collarbone as he studies the pendant, and the contact sends an unwanted current down my spine.
It is not rough. It is not forceful. It is deliberate in a way that makes my breath falter despite myself.
He is close enough that I can feel the warmth of him, close enough that if I leaned forward an inch my forehead would touch his chest.
“I want this.”
The refusal leaves me before I can temper it. “No.”
"Oh?"
“It is all I have left of my mother,” I add more quietly. “She is dead.”
“Excellent,” he replies without hesitation. “That means she is far too dead to object to you not wearing it.”
My stomach drops.
“You humans are sentimental in the most inconvenient ways,” he continues, letting the pendant fall back against my collarbone. “It is a necklace. This is your life hanging in the balance, is it not?”
“Why do you want it?” I demand.
He studies the pendant again, then me. “It looks old. Valuable. Unusual. And you are clearly attached to it.” His eyes gleam with something unapologetic. “I prefer payment that costs a little more than coin. Pain shows commitment.”
“You are sick.”
A low laugh slips from him, unbothered. “If you change your mind, come find me. I will teach you.” His gaze drops briefly to the rabbit bones near the edge of the clearing. “And perhaps arrange another candlelit dinner for us.”
“Goodbye, Arven.”
He lifts two fingers in mock farewell and blows a kiss into the dark, as if we have concluded a pleasant negotiation rather than bartered over my mother’s memory. The forest seems to swallow him, his presence thinning until only the quiet remains.
I stand there for a long moment after he is gone, listening to the wind move through the leaves, to the distant rush of the river, to the faint echo of what it felt like to reach with my magic and not bleed.
By the time I slip back through my window and into my chambers, the palace feels smaller than it did when I left. I hide the boys’ clothes carefully, tucking them away where no searching hand will find them, and slide beneath the covers that still carry the faint scent of Colsar.
I close my eyes and let myself remember the forest, the way my magic answered without tearing me apart, the way it felt to stand in the dark with someone reckless and cruel and entirely unafraid.