5. Cassiel
Idream of Wren again.
In the dream, nothing is wrong. She is beside me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her sleeve. Her hand rests on my arm, steady and familiar, guiding me over uneven ground the way she used to. She laughs softly, and the sound does not cut.
“Cassiel,” she whispers, and her mouth is against mine. No one—no one—could say my name like she could, like a ripple of fire. It rumbled into me.
My brother is there too. I cannot hear what he is saying, only the shape of his voice, the easy rhythm of it. The three of us move together, laughing and dancing.
I do not want to wake.
Let me stay here, I want to beg the dream. I don’t care that none of this is real. I’ll take warm ghosts over cold reality.
“You can, if you want,” says another voice. I expect it to be Wren’s, for hers is the voice of temptation, but it’s my mother’s face that appears. She’s holding a baby in her arms. Runara. And at her shoulder…
My father.
This is no memory. He died before he could meet her.
It really is a good dream.
Birdsong pulls me from it, and I shift in bed, opening my sightless eyes. For a moment, I lie still, breathing, trying to decide whether the sound belongs to memory or to the present. The mattress beneath me convinces me.
I am in my chambers.
The bird sings again, coming from outside.
It’s something big and noisy. Not my bird, then, not the little creature that lived in my rafters most of the winter, sheltered among the beams. It is a small thing.
Even now that the weather is warmer, it still comes by occasionally.
Sometimes it eats from my hand, pecking carefully at my palm as though aware of its privilege.
I do not know what kind of bird it is. I have never asked.
I am afraid it might be a wren.
I do not want to hear anyone speak her name.
The bird is not here now. I am certain of that. I have not sensed it in weeks—not the flutter of wings, not the whisper of claws against wood. Still, the song lingers, drifting in through an open window, bright and untroubled.
A familiar weight presses against my leg.
“Good morning,” I murmur, reaching down. Robin’s tail thumps against the bedframe as my fingers find the thick fur at his ears. He leans into the touch with a contented huff.
“Who needs a wren when I have a robin, hmm?” I say quietly, rubbing behind his ears until his breathing slows.
Breakfast arrives shortly after. I smell it before I hear the door open—warm bread, honey, something spiced.
Anne sets the tray down with careful precision.
She says nothing. She has scarcely spoken to me in weeks, and I do not know whether that is kindness or fear.
I thank her anyway. She leaves without a sound.
A week after Evander’s death, Anne told me that there was a shipment of clay that arrived with my name on. I hadn’t ordered anything. When pressed, I discovered that Wren had ordered it, together with a set of sculpting tools.
There’s only one reason Wren would have ordered those, and it wasn’t for her. It was for me, so that I could create again.
I did not respond well to the information. I hurled the clay on the floor and started screaming. I apologised to Anne afterwards, of course.
It didn’t seem to matter. She’s given me a wide berth, since, and I don’t blame her.
Someone else comes to help me dress. I no longer bother to learn their footsteps. I used to hate the help, now I endure it. It is one less thing for me to think about. One less small failure to catalogue before the day has properly begun.
Dain arrives as I sit down to eat. He pulls a chair close and begins to read my correspondence aloud. I do my best not to groan through each petition and report. How can anything have changed since yesterday? I listen, nodding where expected, storing nothing.
As he reads, my thoughts drift to the day before and the fight with the fey in the forest. I’ve yet to replenish my store. I could send someone else, of course. I often do.
But today, I want the walk. I want the distraction.
When Dain finishes, I rise, fastening my belt by habit.
“I’m going to see the alchemist,” I tell him.
He hesitates. “Shall I come with you?”
“No,” I say. “Not this time.”
I reach for my cane and let Robin fall into step beside me. The day is already moving, whether I wish it to or not.
I might as well move with it.
Robin and I walk down the corridors together. I count my steps without thinking, let the familiar angles of the walls guide me. Robin’s nails click softly on the stone beside me, a steady, comforting rhythm.
I used to chase Evander down this corridor.
The memory unfolds as the air widens and the ceiling lifts. I can almost hear our boots slapping against the floor, his laughter ahead of me, breathless and infuriatingly delighted. He was always faster. Always just out of reach.
Wren caught me here before I fell.
I slow automatically as the passage narrows.
I remember the way the floor dips, the way my foot slid on worn stone.
Her hand had closed around my sleeve, strong, unhesitating.
She let me go almost immediately. I think she told a joke to dispel any awkwardness, or possibly just made me so annoyed I didn’t have any energy left for pity.
She was good like that.
It was her job to be.
Further on, the air changes—warmer, touched faintly with the smell of bread drifting up from below.
I think this is where Ru took her first steps.
I think Evander cried. He denied it immediately, of course, and I teased him for days, but I was actually glad he cried, because I was sure I was going to.
Instead, I got to swoop Ru into my arms, hurl criticisms at Evander, and practically dance us into Mother’s study to deliver the good news.
Robin nudges my leg as we turn the final corner, as though sensing the shift in me. The stairwell rises before us, the stone colder here, the air thinner. I grip the banister and begin the climb, counting each step as the sounds of the castle fall away.
By the time I reach the tower door, the memories have loosened their hold.
I kneel and rest my forehead briefly against Robin’s, breathing in the clean, familiar scent of him.
“You wait here,” I tell him softly. “There are too many things inside that could hurt you.”
He whines once, low and unhappy, but settles when I straighten. I scratch behind his ears one last time, then knock on the door.
There is no answer at first, so I knock again, firmer this time, my knuckles rapping against old oak warped by heat and age. Eventually, a low, distracted murmur answers from within.
I push the door open and step inside.
The air hits me at once. Smoke clings to the back of my throat, tinged with sulphur and something bitterly metallic.
Beneath it all lies the dry, papery smell of old tomes, ink long since faded, and the faint sweetness of crushed herbs ground too fine.
The room crackles softly: coals shifting, glass ticking as it cools, liquid bubbling somewhere to my right.
Edwin, the castle alchemist, is hunched over his desk in the far corner.
I cannot see him, of course, but I remember him well enough from before my sight was taken—long-backed and narrow-shouldered, hair the colour of ash pulled into a careless tie, fingers perpetually stained with ink and reagents.
He used to squint when he worked, as though the world itself were slightly out of focus.
I used to love coming up here when I was younger.
Evander and I took lessons in this tower, though Edwin never taught us himself.
He was not much of a teacher—too impatient, too easily distracted by his own thoughts—but we learned anyway, by watching, by listening, by asking questions he rarely answered.
“Pass me that book on your left, would you?” Edwin asks now, apparently without looking up.
I reach to my left. My fingers collide almost immediately with a leaning stack of books, their spines slumping against one another like exhausted soldiers.
“Can you be more specific?” I ask dryly.
“The red one,” Edwin mutters. “The Elric compendium on—”
“Hmm.” I tilt my head. “That really narrows it down.”
Edwin stops whatever he is doing. The chair leg scrapes, then his footsteps sound as he turns toward me.
“Ah. Your Excellency,” he says, not sounding nearly as mortified as someone else might. “You should have announced yourself.”
“Perhaps I should come with a bell.”
“It would surely be useful to you if the rest of us did.”
“Useful and noisy,” I interrupt, shifting my weight. “Not my favourite combination.”
“That will upset your sister if she hears it.”
“Then let us make sure that she does not.”
We both share a short laugh, before I unhook the pouches from my belt and hold them out.
“I need refills,” I tell him.
“Of course.”
Edwin takes the pouches from my hand, the leather creaking softly. I hear him move away, glass clinking, drawers opening and closing. I turn my face slightly aside—not that it matters, but the habit remains. I do not want him to feel watched, even though I am incapable of it.
I try to think of other things: the weight of my boots on the stone floor, the steady rhythm of my breathing, the faint hiss of flame beneath a crucible. It doesn’t really work.
Instead, my mind snags and drags me backward.
Some weeks after Evander’s death, I came here seeking weapons I could use against the fey. Edwin was not in his room when I first entered. I remember standing just inside the door, carefully orienting myself, counting steps the way I had learned to do.
I turned carefully, and collided with a stack of books.
They went everywhere, thudding and sliding across the floor.
I knelt instinctively to gather them, then froze, my hands hovering uselessly over the volumes.
I had always enjoyed the idea of alchemy, even if I wasn’t particularly adept at it.
My strengths lay elsewhere. History, tactics, literature, languages.
My mind had never been inclined toward chemicals and ratios.
It was a subject that stood between supernatural and science, the blending of elements, the discovery of magic in the mundane.
Still, despite the stories, no alchemist had ever been able to turn lead into gold.
But I did remember stories of how to bring people back from the dead.
I remembered, too, that it was impossible.
“You won’t find any answers there,” Edwin had said, appearing from nowhere. “And not just because you can no longer read.”
“I wasn’t seeking any,” I replied.
“Liar.” He moved closer, bending to pick up the books, the pages whispering as he stacked them. “Everyone who has lost someone has wondered, just for a moment, if there was a way to bring them back.”
“There isn’t,” I said. “I remember that much.”
“Not anymore,” Edwin told me.
I went still. “But there was?”
He hesitated—a rare thing for him—then said quietly, “Once, yes.”
“I can’t remember the story.”
“You’ve heard of a phoenix?”
“A mythical firebird,” I said. “It was said that it could never die—”
“Not a myth,” Edwin interrupted. “And they could die. They did die. Slaughtered by fey and human alike, because their bodies held unimaginable power. The power to bring back the dead.”
I sucked in a breath before I could stop myself.
“I could create you a body,” Edwin went on, his voice clinical now, as though distance might soften the truth. “Any alchemist can. Our physical forms are just sacks of chemicals. But I could not animate it.”
“I’ve heard there are certain fey who can animate the dead—”
“Necromancy,” he said sharply. “Dark, fascinating magic. But the dead are still dead. Whatever souls are made of… they do not linger long after the heart stops beating, or the brain ceases to function.”
“But they can if you have a phoenix?”
“That is the rumour,” he said. “Though the process has been lost. From what we can theorise, whatever was taken from the phoenix—feathers, blood, something else—it did not create a soul from nothing. It merely affixed the soul back into place.”
“So where did the soul come from?” I asked. Where did they go? Where is Evander, now? Is my father with him?
“I don’t know,” Edwin admitted. “No one does. Our records are from a very long time ago.”
I was quiet for a moment. “What happened to the phoenixes?”
“We hunted them,” he said simply. “Fey and human alike. We drove them to near extinction in our quest to conquer death. It is said the remaining ones took flight… and flung themselves into the sun.”
The words settled heavy in my chest. Evander was gone. His soul was not waiting in some vessel or feather or vial. It had moved on, beyond any reach I could imagine.
Strangely, I felt sorry for the birds, to be hunted that way, to have made the decision to take their power with them. And for them to be hunted by both, human and fey alike, to know no allies at all…
Greed, it seemed, did not belong to one species alone.
Only later did I realise I was wrong.
It was not greed. It was grief—limitless, ravenous, and shared by us all. Grief is what led to the hunting of the firebirds, and to the loss of them.
“Sire?”
Edwin’s voice pulls me back to the present. I turn toward it as he presses the refilled pouches into my palm.
“Will that be all?”
“Yes,” I say quietly. “Thank you.”
I tie the pouches to my belt, head outside, and collect Robin. We make our way down to my study. Dain rushes out to greet me as I approach.
“You have a visitor,” he says, very quickly, closing the door behind him.
I groan, not as quietly as I ought to. I’m really not in the mood for it. “Will I cause a diplomatic incident if I refuse them?”
“No, but—”
“Is it Aunt Imogen, or someone as potentially cutting as her?”
“I don’t think—”
“A relative back from the dead?”
Dain goes quiet at that. “No,” he says, very slowly. “But I still—”
I sigh, brushing him aside. I barge into the room, Robin at my heels. “A good morning to you, sir and/or madam,” I say swiftly. “I’m afraid I’m not taking visitors today. Please speak to one of your advisors if—”
“Your advisors can’t help me, Cassiel.”
I still. I know that voice. I know the soft, tilting cadence of it. I recognise the perfume, too, elegant and expensive.
“Hello, Cassiel,” she whispers.
Finally, my voice appears. “Sophia.”