7. Wren
Islip through the narrow gap in the window as a bird, wings folding tight the moment I am inside.
Cassiel’s chambers smell the same as they always have: clean linen, old paper, a faint trace of steel and ink.
There is something new beneath it now, something medicinal, sharp at the back of the throat.
Alchemy. Of course. I’d be impressed with how he’s utilised it in battle if it hadn’t left such a trail of bodies behind him.
He hasn’t killed anyone I care about, yet. Most of the fey hate me anyway. I don’t know how I’ll feel if—when—he does, but at the moment, I know I deserve any hurt he hurls in my direction.
Not now, I remind myself. Don’t think about that right now. Focus on what you can change.
I perch on the curtain rod and listen.
The room is empty. No breath but my own, no steady presence anchoring to the space. Good. I let the magic roll through me and step down onto the floor, bones shifting, feathers dissolving into skin. I draw my cloak close around me, heart beating faster than it ever used to in this place.
Well, that’s not exactly true, but my heart rarely ever beat fast here due to fear, and never fear of discovery. These were my rooms too.
My home.
I shake the thought away, and banish the even louder one that tries to tell me I haven’t had a home since I burnt my first one to ashes. Such thoughts will do me no good here.
I am here for the totem. It’s the next step in getting Cass his sight back. If he has that, then maybe, maybe… the killings will stop.
I can’t heal his heart. I may be able to cure this.
The man in Caldrin had been a fortunate accident.
I had not gone there for miracles, only mercy.
Illness had swept through the town, leaving them weak and fevered, and I had slipped in quietly with supplies—herbs, tonics, things I still remember how to make or could take from the forest. When I realised one of their number was blind, something reckless in me stirred.
He became my first and only test.
I visited him for weeks, always at dusk, always unseen. I fed him a careful concoction of fey drugs mixed with my own blood, diluted to slow the effects. I wanted to give him his sight back, nothing more. Undiluted fey blood can sometimes make people feel like they’re drunk.
Little by little, his sight returned, until he could see almost as well as he could before.
If it worked for him… that means it might work for Cassiel.
I swallow and move deeper into the room, careful to leave nothing disturbed.
I search everywhere I can think of: beneath the bed, the desk, inside the wardrobe, in his dresser.
My fingers skim familiar surfaces, memory guiding me more than sight ever could.
I linger over his clothes. They smell of him, clean and warm and slightly papery.
I linger too on the vials of pearly white liquid he keeps in his top drawer.
Vials of painkiller. How many has he been through since I left?
I slam the drawer closed. I can fix this, I remind myself, even if the search is proving fruitless.
I can’t do anything without the totem.
The problem curls tighter around my ribs. The man in Caldrin had lost his sight to a childhood illness. Cassiel was blinded by magic, by a spell knotted and anchored to the totem I found in Moira’s house—the one thing I never should have brought into this castle.
Cassiel knows of its existence.
Where would he put it?
I search again, slower, more desperate. Still nothing. At last, reluctantly, I turn away from his room.
I know where else to look.
The door to my room opens without protest, the hinges silent, as if the space itself recognises me. The air inside is stale, untouched. Empty. No one has been in here in a while. Cassiel stripped it bare soon after my departure. I watched him do it.
The walls are naked where I once pinned drawings, scraps of maps, bits of ribbon and pressed flowers. The shelves are clean, cleared of books and trinkets and the few ridiculous things I once pretended were mine. He got rid of everything. I have nothing to my name. Not here. Not anywhere.
Unable to stop myself, I sit. Then I lie down on the bed.
It still knows my shape.
This is not the first time I have come back, but it hurts no less for the familiarity. The ceiling stares down at me, indifferent, and memory presses in whether I invite it or not.
I think of our last night together, our last morning, that narrow scrap of time that was ours that I wanted to stretch on forever.
I’d had sex before, of course, but this was different.
I felt like I knew him better through touch.
We’d laughed, we’d talked about having children…
possibly difficult for us, of course, I wasn’t sure. Fey women are never the most fertile.
It was too soon, for us, of course. I’d planned to take a tonic to prevent conception, only I never had the chance with everything that followed.
I didn’t really think about what might have been until my period happened over a month later.
A silly, stupid part of me mourned what wasn’t. A sliver of me wanted his child.
What would he have done, if that was the case?
He would never have put his own offspring to the death, no matter his feelings for me—not if he was half the person I knew him to be. But would he have legitimised them, hidden their origins, loved them as he did Runara?
As he did me, once.
Would he have raised them as his heir? My grandmother would have loved that.
And I would have loved them.
But not for what they could have done for this country. I would have loved them because they were mine, and Cass’ too. I would have loved them because it would have meant I wasn’t alone.
You are meant to be alone, says a dark voice in my head.
Footsteps echo faintly outside.
I am on my feet instantly, prepared to shift. The door opens, and my heart stops in my chest.
Cassiel steps inside, cane tapping softly, expression muted. His dog pads into the room after him, raising his head to look at me.
I raise my finger to my lips. The dog and I have an agreement. He recognises me as the bird in the rafters. He knows that Cassiel accepts the bird, so he assumes that I’m supposed to be here, too.
He still makes a sound to alert Cassiel that someone is here.
Cassiel pauses, head tilting.
“Is someone here?” he asks quietly.
My chest aches. Yes, I want to call out. Yes, I’m here. Maybe I could just whistle—
But if I did that, he would call the guards. He would throw me in the dungeon, or worse. Would he let me explain before he had me executed?
He takes a step forward, then another, reaching out—not blindly, but carefully, as if he knows exactly where I should be. His fingers almost brush my sleeve. His scent surrounds me. He’s so, so close—
I imagine those beautiful hands of his around my neck.
I shift, small again in milliseconds, light and fast. Wings beat the air as I launch past him, the rush of motion tearing a sound from his throat that might almost be my name.
I am gone before he can finish it.