14. Cassiel #2
I rest my palm over the stranger’s sternum, feeling the flutter beneath. It’s fast, then faltering. I bow my head instinctively, my bandages brushing their shoulder.
“You did well,” I murmur. “You can rest now.”
The forest seems to lean closer. A sigh ripples outward, leaves whispering against one another.
The heartbeat stutters again before stopping.
For a moment, there is nothing but the drip of water and my own breath, suddenly too loud.
I exhale, slow and careful. “I’m sorry,” I add, though I don’t know to whom.
Wren doesn’t answer. She’s very still.
“What’s someone doing out here?” I ask her.
“He’s fey,” she tells me. “He belonged out here.”
I ought to have known that, but everyone seems human with your eyes closed. No, that’s not quite right, I realise. It’s just what people are matters less when you can’t use your eyes.
I really ought to know that. When his life slipped away, he reminded me of Evander. His last breath ghosts across my skin, remembered too vividly. The way his chest hitched, the way the world seemed to narrow to the space between us. I’d held him the same way.
My chest tightens until it aches.
“Cassiel?” Wren asks, shifting beside me. “Are you all right?”
“What happened?”
“I think he—”
I shake my head. “Not to him,” I clarify. “To Evander. What happened to him? How did he die?”
Wren sighs. “Are you sure—”
“Yes,” I tell her.
It feels like the last thing I need to know. Did you kill him, was it real, how did he die? The three questions that have lived under my skin, cursing me in a way no spell ever could.
“Very well,” says Wren.
She reaches forward to do something to the body—to close his eyes, I think, or cover up the damage. I don’t think she can tell this tale unless her hands are occupied.
“You remember the fight breaking out, yes? My grandmother shattering the window?”
I nod, swallowing. The sound lives in my dreams. I was thrown to the floor, a guard covered me—
“I covered you,” Wren goes on.
Oh. Not a guard.
“But grandmother didn’t seem interested in you, and suddenly the room was swarming with fae.
I chased my grandmother, but I couldn’t reach her.
It was a battle getting there. I found Evander—” she pauses, inhaling again.
“He said… he said that there had to be a mistake, that there’s no way I’d willingly betray you. ”
My throat tightens. That certainly sounds like Evander.
“We fought together,” Wren cries on, her voice warbling slightly. “But then… then Runara screamed, and he looked towards her, and… and someone cut him down. Someone I knew, actually. I… I killed him. I killed him, and I gathered up Evander and Ru, and then I…”
“What?” I press. “What did you do?”
“This… this fire erupted out of me,” Wren confesses. “I obliterated the entire room. Human, fey, it didn’t matter. I killed them all.” She swallows. “I had no idea I could do that.”
I take a slow, careful breath, not knowing what to say, or even what to think. I had no idea she could do that, either. I’ve taken lives before—but never accidentally. To do that without thinking—
“Did you cause the fire at Benedict’s house?” I ask, remembering the flames engulfing us there, how she seemed petrified by them but also immune.
Because she was.
“No,” she said. “It’s still my fault, but I didn’t cause it directly. After what we saw in Benedict’s basement, I sent out word to my people to come and rescue his captive. I had no idea what they would do to him, or us. I didn’t think. That’s rather my problem.”
“You did something to the fire, though.”
“Yes,” she admits. “I sucked it into myself. I have an affinity for fire, but I do not recommend swallowing it.”
It made her ill, I remember. So ill I thought I was going to lose her.
I don’t want to think about that.
She was never really yours to lose.
“What happened after the fire?” I ask. “The one after Evander was injured, I mean.”
“I… I tried to cauterise the bleeding,” Wren continues. “I think… I think we both knew it wasn’t going to work.”
Evander’s last words—other than talking about a bard he wanted to dance with, that I still don’t fully understand—were something about what Wren was trying to do. I’d been terrified that they were she tried to kill me, or she tried to finish me off.
But her trying to save him makes a lot more sense, and I think, deep down, I probably knew it.
Robin presses against my cheek. Salt reaches my mouth.
“Why… why didn’t you stay with him?” I whisper. I can’t handle much more.
Wren’s voice sounds like she swallowed glass. “Because I had to get Ru out of there,” she tells me.
I lower my head. She could be lying, of course, but I don’t think she is. Not only could I simply ask Runara for confirmation, but Wren’s account seems so painfully Evander that it can’t help but be the truth. He died protecting our little sister. And Ru…
Saints. She saw it all. She likely blames herself. Has she been sitting with that alone, all this time? She must have told Aunt Imogen, surely?
“Cassiel?”
A hand ghosts my cheek, but I don’t let it connect.
“We should bury the body,” I say, gesturing to it. “Or… burn it? Would that be easier?”
Wren nods. “Yes, that would be easier.”
Together, we drag it away from the trees, to a place where it’s unlikely to disturb anything else, and Wren starts a fire with a click of her fingers.
“Neat trick,” I tell her. “It does come in handy.”
She used to have a fear of fire, ever since her mother died in one. She’d wake from nightmares still calling for her. At least I know now how she survived it without a scratch.
The glade fills with smoke, and an awful realisation strikes me.
“The fire,” I begin, “the one that killed your mother. Did you—”
“Yes,” says Wren, her words solid. “I started it in my sleep. I killed my own mother.”
I suck in a breath.
“After that, I swore I’d never use fire again. And I didn’t—not until it was going to kill you, and I had no choice.”
“You did,” I tell her, trying not to think about what she’s just confessed, how awful it would be to kill your own mother. “So thank you, for not leaving me to die in that place.”
Wren goes quiet for a moment. “You’re welcome,” she says eventually, “but I really couldn’t leave you there, you know.”
“It would be easier for you—for your people—if I’d died there.”
“Easier for them, maybe,” she clarifies. “Not easier for me. Not better for me, either. The world is a better place with you in it.”
“I’m killing your people,” I remind her.
Wren goes very quiet for a moment. There’s not much of a rebuttal for that. I have killed them, and I’m probably going to go straight back to it after this is over. How can she possibly justify the world being a better place with me in it?
Finally, she exhales. “I’ve killed them too.”