22. Wren
Light floods the clearing, pouring down the channels, spilling between the stones, filling the space with something vast and and blinding. The stars overheard burn. I wait for it to fade, to stop, but instead, it doubles.
For a heartbeat I think something has gone catastrophically wrong—that the gate has split, that we’ve misaligned the stones and cracked time down the middle. The clearing echoes itself, layered and wrong, the air filled with overlapping stars.
Sound reaches me as though through a blanket, distant and muffled.
Voices are speaking.
“It’s—” I whisper, dread and awe tangling in my chest. “It’s a memory.”
The space resolves, and suddenly we’re no longer alone. Robin barks, charging through the visions, but they pay him no heed. They disperse and reform.
The fey elders from the Moonhollow stand around the star gate as it once was, younger, sharper, dressed in the finery of another season. Their silhouettes shimmer faintly, like reflections on water, but their expressions are intent, grave.
I recognise most of them—Eryndor, Moira, Lamia—although a couple are unfamiliar.
My grandmother is among them.
She stands near the centre of the ring, dark skin catching the starlight, gold tattoos painted across her arms and throat.
There are fewer of them than she wears now, the patterns less dense, but the shape of her face is unmistakable.
With the fey, age is a suggestion at best. They change slowly, and when they do, it’s often by choice—faces reshaped to suit whatever era finds itself most admired.
Cassiel glances at me, then back at the vision, reverent and silent.
The elders tilt their heads skyward, tracing constellations with long fingers, adding the patterns to the chart spread out between them. They murmur to one another as meaning is teased from light and distance.
“A child,” one of them says. “Not fully ours.”
“Half,” another agrees. “Bound between worlds. A child that can be anything.”
“There’s a sign for service,” says a third, uncertain, noting something down. “Or employment. Fealty, perhaps.”
My grandmother frowns. So does Cassiel, leaning over her shoulder.
“No,” says Nubaia, “that isn’t quite right.”
“I spy a bird,” someone else adds, baffled. “Or—” They trail off, frustrated. “It does not fit. The bird seems made of fire and also… not?”
No one can make heads or tails of that, but Eryndor speaks next.
“The second son,” he says, clear and unwavering. “Of the royal line.”
My stomach drops.
Cassiel stiffens beside me. He glances in my direction, but I don’t turn towards him.
The elders argue softly, rearranging meanings, circling the same conclusions without quite stating them. The stars remain indifferent.
“Did you know about this?” Cassiel asks quietly.
I shake my head, eyes fixed on my grandmother’s younger face.
“Not until recently,” I explain. “When I returned to Moonhollow after the fire, the elders said they’d seen something in the stars.
That they knew a half-fey child had to enter into the service of the second prince.
” I swallow. “That’s why they sent me to you.
Why they blinded you. I meant to explain everything to you, but then… ”
My voice trails away, and I can’t quite meet his gaze. He doesn’t seem angry, however. It’s possible he’s just used to my deceptions by now.
“This is why you wanted me to come with you.”
“Yes. This is something we both need to see.” No matter what I’m shown. No matter how much it hurts—
“Half human,” Cassiel says slowly.
I blink and look at him. “Come again?”
“The original translation,” he says. “A half-fey, half-human child.” His gaze holds mine. “You’re just as human as you are fey.”
I have nothing to say to that, but I nod anyway. I’m feeling distinctly human today, after all.
The vision hums on around us, the elders still searching the stars for certainty, unaware that decades have past and that the prophecy has already begun to walk, and breathe, and stand right here—watching itself be born.
The elders’ voices braid together, thoughtful rather than panicked, as if they are discussing the weather instead of lives not yet lived. Finally, they believe they’ve deciphered the meaning of the stars:
The conflict between humans and fey shall end when a half-blood child, blessed by the stars, enters into the service of the second prince.
“Should we do something?” one of them asks slowly, “To… bring this child about?”
“There is no second son,” Moira replies. “Not now. Not even a hint of one.”
“There could be,” someone counters. “And it takes us so long to conceive—”
Nubaia’s voice cuts cleanly through them. “I do not want to tell our women that they must start fraternizing with the humans, do you?”
There is a long pause before Eryndor speaks. “Why just the women? The men are more fertile anyway—”
“Unless we are planning on kidnapping the child,” Nubaia says, unamused, “it is best that a fey woman carries it.”
“She’s right,” Moira agrees. “If we want any sort of control.”
A murmur of assent follows, uneasy and reluctant.
“I don’t think we need to force the prophecy to come true at all,” someone else says at last. “It will come true of its own accord, if we have patience.”
“Patience,” the others echo, almost reverently.
The word lingers in the air, heavy and ironic.
Time shifts.
The vision blurs and reforms, seasons and decades slipping past like pages turned too quickly. Queens are born in Caerthalen, presented to the crowds as wriggling bundles. They grow, age, and become mothers themselves. Three generations pass in the blink of an eye.
For a hundred years, the stars are stubborn and misaligned, the royal line refusing to cooperate. Despite the humans’ usual fertility, the palace sees only a handful of children born to the Aurelthanes, and all of them are daughters.
Each time, the elders return to the gate, frown at the heavens, and go home again.
Their patience grows thin. The stars wheel. Generations breathe and die.
Until—
Cassiel flinches, shoulders stiffening, as the vision pivots sharply.
Night has fallen somewhere deep in a forest, stars pricking cold light through a canopy thick with leaves. A group of knights stands in uneasy formation, listening as a young woman paces before them with a ferocity that makes the air itself tense.
It’s Alessandra, younger than either of us have ever known her. Her skin is smooth, her features fresh, her dark hair shining. Somewhere in her twenties, I think. She may not even be queen.
“If you fail me again,” she says, voice crisp, sharp as drawn steel, “I shall lop off your heads, and see them impaled on spikes in the training grounds.”
The knights swallow. One, younger than the others, dares a glance at his companion. “Is she serious?”
Cassiel breathes in sharply, and so do I, because the young man bears such a resemblance to him they’re almost twins.
His father. Leonitus.
The knight says nothing in reply, looking far too terrified. Leonitus, however, almost laughs. “Do we at least get to choose the spike?” he jokes.
A ripple of nervous laughter passes among the knights.
Alessandra turns, her gaze sharp as flint. “You,” she says, pointing at him. “You’re Imogen’s younger brother, yes?”
Leonitus swallows, shoulders tight. “Yes, Your Highness.”
“There’s something of a mouth on you,” she says, and steps closer, closing the distance with predatory ease. “Come. Let’s see if I can’t teach it some manners.”
The other knights watch, tense and fearful as Alessandra marches Leonitus off into the forest. But the moment the two of them are alone, Alessandra’s sternness melts. Hands tangle, lips collide, and the tension that had weighed on the clearing dissolves into reckless laughter and whispered kisses.
“Do you think they have any suspicions?” Leonitus asks, grinning into her mouth.
“Doubtful,” she murmurs back. “You’re the only one of them with any brains.”
“You really ought to be nicer to them, you know.”
“I can be nice,” she says wickedly, brushing a thumb along his jaw. “To some.”
Their mouths meet again, urgent, playful.
“Come,” she says between kisses, voice low, teasing. “Put that rude mouth of yours to use.”
Cassiel coughs, his eyes darting away from the vision even as the gate holds him there. I imagine it’s quite odd to see your parents together like this. I wouldn’t know. I have no memories of my parents ever being together.
Mercifully, the scene blurs, dissolving into the hum of the gate. The vision shifts again, smooth and disorienting, and Cassiel’s hands twitch as though he can reach through the glow and touch the past. His fingers curl and flex at his sides.
The scene resolves into the palace courtyard, brilliant with sunlight. His parents stand before their assembled people, infant Evander swaddled in Alessandra’s arms. The crowd murmurs in awe and celebration. Cassiel’s breath catches.
The vision tilts, and suddenly we are somewhere else entirely.
The Moonhollow. My home.
Or it was.
“The queen has given birth to a son,” Nubaia’s voice cuts through the soft glow, commanding as it is calm. “For the first time in a century, the possibility of the prophecy is upon us.”
A ripple passes through the gathered fey.
This isn’t the whole of the Moonhollow, I realise.
It’s less than half, and almost entirely women.
Only a few men remain—elders, measured and still, and then one I know immediately, though the vision makes my chest tighten: a tall, dark-skinned man with a head of black curls and swirling black tattoos up his arms in the shape of birds.
My father. Lark.
I inch towards him. I’ve only ever seen his likeness. I have no memory of seeing him warm and breathing.
But he isn’t, I remind myself. He’s just an echo. He isn’t here.
Nevertheless, I move towards him, half hoping his eyes will meet mine, that this vision goes both ways and he can sense me here beside him, want bleeding through the decades.
“Your father?” Cassiel guesses.
I nod. My voice has deserted me.