24. Wren #2
“Why, being fey, of course,” a knight replies.
I recognise him instantly.
Captain Fellwood. Younger and sharper around the edges, but unmistakably him.
Leonitus sighs, long and weary. “Anything else?” he asks. “What was he caught doing?”
The knights glance at one another and shrug. “Some magic display with a woman.”
“Another fey?”
“Unclear, Sire. She escaped.”
“Was he hurting her?”
“No. They seemed to be… enjoying each other’s company.”
“Very well.”
He approaches Lark slowly, studying him with open curiosity rather than disgust. There is no hatred in his face. No delight. Just assessment.
He asks his questions calmly.
“Did you intend to harm anyone?”
My father stares back at him. One eye is bruised so badly that it can barely open. “No.”
“Who are you?”
“A traveller,” he responds, which I suppose is true enough. He does not live in these woods, or even in Ashwood.
“What were you doing here?”
“Walking. Talking. Enjoying the evening.” Lark answers simply, truthfully, innocently, threading the truth through the narrowest possible needle. Hope stirs, fragile and trembling, in my chest, even though I know it’s pointless. I know this is how he dies.
Leonitus asks the question, the one I have heard before. The one I’ve heard Evander utter, with the same careful seriousness, whenever he encountered one of the fey.
Evander was thirteen when his father died. He learned the question from him.
“Do you have any secrets,” Leonitus asks, “that could harm me or my family?”
The world stops. I freeze inside the memory, breath caught, heart screaming yes. Yes. Me. I am the secret. I am the harm. I am the thing he cannot name.
Lark looks up.
“Yes,” he says.
The clearing goes utterly still.
Leonitus’s expression changes—not to anger, but to something like regret. “Tell me.”
“I cannot,” Lark replies quietly. “I have promised not to.”
“No,” I whisper, but suddenly, I’m not whispering at all. I’m crouching beside my father, clawing at the edges of the vision, willing him to lie, to twist, to say no just this once. I would give anything to take back that vow. Anything.
He’s so close, I can see the beads of sweat on his face. His tears merge with his blood. I can almost smell him, almost touch him.
“Please,” I beg. “Lie. Don’t protect me, don’t keep me safe. I’m not going to be safe, not without you.”
But he cannot hear, and he cannot lie.
The king’s men shift, uneasy. Someone clears their throat.
“We can torture it out of him, Sire?” Fellwood suggests.
“No,” Leonitus says immediately. “There is no point. If he has vowed silence, nothing we do can sway him.”
He steps closer to Lark. He meets his eyes and lowers his voice.
“I am sorry,” he whispers. “I can spare you the pain of imprisonment, of a public death, but that is all.”
Lark swallows. Blood streaks his mouth. He nods once, accepting what he already knew was coming. “May I make a request?”
Leonitus hesitates, then nods.
“Let me turn away,” Lark says. “I do not wish to see it coming. I wish to look at the stars—and think of my little bird.”
Something tightens in the king’s face, but he gestures his assent.
Lark turns.
I move, placing myself between the king and my father. “Get up,” I beg. “Fight. Move. Fly away—”
The king readies his axe.
“Papa, please—”
The axe swings anyway.
“Did you know?” Cassiel says softly, his arms around me. “Did you know that my father—”
“Yes,” I say, buried in his chest. My voice doesn’t shake. It’s the only part of me that doesn’t. “My grandmother never lost an opportunity to remind me. She used to point at Caerthalen and tell me that… that was where my father’s murderers slept.”
He stiffens, breath catching. “All the times I spoke to you of him—”
“You are allowed to miss your father,” I whisper, my fingers coiling into his clothes. “And you aren’t him.”
Cassiel swallows hard. “I wanted to be,” he admits. “Most of my life, I wanted to be. I never told you that, did I? My mother was the warrior. He was the thinker. Her right-hand man.” His voice drops. “It must have killed you to—”
“He didn’t want to,” I whisper.
Cassiel doesn’t say anything to that.
“You saw that,” I say urgently. “Right? I’d not imagined it like that. He—he wanted to let him go. He tried.” My throat closes. “He couldn’t. He couldn’t because of me…”
I fold inward, breath shuddering, grief arriving all at once—grief I was never allowed to feel as a child, grief sharpened now by understanding, now that I know what I lost when my father died. Cassiel holds me tighter, grounding me as I sob.
“The visions are still playing,” he tells me.
I know. I’ve missed my mother hearing the news about my father’s death, thank goodness.
The scene that unfolds before us shows me as a little girl around seven, small enough that my feet don’t quite reach the floor as I sit swinging them from a chair in my childhood home, scribbling something on paper.
Nubaia sits opposite my mother. It’s only been five years since I last saw her in these memories, but she looks much older. It could be a glamour, of course, but something is etched into her face like stone. It’s a look she still wears today. I’d thought she was born with it, but now I know.
It’s grief. It sits upon her face like a shroud. She was forever altered by my father’s death.
“She can come when she is ready,” Maeve says firmly, hands curled in her lap. “You can teach her magic when she’s older. When she understands.”
Nubaia exhales through her nose, patient in the way only someone who is very sure they are right can be. “You are delaying the inevitable.”
“I am choosing her childhood,” Maeve replies. “There is a difference.”
I watch this version of my mother—so young, so tired, so unyielding—and something in my chest aches.
“You know what she is,” Nubaia presses. “You know what she will mean.”
“To us,” Maeve cuts in sharply. “Not just to you. She is to end a war for both of us, Nubaia.” Her voice softens, but her resolve does not. “She needs to understand what she’s fighting for.”
The meaning is clear. Not the forest. Not the Moonhollow. Not secrecy and shadow. I will be staying with her until I can choose my path for myself.
Something shifts in Nubaia’s expression, but it doesn’t look like understanding. “I agree,” she says at last. “She does need to know what she’s fighting for.”
Night claims the cottage. Nubaia returns, dropping through the chimney in her bird form.
She slips through the house like a shadow, opening my mother’s door without a sound.
The room is dim and peaceful. My mother is asleep, one arm flung carelessly over the blankets, her hair loose across the pillow.
Nubaia stands over her for a long moment.
What is she doing?
A spell slides from my grandmother’s lips, settling over my mother’s chest, her breath deepening, her body sinking further into sleep. Too deep. Unnatural.
“Fates forgive me,” my grandmother murmurs. Her voice trembles, but she doesn’t sound uncertain. “Sometimes, I must be your hand.”
She turns away.
“Whatever the cost…”
She sets fire to the room with a click of her fingers.
Flame blossoms fast, greedy and bright, climbing curtains, licking at the bedframe. Smoke coils toward the ceiling. The heat surges—
I scream.
The sound tears out of me, raw and wordless, and somewhere inside the vision my small body jerks awake. I am seven. I am barefoot. I am not burning, but my mother is.
I don’t need to see the rest, because this memory burns through my nightmares. The night my mother died. The night I killed her.
Only I didn’t. My magic wasn’t responsible for this. It never was. It was always my grandmother’s—my grandmother, who waits in the trees nearby, waits for the townsfolk to chase me, for one—just one—to call me monster, while others flock to save me.
She swoops down and kills them. She makes herself my rescuer. She’ll take me in her arms and kiss away my tears and tell me that I wasn’t responsible, that fire killed my mother, not me—
And she’s right. I never killed my mother.
She did.