25. Cassiel
Wren is still screaming when the vision ends and the Star Gate finally stills.
“I’ll kill her!” she rages. “I’m going to kill her!”
I’ve no doubt that she absolutely means to try. But Wren’s in no condition to fight.
“You’ll get yourself killed if you run off like that—”
“I don’t care! I’m going to kill her!”
“Wren, Wren, please, stop—” I grab her arms, trying to hold her as she tries to run. It’s not hard. She doesn’t have the strength to retaliate much. “I’ve been where you are. I know what it feels like, how much you want to hurt the person that’s hurt you—”
Wren goes slack in my arms. “Of course you do,” she says. “Because you felt that way about me.”
I manage the barest, guiltiest of nods. “Yes,” I admit, “but I’m really, really glad I didn’t act on that impulse.”
Wren goes very quiet for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll regret killing my grandmother,” she says eventually, her voice barely a breath.
“I might,” I say, swallowing, “if you get hurt in the process.”
She pulls away from me. “Don’t… don’t say things like that!”
“Why not?”
“Because you shouldn’t care about me! Didn’t you… didn’t you see all of that? Your father is dead because of me. Your brother. My mother. I’ve destroyed everything that’s ever mattered to me, and all because… because of some stupid fucking words the stupid fucking stars spat out?”
I have no idea what to say to that.
“The conflict will end when the half-blood child enters the service of the second son…” she repeats. “You heard that, right?”
“Yes,” I say quietly. “I heard that.”
“I entered into your service over a year ago, now,” she tells me. “So why isn’t it over?”
“I don’t… I don’t know.”
She plucks a dagger from her belt and slams it into my palm, pressing herself against the blade’s tip.
“Here,” she says. “End it now. Start with me. Then burn it all down. That’s what my grandmother was afraid of.
It doesn’t say how I end it. Maybe it ends because I die, and take the forest with me.
I’m blessed with fire. Maybe my death starts an inferno. ”
I stare at her, wanting her to take back her words. “Wren… you can’t mean that. You don’t want this.”
“No,” she admits. “I don’t. You’re right. I just want to live in a better world, and I don’t know how to make this one into that.”
“You don’t have to.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to know how to do that. I’ll find the answer. I’m the thinker, after all.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying, it’s not on you. The prophecy that your people have held onto for a century? You’re not the only person in it, Wren. I’m there too. Whatever we have to do, we’ll do it together.”
I let the silence stretch after my words, long enough for Wren’s breathing to slow, long enough for the Star Gate’s faint hum to sink back into the earth. The light gutters and dies. The air feels suddenly ordinary again, like the world has decided to keep going despite everything we’ve just seen.
Robin whimpers. He trots forward and nudges Wren’s leg. Her shoulders sag. All the rage drains out of her at once, leaving her shaking in front of me. I move carefully, afraid of spooking her, and slide an arm around her. She doesn’t pull away. She folds into my chest, forehead pressed against me.
“All right,” she whispers, like she’s agreeing to something she doesn’t fully understand. “All right. No murder today.”
I almost laugh. “No murder today.”
We don’t talk as Wren dismantles the protections, silencing the glyphs and moving the stones until the last sigil fades and the star gate is nothing more than a ring of old rock.
“Come on,” I say, taking her hand like I still need her to guide me, only I’m the one guiding her, this time.
I have no idea where I’m going, but this hardly matters.
We walk side by side, until the stars feel less crowded and the pressure on my ribs eases enough that I can breathe.
Whilst I didn’t learn that my grandmother killed a beloved parent, Wren isn’t the only one unsettled by the visions we were shown.
I have no idea what to make of the prophecy we’re both a part of, or the knowledge of what my father did to hers.
Or the fact she asked me to kill her, and what we’re supposed to do next.
We make camp in a shallow hollow between two low hills.
I gather wood because it’s something I know how to do, because it gives my hands a task that isn’t thinking.
When I come back, Wren is still kneeling where I left her, Robin at her side.
She doesn’t make a move as I arrange the branches, and even then, it’s only to start the fire.
After that, she goes very still, eyes fixed on the flames as if they might explain something to her.
I offer her food. “You should eat.”
She shakes her head without looking at me.
“Wren—”
“I can’t,” she whispers. “I just… I can’t.”
I don’t have much appetite for it either, but I manage a bit of the bread and cheese leftover from Marnie and Tob. I feed a bit to Robin, who still has a bone from Tob to chew. Wren picks at her own food an hour or so later, eating less than a sick child.
The night deepens around us. The fire crackles softly.
“Cassiel?” Her voice is quiet, frayed at the edges.
“Yes.”
“Could you… could you just—” She swallows. “Hold me?”
I sit behind her and pull her back against my chest. She leans into me like she’s been waiting for permission to collapse. I wrap my arms around her, solid and steady, and rest my chin lightly on the crown of her head.
We stay like that for a long time. Her hands twist in my sleeve, then still. Her breathing evens out, though every so often she shudders, as if fragments of the vision are still finding their way back to her.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs eventually. “For saying all that. For… everything.”
I tighten my hold just a fraction. “You don’t have to apologise for being in pain.”
She doesn’t answer. She presses her face into my chest and lets herself be held. I keep my eyes on the fire and the dark beyond it, thinking the way I promised I would about prophecies and answers, and a future where she doesn’t have to carry the weight of the world on her own.
“It’s a mistranslation, by the way,” I whisper.
“Come again?”
“When they were translating the stars. They couldn’t decide on if it was ‘service’ or ‘employment’. It wasn’t either.”
“You… know how to read stars? Better than century-old fey?”
“I know how to translate,” I say. “Remember when I told you that Florwellian has no word for like, only love, hate and neutral? You need to understand the rules of the language to fully translate it.”
“And… you do?”
“I think so,” I explain. “I’m not explaining this well.”
“No, I think I understand.” She pauses, her face screwed up in thought. “What’s the mistranslation?”
“It’s not service,” I tell her. “It’s partnership. Make of that what you will.”
I’m not entirely sure what to make of it myself, because if I’m right, there was no need to blind me at all, just arrange some meeting between the two of us and let the future write itself. If they’d known, if they’d understood… would Evander still be alive?
If, if, if…
I should probably focus less on the ifs and maybes, and more on the absolutes, but even that hurts to think of right now.
I don’t know what to do next, what steps forward to take now that I have my sight back and I know what I know.
I’m not going to attack the Duskfen any more, I know that much, but I also suspect that Nubaia will not be satisfied with that.
Nubaia, who killed my father, and Wren’s mother. Nubaia, responsible for my brother’s death, and my mother’s condition.
Can I really put aside my hatred for her? Could she do the same for us?
“Wren,” I begin, keeping my voice soft.
“Mmm?” she murmurs against me.
“How did my father die?”
Wren stiffens in my arms.
For a moment, neither of us moves. The fire pops softly behind us, the sound too loud in the sudden stillness. I don’t loosen my hold, but I don’t tighten it either.
“I suppose I could go back to the gate one day and see it for myself,” I say quietly. “I don’t think I want to. But I do want to know. You were in the Duskfen Forest then, weren’t you? They say your grandmother killed him.”
She draws in a breath and gently, deliberately, pulls away from me.
The space she leaves feels colder than the stone.
“You were there, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” she says eventually. “I was there.”
I nod once. “Tell me.”
“It’s not a pleasant tale.”
“Neither was what you saw in the gate,” I say. “But we had to see it anyway.”
She wraps her arms around herself, like she’s bracing against an internal wind. “All right,” she says. “I’ll tell you.”
She takes a deep breath.
“My people cheered when they brought him in. I didn’t understand what was happening until my grandma flew up into our home, and told me to come down to the glade.
She was… gleeful. I didn’t like it. I’d never seen her this way.
She was never happy. She took me down with her, and the entire Moonhollow had surrounded him.
He was bound in chains, beaten and bloody.
They tied him to a tree. I had no idea who he was, and no idea why anyone was supposed to be happy about this.
My aunt spat in his face and laughed. Someone shaved off his hair. Only Zephyr looked unsettled by it.”
She pauses, waiting, I think, for me to react, but my voice has vanished entirely.
“The humiliations seemed to go on forever…” she continues, and I try my best not to picture them, “but the laughter ceased when my grandma thrust a knife into my hand, and told me the honour was mine.”
My stomach drops. “Wren,” I whisper, “tell me you didn’t—”
She swallows, and slowly, mercifully, she shakes her head.
“It would have been better if I did,” she adds.
“I… I took the knife at first, hardly knowing what she meant. For a second, I even thought that ‘having the honour’ meant I was supposed to set him free. That’s…
that’s what I wanted to do. My grandmother grabbed his face and forced him to look at me.
‘You killed the girl’s father,’ she told him.
‘My son. Tell me, King Leo, do you remember him?’
“He… he said that he remembered them all, and then… then he looked me in the eyes and told me he had a son my age.”
Once more, I’m rendered mute, but the tears trickle steadily down Wren’s face. I don’t want to think of my father this way, how frightened he must have been, how desperately he must have wanted to come home to us.
I want to be home, right now. I want to grab Runara in my arms. I want to hold my mother again. I want Evander to be alive and so, so many impossible things.
“He apologised to me, for my father’s death,” Wren goes on.
“He said… not much else. My grandmother kicked him in the stomach before he could.
She said I should finish him off before he could tell more lies.
He wheezed, and asked why I looked so human if I was one of the fair folk.
She told him what I was, and that his laws would have me killed.
“‘Not my laws,’ he insisted, but my grandmother’s eyes blazed.
“‘Your wife’s, then.’
“He… he said we didn’t need to fight, that there were other ways…
He begged, begged her to let him live. He…
he spoke of the sons he had at home, of the child he had yet to meet…
She… she kept speaking of her son, reminding him that he never got the chance to watch me grow up…
and then she told me to end it. I… I couldn’t.
I wouldn’t. She got angry with me and said that they would have a little fun with him instead…
and then they started torturing him again. ”
Wren shudders, but there’s still more.
“I ran away. They didn’t notice. I fled into the forest until I couldn’t hear it any more. When I returned in the morning, his body was still there, but he wasn’t.”
She pauses in the awful story. “I’m so, so sorry, Cassiel.”
I rise to my feet and step away from her before my legs can give out. I stare at the trees, trying to clear my head, to imagine something other than the scene she’s just described.
“What for?” I ask.
She sounds confused. “What?”
“What are you sorry for?” I ask. “For telling me? For what your people did? Or for what you couldn’t?”
“For everything.”
I breathe in slowly. “I think we have to stop apologising to each other,” I say at last. “It’s all just… a cycle. An eye for an eye—”
“Makes everyone blind?”
A mirthless laugh slips out of me. “Yes. For want of a better word. We don’t need apologies.
We certainly don’t need revenge. We need forgiveness.
We need—” I pause, steadying myself. “I don’t think I can forgive your grandmother,” I tell her.
“Not in my heart, anyway. In principle, perhaps. However much I don’t want to, I understand her rage.
I’ve felt it too. I just… I don’t think it’s helpful.
It doesn’t heal. It just hurts more. It just… ”
I take a deep breath.
“I can’t forgive your grandmother inwardly,” I clarify, “but I can forgive you, Wren. You didn’t have much choice in any of this. I know that now. You’ve been a pawn in someone else’s game your entire life. Perhaps you don’t need it. Perhaps you don’t even want it—”
“No,” she says quickly. “I want it. Thank you.”
I glance back at her. “Now comes the part where you forgive me.”
She looks genuinely startled. “Forgive you? You haven’t done anything.”
“I was awful to you when we first met.”
“You were in pain.”
“I frequently pretended not to like you.”
“I was, at times, unlikeable.”
Despite everything, a huff of breath escapes me. “I told you I was all right with whatever you were,” I say more quietly. “And I wasn’t.”
She swallows. “I should have told you sooner.”
“I didn’t listen to you when you told me about your cousin,” I say.
“I focused on my own feelings instead of what mattered. If the situation were reversed—if I’d just told you something shocking, but Runara was in danger—I know you’d have been able to set it aside to help me.
If I’d just taken a moment to think clearly—”
“I didn’t give you one—”
“You were short on time,” I say. “I know that. I don’t blame you. But if I’d helped you from the start, then maybe Evander—”
Her breath catches. It probably hadn’t occurred to her that I would blame myself for that.
“We can torture ourselves with what-ifs and maybes,” she says softly.
She’s right. Saints, she’s right.
I reach for her hand, rubbing my thumb over her narrow knuckles. “So, no more what-ifs? No more torturing ourselves?”
“Well,” she says, squeezing my fingers, “not unless you ask me really nicely.”
I groan and let go. “I was trying to be serious, Wren.”
“I’m not very good at being serious.”
“I had noticed.”
I lean across and place a kiss to her forehead. “It’s late,” I tell her. “We should go to sleep.”
“And in the morning?”
“We’ll figure something out,” I tell her, giving her a smile. “It is, apparently, our destiny.”