35. Cassiel
Wren is gone before I can tell her I’ll always need her. The window bangs in her absence. She’s left nary a feather behind.
The room still smells like her—wind and wildflowers—and for a few stupid heartbeats I stand there, staring at the place where she was, as if that might be enough to pull her back.
It isn’t.
My knees give out before I realise they’re shaking.
I sink to the floor and the sound that tears out of me doesn’t feel like it belongs to a prince, or a regent, or any of the people I’m supposed to be.
It’s raw and humiliating and endless. I press my fist against my mouth, but it doesn’t help. I cry anyway.
Robin noses my shoulder, whining softly. I barely have time to open my arms before he’s climbing into my lap, all warm weight and clumsy devotion. I bury my face in his fur and sob harder, fingers twisting in his scruff.
I proposed to Wren, I realise, now feeling mortified and well as everything else. Saints. What was I thinking?
Robin licks my cheek, tail thumping.
That you didn’t want her to go. That you wanted a way to hold onto her.
When the tears finally run dry, I’m entirely spent. Something essential has been scooped clean from my chest and left echoing. I scrub my face, stand on unsteady legs, and force myself to move. If I don’t keep moving, I’ll turn back. Or break. Or both.
Magda doesn’t ask questions when I find her behind the bar, sleeves rolled up, eyes sharp and kind all at once. She just takes one look at me and nods.
“A horse,” I say. My voice sounds older than it did yesterday. “Fast.”
She has one ready within minutes.
The ride back to Caerthalen is a blur of pounding hooves and cold air that stings my eyes. I welcome the ache in my muscles, the burn in my lungs. It’s something I can feel that isn’t this.
I should be reveling in having my sight back, excited by the look of the castle rising out of the mist. I should be gaping at the familiarity of this road, transfixed by the sheer ease at which I navigate, mesmerised by the glitter of sunlight through fog.
But nothing good comes until I’m dismounting in the castle courtyard, and a high, loud voice calls to me from the steps.
“Cassiel!”
I barely have time to hand the reins off before a small body barrels straight into me.
I laugh despite myself, the sound breaking out of me like it’s been trapped for days. I swing Runara around once, twice, just to hear her giggle, and then set her back on her feet, hands still firm on her shoulders.
She tilts her head, studying my face with unsettling seriousness. Her eyes—so like mine—widen and fill with tears. “Can you see me?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, without hesitation.
Her breath hitches. She throws her arms around me again, fierce and tight, and I hold on with such strength I’m surprised she doesn’t complain.
She’s sobbing too hard to.
Behind her, Dain approaches, grinning from ear to ear. “It’s been so hard keeping that secret, you’ve no idea.”
I manage a weak smile in return. “I can imagine.”
Aunt Imogen appears next, sweeping in like a storm in silk and steel. She doesn’t say a word—just pulls me into her arms and cries, unapologetic, her grip strong enough to remind me exactly where I am.
When she pulls back, she wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “No change,” she says softly, knowing what I’m going to ask. “Your mother is the same.”
I nod, because that’s what a prince regent does. Because the world is still turning, and Wren is still out there somewhere, and I have promised—whether she knows it or not—that I will endure without her.
I announce my intention to see my mother anyway, and no one disagrees.
The corridors up to my mother’s chambers feel longer than I remember, the stone colder underfoot, the light too clean.
Sight is still new enough that I notice everything—and wish, violently, that I didn’t, because I’m not entirely sure I do want to see my mother like this, no matter how much I have to.
The doors open.
I have not seen my mother’s face in over a year, not since the world narrowed to sound and memory and touch. In my mind she has remained as she always was: upright, armoured, sharp-eyed, a blade given breath. Caerthalen’s mighty warrior queen.
This is what sight gives me instead.
She lies utterly still, colour leeched from her skin, dark hair spread like spilled ink across the pillow, hands frozen as a corpse’s. Her muscles have dwindled. Her scars look less like medals and more like wrinkles. A lioness posed as a statue.
I stop just inside the room. My chest locks. For a moment I can’t make myself step closer, as if distance might preserve the lie that she could still rise, still speak, still see me.
“Leave us,” I say hoarsely.
The attendants hesitate, then bow and slip away, closing the doors behind them. The quiet rushes in, thick and suffocating.
I go to her side.
Up close, it’s unbearable. Her lashes cast shadows I’ve never seen before. Her mouth is slightly parted, breath shallow but steady. She’s alive—but only just.
I take her hand. It’s warm and solid and real. Not dead. Not a statue. Still here.
Unlike Evander.
“Mama,” I whisper, because no one else is here, and I don’t have to be a regent now, or a prince. I don’t need to be anything other than her son.
I swallow hard and force myself to speak, because if I stop, I don’t think I’ll start again.
“I can see,” I tell her. “I have my sight back. I don’t know if you’d laugh or cry about that. Probably both.”
My thumb rubs slow circles over her knuckles. I wait for her to squeeze back, but she doesn’t.
“I delivered a baby,” I continue, a fragile smile ghosting across my mouth.
“Can you imagine? Despite everything I’ve read, I still felt like I had no idea what I was doing.
It was a little brownie girl. Half the size Runara ever was.
Had the largest, darkest eyes I’ve ever seen.
She was… truly something. I swear—I swear—nothing I’ve ever done has felt so important as bringing her into the world. ”
My voice wobbles. I breathe through it.
“I met people,” I say. “Good ones. Brave ones. The sort you always said were worth fighting for. They helped me when they didn’t have to, and yet our laws would have them killed for stepping outside their forest.”
I hesitate, then plunge on, because she has never raised a coward.
“I learned things about the past. About my father, and Wren’s parents. Wren and I—we were born to end the conflict, but I don’t know how to, Mama. I don’t know what to do.”
My throat tightens painfully.
“I still love her,” I admit, the words tearing free. “I don’t know how not to. I don’t know how to exist without her. I’m trying to be what everyone needs, but I feel like I’m coming apart at the seams.”
I bow my head, pressing my forehead against her hand.
“Please,” I whisper. “Wake up. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix this. I can’t— I can’t do it without you.”
Silence answers me. The same relentless, merciless silence.
I slide down onto the bed, curling carefully against her side, tucking my knees up like I used to when I was small and afraid of storms. I press my back to her arm and close my eyes, pretending—just for a moment—that it curves around me, solid and protective.
Like it used to.
Like I still need it to.
Because whatever I am, I’m still just a person, and no one in this world is meant to walk through it alone.
Let alone save it that way.
The next day finds me sitting in my study, morning light slanting across the desk, bathing the grain in bars of gold and white. Dust drifts in fragile motes.
The pen feels strange in my hand, too light and too thin.
I turn it between my fingers, reacquainting myself with its weight, the way it rests against the callus on my thumb.
I haven’t held one in so long, or at least, not with the intention of writing more than a quick signature dictated by someone else.
I’d be mystified by the sheer wonder of being able to write again if I wasn’t so damn nervous about what I need to pen.
Robin whines under the desk, nudging my knee. I reach under to pat him while Dain clicks his tongue impatiently in the corner.
“Sit down and sharpen your sword or something,” I tell him.
“We can send for a speech writer if you can’t—”
“No,” I say shortly. This one, of all my speeches, I need to do by myself.
I dip it into the ink and write.
The letters are uneven at first, lines wavering as my hand remembers what my eyes can now confirm. It’s clumsy, imperfect—and entirely mine. A quiet, almost painful joy unfurls in my chest at that. I can write by myself again. No guide. No dictation. No darkness.
I wish I could tell her.
Look, Wren, I’m writing!
The joy doesn’t last long. I have a task to do, and while this one will help her, it needs to be managed carefully.
I’m ashamed that it needs to be done in the first place.
I draft and redraft before settling on words careful enough not to damn her further.
A formal retraction of the price on her head.
An acknowledgement that evidence suggests she, too, was manipulated by her people.
That she restored my sight as recompense.
That she is, in fact, the mysterious healer spoken of across the realm—appearing where she’s needed most, leaving nothing but rumours and lives saved behind her.
It isn’t enough. I know it as I write it.
I cannot say I love her. I cannot say she is my equal, my anchor, my ruin. If I do, they’ll say she’s enchanted me. That she’s twisted my mind now that she’s given me eyes again. Love would be treated as proof of her guilt and deception.
I set the pen down, jaw tight.
She may no longer be a target, but restoring my sight will not make the people kind. It will not make everyone trust her. A few might be swayed by her actions as the mysterious healer, but not the entire country. Not our allies.
I hate that she was right, and I miss her so badly it feels physical—an ache behind my ribs that no amount of duty can dull.
When the ink is dry, I hand the missive to Dain, and leave the study.
Robin follows at my heel, close and loyal as ever. He doesn’t need to guide me anymore, but he doesn’t seem to care. Neither do I.
I push open the door to my room, and step inside. The door that leads to her old room is open now. The bed is neatly made. Untouched.
I sit on the edge and press my palm to the blankets, imagining her weight there, her warmth. It’s long since faded, of course. I cling to nothing.
Back in my room, I cross to the chair by the window. My fingers brush the armrest where we first kissed, tentative and disbelieving, then frantic and hungry. I move to the bed, sit where we eventually made love, where the world fell away for a few stolen hours.
Everything remembers her.
I turn to the books on my desk, pulling volumes at random, thumbing through familiar pages I’d thought forever lost to me.
My father’s inscriptions greet me in the margins—sharp sketches, half-finished thoughts, the quiet intimacy of a man who loved stories more than courtly life.
I trace them absently, warming myself in ink and paper and lineage.
A thin volume of poetry slips free.
I pick it up, and thumb tentatively to What Lies Between Stars.
My breath catches.
I remember Wren reading it aloud to me, her voice soft, reverent. I remember how quiet she went at the end.
She was right, too, about this. Stories written in the stars don’t always have happy endings.
Sometimes they burn out. Sometimes they collide.
Sometimes they leave nothing behind but light that takes too long to fade.
We’d argued, briefly, over the meaning of this poem—she’d said it was about lies, and I’d said it was about love.
Perhaps it’s both, but overall, it’s laced with a longing I’d never picked up on before.
I close the book gently, and place it back with the others. My fingers glide over the drawer next, and find paper.
For the first time in well over a year, I pick up a pencil and draw—nothing like the diagrams and instructional sketches I did in Brindlewick.
I draw the desk in front of me, the books stacked neatly together, the papers cluttering the surface.
I draw sunlight shifting through the window. I draw Robin, my bed, the chair.
I draw Wren, as best I can from memory.
I wish for colour, to render her in shades, to pour the gold of her eyes onto paper.
I know I won’t be able to do her justice, but I want to almost as much as I just want her here beside me.
Sighing, I give up on sketching—and everything else. I cross to the bed, throw myself down, and try to sleep. I definitely haven’t been getting enough of it, but sleep doesn’t come. It lingers at the edges of the room but never enters.
Like Wren’s living ghost.