48. Wren
Evander clings to Cassiel’s waist, murmuring something about how big he is, while Cassiel stands, stunned, not sure what to do with himself. If this were Ru, he’d pat her head and stroke her hair, but this is Evander. He isn’t meant to tower over him.
Finally, Evander pulls away. Cassiel stares at him still.
“How do you know who I am?” he gasps. “You’re… you’re just a child.”
Evander smiles, and the smile is far older than the boy wearing it. “I wasn’t always.”
“You… you’re you.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re—”
“Dead?” Evander pulls a solemn face. “Yes, I rather suspected that. I… I remember that.” He touches his middle, where the wound that killed him ought to be.
Cassiel is speechless. I can hardly blame him. I’m struggling to find the words myself.
“And after?” I prompt, when the silence stretches. “What… what happened after? Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” says Evander, swallowing. “Bits of it. I was… drifting. In a place like a sea of stars. I don’t remember much more, but Mother was there, and then… I was here.”
He takes a deep breath.
“Is Mother dead too?” he asks. “Are you? Is that why—”
“No,” Cassiel says. “Mother is not dead, and neither are we.”
Evander breathes a sigh of relief. “Thank the Saints.”
“I think Alessandra was hovering between life and death after her battle with Nubaia,” I reason. “Your castle healers saved her body, but by then, she was holding Evander’s soul and either couldn’t let go of it to return to her own body alone, or didn’t want to.”
I look around the space, eyes focusing on the child-sized beds and the cradle.
I don’t know much about parenthood, but from what I’ve observed of human behaviour, most parents long to keep their children safe, and many, when they’re grown, speak softly of their children’s childhoods, wishing they could hold them in their arms as babes, and keep them safely stowed away from the world.
Alessandra has found a way to make it literal.
“She’s constructed this place to keep you safe.”
Cassiel says nothing. Evander looks down at his feet.
“I’ve… I’ve tried talking to her,” Evander goes on.
“She just… doesn’t seem to hear me. She laughs like I’ve said something terribly amusing, then goes to talk to Father or her parents…
” His eyes turn misty. “I can’t talk to them, either.
They just repeat words and phrases and talk about nothing, but Mother doesn’t seem to notice. ”
He turns away from the two of us, staring at where the wall dissolves into the garden.
“How long has it been?” he asks, and his voice once more sounds so little like a child’s.
“Six months,” Cassiel says. “It’s been six months since you…”
“Died.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Cassiel. I really am. If I had any choice in the matter—”
“I know,” Cassiel says, eyes filling with tears, because what does Evander’s choice matter when the world is what it is?
My eyes rove around the room and the decor, gazing at the way the beds seem grown out of the floor, the curtains end in leaves, and the stone walls dissolve into the garden.
“This isn’t Alessandra’s doing, is it?” I ask. “The leaves and branches, I mean.”
Evander shakes his head. “I’m able to edit the dream—just a little,” he explains. “Never enough to get her attention, but this…”
He places one hand to a tree trunk that splays into the bedroom, arching over the ceiling. The flowers bloom at his touch, showering us with petals that vanish as they hit the floor.
“I’ve always felt a kinship with the forest,” he remarks.
Cassiel glances at me, and I hold his gaze.
“One of our ancestors was fey,” Cassiel speaks. “Queen Vivien. It appears she might have gifted us all with a touch of magic.”
Evander nods, as if this is hardly news to him. I’m not sure how time has passed in this place for him, but it’s obviously given him a lot of time to think. He must have gathered that Alessandra ought not to have been able to construct this place without magic.
“Did you know?” Cassiel asks, not entirely without accusation. “Did you suspect before now—”
“I suspected,” Evander admits. “But I had no way of knowing.”
“Why wouldn’t you—”
“Tell you? Tell Mother? Because I wasn’t sure.
And I didn’t want to be. I was panicked enough by myself without bringing you into it, and what if it wasn’t you and Ru?
What if it was just me? What if some fey had taken advantage of my mother and—” He swallows, not wanting to complete that sentence, or that thought.
What he must have been going through all this time, all by himself…
“How?” Cassiel manages eventually. There’s no accusation now, no annoyance. “Or… why? Why did you suspect you weren’t fully human?”
“I could see this sort of… shimmer on people under a glamour,” Evander admits.
Cassiel groans. “You and Ru both? Honestly, why don’t I get to see things like that—”
“You’ve been blind for over a year, Cass.”
“Still…”
“But…” says Evander, as if he’s only just noticing, “you don’t seem to be anymore. Is that permanent or just here—”
“Permanent,” Cass explains, with a brief smile in my direction. “Courtesy of Wren.”
Evander smiles. “I’m glad you’ve got your sight back.”
“Me too.”
The brothers embrace again, and laugh at the height difference. Both their eyes are shining when they part.
“How’s Ru?” Evander asks. “You said she could see things too?”
“Yes, and use runes, which I imagine is going to add considerable chaos to our lives when we get back.”
“Can you use runes?”
“No,” Cassiel says, sounding slightly put out. “I seem to be rather lacking in the magical department.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I murmur.
Cassiel grins.
“I’m glad you two are together,” Evander remarks. “I was worried that after…”
“Yes, your death did put rather a dampener on our relationship,” Cassiel admits. “But we made it back to each other.”
“Good. You two… you’re meant to be together.”
“You have no idea.”
Evander frowns at that, sensing there’s more behind Cassiel’s words. Cassiel sighs, and fills him in on the past few weeks and all we’ve learned about the prophecy and our stories being entwined since before we were even born.
“Fascinating,” Evander remarks when his brother is done. “And… how are you feeling about that?”
“Overwhelmed,” Cassie admits, which is very much my dominant emotion too. “But glad of anything that binds me to her.”
My chest heats, and I resist the urge to kiss him with Evander standing right there.
Instead, my mind conjures the image of the baby, of the older me, of the little girl with his eyes.
There was a third child, too. I’m sure I glimpsed another in the room.
Three pieces of us with their own beating hearts…
Except, of course, they weren’t. They had no hearts. They were not real.
And yet Cassiel still tried to protect them when those creatures came for us.
“Do you have any idea—” Evander begins.
“How to stop the mounting conflict? No. Waking Mother up seems like a good start, though. If she learns what we are…”
“Let’s hope she wakes up in an amicable mood,” Evander says, with a barely suppressed shudder.
He stops for a moment, his face resettling into a frown. “The… things that were chasing you,” he says. “What—who—are they? I thought I saw Riverspire and Nettlebrook…”
My stomach twists. Cassiel looks at me, trying, I’m sure, to find a softer way to explain this to Evander that doesn’t pin me to the violence like an insect on display, but I’ve never been one for mincing words.
Especially when I’m the target.
“They’re my victims,” I say, as flatly as I can.
“You… you probably don’t remember this,” I carry on, “But when you were hurt, I wrapped you and Runara in a protective bubble and… torched the room. I obliterated everyone there. Your people, mine. I didn’t…
I didn’t know what I was doing. It wasn’t on purpose.
But I killed them. They are dead because of me. ”
Evander stares at me, and I hold his gaze. Whatever comes next, I deserve it. I killed his friends. He should hate me.
But this is Evander, and I’m not sure he has hatred in him.
What a king he would have made, I think, and then want to cry because of that, too.
Evander takes a long, deep breath. He rocks back on his heels, collapsing on the bed behind him, and runs his hands through his hair.
“I see,” he says. “Right.”
“You can yell at me, if it helps,” I suggest.
“I don’t think it would,” he continues, staring at the ground. “You killed my knights, but you saved my sister. You tried to save me. I can’t be angry about that part.”
I swallow, hating him for being so good, and for being dead on top of it all.
His brow creases into a frown. “Why did you summon them?” he asks.
“I’m not sure I did. I wasn’t even thinking of them when they appeared. They’re just… there. Like they are in my nightmares.”
“Interesting,” Evander says.
Cassiel pulls a face. “Don’t do that!”
“Do what?”
“That thing where you’re thinking something big, and won’t share it with the rest of us! It’s really annoying.”
“You—you do that all the time!”
“I was your tactician! I told you all of my theories!”
“What about the time with the nixies in the river—”
“Tactical silence,” says Cassiel, pursing his lips. “It was a need-to-know basis.”
“This is a need-to-know basis.”
“Well, I need to know!”
I bite my lip to stop myself from smiling.
I enjoy watching siblings. Zephyr and I aren’t like this.
He is the closest I have to a brother, but he was more or less an adult by the time I arrived in the forest, and it isn’t the same.
I long, fleetingly, for the sibling my mother had envisioned for me, but then my mind twists more painfully to the children Cassiel and I saw. He said that was his dream, but was it?
I conjure their faces too. I conjure an image of a future where I look that free, and happy, and—
And old. Aging with him. Living with him.
I can understand why Alessandra stays here.
“Fine,” says Evander, relenting. He takes another breath. “Wren, have you considered that maybe—”
But whatever it is that I have or haven’t considered, I don’t hear his words.
Something starts to scream.