Chapter 39 Cassiel
The world is black and burning.
Heat lashes at my skin, smoke curls into my throat. The scent of charred wood and something darker—something wrong—fills my lungs. My ears ring from the blast, drowning out everything except the roar of the fire.
“Wren!” I shout, but my voice barely carries over the destruction. I push myself up, but my limbs are unsteady, my breath thin. My hands hit something sharp—glass? Splinters? I don’t know. I don’t care.
I reach forward, searching. A chair leg, broken. A rug, smouldering. The edge of a table, half-collapsed. No Wren.
“Wren!” My throat is raw, the word torn from me. I crawl forward, feeling my way through the wreckage. The heat is unbearable. Embers catch at my sleeves, searing into my skin. I slap them away, flinching at the sting. I burn myself again, palm meeting something metal and scorching.
Still no Wren.
The smoke thickens, stealing what little breath I have left. My head spins.
But through the unbearable smog comes a small, weak sound. A whisper of a word.
“Here.”
Wren.
I lurch toward her voice, dragging myself forward. My fingers brush empty air—no, not empty. Something is there.
A strange, rippling sensation rushes over me, like breaking through the surface of water. Somehow, the air is cooler here. It should be impossible.
I don’t care about any relief it brings. My hands find her. Wren is stiff beneath my touch, her limbs locked, her body rigid as stone. I press my fingers to her cheek, her shoulder. She doesn’t move.
“Wren,” I breathe, heart hammering. My hands tighten on her arms. “Wren, speak to me.”
Nothing.
But she’s breathing. I can feel it, faint and shallow.
I pull her close, curling around her as best I can in the wreckage. The fire rages around us. Whatever temporary shield we have, it won’t work.
I don’t know what’s happened to her.
I don’t know how we’re going to make it out.
“Wren,” I choke. “Are you hurt?” I feel my way down her body, searching for blood, something broken, a reaction from her—something.
I can’t find anything wrong with her. But I don’t know.
I can’t tell. There’s too much to search, too much uncertain.
Saints, I want my sight. I need it. I have to know if she’s all right.
I find her arms and loop them around my neck, trying to lift her upright, to move. I barely manage a few inches off the ground before my chest crunches, like it wants to fall out of my body. We collapse on the ground. I cough and pant, my lungs burning.
“Wren, please,” I whisper. “I can’t… I can’t get us out.”
My chest is tight. Everything hurts. I don’t know how much longer we can stay like this.
Is this it? Is this how it ends?
I don’t want to die.
At least I’m with her.
My hands find her face. My thumb traces her lips. I brush my mouth to hers, briefly. There’s not enough left in me for more. I sag against her shoulder.
Slowly, Wren begins to stir. Her arms circle around me, holding me close. Her fingers slide against my skin. “Cassiel,” she whispers, her voice unbroken.
“Wren…”
Her lips brush my forehead. “I won’t let you die,” she says, like she has the power to bind me to this world. I wish she did. It feels like she does. “I refuse.”
She sucks in a deep breath. It’s a terrible idea, given how much smoke is around us. Her body tightens around me.
I’m going to feel her die, aren’t I?
The air shifts around us, growing colder. Noise starts to fade. Consciousness is slipping away from me.
“We… we need to move…” I whisper. Perhaps the breeze is coming from a window. Perhaps there’s a way out after all—
“No, we don’t,” Wren tells me, her fingers carding through my hair. “There’s no fire anymore, we’re safe.”
The smoke’s clearly getting to her, or maybe she hit her head when she fell. There’s fire everywhere. I can feel it. I can hear it.
Except, I can’t. There’s no crackling. The world is still warm, but there’s no inferno. No flames lick at my skin.
Where did the fire go?
I don’t know. I can’t think. I can’t breathe.
I fall back against her shoulder, and this time, I don’t get up.
There are voices. Hands. The sensation of movement.
I don’t remember the journey back. One moment, I’m in the wreckage with Wren—holding onto her, fighting against the weight of smoke and exhaustion. The next, I am here.
Home.
The castle is a storm of sound and motion. Dozens of hands touch me—pulling, guiding, lifting. The cool air of the corridor rushes over my face, a sharp contrast to the suffocating heat of the fire. I must be on a stretcher or in someone’s arms, but I barely register it.
It doesn’t matter.
“Wren,” I rasp, trying to push myself up. My chest screams in protest. A hacking cough rips through me, my lungs seizing, but I force through it. “Where is she?”
The voices blur together. Too many. Too loud.
“She’s being seen to, Your Highness.”
“Smoke inhalation—”
“Burns, some bad, some minor—”
“She’s fine—”
I can’t tell who’s talking, or if they’re talking about me or her. It’s impossible that she escaped unscathed. I need to hear her, to touch her, to know she’s safe. She was so awfully, painfully still in the fire.
The fire. Benedict. Oh Saints. I hadn’t even thought about him, or the rest of his household, or that poor creature in the basement.
Just Wren.
I try to struggle upright, only for someone to shove me back down.
“Cassiel.” Evander’s voice cuts through the haze, sharp and steady. “She’s fine. Wren is fine.”
I don’t believe him.
“She—” Another cough wracks my body, tearing what little strength I have left from me. My throat feels raw, my ribs tight, as though the smoke is still inside me, choking me from within.
Someone presses a cup against my lips. “Drink.”
I turn my head away.
“Drink, Cassiel,” Evander repeats. There’s iron in his voice now, that same tone he’s used since childhood, the one that never allows for argument.
I don’t want to. But I have no strength to fight him.
The liquid is thick and bitter, sliding down my throat like honey laced with fire. My body seizes at the taste before sluggish relief begins to creep into my limbs. The pain dulls. My head grows heavy.
I fight to keep my eyes open.
“She’s fine,” Evander says again, softer this time. “She’s being checked over. She’ll be in the next room.”
The words sink in slowly.
I swallow hard, trying to breathe through the tightness in my chest. Evander wouldn’t lie. Not about this.
Fine. She’s fine. She’s right next door.
The tension in my muscles eases, though not fully. Not completely. But the world is slipping away, and I can’t hold onto it.
I wake to warmth and weight—blankets pressing down on me, the air thick with the scent of herbs and burnt fabric. My throat is raw, my chest tight, every breath dragging like a blade against my ribs.
There’s a hand in mine, but it’s not Wren’s.
The fingers are broader, rough with calluses in familiar places. I try to move, to turn toward them, but my body is sluggish, my limbs heavy. When I part my lips to speak, all that comes out is a rasp.
Evander sighs. His grip tightens, steady and grounding. “Don’t,” he says. “Drink first.”
Something cool presses against my lips. A hand cradles the back of my head, tilting me forward just enough to force the liquid down my throat. It’s thick, cloying, numbing the rawness even as it soothes.
I cough, weakly pushing at his hand. “Wren,” I croak.
Evander exhales sharply. “She’s sleeping.” His voice is firm. “She’s not hurt, I promise you. You are.”
I try to sit up, but his hand is already on my shoulder, pressing me back down with ease.
“Lie still.”
“I need—” Her, her, her. I need her.
“No, you don’t.” His grip tightens, just for a moment. “You have several burns. Some worse than others. Your lungs are still recovering from the smoke. You’ve been unconscious for hours.” He hesitates. “The healers say you were lucky. You both were.”
My head spins. My fingers twitch against his. “What… happened?”
Evander is quiet for a long time. When he finally speaks, his voice is careful.
“We… we aren’t sure,” he admits. “From what we can understand, your friend Benedict was involved in some rather gruesome experiments. It appears the fey came to liberate one of their own, and either by accident or on purpose, set fire to the whole house.” He pauses.
“Villagers dragged you and Wren from the wreckage. It’s a miracle you weren’t more badly hurt. ”
“Benedict?” I answer, already knowing the answer.
Evander goes quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I know he was a friend of yours.”
He was. Or at least, I thought he was. He was offering me my sight back, for Saints’ sake.
But at the same time, the voice he used when talking about his experiments, the complete disregard for the creatures he was torturing…
that was a man who loved science more than people, someone who let ambition overrule empathy.
I would trade many things to get my sight back, but not someone else’s life. Not even a fey’s.
Well, not unless they deserved it.
“His household?” I ask my brother. “Did they—”
“Most survived,” Evander tells me. “Lived to explain what went on in that house.”
I swallow against the tightness in my throat, remembering the stench, the sounds… the way Wren couldn’t describe it. “The fire—”
“Was put out,” Evander finishes. “By magic, it seems.”
The words settle heavily between us. I try to breathe through the ache in my ribs, to think through the sluggish haze in my mind. I can still feel the heat searing my skin, the smoke curling in my lungs.
Who put it out?
My stomach twists. “What happened to Benedict’s lab?”
“Destroyed.”
I sigh. Along with any potential cure he might have had. It was probably nonsense, anyway. He’d clearly lost his mind. Mother had tried everything after I first lost my sight. I never asked what was in the cures, but she almost certainly tried fey blood.
Fey blood. Could I honestly have ingested such a thing, knowing where it came from? I’m not sure I’ll ever forget Wren’s silence as we stepped into the room, the way her body stiffened, how she wavered when I asked her to describe. What had she seen?
I’m no friend of the fey, but what Benedict was doing, how casual he was about it…
I think he deserved to die, as awful as that sounds.
“What did you find?” I ask. “In his basement? Was there anything—”
Evander shudders. “You don’t want to know.”
For once, I think there’s reason to be glad for my blindness. And yet my mind twists and turns, imagining horrors I’ll never see. Maybe that’s worse. Maybe it’s better. I don’t know anymore.
I take a slow breath, but it’s a mistake. My chest tightens, hot and raw, and before I can stop myself, I’m coughing again. My entire body shudders with the force of it. Pain flares across my ribs and throat.
Evander swears under his breath. His hands press against my shoulders, holding me steady as I choke on smoke that isn’t even there anymore. My lungs won’t let it go.
“Breathe through it,” he murmurs. “Easy. Here.”
Something presses against my lips. Another potion. I barely manage to swallow before another coughing fit shakes me, my body wracked with exhaustion. My head spins, my skin is taut.
“That’s it,” Evander says, more to himself than me. “You need to sleep.”
I try to shake my head, try to tell him no—I need to check on Wren, I need to be sure—but my limbs are heavy, my thoughts slipping. I barely register Evander easing me back down, barely feel the cool press of his hand against my forehead.
Wren.
Please be all right.
Darkness swallows me before I can ask again.