I Am Not Afraid
SERAPHAE
We didn't get a chance to move.
The shadows reached us first. Tendrils whipped across the ground and wrapped around my leg. Before I could even react, my feet were pulled out from under me. All four of us went down to the ground at the same time. The cold earth met my back and punched the air out of my lungs.
I slashed with my dagger.
It did nothing.
“Sera!” Maelor shouted somewhere to my left.
I looked up in time to parry the ice shards coming at me with my dagger. Frost splashed cold across my face. A split second slower, and it would’ve impaled my eye.
“Light.” Riven's voice strained. “We need light.”
Right.
I turned my palm toward the tendril locked around my ankle and pulled my magic. The orb cut through the dark whip of shadow.
It broke.
I ripped my leg free and rolled toward Caelan.
He was pinned. Two tendrils coiled around both ankles and one on his left wrist. I thrust the orb toward him, and the shadows dissolved instantly.
He rolled and got to his feet half a second before another icicle speared down.
I grabbed his sleeve and dragged him sideways.
It hit the earth where his head had been.
I sent the orb rolling toward Maelor and Riven. Light bounced once across the shadows holding them, and they were free.
Across the clearing, the imposter stood.
Same posture. Same infuriating calm. Same face.
Caelan hurled fire at it. The imposter moved exactly as Caelan had moved when I'd tried to kill him at the masquerade. Fluid and unhurried, avoiding it without apparent effort. Of course the fear manifested with his competence intact. Why wouldn't it?
The imposter mirrored Caelan and sent an identical ball of fire. Two flames met in the air between them with a crack that rattled the trees and threw light across the clearing in a burst.
Maelor and Riven charged together. Steel sliced against the air. Maelor swung wide and heavy, forcing the imposter to shift its footing. Riven moved at its flank, sword aimed for joints and tendons, precise and relentless.
The imposter avoided both of them effortlessly. Lightning snapped from its palm toward Riven.
Then Riven wasn't there.
He didn’t duck or jump. He was there one moment and simply not the next. The lightning struck empty air where he had been. Then he reappeared behind the imposter with his blade already moving. A tendril of shadow caught it.
I stared while narrowly avoiding a fireball.
Shadow-stepping. That was his ability. That was how he appeared without sound, without warning, from places he shouldn't have been able to reach. I had assumed it was the way he moved. He wasn't moving at all.
“How do we stop it?” I asked Caelan.
He shook his head, switching from fire to lightning. “You don't stop it. It keeps going until it destroys everything.” He paused and looked at me. “Like it always does.”
In his voice was something I had not heard from him before. He sounded exhausted and resigned.
He was afraid of himself.
Not of what he had done, but of what he was and what he could still do. Of the version of himself that lived inside him, waiting.
Steel rang loud as Maelor and Riven kept the imposter occupied.
If the forest made fear real, then the fear was its fuel. Take the fear away, and maybe it would have nothing left to run on. Maybe. I didn't know. But it was the only logic I had, and we were running out of time.
I closed the distance between us in three strides and took his face in both hands.
Caelan turned, eyes wide with something I didn't expect.
Surprise.
Actual surprise, from a man who was surprised by nothing.
“Look at me,” I said.
He did.
I looked into his eyes. Like ice water, deeper than the surface promised. And for once, I did not care if I drowned in them.
“The forest is taking what you're afraid of and making it real.” I kept my voice low and steady. “Don’t let it.”
His face crumbled in resignation. Not slowly, but all at once. The way things collapsed when they’d been held together for too long past their limit.
“I can't.”
The Prince of Twilight. Who didn’t stop eating as five assassins came through windows. The pinnacle of composure. And he was fracturing right before my eyes.
“You can.” My voice was steady.
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. Lightning in one, frost crawling from the other. Both running from him like water he couldn't hold.
“This isn't even all of it.” His voice was the quietest I had ever heard it. “This is just what I have left. The rest—“
“I know.”
I brought his face back up. Close enough that there was nothing else to look at. Nothing to hide behind. Just me and what I was saying and whether he was going to let himself hear it. I needed to make him hear it.
“You were eight years old,” I said.
He went very still. The kind of stillness that came when words landed where I wanted them to.
“You were a child.”
A muscle moved in his jaw.
My thumb brushed his cheek. I felt him exhale.
“You are not that anymore.”
His hands came up and closed around mine where they held his face. Slowly, like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed.
Everything else kept existing. Maelor and Riven. The imposter prince. All of it. But I had stopped noticing it.
“You don't understand what I am,” he said.
“No,” I admitted. “But I understand this.”
I held his gaze, willing him to believe me.
“I am not afraid of you.”
Something moved through his face. A fracture he had been carrying since he was eight years old on a floor with his mother’s hands going cold in his.
“Sera—“
“I am not afraid,” I said again, firmer this time. I closed what remained of the distance between us. Our chests almost touching. His breath warm against my forehead. His eyes searching mine like he was looking for the lie in it. The part where I took it all back.
There wasn’t one.
“Do you hear me?” My hands tightened on his face. “You are not going to hurt me.”
He looked at me.
The old belief fighting against the new one. The eight-year-old boy against the two centuries of proof, and I held his face and didn't look away.
I let him fight it.
“Say it with me,” I said softly. “I am not afraid.”
He breathed long and steady and closed his eyes. His forehead came down. His fingers threaded into mine where they held him, and the world narrowed to just that. Cold air, the dark forest, the sound of steel behind us, and this impossible closeness that had nothing to do with distance.
His voice came low and certain.
“I am not afraid.”
When he opened his eyes, they were different. The fear was still there. It would probably always be there. But there was something else. Something that knew what the fear was and had decided what to do with it.
He looked at me for a moment longer. Then he took my hand and extended it toward the imposter.
He exhaled a shuddering breath.
“Call it,” he said, lips brushing against my temple.
I reached for my magic.
We both turned to face the shadow that wore his face.
My orb formed, and his magic went into it. Lightning threading through white light, and my palm went cold as his ice joined it too. The familiar hum vibrated along my skin where his hand touched. The orb grew past anything I had ever made, past anything I thought my magic could hold.
The imposter tried to summon. Nothing came. No fire, no ice, no lightning. Just a shape wearing Caelan's face with nothing left inside it.
Riven and Maelor glanced over and immediately stepped back.
We let it go.
It crossed the clearing at a speed I couldn't track and hit the imposter like a reckoning. The shape split, fractured, and came apart into nothing. Shadow into air.
The sound of our ragged breathing was all that was left.
Then the forest returned. Birds first, then the insects, then all of it, sound flooding back in like a breath released.
We stood in the middle of it.
His hand still in mine. My other hand against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat under my palm, or maybe it was mine. He looked down at me with an expression I didn't have a name for and had not seen on him before.
The bond did something.
Except I knew it wasn't the bond.
Whatever I was feeling was mine. Entirely and inconveniently mine. And it was more dangerous than anything that had just come at us from the dark.
“Did you mean it?” he said.
I looked at him. I considered deflecting. I considered a joke, a pivot, one of the seventeen ways I had of not answering a question directly.
I didn't use any of them.
“Yes,” I said.
We looked at each other for longer than we should have. Long enough that it meant something neither of us was going to say out loud yet.
Maelor walked up, sheathing his sword. “Well,” he said, surveying the clearing. “I hope that's the last of the Budget Prince.”
Riven materialized beside us.
We were alive. We were going to walk out of the forest.
But something had shifted. I could feel it the way you felt a change in weather before it arrived. In your joints, in the air, in the quality of the silence between two people who had just said something real and unguarded.
I didn't think about what that meant.