My Veyra
SERAPHAE
Caelan had fought better than he had any right to.
Fae princes of Primoria rarely fought. They had magic for that. I had known this. I had known it since the masquerade when we first exchanged blows, and he had still surprised me. It had bothered me ever since, the way things bothered you when they didn’t fit the category you had put them in.
Maelor had explained it without being asked, in the way Maelor occasionally dropped heavy commentary and walked away immediately after.
“Most of Caelan’s magic left him during the accident,” he said. “So he compensated. Strategy. Actual fighting.” A shrug. “Defending a border for over a century also improves certain skills.”
It made sense. When your magic wasn’t reliable, you found other ways. You became the other ways.
It had been over a week since the spar. Caelan and I had not managed to be alone.
Today had been the worst of it. I thought we'd finally have a chance when we headed toward the study. Then he told Riven he wanted to be alone. Riven had physically removed me from the vicinity when I failed to take the hint on my own. Then he brought me to the training yard and ruthlessly trained me as if he were preparing me for a war I hadn’t agreed to fight.
Dinner could have been another perfect opportunity.
Everyone else had eventually filtered out, and Caelan had stayed and I had stayed on purpose.
But Riven. He had simply remained in his chair, stirring his coffee at sixth bell like a man with nowhere to be and no awareness of what he was doing, or complete awareness and doing it on purpose.
I gave up, finished my wine, and said goodbye to them both.
Sleep did not come.
By the time I gave up on that too, the estate was quiet. The corridors were dim, and the garden was the only place that felt like it had air in it.
Primoria at night was not like anywhere else. The plants had colors that had no business existing, some of them glowing softly in the dark, fireflies moving between them in slow circles. The fountains ran. And underneath everything was the sound of silverbells.
It came out of nowhere, their melody too beautiful to ignore.
I followed it, which was ridiculous, and I went anyway. All because someone had once mentioned that talking to plants was therapeutic.
That was where I found him.
Caelan was sitting on the edge of the fountain. Completely and utterly alone, legs stretched out, facing the silverbells with the particular stillness of someone who had been here for a while and was in no hurry to leave.
I stood there for a moment.
His crown was gone, but the weight of it never left. It lingered in the set of his shoulders.
He held out a fist. I watched as he slowly opened it, revealing a single firefly that hovered over his palm. The soft glow flickered around his stillness before it drifted away. He didn’t reach for it. Just watched it go.
The monster feared by both realms offering gentleness to something so small it would never understand. The kind of gentleness he was never given.
My chest tightened at the thought of it.
The cruelest part wasn’t that he was kind even when the world wasn’t. It was that the world had decided long ago that it would never see it.
He looked up when I approached. Surprise moved through his expression.
“Can’t sleep?” he said.
I swallowed and forced a smile. “Thought I’d come talk to the silverbells.”
He chuckled, and I moved to sit beside him.
He was in a cotton shirt with the sleeves pushed up and what I was fairly certain were pajama trousers. I was in a nightgown and his cloak, which he noticed and said nothing about.
I glanced at his side. “How’s the wound from the Hollow?”
He touched his ribs. “Healed.”
“Healed,” I repeated.
“Fae heal faster.”
Unfair on every possible level. The slow aging. The bone structure. And now this.
“Show me,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
I believed him entirely. I had stopped feeling the echo of his pain through the bond yesterday. I wanted to see it anyway.
He raised a brow. “If you want my shirt off, you can just ask.”
I smacked his arm. He laughed and reached for the hem of his shirt and lifted.
I had been prepared for a wound.
There was no wound. There was only a physique that suggested the gods had taken a specific and personal interest in the outcome. Hard planes of his stomach, sharp lines, the lantern and firefly light doing nothing to make this easier to look at neutrally.
I was supposed to be looking for evidence of healing. It was there. Probably.
If one squinted.
“Oh,” I said.
He lowered his shirt.
“You didn’t even look.”
“I did look.” I blinked. “It healed beautifully. Very good job.”
“Where was the wound?”
I gestured at his entire torso. “Right there. I saw it.”
He made an amused sound and shook his head.
We went quiet. The garden moved around us, fireflies drifting, the sound of water, the silverbells beside us. He was looking at my face the way he did when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.
My gaze caught on the flowers behind him, and he turned.
He shifted on the bench and reached over to the planter to pluck a flower.
“My mother and I used to plant silverbells together,” he said, spinning the stem in his fingers.
“She was so particular about it. She let me dig the holes, and I was terrible at it. Wrong spacing, wrong depth. She fixed every one after I went to bed.” The corner of his mouth moved.
“I didn’t know that until one of the groundskeepers told me so. ”
The silverbells moved faintly in the wind I couldn’t feel. Their melody filled the space as if it too was reliving the memories.
“ The night before she died, she brought me to her garden and told me to listen to the bells,” he said, quieter now. “She said the bells would remember her laughing even when I couldn’t hear it anymore.”
I had scooted closer during the story without realizing it. The way one moved toward warmth.
“Do you miss her?” I asked.
I didn’t know what missing family felt like. I never remembered mine. But with how long fae lived, I couldn’t help but wonder if he missed her still.
“Every day,” he said as he gently placed the flower on the bench next to him.
“It got quieter after two centuries.” He looked at the silverbells with an expression close to guilt or shame.
“The hardest part isn’t missing her. It’s that she’s becoming harder to remember.
There are days when I can’t remember how her laugh sounded. ”
I looked at him. The glow from fireflies drifted around us as if it didn’t feel the weight of the silence that I felt.
My eyes traced the line of his jaw, the dark hair, and the eyes that turned glassy like blue ice.
He looked unguarded and vulnerable. Every bit of the mask he wore was gone.
The sight of it pressed uncomfortably against my sternum.
He was still looking at the silverbells when I closed the last of the distance. He felt me and turned. He stilled from either surprise or whatever my face was doing. His gaze dropped to my mouth the same moment I leaned in and kissed him.
Just once, carefully, like a question.
His lips were softer than I expected. The way they fit against mine was also a detail I noted. I decided that I liked kissing him immediately.
He stopped breathing and did not move.
Then I kissed him again. A little less soft, less careful.
He kissed me back properly. His hand slid to my jaw, tongue teasing the seam of my mouth before I welcomed him in.
My hands found their way into his hair, and I breathed him in like he was air that I lacked.
He kissed me like he had been starved for it. The kind of kiss that you felt somewhere behind your sternum before it reached anywhere else. My heart was doing something I had no language for, so I kissed him harder. My fingers tightened in his hair.
He made a sound against my mouth that made my toes curl and kissed me harder back. His hand found the small of my back and pulled me flush against him.
The way his mouth moved against mine pulled a sound out of me that did not ask for permission.
We had to stop. If we didn’t, I was going to tell him to lay me down right here on the fountain’s edge, which was both appealing and impractical.
The sound of footsteps from the night patrol made the decision for us.
We broke apart.
His eyes were dark and hooded in the way I was going to think about for a very long time. His hair was what I had made of it.
I considered, briefly and very genuinely, dragging him upstairs.
He gave me one more kiss instead and let it linger. Before he could pull away, I pulled on his shirt without meaning to, and he smiled against my lips.
The footsteps were not night patrol.
“It’s seventh bell, Maelor. No one is out here.” A familiar female voice sounded from somewhere behind us.
I froze, still breathless.
Caelan closed his eyes and said Maelor’s name under his breath in a tone that communicated a great many things.
I grabbed his arm and pulled. He came willingly. We pressed back behind a trellis of flowers that glowed an unreasonable shade of purple and smelled overwhelmingly of honey. I made a note to come back for those.
Brie came through the garden path with a bottle of wine in one hand and Maelor’s arm in the other. Maelor, who could lift a wagon if required, was dragging his feet as if he were resisting and failing.
They sat on the fountain’s edge where we had been.
Brie looked down and pressed a hand to the stone. “Hmm.”
“What?”
“It’s warm.”
Maelor looked around the garden with the instincts of a soldier.
Caelan and I pressed back against the trellis.
“Someone was just here,” Maelor said.
“It’s a garden,” Brie said. “People sit in gardens and leave. Will you please just sit.”
I tried to find a gap between the flowers. My fingers pushed through the thick vines.
“This is an invasion of privacy,” Caelan said from behind me.
I ignored him.
“I’m serious about the eastern pass,” Maelor said. “We’re at peace. There’s nothing to fortify.”
“You were there for less than a week.” Brie made a dismissive gesture.