Chapter 16
The cottage felt strangely quiet in the days after Woolf arrived, as if the whole place were holding its breath. Ilys felt time slipping away; worry of her absence at the Sanctum pricked her. Yet Rowenna lay pale and hollowed, her limbs loose with fatigue, curls clinging damp to her temples.
She slept more than she spoke, breath rasping low as her body remembered itself. Sometimes she stirred and whispered nonsense. Sometimes she reached blindly and whispered, “Are they all right?” before sinking again.
Ilys had never felt more ill-equipped and displaced.
The child—Woolf, as the name had somehow clung—seemed impossibly small. His fists curled like little seeds. His mouth opened and closed in wordless complaint. His eyes, when they opened, were dark and fathomless, like rain water pooled in a hollow stone.
Ilys held him like she might break him by thinking too loudly. Her hands, made for sword-hilts and saddles, were all wrong for this kind of softness. She hovered when he cried. She flinched when he rooted. She cleaned him like one might disarm a trap.
“You are a damp, shrieking mystery,” she whispered once, eyes narrowed as she changed a nappy with the delicacy of a mutt braiding hair.
But Rowenna needed rest. And no one else was coming.
So, Ilys fed Woolf awkwardly, with one arm and half a prayer, rocked him in the creaky old chair by the hearth, and sang nonsense songs in a voice she hadn’t used since she was a girl.
She burned the porridge twice. She kept the fire going.
She learned, slowly, the difference between a hunger cry and a tired one.
And Woolf, for his part, tolerated her.
Somewhere in the second night, after feeding and tending to Spire, Ilys sat curled with the child in her lap, half asleep. Woolf had stopped crying some time ago and now blinked at her with unnerving calm, studying her veil to find the face beneath.
“You don’t know who I am,” Ilys remarked. “And I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Woolf made a soft snuffling sound and smacked his lips in approval, apparently unbothered.
Ilys touched his brow with one calloused thumb. “But you’re not so awful. For an animal that came screaming into the world.” Her voice, roughened to a hush, barely reached the air. “You’re not what I expected,” she admitted. “And yet… here you are. Stealing hours from me like it’s your right.”
She didn’t realize she’d begun to sway, back and forth in the chair, a rhythm older than memory.
By morning, when Rowenna finally woke, bleary, sore, and blinking against the gray light, Ilys dowsed in the chair, Woolf curled against her chest, fast asleep.
And Ilys, though she never quite said it aloud, had already begun to fall in love with the little thief who now slept like he had always belonged in the crook of her arm.
The days grew longer, and Rowenna began to rise.
She moved with caution at first, hand catching on every surface, breath hitching at each turn, each step.
But strength returned to her by degrees, like sunlight returning to a frost-hardened field.
She no longer slept through Woolf’s cries.
She hummed as she swept, stopped to pick dried herbs from the rafters, lifted her son with a surety that spoke of blood-knowledge.
Ilys watched from the table, elbow-deep in laundry, and felt a mystified emotion bloom and twist inside her.
She told herself it was pride. Relief. Maybe it was.
But there was a sting to it too.
Rowenna had her arms back now. Her voice, her footing. She didn’t need Ilys for every small thing anymore.
So when Rowenna paused near the hearth one evening, babe in arms and cheeks flushed from movement, Ilys crossed the room and held out her hands.
“Give me my Woolf.”
Rowenna turned, amused. “You know we’ll have to call him another name eventually.” She sighed, pressing her lips to the child’s forehead. “Leif wants to name him after his father, Beck.” Rowenna furrowed her brow and looked down at the boy in her arms. “I think it fits him. Sturdy little thing.”
Ilys took him carefully, holding him close against her chest. “Look at this head of hair," she grumbled. “He’s got more than most grown men. Wild as brambles. He’s my Woolf.”
Rowenna lethargic smile manifested dotingly. “Then he’ll be both.”
She brushed her knuckles gently across his cheek, then looked up at Ilys, fondness and knowing in her gaze. “You are Ilys,” she said, “and Veilwalker. My boy is Beck… and Woolf.”
Outside, the wind stirred the trees, whispering its own old names. Inside, the world felt small, and safe, and real. Ilys looked down at the boy, Beck-Woolf, with his unruly hair and tiny, clutching fingers. He blinked up at her, solemn and strange.
“Both, then,” she dictated. “Lucky thing.”
The child yawned, soft and sudden, and the room seemed to still, as if even the world had paused to witness this very small, very loud person begin to stretch into his many names.
The hooves were too fast.
Rowenna looked up from the cradle near the hearth, her brow creasing. “Is someone—?”
Ilys bounded to the door.
She opened it just as Lord Veylen dismounted, his cloak a wet, angry flare in the mist. The horse frothed at the mouth, flanks heaving. The man hadn’t ridden, he had hunted.
Veylen crossed the yard in four long strides and struck Ilys full across the face. The crack of it echoed through the still morning like a snapped branch.
She didn’t fall. Her head jerked sideways, blood blooming along her lip, but she held her stance. Inside the cottage, Rowenna stood frozen, clutching Woolf close to her chest.
“Did you think,” Veylen hissed, voice low and furious, “that there was anywhere in this kingdom you could go where I wouldn’t find you?”
Ilys didn’t answer.
He stepped closer, breath hot with cold fury.
“You, who wear Death’s mark, you think that earns you privilege?
That it gives you rights?” His gloved hand reached for her cloak, bunching the fabric near her collar.
“You forget yourself. And if you think I won’t teach you the cost of your disobedience by turning this cottage to ash, you haven’t been listening. ”
Ilys’s hand twitched at her side, but she did not reach for a blade. Not with Rowenna behind her. Not with the child.
Instead, her voice came low and even. “Surrender your threats.”
Veylen stilled.
“I will come,” she said. “I’ll gather my things.”
He stared at her for a long, hateful moment. Then he released her cloak with a sharp flick, straightening his spine.
“Good,” he said. “Obedient, at last. The King will be pleased.”
He turned, already striding back through the fog toward his mount. “Dusk,” he called over his shoulder. “If you make me wait, I’ll make you regret it.”
The horse reared once as the odious man mounted, then vanished into the mist.
Ilys stood in the doorway, the taste of blood in her mouth. Behind her, the cottage lounged still and warm and small, the last place she had ever known peace.
Guilt curled in her chest, nestling in its favorite crevice. She cursed the weak naivete that had brought her here and made her think she deserved such. She forced her feet forward, already grieving the last of her love she had to give.
You are too soft. She heard Grim’s voice in her head.
And it had almost cost her everything once more.