Chapter Twenty-One Frejara
The days no longer pressed so hard at the edges.
They passed, not easily, but without the constant bristle of teeth.
I still woke to the sea breeze clawing through the beams and the ache of half-healed wounds pulling at my skin – but something in me had loosened.
Not stilled, not softened, just uncoiled enough that I no longer spent each hour scanning for a way out.
The maps I kept in my head—of exits, of weaknesses, of the possible arc of a blade through the dark—had begun to blur.
I still watched Mathias, still measured the space between us when he approached, but sometimes my attention drifted, unguarded.
And Maeve, with her broth-scented hair and the careful hands of someone used to tending what’s broken, no longer felt like a threat masked as care.
I caught myself listening to her muttering as if it were familiar – and that, somehow, disturbed me more than the rope ever had.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise he’d stopped tying my hands.
The door still locked each night, the bolt drawn with that same careful scrape, but the binds were gone.
And whereas the rope still sat there, twined neatly by the satchel near the archway out, it was now left untouched in a way that felt purposeful rather than forgotten.
At first, I thought he’d meant to return for them and simply hadn’t.
But the second night passed the same, and the third.
And by the fourth, I lay there long after the fire had burned down to embers, staring at the dark beams overhead and thinking not of the missing rope, but of the choice behind its absence.
When I finally asked—half curious, half trying to catch him in whatever game he thought he was playing—he didn’t answer right away. Just glanced toward the fire, then back to me, and asked, “Where would you go?”
It wasn’t unkind, nor was it to corner me.
It was just a simple question, dropped into the space between us like a stone into water.
And I found I didn’t know. Not because the paths weren’t there – they were – but because none of them led anywhere I could walk without him.
The cliffs offered no passage. The marshes beyond were crawling with eyes that dreamed of my head on a spike.
And the townsfolk would not skip a beat dragging me to the gallows if they thought that whatever covenant Mathias and I had was broken.
That was the truth of it – sharp as a knife and lodged just as deep.
He spoke like someone with no use for performance.
Each word was offered with care, never more than he meant, but never less either.
Over time, I began to test them less – not because I’d grown complacent, but because I couldn’t find the cracks.
His answers were always the same shape as his actions, and there was something in that steadiness that pulled more from me than I intended to give.
I found myself speaking of things I hadn’t thought about in years—the weight of a command banner in the wind, the sound of boots sinking into the floodplains of the Ironvein River—and didn’t pull back when he listened.
We sat nearer now; the distance between us had thinned, and though no word passed about it, neither of us moved to reclaim the gap.
Sometimes it happened by the fire, when one of us shifted and our arms brushed together in passing; other times on the broken steps at the back of the temple, where we sat with the dawn creeping over the sea and the warmth of the light caressed our skin.
The air between us had changed – not charged, not tender, just quietly altered – and I began to notice the small things more keenly: the sound of his breath in the cold, how the weight of him shifted when he leaned forward, the rough brush of his hand against my arm when a gust sent a scatter of ash through the room, his fingers at my sleeve for a beat longer than needed, and I didn’t draw away.
And Maeve. Maeve came each day with the same deliberate calm, a bowl of water balanced in one hand, the sharp, clean scent of herbs trailing after her.
She examined the bruising where the branch had struck, her fingers firm but careful, as she cleaned the raw skin around my wrists with practised ease.
She asked whether the dizziness had passed, whether the ache behind my eyes still came and went, and I found myself answering.
I’d memorised the rhythm of her hands by then—the sure way she folded the linen, the press of balm smoothed in slow circles across my skin.
One morning—impossible to tell which, as I had already stopped trying to count how many had passed—she adjusted the collar of my shirt to check for bruising along my upper back, and her fingers paused.
Not for long, but long enough. Her hand remained there, resting lightly against the edge of my shoulder, while her gaze fixed on the skin right underneath it.
I could feel the intent in the way she traced the lines with her eyes as if trying to place them against something she had once known.
She didn’t look at my face, just lowered the fabric again with that same quiet precision, then reached for the bowl as though nothing had changed.
But I had felt the shift – subtle, measured, and unmistakable – and for the rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way her hand had stilled.
The mark had long since become part of the landscape of my body – a thing I no longer noticed until it stirred, low and smouldering beneath my skin.
It didn’t ache like a wound or pull like a scar, rising and receding on its own terms. Some days it went untouched, no more than a faint warmth curling beneath the shoulder.
But other times it flared without warning – not with pain exactly, but with pressure, as if something beneath the surface remembered its purpose and meant to remind me.
Maeve never commented on the birthmark and never reached for it directly.
But the next time she peeled the fabric away, I saw it again – the flicker that passed through her gaze, the brief hold of breath before her hand resumed its careful path.
She slowed as she passed over the mark, her fingertips brushing across it with a focus so precise it felt more like study than care.
I began to watch her more closely when she came, not just for the work she did, but for the way she moved around that single spot over my shoulder – the way her attention caught on it, again and again.
That night, the wind died early. Even the gulls – ever restless in their circling cries – had gone quiet, as if some unspoken pact had been struck between sea and sky.
The fire in the hearth had burned down to its last faint core.
I lay back on the pallet, the rough weave of the blanket drawn up to my neck, one hand folded across my chest, the other curled in the space between my ribs and hipbone.
The rope sat untouched in the corner. The bolt had slid into place long ago.
There was only the hush of the night and the warmth still lingering where Maeve’s salve had been worked into the skin of my wrists.
My eyes closed without resistance. And in the dark behind them, my thoughts scattered like falling leaves before sleep took hold.
It came gently at first—not with fire, pain, or a sudden cold, but with the absence of all those things.
As if the world had slipped its tether, and I’d gone with it, drawn into a current I never learned to fight.
Time thinned. Weight shifted. And when I opened my eyes again, the roof beams were gone.
The salt-damp walls, the coil of smoke, the faint creak of wind through stone – all gone.
I was no longer in the ruin but somewhere else entirely, somewhere entirely wrong.
The air struck me first, thick and rancid with old iron and scorched stone, sinking down the back of my throat.
The light came next—if it could be called light—dim and pulsing and blood-warm, casting long shadows that moved not with the flicker of flame but the slow, unblinking drag of something alive.
I was standing, not lying, not dreaming – standing, awake and aware in a place that stank of memory and ruin, and I knew, with the certainty that lives in the marrow and nowhere else, that I should not be here.
The chamber breathed around me – not with air, but with a weight that settled low in the chest, as if the walls themselves were watching. Slick with shadow, they seemed to close inward with every blink, each surface pressing tighter, resentful of being seen.
And then I saw her.
She lay at the centre of it all, crumpled on the floor, like something discarded after use.
Her nightdress was torn and soaked dark through the middle; blood pooled thick beneath her hips and belly in heavy arcs, as though her body had tried to claw its way back from whatever had taken it and failed.
Her fingers twitched—barely—where they pressed against her midsection, and the breath that raised her ribs was shallow and ragged, still tethered by the cruel grip of something unfinished.
And standing above her, still as a monolith, was the Queen Mowgara.
My Mother. Her hands were coated to the wrist in blood that gleamed in the firelight like lacquer, her expression hollow of triumph or regret, her presence swallowing the air like gravity.
But it was what stood behind her that made the breath catch raw at the back of my throat.