Beron’s seat was so vast it took us three days to enter, pass through, and clear it. Lucien led us through the outskirts, tense at every call and rustle.
The Forest House was a sprawling complex, Lucien informed me during the few times we risked or bothered to speak to each other. It had been built in and around the trees and rocks, and only its uppermost levels were visible above the ground. Below, it tunneled a few levels into the stone. But its sprawl generated its size. You might walk from one end of the House to the other and it would take you half the morning. There were layers and circles of sentries ringing it: in the trees, on the ground, atop the moss-coated shingles and stones of the House itself.
No enemies approached Beron’s home without his knowledge. None left without his permission.
I knew we’d passed beyond Lucien’s known map of their patrol routes and stations when his shoulders sagged.
Mine were slumped already.
I had barely slept, only letting myself do so when Lucien’s breathing slid into a different, deeper rhythm. I knew I couldn’t keep it up for long, but without the ability to shield, to sense any danger …
I wondered if Rhys was looking for me. If he’d felt the silence.
I should have gotten a message out. Told him I was going and how to find me.
The faebane—that was why the bond had sounded so muffled. Perhaps I should have killed Ianthe outright.
But what was done was done.
I was rubbing at my aching eyes, taking a moment’s rest beneath our new bounty: an apple tree, laden with fat, succulent fruit.
I’d filled my bag with what I could fit inside. Two cores already lay discarded beside me, the sweet rotting scent as lulling as the droning of the bees gorging themselves on fallen apples. A third apple was already primed and poised for eating atop my outstretched legs.
After what the Hybern royals had done, I should have sworn off apples forever, but hunger had always blurred lines for me.
Lucien, sitting a few feet away, chucked his fourth apple into the bushes as I bit into mine. “The farmlands and fields are near,” he announced. “We’ll have to stay out of sight. My father doesn’t pay well for his crops, and the land-workers will earn any extra coin they can.”
“Even selling out the location of one of the High Lord’s sons?”
“Especially that way.”
“They didn’t like you?”
His jaw tightened. “As the youngest of seven sons, I wasn’t particularly needed or wanted. Perhaps it was a good thing. I was able to study for longer than my father allowed my brothers before shoving them out the door to rule over some territory within our lands, and I could train for as long as I liked, since no one believed I’d be dumb enough to kill my way up the long list of heirs. And when I grew bored with studying and fighting … I learned what I could of the land from its people. Learned about the people, too.”
He eased to his feet with a groan, his unbound hair glimmering as the midday sun overhead set the blood and wine hues aglow.
“I’d say that sounds more High-Lord-like than the life of an idle, unwanted son.”
A long, steely look. “Did you think it was mere hatred that prompted my brothers to do their best to break and kill me?”
Despite myself, a shudder rippled down my spine. I finished off the apple and uncoiled to my feet, plucking another off a low-hanging branch. “Would you want it—your father’s crown?”
“No one’s ever asked me that,” Lucien mused as we moved on, dodging fallen, rotting apples. The air was sticky-sweet. “The bloodshed that would be required to earn that crown wouldn’t be worth it. Neither would its festering court. I’d gain a crown—only to rule over a crafty, two-faced people.”
“Lord of Foxes,” I said, snorting as I remembered that mask he’d once worn. “But you never answered my question—about why the people here would sell you out.”
The air ahead lightened, and a golden field of barley undulated toward a distant tree line.
“After Jesminda, they would.”
Jesminda. He’d never spoken her name.
Lucien slid between the swaying, bobbing stalks. “She was one of them.” The words were barely audible over the sighing barley. “And when I didn’t protect her … It was a betrayal of their trust, too. I ran to some of their houses while fleeing my brothers. They turned me out for what I let happen to her.”
Waves of gold and ivory rolled around us, the sky a crisp, unmarred blue.
“I can’t blame them for it,” he said.
We cleared the fertile valley by the late afternoon. When Lucien offered to stop for the night, I insisted we keep going—right into the steep foothills that leaped into gray, snowcapped mountains that marked the start of the shared range with the Winter Court. If we could get over the border in a day or two, perhaps my powers would have returned enough to contact Rhys—or winnow the rest of the way home.
The hike wasn’t an easy one.
Great, craggy boulders made up the ascent, flecked with moss and long, white grasses that hissed like adders. The wind ripped at our hair, the temperature dropping the higher we climbed.
Tonight … We might have to risk a fire tonight. Just to stay alive.
Lucien was panting as we scaled a hulking boulder, the valley sprawling away behind, the wood a tangled river of color beyond it. There had to be a pass into the range at some point—out of sight.
“How are you not winded,” he panted, hauling himself onto the flat top.
I shoved back the hair that had torn free of my braid to whip my face. “I trained.”
“I gathered that much after you took on Dagdan and walked away from it.”
“I had the element of surprise on my side.”
“No,” Lucien said quietly as I reached for a foothold in the next boulder. “That was all you.” My nails barked as I dug my fingers into the rock and heaved myself up. Lucien added, “You had my back—with them, with Ianthe. Thank you.”
The words hit something low in my gut, and I was glad for the wind that kept roaring around us, if only to hide the burning in my eyes.
I slept—finally.
With the crackling fire in our latest cave, the heat and the relative remoteness were enough to finally drag me under.
And in my dreams, I think I swam through Lucien’s mind, as if some small ember of my power was at last returning.
I dreamed of our cozy fire, and the craggy walls, the entire space barely big enough to fit us and the fire. I dreamed of the howling, dark night beyond, of all the sounds that Lucien so carefully sorted through while he kept watch.
His attention slid to me at one point and lingered.
I had never known how young, how human I looked when I slept. My braid was a rope over my shoulder, my mouth slightly parted, my face haggard with days of little rest and food.
I dreamed that he removed his cloak and added it over my blanket.
Then I ebbed away, flowing out of his head as my dreams shifted and sailed elsewhere. I let a sea of stars rock me into sleep.
A hand gripped my face so hard the groaning of my bones jolted me awake.