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Rhysand

I did not plan to see her.

I had planned to endure Tamlin’s posturing at the border conclave, listen to the human queens snarl with painted mouths and unpainted knives, and count the minutes until I could return to Velaris, to starlight and sanity. I had planned to say as little as possible so I wouldn’t say too much.

And then I walked into the sun-bleached hall Tamlin had chosen for his diplomacy and found her standing beside him, his hand a possessive brand at the small of her back.

For a suspended heartbeat, the world narrowed to the mortal woman with gold-touched hair and eyes the green of moss after rain.

The bond struck like a bell.

It wasn’t a roar. Not a thunderclap. It was the quiet, devastating sound of something ancient recognizing itself. A cord tightening from some long-forgotten point in my ribs, a thread pulled taut. My vision doubled—the room as it was and the room as it could never be again.

“Rhys,” Mor murmured from my left, too low for anyone but me and my sentries to hear. I felt Cassian go very still at my right. Azriel did not move at all. My siphons hardly hummed. Only the thing in my chest rose from its long kneel and looked.

I did not move. The High Lord of the Night Court did not sway. Did not stagger.

I let my eyes go lazy with indolence and let my mouth curve into the kind smile that always left our enemies guessing. “High Lord,” I said to Tamlin, and managed not to put my hands around his throat.

Tamlin looked older than the last time I had seen him up close. He had been handsome once in a way that was careless: sunlight and field-fresh arrogance. Now the lines about his mouth were cut with a bitter chisel. He wore pale green like armor. He placed that hand on the mortal’s spine as if to say see, I am trusted by mortals, I am redeemed, the world loves me again.

“Rhysand,” he answered, and if he heard the hollowness in his own voice he did not show it. “Welcome to the Spring Court.”

The mortal queen—Elara Vance, a corner of my mind supplied, because I did not come to my enemies’ homes without knowing who sat at their tables—turned her face to me. Not shyly. Not boldly. Curiously, head tipped as if listening for a sound only she could hear.

I pulled. Only a whisper. The smallest test against the bond. Do you feel me?

Her pupils dilated. Just a fraction. Tamlin’s fingers tightened against her back.

She looked. Not like a woman noticing an intruder. She looked like someone turning toward warmth in a cold room.

A slow and terrible triumph uncurled in me. Then, just as quickly, shame washed it out. She was mortal. Young. Twenty, Azriel’s shadows supplied. Way younger than the decades I had spent chained Under the Mountain. Her mouth was as soft as the petal of a rose in a book a child might press and forget. She did not know what a mating bond was. Her kind told stories of love that were either legend or transaction. In the mortal courts, the word mate meant what a father wished and a treaty permitted.

It did not mean this.

“The Night Court thanks Spring for its hospitality,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at her. I did not try.

If Tamlin noticed, he pretended not to. He extended his free hand, not to me but to the dais, to the chairs aligned like figures on a game board. “Let us get to it. Our friends from the human realm are impatient to return beyond the wall.”

Our friends. The mortal queens—five today; the sixth had sent a proxy who already looked bored—sat in a neat half-circle. Jewels that could buy villages dripped from their wrists. Only the youngest wore none.

Her gown was a simple, exquisite thing: cream silk that skimmed a slender frame, the fabric catching every breath of wind from the open arches. No corsetry. No crass display. The neckline was high enough to be modest and low enough to whisper I know you’re looking. Her hair was not pinned within an inch of its life as the other queens’ were; it fell in waves to her waist, sun caught in gold threads. Her crown—if it could be called that—was a circlet of wrought vines. Spring’s touch. Tamlin’s pride.

She had not put it on herself. I could tell. There is a way a person’s hands set the thing that means I am mine upon their head. There is a different way when someone else sets it there for you.

“Your Majesty,” Mor said smoothly, inclining her head to the eldest queen, though none of these women were our anything. “We’re honored.”

The eldest queen smiled with the brittle dignity of a woman who had starved and learned to hide the hunger. “Lady Morrigan,” she said. “High Lord. Generals.” Her gaze flicked to Cassian and Azriel, lingering a beat longer than propriety on their wings before returning to Tamlin. “Shall we begin?”

We all sat. The table was long and white as a bone. Tamlin took the head. I took the other. It made a perfect, ugly symmetry. She stood behind Tamlin’s shoulder until he made a show of drawing out the chair next to him. She sat with a polite nod, kept her hands folded in her lap, and said nothing.

I said nothing. I trained all my attention on the matters at hand so that I would not put my fist through the table.

Borders. Grain levies. Trade routes through the southwestern marsh. Mortal villages struck by poachers from the Autumn Court and reparations thereunto. Tamlin’s emissaries droned, and the queens responded with the practiced outrage of rulers who had learned that outrage buttered the bread better than gratitude. Mor cut through the worst of it with charm that could peel paint from a wall. Cassian and Azriel played good cop, silent cop. I let my shadows listen to everything we weren’t being told.

And the bond hummed. 

I could feel, twenty feet away, when Elara’s breath hitched. I could feel when fear, fine and filigreed, threaded through her composure—the mild panic of a mortal woman in a room of predators pretending to be civilized. It was not that she was fragile. She had more spine in her than half the men at the table. It was that she could die. Easily. Right here, if someone decided to make a point. And that I could not tolerate.

I kept my eyes on a parchment about river rights. “Night will reinforce the western posts,” I said. “We’ll take the cost in trade grain rather than coin.” I signed. Tamlin signed with a flourish designed to show how steady his hands were. He had no idea how he shook.

“High Lord Rhysand.” The eldest queen again. “And what does the Night Court ask of our mortal realm in return for this generosity?”

I let my mouth curve. “Only that you continue to remind your people we are not the monsters your grandmothers were told we were.” I did not look at Elara when I said it. I did not have to feel her attention snag on me like cloth on a thorn.

Tamlin’s fingers on the table—tap, tap. “Night is generous with words,” he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling in a way his court had once found so charming. “What of action?”

“Action?” I repeated lazily. “We’ve taken action every day since the snow melted.”

“On your borders,” he said, the green of his eyes hardening. “On our border, Night is… less present.”

Cassian huffed a sound that might have been a laugh. Azriel did not bother to blink.

“If Spring requires aid,” I said, still not looking at the woman whose pulse I could hear over the debate, “I would be happy to send a contingent. I have two generals growing restless.”

Tamlin’s jaw worked. He didn’t want my soldiers near his lands. Near his people. Near her.

A thought slid through me, slick and unwelcome: Did he know? Not the bond—he couldn’t know that; even most Fae didn’t believe in it until it throttled them. But did he know the danger of letting his prize look too long at the dark?

I pulled again. Not harder. Not bolder. Just a second brush, a question pressed to skin. She turned. There was a quick, almost alarmed breath through parted lips. She looked away at once, cheeks flushing.

Tamlin almost smiled. As if enjoying the prettiness of it.

Mor said something that made the eldest queen laugh. Papers shuffled. The sun moved along the floor like a contented animal.

When the meeting broke for a mid-day recess, I stood and said, “A walk,” to no one. Cassian and Azriel fell into step behind me. Mor drifted deliberately toward the queens, easing herself into their circle as if she’d been born there.

We came to the outer colonnade where ivy climbed the pillars and the air smelled of honeysuckle and cut grass. Far below, the meadows rippled like green silk. The day was a painting of Spring Court virtue.

Cassian exhaled under his breath. “So.”

“So,” I said.

Azriel’s shadows coiled around his boots and vanished again, as if respecting a sanctity. “You’re certain.”

I did not answer him. I looked out at Tamlin’s perfect world and held my hands open at my sides because they ached to close around someone’s throat. “Her name is Elara Vance.”

Cassian’s eyes flicked to me. “The mortal.”

“The mortal queen,” I corrected. It felt obscene on my tongue—queen and mortal and mine.

Cassian’s siphons glinted. “You going to tell her?”

“Today?” I enjoyed how offended the question sounded even in my own head. “No.”

Azriel said nothing. Which meant he was thinking everything I did not want to hear.

“She likely thinks love equals mate,” I said, hearing how flat those words were and hating Tamlin for it. “He told her it does. Of course he did.” I imagined Tamlin, all contrition and soft hands, saying it like a prayer: you’re my mate, you’re safe, stay. I imagined how a girl who had been traded across a wall would need something to make sense of it.

Cassian swore, a low, ugly sound. “He—”

“He is who he has always been,” I said.

Neither of them was foolish enough to tell me I needed to think clearly. I was thinking with clarity so sharp it cut.

“I will not take her,” I said to the meadow, to the honeysuckle, to my brothers. “I will not drag a mortal from the life she was given and make her the subject of every rumor from here to the Dawn Court.”

Cassian scuffed the toe of his boot against the tile. “Who said anything about dragging?”

Azriel’s shadows slid over the railing like smoke. “There is Calanmai in three nights.”

I turned. “And?”

“Tradition draws crowds,” he said softly. “And separates them.” He didn’t look at me. “She will be here.”

“Az,” Cassian warned.

Azriel’s mouth twisted in something not unlike pity. “If he parades her around that night, the bond will drown you both.”

He was wrong. The bond wasn’t a drowning. It was a tide. It could lift or carry or crush. And I had spent a lifetime learning to breathe underwater.

“Three nights,” I said, and let the words be an answer to something else entirely.

We did not stay in the manor. I would not sleep within those walls if I could help it. We made our base in a hunting lodge Tamlin never used, a place I had courted death in once with a different face. My sentries rotated like clockwork. My dreams, when I caught an hour of sleep, were empty of mercy.

On the evening of Calanmai, the sky blazed gold, then pink, then violet as if trying on gowns. Spring Court villagers gathered around bonfires, their faces bright with wine and superstition. I wore no crown and no insignia. The Night Court did not attend another court’s revels in any official capacity. If the High Lord of Spring noticed a well-dressed stranger strolling his fields as twilight fell, he did not announce it.

Music rose; drums in a steady, intimate thrum. The rites would be sung later inside the trees by those given to old things. Out here, the celebration was harmless pageantry: flowers woven in hair, food piled high, girls and boys painting each other’s cheeks and pretending not to notice how often the other looked back.

I felt her before I saw her. A tension on the world. A thread gone tight enough to sing.

She moved at the edge of the crowd, unaccompanied, head bare. No guards. No Lucien. No Tamlin. My first instinct was wrath—how could he be so careless?—and then I realized the truth: like every animal, Tamlin kept the things he wanted most under his eye until he wanted to show them off. Tonight, he would appear with her on his arm when it served him, after she had been left to wander and feel small among people who would look at her like a novelty.

She didn’t look small.

Elara walked with her hands folded loosely at her waist, letting the scene pass through her like a breeze. The chalk along the path had smeared from dancing feet. She stepped around the worst of it without thinking. Her dress tonight was a soft green, no Spring stamp this time—subtle embroidery at the hem, nothing to snag in branches. She wore no jewels. The firelight turned her hair to copper and gold. She stopped at a stall where a child, no more than eight, was painting clay whistles and hummed with him until he laughed. The bond hummed with him, too, as if delighted by the sound.

I leaned against the rough trunk of an oak until bark dug into my shoulders and said, to myself, to the moon, to my restraint, do not ruin this. Let her be a girl at a party. Let her eat a sugared fig. Let her imagine that the world holds no teeth.

The drums changed.

A subtle shift, but everyone who had grown up in this land heard it: the moment before the great old rite, when the revelers either drifted home or toward the forest depending on their appetite for myth. People began to pair off, laughter growing louder to drown nerves. The air tasted like smoke and something green.

Elara did not move toward the trees. She drifted away from the main fire, toward a copse where fireflies sparked like fallen stars. No guards still. I didn’t see the event as a trap. Tamlin wouldn’t waste his theatricality here. Still, I sent a thought down the tether that linked me to my sentries. Eyes out.

From the darkness between two birches, a pair of revelers stumbled. Drunk. Older. One of them saw Elara’s crownless head, her smooth dress, and the way she wasn’t watching her own back. He smiled without mirth.

“Lost?” he asked.

Elara’s hand tightened where it had been loosely curved. “No,” she said, politely. “Just—fresh air.”

“Fresh air’s better in the woods.” He took a step toward her.

I was across the clearing before the second step landed.

“Gentlemen,” I said mildly. “I believe the lady didn’t ask for a guide.”

Both males turned. The drunker scowled. “Who asked you?”

“I ask me often,” I said. “It’s a character flaw.”

Elara’s eyes went wide. Not at the males. At me. Not fear. Startled recognition. The bond quivered.

“It’s all right,” she told the males, and to her credit, her voice was even. “I’m going back.”

“She’s with me,” I said, smiling at them in a way that would not read as a threat unless you knew what my smiles meant. “Unfortunately for you.”

They looked me up and down, saw what I wanted them to see—an idle lordling in black with hands too clean—and sauntered off with a muttered oath. I didn’t shift my weight until they were gone.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” I said finally, and hated how Tamlin that sounded.

“I’m not,” she said, and the words came out before she seemed to think. She flushed. “I mean—I didn’t realize the bonfire would be so…”

“Loud,” I supplied.

Her mouth tugged at one corner. She took a breath—it steadied her shoulders—and looked me fully in the face. “We met at the council.”

“We did,” I said. We recognized something at the council.

She glanced past me, toward the bonfires, then back. I didn’t crowd her. I stood exactly where I was and let her decide how close the world felt. Her eyes were green and soft and steady. Not weak. Steady like a hand you’d let hold a knife at your throat because you knew it would only cut if you asked.

“I never got your name,” she said.

Of course she did not. Tamlin would not have let it be spoken near her if he could help it.

“Rhys,” I said. I waited.

“Elara,” she said, and there was a small pride in it, as if daring me to mock the mortal syllables.

“Elara,” I repeated, and the bond shook itself like an animal after rain.

Her throat worked. “High Lord,” she added, a beat late, as if the title had only just joined the face.

I inclined my head. “Only if we are performing for an audience.”

“You’re always performing for an audience,” she said, then winced. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”

I nearly laughed. “It was honest.”

“I’ve heard,” she said, “that the Night Court delights in honesty.”

“Who told you that?” I asked blandly, curious despite myself.

“Someone who wants me to believe that your kindness is just a different shape of trap.” She colored again. “I’m sorry. It has been… everyone wants me to believe something.”

I let a breath move through me. “And you?”

“I want to believe I’m not a fool,” she said simply.

There are declarations wrapped in lace. And there are declarations wrapped in plain cloth that cut more cleanly. I found myself wishing I could put a cloak over her shoulders, not because she looked cold but because the night had teeth and I knew them all by name.

“Walk with me,” I said, because it was the most innocent thing I could offer.

She studied my hand where it hung at my side, not extended. Her mouth softened as if at some private decision. “All right.”

We did not go into the forest. I would not walk a mortal deeper into Spring’s rites. Instead, I led her along the edge of the meadow, where the firelight failed and the stars began. The night insects sang a thousand small songs. Someone behind us laughed too loudly. Another someone wept. Calanmai made people remember what they wanted and what they didn’t have.

“You don’t look like the paintings,” she said after a time.

“I hope not,” I said. “The painter would have been very bored.”

She smiled, only a little. “The Night Court is always in the dark in the paintings. You know—wings and whips and masks.”

“Spring is always full of flowers,” I said. “Even when it isn’t.”

Her head tipped. “Is it?”

“Full of flowers?” I glanced at the bonfire garlands: roses bought, not gathered. “Sometimes.”

We reached a low stone wall, warm on its top from the day’s heat. I sat upon it and gestured for her to do the same. She perched as if prepared to flee, then realized how ridiculous that was and relaxed a fraction. The bond eased with her, like a muscle unclenching.

She wore a cologne of nothing. Humans smelled like the truth.

“Why are you out here?” I asked. Not accusatory. Curious the way I would ask a star why it chose this slice of sky.

“I told you,” she said, but there was a rueful lilt. “Loud.” She traced a line in the dust with one careful finger. “Everyone here knows what they’re doing. The steps of the dances. The jokes you only get if you were born in these fields. I—”

“You were born with a crown,” I finished. “Those come with different steps.”

Her laugh surprised us both. “It wasn’t so heavy when I first put it on.”

“Crowns rarely are when we’re young enough to trust the mirror.”

She glanced at me sidelong. “And when do they get heavy?”

“When someone else starts reaching for them,” I said. “Or when we realize what we’ve been asked to carry underneath them.”

Elara’s hands stilled. The night pressed closer. She did not speak for a long moment.

“I thought love meant… everything at once,” she said finally. “Like the stories.”

“And now?” I kept my voice a safe, even thing. A hand open on the table.

“And now I think love is… different shapes. And some of those shapes are very easy to confuse with cages.”

Tamlin’s hand on her back. The circlet set upon her hair by someone else’s fingers.

The bond pulled, insistent as a tide, tell her—

No. Not like this. Not in the garden of the male who would turn the world to ash to keep what he thought was his.

“What does it feel like?” she asked suddenly, and I understood at once we were now in dangerous water.

“What does what feel like?” I asked, though the bond had already answered.

She looked at my hands, the rings on them. “To be Fae,” she said. “To live so long that a night like this is only a pinprick on a map. To know that the thing you want will still be there tomorrow. That you have a thousand tomorrows to try again.”

I could have lied. I could have said that was exactly what it was like, and we could have been two polite creatures sharing a lie in the dark like a blanket. Instead I said, “It feels like having a thousand tomorrows to make a single mistake.”

Her breath went out. “Oh.”

“And sometimes,” I added softly, “it feels like today is the only day that will ever be, and if you do not say the thing you will never forgive yourself.” I looked at her. Not unkindly. There is a way to look at a person that says I see you without saying you are mine.

“Say it, then,” she whispered, almost like a dare she wished I wouldn’t take.

I smiled at the stars. “You don’t know me.”

“No,” she agreed. That honesty again. “But I—” She cut herself off. “We met at the council. And I—felt—” She made a helpless gesture with her hand, something like a musician groping for a note. “It’s nothing. I’m being foolish.”

“The first truth we say out loud always feels like foolishness,” I said, and knew I was not helping the cause of my restraint. “You felt a thread.”

Her eyes flew to mine, green steady and bright. The fireflies hummed.

“You aren’t mad,” she said. Not a question.

“I am always mad, Elara,” I said mildly, and saw her catch on the use of her name as though it had landed in her chest and rung the bell there. “But not at you.”

“At who, then?”

“At men who think they can make the world obey by putting their hands on it.” I could taste my own bitterness. I swallowed it. “At history. At myself, sometimes.”

She looked down at her hands. Night gathered in her hair like a benediction. “I don’t know what the stories mean by mate,” she said at last, so soft I might have pretended I didn’t hear it. “Everyone says it like it’s… destiny. The first time I heard the word I thought it was just another name for love. So when—when he said—” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m asking you.”

“You’re asking if there is a word that can make a choice for you,” I said gently. “There isn’t.”

Her throat worked around an audible swallow. “So it’s not… magic?”

“Magic exists,” I said. “Some of it cruel. Some of it kind. Some of it simply… is. But even the oldest magic doesn’t absolve us of choosing. The word mate is old. It means I see you as you are and I cannot look away. It means if there is a door between us, I will spend a life learning how to unlock it. It means… very little, if we use it as a chain.”

She did not look away. “And if one person feels it and the other—doesn’t?”

“Then the first must decide whether to carry it quietly or set it down,” I said. “And the second must be free to say no.”

We let that stand between us. The music from the bonfires rose and fell like breathing. Somewhere in the woods, the old rite began and the world turned on with or without our careful consideration.

She shivered. Not from cold. From something older than either of us. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

I inclined my head. “Probably not.”

“I should go back,” she added, more to herself than me. “He’ll—” She stopped.

“Notice?” I supplied.

“Hurt,” she said at last, and the truth in it was so pale, so wisp-thin, that I might have missed it if the bond hadn’t carried it right into my hands. Not hurt her. Hurt at her. Wound himself with jealousies and call it love in the morning.

“Then go,” I said. “Before he notices.”

She stood slow. I stayed seated because standing would have felt too much like stepping in front of a blow. She looked at me as if memorizing the shape of my face for some day when memory would be all she had.

“Rhys,” she said, and my name in her mouth was a blessing I did not deserve.

“Elara,” I said, and gave her a smile that meant I will not ask you for anything.

She hesitated. Then, with a tiny movement that might not have been discernible to anyone but a male who had spent five hundred years learning to see what was not for him, she reached out and touched my hand. Not my fingers. The back of my hand, quick, careful.

The bond sang.

She snatched her hand back as if burned and turned away. I watched her go. I did not follow. I sat on the warm stone wall until the moon climbed and the drums quieted and the first of the villagers began to trail home with wreaths crushed in their hair.

Mor found me there, eventually. She had grass stains on her dress and laughter in her eyes. She sat beside me without asking if I wanted company.

“Well?” she said.

I stared at nothing. “She is mortal.”

“She is your mate.”

“Yes.”

Mor breathed out a low, almost reverent sound. “Damn.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Be happy for me yet.”

Mor considered me, all the old sorrow and all the old fierce love in her. “I’m not happy for you,” she said. “I’m happy for her. The universe gave her someone who will not crush her for the shape of her light.”

I closed my eyes. “He will not let her go.”

“Then he will have to learn what letting go feels like,” Mor said, voice mild as cream and twice as dangerous. “He has made many others learn worse from him.”

“I will not start a war for my own heart,” I said.

She bumped my shoulder with hers. “You’ll start a war for people you’ve never met. Don’t get precious now.”

I laughed. It felt like a wound reopening and also like something newly healed.

“Az says the Rite ended quiet,” Mor went on. “Cassian says you looked like you were going to be sick and he enjoyed it immensely.”

“I am fine,” I said.

“Liar,” she said cheerfully.

We watched the first fire gutter out. The scent of smoke softened. Night took back the ground the bonfires had claimed and the stars came down like a final mercy.

“Tomorrow,” Mor said lightly, “Tamlin will pretend your presence here was an insult he can rise above. He’ll bring her down the steps with the sunrise behind her and pretend she chose the light, not the leash. He will be wrong on all counts.”

“And what will I do?” I asked, equally lightly.

“You will do what you always do,” she said. “You will be patient until you aren’t.”

Tamlin was very good at pretending the next morning.

He stood at the top of the manor’s white steps with Elara at his side and his court gathered below like worshipers before a statue. He looked like a storybook illustration. She looked like a human trying not to tremble in a room full of hungry predators, and succeeding, and hating herself for the success.

The eldest mortal queen had left at dawn. The others lingered—ostensibly for one more walk in the gardens, actually because power is a scent and they liked how it smelled here.

I did not join the crowd. I stood beneath an espaliered pear tree and pretended to be fascinated by the fat bees crawling in the blossoms. Azriel drifted at the edge of sight like a shadow that had discovered it could be more. Cassian was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was either being good or being very, very bad.

Tamlin lifted Elara’s hand and kissed the air just above her knuckles. She smiled down at the people like a queen who had learned how to smile without promising anything. She wore white today. The vines were gone from her hair. The circlet had been replaced by a ribbon, simple and elegant and undeniably mortal. When her gaze moved over the crowd, it didn’t stall on me. It skated. She was learning.

“High Lord of Night,” Tamlin called, as if summoning me for a trick in the afternoon’s entertainment.

I stepped forward. Slowly. Too slowly to be obedient. Not so slow as to be rude.

“Thank you for gracing our festivities last night,” Tamlin said, making sure everyone heard our.

“My pleasure,” I said, letting the words mean a dozen things.

“Perhaps,” Tamlin continued with the graciousness of a man offering someone a seat on their own coffin, “you’d care to say a word about peace between courts and realms. Our friends from across the wall would be glad to hear it from your lips.”

There it was. Hold out the olive branch; watch me refuse and be the villain; watch her flinch.

“Gladly,” I said, and the murmur went through the crowd like a breeze. I mounted the steps and stood two below them, not by Tamlin’s side but close enough that I could smell the soap in Elara’s hair.

I looked, not at Tamlin, not at the courtiers, but at the cluster of Spring villagers who had been allowed near the lawn’s edge. Faces browned by sun. Hands lined with work and worship. Some had children at their knees. One of those children—small, gap-toothed—was the same boy whose whistle Elara had admired last night. He saw me and promptly hid behind his mother’s skirt.

“Peace,” I said, and let my voice go easy, as if we were sitting at kitchen tables instead of on a white-washed stage. “It’s a pretty word. It looks very fine on parchment. But peace is only useful if it means you can sleep with your doors open and wake to find your chickens still in the yard and your children still where you left them.”

A ripple of laughter, surprised out of them. Good.

“I cannot promise you a world where bad men do not look at a fence and think of ways to get over it,” I went on, and felt Tamlin go very still two steps above me. “But I can promise you that in the Night Court, we have learned how to build fences that are harder to climb. And we have learned that when our neighbor’s smoke rises, we do not ask whose fault is ituntil after we help with the water.”

I let the silence fall. Elara’s breath caught quietly. She was so close I could have reached up and touched the ribbon at her wrist. I did not.

“The Night Court will do what it can,” I finished. “Not because it makes us look kind. Because it makes your lives less likely to be ruined by men who are afraid of their own shadows.”

That got more laughter, nervous and delighted. I smiled as if I had not meant it very seriously. Tamlin’s hand tightened on the balustrade. Elara did not move at all.

“Thank you,” Tamlin said through teeth he did not show when he smiled. “As ever, Night’s words are… entertaining.”

Mor coughed delicately into her hand in the crowd. Cassian reappeared at the back, looking like a cat who had eaten something that had deserved it.

I descended the steps. Elara’s gaze followed me as if of its own accord. I did not look back.

We left that afternoon as if we had come to do only what we had done.

In the pine-sweet shade of the hunting lodge’s portico, I watched the shadows of the boughs sway across the packed bags. Mor adjusted her gloves. Cassian juggled a peach. Azriel studied the dirt on his boot as if it held state secrets.

“You’re not going to say goodbye,” Mor said finally.

I looked at her. “To whom?”

Mor rolled her eyes. “To the bees.”

“She knows where to find me if she ever needs to,” I said, which was both a lie and a vow.

“Does she?” Cassian asked around a bite of peach.

Azriel lifted his gaze at last. “Tamlin will try to make the world very small around her.”

“He already has,” Mor said.

I had walked the manicured paths that morning. I had counted the guards posted where they could be seen and the places where they could not. I had seen the window with bars that were cleverly integrated into the design so a brain would accept them as decoration. I had seen the way Elara’s rooms faced a view that was beautiful and contained.

“She is a queen,” I said. “Even small, her world is hers.”

“You say that like it is a blessing,” Mor murmured.

“I say it like it is a fact,” I said. “And like facts, it can be changed.”

We mounted. We left.

The meadow bowed under the wind as if in farewell. The white manor receded until it was a smudge. The wall—old, watchful—slid by to our right, its stones holding more stories than any of us had years. I put my back to it and faced the road ahead. Velaris waited with all her quiet demands and forgiven sins.

The bond did not quiet.

I did not ask it to.

That night, in my town house by the Sidra, I stood on the balcony and let the warm spring wind lift the hair from my brow. The river murmured of a hundred small lives being lived well. Above me, the stars came out in their usual, generous profusion. I had loved them once because they were indifferent to my pain. I loved them now because they were indifferent to my joy.

Mor came, of course. She let herself in without knocking and joined me without preamble. She handed me a glass of something golden and sweet. “To terrible ideas,” she said.

“To doing the right thing second,” I said, and we clinked.

“You’re going to pretend,” she said after a sip, “that you can leave her there and be the wise High Lord who knows the difference between what is his and what is not.”

“I am going to try to be a good man,” I said.

“Good men are overrated,” Mor said absently, and then, kinder: “Good men who think they are monsters are even more overrated.”

I laughed despite myself. “You’ve been talking to Amren too much.”

“I have, and she told me to tell you to stop mooning over balconies and either steal the girl or stop being insufferable.”

“Amren would advise theft if I asked whether I should steal a pastry,” I said.

“And she would be right about the pastry,” Mor said gravely.

We were quiet for a time. The river went about its business. Somewhere below, a trio of musicians tuned their instruments and launched into a song about a sailor who had fallen in love with the wrong ocean. Velaris made a gentle refusal to despair.

“Do you ever wonder,” Mor said finally, softly, “what we would be if the world hadn’t happened to us the way it did?”

“Every day,” I said.

“And?”

“And some days I am grateful for it,” I said. “Others, I want to tear it down with my teeth.”

She leaned her head against my shoulder. “You always did like difficult projects.”

I finished my drink and set the glass carefully on the rail. “She will come to know,” I said into the night, as much to convince myself as to tell Mor. “The bond is patient. It will not strangle her. If she never names it, I will be no less myself.”

Mor’s hand found mine, squeezed. “You can be patient,” she said. “But you don’t have to be alone.”

I glanced at her, at the lights below, at the stars. “I am never alone,” I said. It was only mostly true.

When Mor left, I stayed where I was until fatigue dragged me under. I dreamed of a white stone wall warm from the sun and a ribbon in a mortal girl’s hair. I woke to quiet and the low certainty that threads do not tug for no reason.

I did not send for her. I did not send anyone to linger at Spring’s gates.

I sent a letter to the eldest mortal queen. It said only:

When you chose your youngest to cross the wall, did you intend to send a lamb? Or did you finally remember what wolves are for?

I sealed it with no crest and sent it with a courier who would not be traced.

Then I went to work. There were roads to mend, and a city to love, and a thousand tomorrows to attempt not to waste in a single mistake.

And somewhere beyond the wall, in a house with too few open windows, a mortal queen woke and put her hand to her heart as if to quiet a sound she could not yet name.

Chapter Text

Elara

By noon, Calanmai had been folded away like a tablecloth: petals swept from the steps, garlands unwound from the pillars, the smell of last night’s smoke replaced by soap and cut grass. Spring is very good at pretending nothing happened. The house wore its daylight face—white stone bright as bone, light pouring through high windows in generous squares—like it had never learned how to hold darkness at all.

The council table was long and vine-carved, the kind of piece that looks like it would sprout if you turned your back. Three of the mortal queens remained. The eldest had departed at dawn in a rustle of brocade and efficient goodbyes. The youngest of the remaining pair fanned herself with a painted bird and watched everything through her lashes as if the room might confess a secret if she stared long enough. The third—older than me by a decade—sat straight as a spear and had not smiled once.

Tamlin poured my tea himself. He always did when there were witnesses. “You didn’t sleep,” he said gently, like a man laying a cool cloth on a fevered brow. “The drums?”

“They carried,” I said. I kept my hands light around the cup. Even porcelain feels like a shackle if you grip it hard enough.

He didn’t touch me. He almost never did unless ceremony required it. But his attention kept landing on my face—my mouth, my eyes—as if he were trying to scent a draft he couldn’t quite catch.

Ianthe entered without being announced, white silk sliding over white marble. She had that polished temple smile—the one that lets you relax because you’ve mistaken it for safety. “Shall we begin?” she asked, then turned the warmth of her gaze on me. “Your Majesty, the language for your glorious union must be precise. Sacred things require careful words.”

“Precise,” I repeated, tasting the word as if it were a fruit I might buy and regret later.

Tamlin slid a ribbon-bound packet across the table. Green ribbon—the exact gentled green of new leaves. “Arrangements with your council,” he said. “Protection, celebration. Standard.”

The ribbon pricked my palm with a little heat when I touched it. Not pain—more like walking into a room where two people had argued and left, and the air kept the memory. I didn’t pull back.

“Oh—careful,” Ianthe murmured. A fraction too quickly.

“It’s ribbon,” I said, and untied it anyway. The heat eased, as if a door no one had pointed out had settled back into its frame.

The papers were pretty: tidy lines of script in my tongue and one I couldn’t read, careful headings, space between paragraphs like well-kept gardens. Patrols along my realm’s border villages. A tithe—grain and timber, nothing that could starve a winter. Spring would “defend to the last” any hamlet bearing my crest. And tucked between “music chosen to honor both peoples” and “witnesses to stand in grace,” a line that made my finger still:

The bridal party waives all right to contest the union ceremony and its accompanying rites…

“What does this mean?” I asked. I kept my voice mild. Rooms like this reward you for sounding untroubled.

“Formality,” Ianthe purred, folding her hands in her lap. “To prevent disruptions. Imagine—a jealous uncle, a drunken aunt.”

Tamlin’s jaw flexed once. He didn’t look away. “It steadies nerves if anyone—” a measured pause “—falters.”

“Nerves,” the queen with the fan murmured, amused. “Useful.”

I read the line again. Steadying is not silencing, but sometimes the difference lives in ink none of us get to see.

I stacked the pages neatly and laid the ribbon across them like a sleeping vine. “Later,” I said, apologetic in the way queens are; the sort of apology that buys time. “My head is still full of drums.”

Lucien said nothing. That was new. Lucien usually filled the air with jokes light enough to carry heavier things across a room. Today, his fox-bright eyes slid past mine as if someone had asked him to be furniture.

We moved on to flowers for the arch, to the length of the procession, to the food that would not steal mortal senses—“We do take care with that,” Ianthe said like a benediction—and I practiced nodding at details that didn’t matter so I could keep breath for the ones that did.

He came to my rooms in the soft heat of late afternoon. No attendants. No priestess. Just Tamlin and that house-hush that makes you hear your own breathing.

He set a white flower—petals faintly green at the edges—in a shallow bowl on my dressing table as if it needed a ceremony. “About earlier,” he said to our reflections. “Legal phrasing can sound harsher than it is.”

“It wasn’t the phrasing,” I said. “It was what sat under it.” I turned on the stool to face him. He had the sort of face people call handsome and mean safe. Today, safe wore shadows under the eyes.

He watched me. Not like a hunter. Not like a lover. Something between—someone making a map he didn’t trust. “You were out by the meadow,” he said lightly. “Near the trees.”

“It was loud,” I said. “I wanted air.”

He nodded like I’d handed him a rope and he wasn’t certain it would hold. “Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone trouble you?”

“Two revelers. They left.”

“Good.” A small breath. Then, too casually: “Did anyone speak with you?”

The drums from last night knocked once at my ribs. A male in black had leaned against a warm stone wall, said his name like it wasn’t a weapon, and asked if I wanted to walk where the grass began and the firelight ended.

“People were friendly,” I said. “It was a festival.”

A tiny flare of his nostrils, a fraction of a fraction, like a man testing a door for drafts. His power didn’t move. Something else did—the insecurity he keeps in a box and keeps checking is latched.

“I need you to understand something,” he said quietly. “He and I—” He didn’t say Rhysand’s name. He didn’t need to. “We were set at each other before we were old enough to understand the field. My father. His father. They built us like opposite teeth in the same trap.”

“I’ve heard a version of the story,” I said. “Pieces.”

“There were murders I didn’t stop.” The words were flat; he’d worn them smooth from handling. He didn’t reach for me or for his dignity. He set the lack on the table between us like a third person. “He won’t forgive me. He shouldn’t.”

He looked at his hands—the hands of someone who can build and break. “When I was young, I believed I could be a different shape than the men who raised me: kind where they were cruel, open where they were closed.” A small, ugly laugh. “Sometimes kindness is just a prettier way to control a picture.”

He lifted his eyes again. “He’s very good at pictures.”

“Pictures,” I repeated, thinking of black hair and a mouth trained to smile like a blade kept sheathed on purpose.

“He paints the Night as choice now,” Tamlin said. “Mercy. ‘Doors, not chains.’” He said the phrase like it tasted bitter. “People like to be told what they’re doing is their idea. He is a master of that. He will make you feel seen.” Quietly, like a warning given from experience: “He will make you think he wants nothing from you at all.”

“He didn’t touch me,” I said before I thought better of it. The truth wanted air.

A tick in his jaw. Gone a heartbeat later, smoothed away. “He’s patient when it counts,” Tamlin said. Not a threat. A fact.

We let the silence sit. He braced one hand on the carved vines of the dressing table, anchoring himself to things he owned.

“I want to build a world that deserves you,” he said finally. “Where your crown means the door stays open, not that it shuts behind you.” He swallowed. “Help me.”

“What are you asking?” I said. Both of us heard what I didn’t say: and what aren’t you telling me?

“Choose us,” he said, very gently. “Choose me. Don’t let him write us as villains in your head.”

I thought of the ribbon tucked in my drawer. Of the hairpin that had arrived from Velaris that morning with a courteous card: In friendship between realms. Dark metal shaped like a night-blooming flower. When I’d touched it, the metal had held a warmth this shaded room hadn’t given it.

“I’m not choosing a story,” I said. “I’m choosing words that don’t bleed when they’re spoken.” I stood, because sitting made me feel small. “The line in the papers—the one about waiving the right to contest—how is that not a leash with nicer letters?”

His mouth pressed thin. He didn’t move toward me. He never forced distance smaller than I made it. “It’s meant to keep people from making a spectacle,” he said. “To keep you from being humiliated.”

“Or from changing my mind,” I said. “Which is not the same thing.”

He shut his eyes briefly. “If you bolt at the threshold, the world will call you capricious. It will call me weak. It will call both our peoples fools.”

“If I speak vows with my mouth and can’t revoke them with my mouth,” I answered, “the world can call me prisoner and be right.”

Something ugly and honest crossed his face—the look of a man who knows he’s standing on the wrong side of a line and doesn’t yet know how to step back. “I don’t want to trap you,” he said, hoarse. “I want to make sure a priest doesn’t turn our day into a spectacle.”

“A priest,” I repeated, and let the word sit where Ianthe had stood that morning with her perfect smile.

He followed my gaze to the flower he’d set in the bowl. The petals had softened further, green bleeding into white. “He—” He stopped, breathed, tried again. “He plays patient. He makes you think you came to him. He makes men like me look like we’re… snarling.” It wasn’t quite jealousy. It wasn’t quite fear. It was the raw place in a man who has built his life around being the one the world goes to for safety and realizes the world might choose somewhere else.

“I’m not yours to keep safe,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m a queen.”

His mouth twitched—hurt and pride together. “You are,” he said. “Which is why I’m asking. Choose us. Don’t let… the Night… draft you into its story to make a point about Spring.” He swallowed the next thing he wanted to say. “I’ve made enough mistakes I can’t undo. I’m trying not to make new ones.”

He left then—not dramatically. He left like a man who had exhausted the right words and didn’t trust himself not to use the wrong ones next.

When the door latched, I opened the top drawer and laid the green ribbon beside the hairpin. I tied one small knot. Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. Yanking a knot tight in a quiet room doesn’t change a courtyard.

I untied it again and shut the drawer.

I sat very still until the light moved across the floor by the width of a hand. In the walls, in the hush, I could almost hear it again—the thrum from last night that wasn’t the drums. The way a name had felt in my mouth when I said it back to him. The way the air had changed temperature at the edge of the meadow, cooler where the bonfire’s reach ended and something else began.

I took out the treaty again. I read every line twice. The line about waiving the right to contest stayed small and neat on the page, perfectly behaved, until I pictured it spoken over me with a courtyard listening. Then it grew teeth.

I imagined saying yes and meaning it. I imagined saying yes and discovering the ink had meant something else on my behalf. I imagined the way a crowd would look at a mortal queen who changed her mind half-way through a story men had already decided how to tell.

I closed my eyes and put my fingertips to my throat. My pulse beat steady; I counted it to the end of a breath. “I will not be steadied,” I whispered into the empty room, “by words I didn’t choose.”

The house did not answer. It didn’t need to. Somewhere in the garden, a bee blundered into a pane of glass, buzzed confused, and found its way out again.

I rose and went back to the table. I wrote in my own hand across the margin of the contested clause: Define “contest.” Define “accompanying rites.” Define “steady.” Then I put down the pen, because clarity purchased in ink is only worth anything if you can buy it aloud later.

I went to the window. The lawns were already getting ready for the ceremony—the arch half-dressed, the chairs getting aligned in polite expectation. From this angle, the arch’s greenery looked like it was growing over a gate rather than decorating one. I had the sudden, steady thought that I would not walk under anything that locked behind me when I passed.

I didn’t know what would happen if I said that out loud to a courtyard full of people. I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t. But I knew which version I could live with in the quiet.

I shut the window and let the house keep its daylight face a little longer.

Rhysand

The wind brought Spring to us before Azriel did—green-sweet, like crushed leaves over damp stone. It threaded through the arches of the House and tried to make the mountain smell like a garden. The House was polite about it and let the scent pass without keeping any.

Azriel set the letter down the way you lay a knife between friends. Not threatening—just honest about what it is. A seal of glossy green wax winked up from the vellum. The sigil of Spring: vines circling a beast that had never learned to love the hands that fed it.

Cassian, who had been braced on the balcony rail pretending to ignore the door, sauntered over and planted his palms on either side of the envelope. “Spring sends us party favors now?”

“It wasn’t addressed to us,” Azriel said. Shadows slipped over the back of his hand as if they’d followed the letter here and didn’t like where it had ended up. “Marked for Day. The courier carried a tracer spell in the pigment. I bled it off before he knew he’d lost anything.”

Mor’s brows rose as she slid into a chair, all gold and carelessness. “Stealing the mail, Shadowsinger. Scandalous.”

“We don’t steal the mail,” Cassian said solemnly. “We redirect it. Mail theft is a crime. Redirection is a hobby.”

Azriel lifted one shoulder. “Consider it a public service.”

I didn’t touch the letter. Not yet. The House gathered itself around the table, wood warmed by years of our hands. The Sidra glinted far below through the open archway; the city’s roofs threw sunlight back like coins we’d tossed to children. Two weeks since Calanmai. Two weeks since the drums and a mortal girl at the edge of a meadow, the bond humming like a string plucked somewhere too deep for sound.

“Open it,” Mor said, and it was kinder than it sounded.

I broke the green wax with a flick of power. Spring’s perfume curled out: grass, nectar, and beneath it something strained and rancid—fear polished until it shone.

Vellum, of course. Spring never writes on anything that doesn’t look like it should be framed.

The Union of High Lord Tamlin of the Spring Court and Her Majesty Elara Vance, Youngest Queen of the Mortal Realm…

The words curved like they wanted to be admired more than read. It went on: the hour, the dais, the route through the gardens. A list of courts in their proper rows: Day, Dawn, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Mortal queens in a place of honor. Night—absent, as if the cartographer had decided we’d fallen off the edge of the map.

Cassian’s mouth went sharp. “He invited everyone but us.”

“Of course he did,” Mor said lightly, but her eyes were knives. “If the Night Court isn’t in the picture, the colors don’t have to clash.”

“Day was meant to bring the blessing,” Azriel added, tapping a finger on the margin. “Cleric to witness the rite for treaty recognition. Without them, the contract would be unrecognized across courts. With them—binding.”

“And you intercepted the invitation before it reached Helion,” I said. Not a question.

Azriel inclined his head. “He would have gone. Day is fond of being neutral when it gets to wear its best robes.”

Mor snorted. “Day is fond of being neutral, full stop.”

I let my thumbs rest along the edge of the vellum and watched the sunlight catch on the gold ink. Elara Vance. It hit me in the ribs the way a name is supposed to when it has already built a room in your chest.

“She won’t know we’re not invited,” Cassian said. “She’ll expect to see everyone with crowns. She’ll think if we’re not there, it’s because we chose not to be.”

The bond hummed. I set the letter down.

“We’re going,” I said.

Cassian grinned. “As ourselves? Or do I get to be Helion’s scandalous nephew?”

“As ourselves,” I said, and watched satisfaction and worry share the room. “We will not slink through someone else’s door. We will walk through ours.”

Mor propped her chin on her fist, dangerously pleased. “Diplomatic incident as a lifestyle choice. I approve.”

Azriel slid a second sheet onto the table. Not vellum—copying paper. He’d already handled the worst part of the problem. “Ceremony script,” he said. “Ianthe’s hand. Mirrored text—old language and new. ‘Unity’ and ‘subjugation’ share a root here. Spoken as written, the rite resists withdrawal once begun.”

Cassian’s wing-tips flared with a sound like soft thunder. “Resists how.”

“Hurt,” Azriel said simply. “More than a mortal body can safely carry.”

I kept my hands on the table because I wanted them on someone’s throat. “The thread?”

Azriel produced a narrow strip of green-stitched fabric from inside his coat, laid it beside the script. “Dawn dye. The seamstress was told to use it in hems and cuffs. It hums when vows are spoken. It amplifies intent—any intent.”

“Persuasion dressed as tradition,” Mor said. “I despise her more every week.”

“She doesn’t know,” I said, to the House, to the slab of sky beyond. “Elara.” Saying her name aloud set something right and wrong in me at once. “She thinks the ceremony is symbolic. That the papers are politics, not a hand on her throat.”

“Then we treat the papers like a blade,” Cassian said. “And knock it out of their hand in front of the crowd.”

Mor reached for the copied script and flicked a glance at me over its edge. “You sure you want to stand in the same garden as Tamlin when you’re feeling like… this?”

“Like what,” I said.

She waggled her fingers, gold catching sunlight. “Like a storm in a suit.”

“Charming,” I said.

Azriel’s shadows, who have always loved the truth more than flattery, nosed my wrists. “We need a plan that survives his temper,” he murmured.

“Which one?” Cassian said. “Rhys’s or Tamlin’s?”

“Both,” I said. “We go to expose the clause, not to humiliate him. We go to make the choice visible. If she walks away, it has to be because she chose to walk.” The bond hummed its agreement, or maybe that was just me needing it to.

“If she doesn’t?” Cassian asked, not unkind. He always asks you to say the thing you don’t want to hear.

“Then we give Spring the clean wording anyway,” I said. “We send it to her council. We untie every knot they’ve tied. And we protect her realm because it’s right, not because I want something from its queen.”

Mor’s gaze softened. Cassian’s grin turned rueful. Azriel’s mouth barely moved, but I knew he approved.

“Who tells Day?” Mor asked, practical again. “We can bring our own Dawn cleric to read the clause into the air, but Day was meant to bless the rite. If Helion shows up expecting a fête, this turns into a chorus.”

“Helion knows how to sing loudly when it suits him,” I said. “Az, inform him that his invitation was… lost and found. Ask him to attend, and to enjoy the performance. He will.”

“Done,” Azriel said.

Mor tapped the green-stitched fabric. “The seam. The dye. If the script is cleaned, Ianthe still has a hem full of tricks.”

“I’ll get it out,” Mor said, answering herself before any of us could. “I know a seamstress who owes me a favor. Two, if we count the time I prevented her from marrying a man who names his horses after himself.” She flashed teeth. “I can charm the dye out and charm the new thread in without anyone noticing.”

“Do it,” I said. “Quietly.”

Cassian stretched, a lazy roll of muscle and mischief. “What’s my job besides looking handsome and making Spring guards nervous?”

“Stand where they want you not to,” I said. “Be a wall that smiles.”

“Gods,” Mor muttered. “His favorite.”

Azriel flicked the invitation with a finger. “There’s still a tracer in the seal pigment,” he said. “Muted, but enough for Spring to know where this letter ended its day. I bled it, but if we carry it into the House’s heart, someone will be able to count our steps.”

“Burn it,” Cassian suggested.

“No.” I shook my head. “Let it live. Let them wonder how many hands it passed through before it found ours. Let them worry who else knows.”

Mor’s smile sharpened. “Petty, precise, and plausible deniability. I love you.”

I picked up a pen and began the dullest correspondence of my life. “We need two letters,” I said. “One to the eldest mortal queen: binding magic, hidden clauses, public record. The kind of language that makes a woman like her smell blood and ask the right questions.” The nib scratched; the House hummed approval. “One to Tamlin: Night acknowledges the ceremony as an inter-court rite. Night insists on sending witnesses for the sake of treaty compliance.”

Cassian leaned in. “You’re telling him we’re coming even though we’re not invited.”

“I’m telling him the law doesn’t need an invitation to show up where it’s being broken,” I said.

Azriel’s shadows tightened. “He could block the gate.”

“He can try,” Cassian said, delighted.

“No one throws a fight in the garden,” I said. “I will not give Spring’s people a memory of blood to feed their priests for a generation. If he refuses us the lawn, we stand on the public road. We only need to be close enough to speak into the room.”

Mor flipped the script, scanning the mirrored lines again. “We’ll need the Dawn cleric to walk right up to the dais and read the clause into the air. ‘Blessings’ don’t travel well when someone has written knife into the margin.”

“Helion will love the theater,” Cassian said. “He’ll lend us a robe if we ask.”

“I’ll get a real cleric,” Azriel said. “Not a robe.”

“Good,” I said. “Ianthe will hiss like a kettle.”

“Do we bring Amren?” Mor asked, half-hopeful, half-wicked. “She could glare the ink off the page.”

“Amren has no patience for weddings,” I said, and almost smiled at the memory of her shredding a dance card with the same efficiency she’d once used on an invading legion. “She’ll stay. Velaris needs her here.”

Cassian slid a sideways glance at me. “And what about you. Are you going to stand at the back and pretend you’re not the most dangerous thing in the garden?”

“I’m going to stand where she can see me if she wants to,” I said, and tested the words against my ribs. They held. “I will not be a reason she runs. I will not be a reason she stays.”

Mor’s mouth softened, something like pride and pity both. “You know she knows you,” she said.

“She will remember my name,” I said. “She will not know my friends.”

“She’s seen us once,” Mor said. “At the council after the snow melt. I saw her watching the room the way people do who have been taught not to be noticed. She didn’t get introduced.”

“Good,” I said. “Let her see a golden stranger, a mouthy brute with wings, and a shadow carrying a priest. Let her see a High Lord who didn’t wait for permission to walk into a room where a mortal was being turned into a performance. Names can come later. Doors first.”

Cassian clapped my shoulder, then left his hand there because he’s learned when to be a weight and when to be a wing. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

“I’m not worried about me,” I said.

“You’ll be fine,” he repeated, the kind of insistence you use on a friend who insists he doesn’t need it.

Mor stood, swept the green-stitched fabric into her palm like it was a prize she’d been waiting all day to win, and kissed my cheek just to annoy me. “Let me go play dress-up with Dawn thread,” she said.

Azriel’s shadows curled tighter around his shoulders—his version of rolling up his sleeves. “I’ll send to Helion and Dawn,” he said. “And put eyes on the Spring road, the Spring sky, and the Spring mice.”

“Not the mice,” Cassian said. “They have enough problems.”

Azriel did not dignify that.

The plan was a living thing now, moving from our mouths into the city, into the House, into the pathways between courts. It made the air in my lungs easier and harder at once. I excused myself before I said something sentimental and went to the arch that opened to the highest balcony, to where the wind ran its cold fingers along the mountain’s face.

Velaris laid herself out beneath us, her tiles and terraces and trembling flowers in their boxes like a map of the life I’d promised my people—quiet, if we were lucky. Fierce, when required. Kind, always.

Cassian left us to the wind and went to the roof ring to shout at someone about their stance. Mor left in a flash of gold and intention. Azriel slipped sideways into a different sort of movement and became something the light didn’t catch if it wasn’t paying attention.

I stayed.

The invitation lay open on the table, Elara’s name catching a last line of sun. I let myself say it, softly. Not a prayer—I don’t pray. An address.

She had looked at me on Calanmai like a person could look at a horizon and decide whether to walk toward it or let it be beautiful and far. She had touched the back of my hand for a heartbeat and made the bond sing a note I had not known I could hear anymore.

“She will be frightened,” I told the mountain. “Not of me. Of the space the choice opens under her feet.”

The mountain, blunt and wise, said nothing.

I returned to the table and finished the letters. The one to the eldest queen was bloodless and exact. Binding magic requires public disclosure to the signatory’s people; this is not a matter for private devotion but public record. She would taste the implication and store it for when it served her.

The one to Tamlin was shorter. Night acknowledges the rite as inter-court. Night will attend to ensure compliance with the language recognized across courts. I did not ask. I did not threaten. I let the tone do the work of standing in his doorway and looking at him until he admitted the room had one.

“Seal these,” I said to the House, and the little tray we kept for dull tasks slid forward obligingly. The wax the House provided was plain. Azriel’s tracer had already been bled from Spring’s. I pressed my crest into plain red and watched it cool.

When I looked up, Cassian had reappeared in the doorway, sweaty and smug. “I told the Illyrians not to break anything if they get excited,” he said. “They said that was a big ask.”

“You are a terrible influence,” I said.

“I’m a delight,” he said. “Do you need me to go kiss a priest to make sure he shows up?”

“Save your talents for the guards who think your wingspan is a personality trait,” I said.

He grinned, delighted. “It is.”

The House settled around us as evening moved in—shadows long, the Sidra turning metal, the roofs of the city catching the day’s last warmth. For a long minute no one spoke. There are silences you earn by telling the truth out loud. This was one.

“I hate weddings,” Cassian said at last, apropos of nothing.

“You love free cake,” I said.

“I love cake,” he conceded. “The wedding part is usually a trap.”

“Not if the words are honest,” I said, and heard how tired I sounded.

“Make them honest, then,” he said, as if it were as simple as rearranging a room. “That’s what we’re going for, right? Not happy. Honest.”

“Honest is the only way happiness isn’t counterfeit,” I said.

He made a face. “You’re insufferable when you’re right.”

“Then I’ll make it brief,” I said, and allowed myself one small, private, unlovely smile.

By the time the lamps lit themselves, the letters were gone into the House’s channels, Mor was already elbow-deep in someone else’s wardrobe, and Azriel was sending word through spaces where sound goes to rest. I stood again at the high arch and looked toward a court dressed in flowers and careful lies.

I didn’t think of what I might do if Elara looked at me and asked. I did not rehearse speeches or glorious refusals. I let the plan be a door where a wall had been, and promised myself—again, for the thousandth time—that I would not be the kind of man who confused his hunger with someone else’s fate.

Night gathered itself about the House like a cloak. The wind stopped smelling like Spring and went back to clean stone and moon on water.

We would go to the garden anyway. We would stand at the edge of someone else’s ceremony and remind the ink it answered to the truth. We would not be welcome, and we would not require welcoming.

And if a mortal queen lifted her chin and spoke the words only she could speak, we would make sure everyone heard them.

Chapter Text

Elara

The man of Night came again in my dreams.

Always the same, and always him—Rhysand.

We stood on a balcony that seemed to hang over the world. Below it, a river of black glass braided through a city that glittered like a spilled constellation. The air there felt crisp enough to bite; music drifted from an unseen square, threaded with laughter that didn’t feel cruel. He would stand with his hands tucked behind his back, posture too careful to be careless, and he would look at me like he already knew what I would say if he asked.

I never asked. I always woke right before I could.

I woke like drowning into sunlight—into the Spring Court’s perfect morning, the ceiling’s white plaster blooming back into focus. My skin was warm; the name I would not say aloud pressed hot against the inside of my mouth.

Rhysand.

I lay still a moment, hand splayed over my sternum, counting heartbeats. The dreams had started two nights after Calanmai and hadn’t let me go—always the balcony, always that city I now suspected had a name. Velaris. It had to be. Tamlin had said it once in a voice that made the syllables sound like a stain: He hides in his city of masks. As if beauty itself were an accusation.

If that place was a mask, it was better at honesty than most faces I’d known.

The manor had become a hive since Calanmai. Courtyards churned with florists and ribbon-tiers; stewards argued in corridors about seating and sashes; the kitchens smelled perpetually of sugar and roasted fruit. By noon each day I could tell you where in the house I was with my eyes closed by the perfume of the room—orange blossom in the west galleries, beeswax in the northern hall, the far wing crushed under the priestess’s favorite incense, that sweet, strangling myrrh that got into your hair.

Ianthe presided over it all as if she’d been born to marshal chaos and then pretend she was its author. Sacred things require order, she’d told me with a smile that showed no teeth. Beauty must be disciplined to please the gods. And with that she’d taken my schedule as if she were a midwife and the day itself my child.

Tamlin was kind. To say otherwise would be lying for sport. He sent a white rose to my pillow every morning, each with a ribbon of green tied around its stem. He had notes delivered in his hand—I hope you rested or the east garden is at its best by ten. Some mornings he appeared with the notes, contriving a walk past the willows that arched over the lower paths; he would match his strides to mine and listen while I spoke of my southern ports and the drought maps my advisors had drawn with red ink. He said all the things men must say when they want mortal realms to think well of them: We will protect you, and You will be safe here, and You deserve to be happy. He meant them. He meant them so hard his jaw ached around the middle one. He meant them so hard it made the words heavier than they needed to be.

It would have been so simple to believe him completely if not for those moments he forgot to breathe. I would catch him staring at nothing, hands opening and closing as if they had not learned how to be empty. I would say his name and he would start and smile and ask about cake tastings. Spring was full of sweetness; I do not fault a man for trying to drown out what he fears with sugar.

The other High Lords were coming. I learned it the way queens learn everything useful: by hearing two maids forget I was in the hall and one lower guard forget he ever had a mother. Day, Dawn, Summer, Autumn, Winter—the entire compass. Only Night not invited. The information lived under all of Tamlin’s careful generosity like a splinter you keep working at with your tongue: irritated, not bleeding, never letting you forget your mouth.

I bathed in water that smelled like gardens too much to be a river. Ianthe’s acolytes lifted my hair and poured it back down my back in pale waves, threaded white ribbons through it. One pressed some anointing oil against the hollow of my throat and murmured a word I didn’t know. Another painted my lips with crushed rose petals and whispered truth as if the sound itself had magic in it. Perhaps it did. In Prythian, words often come with a bill.

“Your Majesty,” Ianthe said, floating into the room in her whites, a portrait of sanctity painted by someone who loved smooth surfaces. “The Cauldron blesses us with such a day.”

I turned from the balcony. The sunlight hit her hair and made a halo. “You’ve made certain of that,” I said.

She accepted the compliment as if it had been a tithe. “I do what is required of me.”

“That seems to be quite a lot,” I said, and didn’t let my eyes stray to the wedding gown laid out across the chaise in its white shroud. From here the fabric’s sheen looked like a calm lake; I could pretend the ripples were the breeze and not something else.

Her smile warmed another six degrees without rising toward sincerity. “A union of this consequence requires precision.” She came nearer, hands folded. “Tamlin is fortunate to have found such grace in a mortal queen. You have healed this court more than you know.”

“You say that as if it needed healing.”

“It did,” she said gently, as if I were clever to have asked. “There was… influence. Darkness. Tamlin suffered much navigating it. But he is light by nature. He survives.”

“Rhysand,” I said, because Tamlin had given me that name with meat on it now, because I was not a child and I do not accept stories without nouns. “You mean Rhysand.”

Her eyes didn’t change. “I mean the Night Court.”

“Is that what happened?” I asked. “He—Night—hurt Spring?”

“Night deceives,” she said, the way a tutor says two and two are four. “It seduces. It convinces good men to doubt their goodness and good women to doubt their minds. Rhysand delights in making mortals believe their thoughts are their own.”

“He didn’t whisper to me,” I heard myself say. “He looked.” And I shouldn’t have confessed that to this woman if I’d been thinking like a queen and not like a person.

Still no teeth in the smile. “Dreams can be poisoned. We will scrub them away when the vows are spoken. It is better not to dwell on old wounds on a day made for healing.”

Healing. The word looked like a hydrangea and smelled like iron.

“What does that mean,” I asked, and too late remembered the cost of sounding like you did not know something in a house where ignorance is currency. “Scrub away.”

“Blessings tend to what needs tending,” she said, serene. “You will feel steadier. Clearer. You will sleep.” Her hand moved—the briefest suggestion of touching my hair—and didn’t touch. She had learned that I am mortal the way one learns that summer ends: with occasional surprise and irritation; with the sense you will be proven right eventually. “Rest. The gown will be brought in a moment for final blessing.”

Her attendants followed her out like well-trained birds. The scent of myrrh pulled itself through the room after them and vanished under the open window’s clean air.

I was left with the sunlight, the gown, and the quiet that isn’t quiet at all—that pressure against the edges of a room that says someone has been here talking and now you are meant to live with the impression of their mouth.

The gardens beyond the balcony were perfect. Rows of chairs in polite expectation. The arch half-swallowed by vines that made the light there look like water. From this height the arch could have been a gate. The idea slotted into me like a coin into a slot: I would not walk under anything today that locked behind me when I passed. The thought shocked me with its certainty. I had not chosen it. It had chosen me.

I made myself cross to the chaise. The gown lay in its shroud, heavy with someone else’s meaning. I reached and let my fingers rest on the fabric. It was warmer than it ought to be after lying in a cool room. The embroidery—silver and green vines—had the prettiness of a thing meant to distract. In that moment, I swore I felt it hum ever so faintly, as a plucked string hums against a body that didn’t want to be an instrument. I jerked my hand back and told myself it was only my own pulse traveling through fabric.

I was about to call for the seamstress when the air shifted.

If magic had a silence, it would be this. Not the absence of noise; the presence of listening. The candles trembled as if a draft had slipped under the door. The space at the center of the room… folded. It is the only word I have for it. As if reality had a seam and someone had pinched it.

A woman stepped through it.

Golden, was my first thought. Not just her hair, which fell in a spill that caught and played with the sun, but the way she took up the room—warm and unapologetic about it. Her gown shimmered between rose and gold depending on how the light pet it. She smelled like oranges that had ripened at night. She looked at me as if she knew what I would look like when I laughed, and had chosen to meet me anyway.

“Hello, darling,” she said, irreverent and bright. “Elara, yes?”

A noise left me that would have been a laugh if I had more practice. “Who—”

“Mor,” she said, strolling toward my vanity as if she had been born in this house and I was the guest. “Cousin of Rhysand’s.” Her eyes flicked over the silver sun pendant at my throat, the white ribbons in my hair, then landed on the gown and stayed. Her smile thinned an infinitesimal degree. “And occasional party-crasher.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, and marveled that my voice remembered how to be even. “No one from the Night Court—”

“Is invited? Yes,” she said cheerfully. “It was rude. We’re very used to rudeness.”

“Are you here to threaten me?” I asked, because if she was I wanted to hear it said plainly.

“If I were,” she said blithely, “there would be thunder.” She glanced at the ceiling as if checking whether it might oblige. “I’m here to fix your dress and to tell you the truth in a way that doesn’t set off all the alarms at once. We can do charm or honesty first—your choice.”

“You said fix my—” The rest of the sentence went very white and bright in my head. “What is wrong with my gown.”

“Besides the aesthetic?” She tipped her head. “Pretty, if you like to look like you were poured into milk. The hem is full of Dawn dye.” She moved to the chaise and flicked the shroud back. “Here. Here. And in the cuffs. It amplifies magical suggestion. Tradition calls it ‘blessing.’ Priests call it ‘safety.’ It makes obedience feel like devotion. It’s very in vogue among those who prefer certainty to consent.”

“Ianthe said it was for luck,” I said, and then couldn’t believe I’d said Ianthe’s name to this woman as if I owed the priestess protection.

“Of course she did,” Mor said with a grin that didn’t reach her eyes. “She lies prettily. Most snakes do.”

I could feel the shape of the lie I’d been cradling for a week then, could feel it in my hands. “How do you know any of this.”

“Because I grew up with clothing that made survival a performance,” she said simply. “Because you can smell Dawn dye if someone makes you learn how. Because my friend with the shadows broke into the place where she keeps her spare robes and found the spool she’d ordered.” Her mouth quirked. “Because we don’t like it when people try to trick women in public and call it divine.”

“That’s a lot of reasons,” I said. “Why should I believe any of them?”

“Because your gown hums when no one touches it,” she said quietly. “Because your quiet doesn’t feel like peace. Because you woke from a dream this morning and felt the air on your skin like the night itself had been a window, not a veil.”

Every hair on my arms rose. “My dreams are my own.”

“Sometimes,” she said softly. “Sometimes they’re invitations.”

“From your High Lord,” I said, and put every ounce of ice I had into the title. “This is his doing, then. The dreams.”

“Rhys doesn’t play in minds,” she said lightly, but there was a line in it, drawn hard. “He doesn’t have to.” She tipped her head, smiling like she’d caught me out. “Have you ever been to Velaris?”

“The city under stars,” I said before I could stop myself, and wanted to swallow the words back. “No.”

“You dreamt it,” Mor said, triumphant and tender both. “Of course you did. It’s his home. Night clings to people who get close to him, the way sunlight clings to Spring. He’s… porous, for lack of a better word. He carries his court with him. You brushed up against him at Calanmai and the city decided to say hello.”

“Courts are not cats,” I said, because my brain needed a sentence I could survive saying.

Mor laughed, delighted. “Velaris is. Don’t let her hear you say otherwise. She’ll make you trip on your own hem out of spite.”

“You’re telling me my dreams are architecture being… friendly,” I said.

“I’m telling you you’re not mad,” she said. “And that when you walked to the edge of the meadow and a man of Night said your name like it belonged to him, you chose to say his back. That is the only thing that matters.”

“I did not choose—” The denial came out ragged. “He was in the path and I—”

“Could have walked away,” Mor said, not unkindly. “You didn’t. Neither did he. That’s not a spell. That’s two people being inconvenient at the same time.” She bent and pinched the embroidered hem between her fingers, brought it to her nose, sniffed. “Ugh. Dawn priests and their certainty. Hold still.”

“Hold—” I barely had breath to protest before she’d conjured a spool of thread into her hand, gold as everything else about her, and a slim silver needle. She did not prick her finger to bless it. She did not draw a symbol in the air. She unpicked three stitches with the speed of someone who has done this for other women in other rooms while other courts tried to pretend they were being kind.

When the needle slid under the seam, something I had called silence sang. It wasn’t sound. A pressure darted up my ankles and skittered along my calves, like stepping into cold water and learning the river had a current. My breath hitched. Mor did not look up.

“That’s the dye,” she said. “When I pull it free, it complains.” She worked steadily, replacing the greenish glimmer with something that held the light and let it go. “It’s like coaxing a ghost out of a dress. They always cling.”

“If Ianthe walks in,” I said through my teeth, “what will you do.”

“Smile,” Mor said. “I’m excellent at smiling at priests. They think you’ve forgiven them when you do.”

“You’re blasphemous.”

“I’m efficient.” She bit the thread with small, neat teeth, slid the needle through the last loop, and smoothed the seam flat. “Stand.”

I did. My knees remembered how. Mor went to the cuffs next. The pressure eased with every stitch, the hum thinning until what lived in the fabric felt more like… fabric. Pretty. Clean. Capable of being whatever the person wearing it wanted to be.

“Why are you helping me,” I asked, when we were both quiet enough to hear birds outside returning to a chorus that was no longer polite. “Truly.”

Mor tied off a knot and looked up at me under her lashes with eyes far older than her grin would let you guess. “Because a woman once held a door for me when everyone else tried to turn the lock,” she said. “Because my court is built on the idea that a person who is not free is not ours. Because Rhys asked me to. Because you remind me of things I promised not to forget.” She shrugged. The movement was light; the meaning wasn’t. “Pick one.”

“Rhysand asked you to,” I repeated, as if the name would behave if I said it often enough. “He’s here.”

“Outside,” she said. “It would be rude to break your doors. We do rude only when someone else does it first.” She tucked the needle into the spool and tucked the spool into—nowhere. It simply wasn’t in her hand anymore. “He came because he believes no one should be bound by language they didn’t write.”

“I agreed to this union,” I said, and I meant it. I had. Even if my signature had been the last line of a page everyone else had drafted. “I will protect my people.”

“And who protects you,” she said again, not because she didn’t remember and not because she wanted to win, but because she wanted me to decide whether the answer I’d given myself had been sufficient.

I closed my eyes. Behind my lids, the balcony. The black river. A city that had walked into my head and decided to sit down and not move. I’d told myself it was distraction. Now I wasn’t sure it hadn’t been instruction—the quiet kind that doesn’t tell you what to do, only asks you whether the thing you’re doing has ever belonged to you.

“I don’t know what to believe,” I said. It came out thin and very young; I hated it. I am not young. I have trained my mouth not to betray me. Today it wanted to.

“Believe the feeling you had when you put your hand on that gown and it felt warm,” Mor said. “Believe the way rooms go quiet when Ianthe walks into them and tells you it’s the gods you’re hearing. Believe the way Tamlin’s breath stutters when the word Night touches the edges of his patience. Believe that you are clever enough to have survived your sisters and your council and your own fear of being small and that none of that came from a man smiling at you in a garden.” She tilted her head. “Believe he wants you to choose him, certainly. He is flesh and pride like all of us. But believe he wants you to choose. That is rarer than you’d like it to be.”

The light through the window shifted a fraction; a cloud somewhere reconsidered its life and moved on. The gown looked like a gown again. The silver sun at my throat had cooled.

“What will you do,” I asked, “when the ceremony begins. You said you’re here to fix a dress and tell the truth without setting off alarms.”

“Dawn cleric will read the clause into the air,” Mor said, popping the p in clause as if it offended her. “A real one, not a robe borrowed from Helion’s wardrobe—don’t look at me like that, it’s a funny mental picture. The old language and the new will be heard by witnesses who like their reputations more than they like Spring’s comfort. If anyone tries to speak words that hurt you when you pull away, the hurt will die in the ink instead of on your tongue.” She lifted a shoulder. “And if anyone still tries to force a day to go the way they wish it to against your will, a winged idiot will stand where they need a wall and my quiet friend will snuff the magic like a candle. You’ll have room to speak.”

“You expect me to…” I didn’t know which word to pick. Flee. Deny. Announce. “Make a scene.”

“I expect you to do whatever you can live with tomorrow,” Mor said. “If that is whispering no quietly in the moment between two words, we will make sure the quiet is audible. If that is saying yes and meaning it, we will be very annoying about ensuring no one believes we bewitched you.” Her mouth curled. “If that is asking to write your vows with your own hand and your own lawyer, I’ll hand you a pen and push the nearest table into the sun.”

A laugh left me then, unwilling and grateful.

Mor grinned as if she had been waiting for it all morning. “Oh, good. You do that well. I was afraid you’d been trained out of it.”

“I was,” I said. “A little.”

“Consider this remedial work,” she said lightly.

The knock at the outer door came then—soft, a servant’s warning. We both stilled. The room remembered it belonged to Spring.

Mor glanced toward the door, then back to me. Her cheer dimmed a shade, leaving behind something like respect. “We’ll be in the crowd,” she said. “Don’t look for us. You’ll find us anyway. The Night Court doesn’t disappear; we choose where to be seen.”

“Everyone else will see you, too,” I said, and thought of the list of courts lined up like seasons on a page. “They’ll know you weren’t invited.”

“Good,” Mor said, entirely herself. “It’s nice for people to remember the Night exists even when it’s inconvenient.”

I hesitated. The question burned my tongue. I asked it anyway. “Is the story between them only… the murders?” I had heard the outlines. A mother and a sister on a mountain road turned into red. Tamlin’s father’s cruelty doing what cruelty loves. “Is that why they look at each other like their bones itch? Or is there something else I should be afraid of?”

Mor’s mouth went soft around the memory, hard around the answer. “Sometimes a thing is exactly what it looks like when you’re far away,” she said. “A dead mother. A dead sister. Boys built into weapons by men who liked calling their sons swords. There are other sins. But that is enough.” She peered at me. “You already knew this. You wanted me to say whether there was a new, worse story that you had not been told.”

I nodded.

“There isn’t,” she said. “Just the old, true one getting replayed until someone ends it.” She tipped her chin toward the gardens. “You have a chance to write a different line on the script today. Not because of Rhys. Because of you.”

I took a breath. It went in. It came back out. Amazing, the things a body remembers when someone opens a window.

Mor flicked her fingers once and the tiniest shimmer rolled through the gown, the pendant, the ribbons. It felt like a promise being ironed smooth. “The dress won’t fight you now,” she said. “If it does, pinch the hem and think of something that made you laugh as a child. Dawn dye hates joy that doesn’t ask permission.”

“That’s not real,” I said, blinking.

“It is,” she said. “Everything here is ridiculous and true.”

The door-knock came again, louder. “Your Majesty?” a timid voice called. “The seamstress—”

“Tell her to wait,” I said, surprising myself. “Five minutes.”

“Five minutes,” Mor echoed, delighted. “That’s exactly how much time I need to give you bad ideas.”

“I thought you’d already done that.”

“Haven’t even gotten started.” She sobered. “Elara. Whatever you decide in there—no one from my court will touch you. We will not put a hand on your wrist and call it rescue. If you walk, we clear the way. If you stay, we shut up and send boring letters until the language is clean.”

“I don’t know you,” I said slowly, “and I believe you.”

“That’s the Night for you,” she said, and winked. “We’re terrible and trustworthy.”

“Is he nervous,” I asked, before I could pretend the question belonged to anyone else’s mouth. “Rhysand.”

Mor considered. “He’s… steady,” she said at last. “Like a man who taught himself to stand up in storms and then realized there are worse things than rain. He’s not coming to take you. He’s coming to make sure you can take yourself.”

The pendant at my throat lay quiet now, only metal and a symbol and a memory of heat. The gown looked like something my hands could own. The room felt less like a stage and more like a door I could stand behind, breathing, until I chose to open it.

“Go,” I said, because if I kept her I would start to ask for something I wasn’t ready to ask for. “Before the House remembers it hates you.”

“The House and I have an understanding,” she said. “I leave before I make a scene, and it pretends it didn’t enjoy the visit.” She reached out, hesitated, and then touched my forearm with two fingers, brief and gentle. “See you in the garden.”

The air folded around her again—neat as a well-made bed—and then she was not there.

The room was itself. The silence returned and found it had changed shape in its absence. Outside, someone shouted about chair placement; someone else laughed the way people laugh when they are being paid to act like relief.

I crossed to the chaise and laid my palm flat on the gown. It was cool. It lay there, fabric, not verdict. I smoothed it once. Twice.

I went to the window and looked at the arch again. It still looked like a gate. The path beneath it still ran two ways—forward into a story written in lilies, or sideways into a blank.

I counted to five and told the seamstress to come in.

When she and her pins and her promise of perfection fussed around me, I stood very still and thought of a city that was either a sin or a sanctuary, depending on who said it, and I let myself admit, if only in the most private chamber any person has, that I wanted to see it in the kind of light that doesn’t love anyone unless they ask.

I let myself admit that if Rhysand was there, at the edge of a crowd that had been told not to invite him, I would see him even if I did not turn.

I let myself admit that I had not been living with fear these last three weeks. I had been living with the idea that I might be able to do something braver than endure.

When they left me dressed and shining and ready to be blessed, I sat one moment longer on the edge of the bed and pressed my fingertips to my pulse until it steadied into a rhythm I could walk to.

Then I stood, and the dress did not hum, and I did not feel steadied by anything I hadn’t chosen.

On the floor by the chaise, half-hidden by the fall of fabric, lay a single gold thread, no thicker than a hair.

I picked it up, looped it once around my finger, and tucked it into the little pocket sewn into the side of the gown—the one the seamstress had laughed about yesterday, for luck.

“Luck,” I said to no one. “And choice.”

The knock came a third time. “Your Majesty?”

I stood. “I’m ready,” I said, and this time the words didn’t sound like a line someone else had rehearsed into me. They sounded like mine.

Rhysand

I am nervous. 

There, I said it. To myself and accidentally down the channels because Cassian barked a laugh.

You? Nervous? Cassian’s mind-voice is all grin and wings. Do we have a commemorative banner? I can commission something with tasteful glitter.

Glitter and I are not on speaking terms, I send back, deadpan.

Mor pours sunlight through the link, warm, irreverent. Hem and cuffs are clean. Dye’s out. The priestess tried to bless the dress again and I smiled at her until she remembered she had an appointment elsewhere. Elara’s breathing. She looks like herself, not a statue.

Azriel is a taut, cool thread under us. Dawn cleric is here. Helion escorted him personally. Summer, Autumn, Winter seated. Spring’s wards are listening. They don’t like us. The arch has a reactive snare—if tampered with, it backlashes along the herbs braided through the base. I can blunt it if needed.

Good, I say, and draw one long breath. The bond hums lightly—Elara's moving between rooms, the rhythm of a woman teaching her body to behave under watchful eyes. Weeks since Calanmai and I can still call up the feel of her turning, the way the world found a new center by the width of a breath.

I stand at the edge of Spring’s lawn where the public road gives way to ceremony—where the grass is more intent on being green than grass. The House’s glamour settles over me like a well-cut coat: not to hide me; just to make eyes slide and not stick until I want them to. Above, Cassian’s shadow drifts over pale flagstones—a hawk that decided to learn how to joke. At the far colonnade, Azriel is an absence where shape should be. And within, Mor—already a rumor among bridesmaids who don’t know they’ve met their favorite disaster—waits with a smile like a blade wrapped in silk.

Music begins—polite strings, careful beats. Spring is very good at turning sound into manners. Mortals packed into their best stand in the back; courtiers gleam. The mortal queens sit like a row of jewels, emotionless with practice. Helion lounges, golden and ferocious; Tarquin watches, bright and wary; Kallias and Viviane hold frost like a courtesy in their palms; Eris pretends he’s bored, which is how Autumn tells you it’s paying attention. Ianthe, washed in white, lifts her hands as if calling down blessing and not theater.

Tamlin stands beneath the arch drowned in green. He looks like the apology of sunlight after a winter no one asked for. If you didn’t know him, you would call it grace. I know him.

Mark, I send into the net of us, and step across the line that separates public from private.

We do not creep. We do not dither.

We walk in, Mor on my arm, Azriel’s shadows lengthening at the edges of sight, Cassian dropping nearer to the terrace with the unthreatening arrogance of a species that learned to terrify before it learned to talk.

Conversations falter, then still. I hear the sound of a hundred throats remembering how to swallow.

Tamlin turns.

We look at each other the way men do who were built by the same kind of hands and survived by building themselves different anyway. His pulse jumps. Mine is steady because I’m holding it down with shame and practice.

I incline my head, civilized as a knife laid parallel to a loaf of bread. “Apologies,” I say, easy as breath. “It seems our invitation went astray. Tragic for the messengers. The Night Court prides itself on punctuality.”

Helion covers a laugh with the back of his hand. I don’t look at him.

I look at her.

Elara appears at the far end of the aisle. She is not a statue. She is not an altar. She is a person wearing white because someone told her to. The ribbons in her hair are simple now, not humming. The silver sun at her throat is only metal. She takes a step, then another. The bond inside me does not yank. It doesn’t need to. It hums the way a river does as it enters a bend, knowing the curve is what makes it river and not trench.

Breathe, Cassian says, and I do, because he’s the only person I obey before I think about it.

Elara walks.

I catalogue the small things: the way her weight shifts to avoid a hairline crack the decorators missed; the way her gaze moves—front row, arch, sky, not back to me; the way her fingers rest open at her sides instead of tightening, a choice most people cannot make when a crowd is watching. She carries her fear well; she refuses to distribute it. Her eyes find mine for the space of half a breath. And in that sliver, I see it—the dilemma breaking like light through leaves. Not fear alone. Not certainty.

She arrives at the dais. Tamlin’s shoulders ease a fraction. He believes he has made it past the hardest part of the day.

Ianthe raises both hands to claim the air. “We gather,” she breathes, holy as a salesman, “to witness—”

“—the legal language,” Mor says, bright and bored. “Which the Dawn cleric will read into the air for the record. It would be so embarrassing for anyone to pretend later they misheard.”

Ianthe’s smile cracks and resettles. “That isn’t—”

I nod to the cleric.

The Dawn cleric steps forward. He is exactly the kind of old that frightens men like Beron and bores men like Helion: incorruptible, unimpressed. His voice lands in ears like water into a held cup.

“In the old tongue and its mirror,” he says, “the roots for unity and subjugation are cognates: to bind. Arranged thus—” he taps the gilded line, “—the vow resists revocation once begun. Magical bleed follows. On a mortal, it is fatal.”

Sound thins to a line.

Tamlin looks at Ianthe. He is a man accustomed to delegating his lies. She provides the smile on cue. “A misreading, High Lord. Sacred nuance—”

“Words mean what they say,” the cleric replies. He does not blink.

Rhys, Azriel murmurs, her pulse just changed.

I turn my head. He didn't need to tell me. I felt it too.

My eyes slide to Elara. Confusion bumps against conviction there, visible as weather. She flicks a glance—not to me; to the arch. I can almost feel the shape of the thought moving through her: What was I saying yes to? Where does this path lead? If I step, who does it turn me into? If I refuse… who will pay? The bond hums a low, steady counterpoint. I make no move to press.

Tamlin steps forward, voice pitched just for her. “We can strike any line you dislike,” he says, soft, earnest. “We can simplify everything. We don’t need tradition. We need… us.”

Ah. There he is. The best version of him. The kindness he thinks is a shield against accountability. It is almost enough to sell the room on him; I watch it land like rain on a garden that should have been watered yesterday and wasn’t. Heads tilt; breath catches.

Elara’s mouth parts. I see the future in her eyes—the one where she says yes and tries to make the rest of her life honorable enough to justify this moment. I see the one where she says no and admits to herself she wants something she hasn’t had permission to want.

Rhys, Mor warns down the link, not because I’m moving, but because she knows me. Don’t rescue. Witness.

I do. I watch the fight take place in her without lifting a finger. Her gaze skims the front row—mortal queens weighing; Helion’s delight sharpened now into defense; Tarquin’s polite, fierce interest; Kallias and Viviane’s unblinking attention; Eris’s lazy, predatory curiosity. The ground under this choice is not neutral. She sees that. She weighs it against the faces of children in her southern hamlets, against a treaty drawn without her hand, against a priestess’s soft certainties, against a male who has been unfailingly, suffocatingly kind.

Her eyes come back to me for the briefest heartbeat—help? Not the kind that asks to be carried. The kind that asks to be seen doing a hard thing.

I incline my head the smallest measurable degree. I see you, the gesture says. No net, no shove. The air will hold.

She turns to the arch.

“I…” she starts, and falters. Ianthe’s mouth curves. Tamlin leans, just slightly, toward relief.

Elara steadies. She inhales like a diver. “I need to see the clause,” she says—to the cleric, to the gathered courts, to the gods themselves. “The exact words. Spoken aloud.”

The Dawn cleric makes a small, pleased noise—the sound a satisfied scholar makes when a student refuses to accept a paraphrase as truth. He reads. Exactly. The old words and the new, the mirrored phrasing that weds bind to bleed. He says the quiet part, too: accompanying rites enforced according to priestly judgment.

Something in Elara’s face—there, that quiet again—locks.

Ianthe moves to speak. Azriel’s shadows, patient as cats, resettle.

Elara looks at Tamlin. The silence goes tight. “Did you know?” she asks, voice low. It is not an accusation yet. It is a last mercy extended, the chance to be clean.

He freezes for the length of a breath. It’s small. It’s damning. “I trusted Ianthe,” he says—not quite answering. “I would never hurt you.”

A petal browns and drops.

Elara closes her eyes for half a heartbeat. When she opens them, the dilemma has resolved. Grief remains—grief for the version of the world where this worked, for the boy who poured tea and listened; but the choice is done.

“I will not speak vows I did not write,” she says, and then—no tremor—“I do not consent to this union.”

It lands cleaner, deeper than any shout would have. No hysteria. No spectacle. A line drawn across a page the world thought it owned.

The arch groans. The vines quiver. Magic flinches like a horse met with honesty for the first time. The reactive snare at the base of the arch reaches for the dye Mor ripped out and finds air. It snaps back, spitting spite. The first lash of it whips toward Elara—

—and dies against Night. I don’t let it touch her.

Tamlin’s pretty mask fractures.

It happens quickly: disbelief to humiliation to rage, all flooding through the same thin place. He laughs once, a sound that tries to be charming and lands as something with teeth. “No?” he says, softly. “After everything—after I—”

Mor doesn’t interrupt. She stands at the edge of the dais with her hands folded, expression the very picture of benevolent disaster, and lets him hang himself.

Ianthe hisses something holy and reaches for the old words with the greed of someone who thinks magic is most beautiful when it removes choice. Azriel’s shadows, tender as a closed door, cover her mouth.

Tamlin moves.

Not to her. To me.

Vines explode from between the flags. The scent of green turns rank. Light—the kind Spring hoards—pours from his hands, bright enough to leave ghosts on the eyes. He aims to blind me, then bind me.

I step into Night like a man stepping into a well-fitting coat. The vines writhe, miss, recoil. The light meets geometry and shears away in crisp planes. Elara says, “Tamlin—” and because he is all nerves and story now, he doesn’t hear her.

He lunges. I meet him halfway.

It is ugly. It is honest. We do not pretend to be dueling. We are boys built into blades by fathers with very different names for the same hunger, trying too late to learn a language that isn’t steel.

He swings. I let the shield take it and feel the force in my forearms, the way you do when you catch a falling thing and your body asks whether you’re certain you want to keep being kind. I strike—not for show, for space. Our power collides: his a flood of gilded insistence, mine a vacuum wrapped in starlight that refuses to be a mouth. Courtiers scatter; guards surge. Cassian drops from the terrace with a crack of wings and takes up position where any sane man will decide his blade doesn’t want to be.

Tamlin shouts something that might be my name if it hadn’t been buried under claim. “You poisoned her,” he snarls. “You put your fucking city in her head. You dragged her out of her senses. You fucking poisoned her!”

“You cannot bear that a woman’s choice is hers,” I say, too calm, because I have spent centuries practicing sentences that will get me killed slower. “You cannot bear that kindness is not the same as consent.”

He goes for my throat. The shield sings. Something inside me answers in a register I try not to use.

Snow, iron, the one note the world made when my mother’s voice broke for the last time. My sister’s fingers, small and furious, shoving me behind a rock I did not fit behind. The taste of blood where I bit through my tongue so I wouldn’t give our killers the satisfaction of a scream.

Night surges.

I catch his neck in it and squeeze.

The garden tilts. The arch keens. Someone screams—maybe mortal, maybe priest. Cassian’s voice down the link hits me like a hand to the chest: not words, just my name, my name, my name. Mor’s slices after: Rhys. Look at her.

I look.

Elara is horrified. Not by him. Not by me. By the idea that this is the only ending males like us remember.

“Stop,” she says. Not command. Refusal.

I loosen. He drags in breath and swings because it is the only language his body trusts. I let the blow shear off my shield, catch his wrist, turn him, pin him to the stone with a pressure calibrated to bruise and not break.

“Don’t make me be the thing you’ve always needed me to be,” I tell him, very soft. “I am exhausted, Tamlin. I am tired of loving nothing but my capacity for ruin.”

He spits something that tastes like pride and fear. I release him.

Helion takes two bored steps and snaps light across the space between us. It stings like a ruler on knuckles. “Gentlemen,” he says to a crowd that has forgotten how to breathe. “Must we audition for tragedies in front of the mortals?”

Kallias lifts his hand and winter slides into the air like manners. Tarquin sends a long, cool ripple of calm across the back rows so the humans remember how to breathe. Eris checks an invisible fleck from his sleeve the way one might inspect a fly for potential.

Tamlin staggers upright. He turns to Elara. The expression on his face is naked, ugly, raw. “Please,” he says. The word is unpracticed. “I can— We can—”

Elara meets his eyes and ends the oldest story in the book by telling the truth. “No,” she says. “Not like this. Not with these words.”

I turn to the courts. Because truth only counts if it’s said into air other people breathe.

“The priestess of Spring wove a binding clause into a union vow,” I say, voice carrying. “A Dawn cleric confirms it. Spoken as written, a revocation would cause bleed—fatal to mortals. The hem and cuffs contained Dawn dye designed to amplify obedience. We removed it. Night objects.”

Beron arches a red brow. “On what law?”

“Consent,” Mor says sweetly. “A new fad. Try it.”

“Recognized across courts,” the Dawn cleric supplies, unruffled. “Even yours.”

“And while we’re ending old stories,” I add, because the blade has been warm in my mouth since I was very young, “let’s retire the legend of the mountain pass as absolution. Tamlin’s father wanted my family dead. But the hand that finished it belonged to Tamlin. He swung. He stepped. He made sure.”

A lift of the mortal queens’ heads; a sharp flicker from Tarquin; Kallias’s mouth doing that thing where it almost becomes human. Eris’s boredom sharpening to interest.

Tamlin’s face goes momentarily, terribly young. Then rage resumes its post.

“Rhysand,” Helion drawls in a tone that says he would prefer this in a salon with olives, “as entertaining as the catharsis is, can we stop humiliating ourselves in front of women who just made cleaner choices than any of us managed at that age?”

“Gladly,” I say, and lay my last card where everyone can see it. “Elara Vance is my mate.”

The garden exhales its gossip in silence. Even birds reconsider speaking.

Tarquin’s eyes brighten. Kallias inclines his head, the faintest degree—that rare Winter admission that someone did something brave. Eris looks bored unto rapture.

Tamlin doesn’t flinch. He has carried that pebble in his boot since the meadow. Saying it aloud only reveals that he has been limping.

“I expect nothing from her,” I say to the queens, to the record, to the future fights. “She owes me nothing. If she wants to return to her realm, I will take her. I will sign a treaty that secures her people’s protection—no tithe, no leverage."

“Big oaths,” Eris murmurs. “Very unfashionable.”

“You’d know,” Mor says, a smile like a blade.

anthe inhales to speak a holy word that smells like a trap. Azriel’s shadows drift across her mouth; the word dies of natural causes.

The thread tightens one last time—fight or spectacle. I do not cut it. Mor turns to Elara with that infuriating, saving light and says, “Darling, would you like to leave before these men decide to cosplay their fathers again?”

Elara looks at what Spring has arranged for her. She looks at me for a single, steady heartbeat—will you let me do this myself?—and the bond hums without tugging.

“Yes,” she says.

Mor takes her hand, and the world folds, neat as a seam.

They are gone.

Tamlin lunges into the space where choice just stood—because habit, because panic, because the story he’s been telling himself about what men are for has not learned any new verbs. Guards surge. Cassian lands like a smiling wall and the thought of a fight decides to do something else with its afternoon. Helion snaps his band of light. “Enough,” he says, casual as a god. “We can all go home and be embarrassed there.”

I turn from Spring before I do something my city will pay for. Home, I tell my court. The word opens a door.

Azriel flows into shadow. Cassian lifts with a thrum of wing and delight. The last thing I hear in the garden is the rustle of roses realizing they were asked to play at love and decided, finally, that they would rather be plants than props. The last thing I see is Ianthe’s smile cracking where even she can’t paste it back.

We dissolve into the cool, clean air between courts and leave Spring to explain to itself why the day went honest against its will.

Elara

When I wake, the world smells of rain.

Not the sticky sweetness of Spring’s perfumed storms but clean rain—the kind that leaves a taste of stone and distance in the air. For a moment I don’t move. The sheets beneath my hands aren’t silk; they’re cool linen. My gown is gone. Someone has braided my hair back loosely, and there are faint bruises around my wrists where the vines struck before Rhysand’s shadow swallowed the magic.

Rhysand.

The name flickers like a struck match.

Two shadows move near the hearth. The twins—their resemblance uncanny enough that looking between them feels like watching a reflection breathe—work in unspoken rhythm. One wrings out a cloth in a basin; the other stirs a bowl that steams faintly of crushed herbs.

“You’re awake,” says the first, a smile gentle as moonlight. “I’m Nuala. This is Cerridwen.”

They are efficient, soft-spoken, and terrifying in the way people are who know precisely where they belong.

Cerridwen kneels, offering the bowl. “Drink. Chamomile, valerian, and something Azriel swears isn’t poison.”

My throat remembers dryness; I sip. Warmth spreads outward, coaxing the tightness from my chest. “Where am I?”

“The House of Wind,” Nuala answers. “Velaris. You’ve been asleep for… most of the night. We removed the last of Spring’s glamour.” Her gaze flicks over me, assessing. “There wasn’t much left that wanted to stay.”

I glance down. My skin feels lighter, as if something sticky has been peeled away. “I thought glamour was only illusion.”

“Not the kind they used.” Cerridwen wrings the cloth again and runs it down my forearm. “Spring magic soaks into pores. It tells the air to remember what you were told to be.”

I don’t know whether to shiver or laugh. Instead I whisper, “Thank you.”

They trade a quick look that might be approval. “You’ll want fresh air,” Nuala says. “He’s on the upper balcony.”

He.
The bond answers before I can. A pulse—not command, not demand—just a steady thrum that feels like a heartbeat under my own.

I find slippers beside the bed. The House, living and mildly opinionated, nudges doors open as I move through its corridors. The climb is longer than it should be—every step an echo of something I’ve refused to name—but the night air meets me before hesitation can.

The door opens to air that tastes exactly like memory.

Cool. Clean. Alive.
I step out and the world rushes in to meet me.

The balcony curves wide and open, suspended above a city that glitters as if the stars themselves decided they were tired of being so far away. Below, ribbons of gold spill along the riverbanks; rooftops shimmer under starlight. The Sidra gleams like black glass, its surface catching every reflection the heavens are willing to give. Wind slides through my hair and brings with it the scent of bread, salt, jasmine, and something impossible—like laughter turned into air.

My breath stutters.
This is it. This is the place from my dreams. The balcony with its carved balustrade, the hum in the stones beneath my feet, the faint music carried from somewhere unseen. Even the air feels right—the same soft pressure on my skin that I could never name while I slept.

I press a hand to my chest. The bond thrums gently, but it’s not what makes my throat ache. It’s recognition.

“I’ve seen this before,” I whisper.

Rhysand turns from the railing. Moonlight kisses the silver on his cuffs, the edges of his hair. His face is half-shadowed, half-soft. He doesn’t interrupt.

“I’ve dreamt of this place since Calanmai,” I say. “The city. The river. The stars. I thought I’d gone mad. Part of me was afraid to believe it existed, but the other part…” My voice breaks on a laugh. “The other part always knew it did.”

He studies me for a long moment. Then, quietly, “Velaris has a way of finding people who need to see it.”

I look out again. The Sidra winds through the city like a living thing; lanterns float over it in slow, deliberate procession. On the opposite bank, towers rise like the spines of sleeping creatures, lit from within by steady golden light.

“This—” I breathe, “—is what peace must look like.”

Rhys comes to stand beside me but doesn’t close the space. His hands rest lightly on the railing, careful not to touch mine. “It’s not perfect,” he says. “But it’s real. That’s more than most courts can claim.”

We stay that way, two silhouettes against the silver sprawl. Wind fills the pauses between us. When I speak again, the words slip out small but steady. “You said you would protect my people. Without binding clauses. Without bargains.”

“I meant it,” he answers. “Night keeps its word even when no one believes it.” His gaze stays on the city, not me. “Your realm will have its treaty. No oaths that cost blood. No fine print hidden under candlelight. If you choose to return home, I’ll take you myself. The border will remain guarded, and your people will be left in peace.”

It should sound like politics. It doesn’t. It sounds like a vow spoken by someone who finally learned that power can be gentle.

“And if I don’t return?” I ask.

“Then you stay here,” he says. “Velaris will keep you safe. You’ll have a place that is yours. No one will decide for you again. Not me. Not any High Lord.”

The wind rises between us, catching the hem of my robe, threading his hair into the starlight. I stare down at the city that shouldn’t exist and at the same time feels more honest than anything I’ve known.

“I spent so long thinking safety was something I owed to others,” I murmur. “Something bought by obedience.” I shake my head, smiling a little. “I didn’t realize it could be something I was allowed to have.”

His voice is soft, almost lost to the wind. “You are allowed everything.”

For a while, there’s only the city’s breathing—the hum of lamps, the sigh of wind through narrow streets, the pulse of the river far below. I could leave. I could return to my realm tomorrow, with papers signed and peace bought the right way. But my hands are steady on the stone, and I know before I even open my mouth that I’ve already decided.

“I think,” I say slowly, “I want to stay.”

He turns toward me. Not surprised. Just still.

“I want to see the sun rise here,” I continue. “To learn the names of the streets in my dreams. To breathe without wondering who’s watching.” I meet his eyes. “You’ll keep your word to my people regardless. So… let me see what freedom looks like before I go back.”

Rhysand nods once, as if sealing something invisible. “Then Velaris will be your home for as long as you wish it.”

There’s no smile, no triumph—only quiet understanding. The kind of understanding that leaves room for whatever might come next.

We stand together in the wind. Below us, the Sidra carries starlight through its veins. Above, the heavens seem a little closer. For the first time since Calanmai, the air feels like it belongs to me.

Rhysand doesn’t reach for me, and I don’t move closer. Still, something between us shifts—light, fragile, infinite.

Hope, maybe.

He exhales. “Welcome to Velaris, Elara.”

I look over the city—the dream made real—and let the words settle in my bones like warmth.

Home, I think. Not a promise. Just the possibility of one.

And for the first time, possibility feels enough.