Page 25 of Blade of the Nightking

“The worst part… is that I would do it again.”

Shame burned through me. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” he said softly. “I mourn for my city, for my people, but⁠—”

“Aedric—”

“Listen.” His fingers closed around my wrist, anguish plain in every line of his face. “I suffered for three hundred years severed from the bond that was rightfully mine—the bond I tried to save and lost. You can’t imagine what it was like. To live incomplete.” His grip trembled. “If you’d died, I would have too—I couldn't survive that loss again. I know what that makes me.”

I couldn’t speak. Instead, I looked around the chamber, if only to hide the sting burning behind my eyes.

It was vast, a series of interconnected rooms wrapped in gilded warmth and impossible luxury. Great towering panes stretched from floor to ceiling, revealing moonlit gardens beyond. Silver fountains spilled into mirrored pools, while dark trees swayed gently in a nighttime breeze, their branches whispering beneath a velvet sky scattered with stars.

It was glamor. I could feel the faint hum of magic against my skin, subtle and effervescent, like carbonation prickling through the air. The illusion shimmered faintly at its edges if I looked too long, the stars too still, the movement too perfect. We were in a cave, or something like one. Perhaps beneath a mountain. I’d understood that the moment I looked up and found no sky, only jagged rock hanging above us like the teeth of some great beast.

“Perhaps Calantha should lead after all.”

“No!” The word slipped out before I could stop it, edged with a sudden terror I couldn’t hide.

He looked up at me through damp lashes.

“Her magic is a terrible thing,” he said after a moment. “But it’s always been a great boon to this Court.”

“She enjoys it, Aedric,” I whispered. “Hurting people.”

His mouth tightened, though whether in disagreement or resignation, I couldn’t tell.

A cold, ugly feeling twisted in my stomach. Before I could bury it again, the words slipped free. “She hurt me.”

His expression didn’t shift. If anything, it smoothed suddenly—a mask sliding into place.

“There was nothing I could do,” he said, brittle. “The Full Circle⁠—”

“You’re a High Lord.” Speaking felt strangely painful, my throat too tight around the rising bitterness. “You’re one of them. You had the power to stop it, didn’t you?”

“You left us no choice after what you’d done.” Not an answer.

His hands clenched once against his knees, white-knuckled as though forcing himself into steadiness. “You destroyed the Veil,” he said evenly, too calmly. “You released Rìan. That’s treason, Elowen. You were fortunate not to be executed on the spot. I intervened—I spared you from that.”

“You bound me in iron and threw me into a warded cell!”

Burning metal biting into my skin, darkness pressing in from every side, the helplessness of it so suffocating that even now my voice trembled beneath the memory of it.

“The Full Circle ordered it,” he said again, more firmly now, frustration beginning to bleed through his carefully composed exterior.

“You didn’t fight them. You didn’t stop them.” The grief and betrayal I’d been holding back cracked me open. “You said you loved me, and you let that happen. You didn’t come for me. You didn’t even come to see me.” The bond throbbed between us, emotions moving through it in a tangled, muddy current, though outwardly he gave nothing away. It only fueled my anger.

“You let Calantha tear me apart. She ripped through my magic with her sight! How could you allow that? How could you do that to me?”

The hurt rose too fast to stop.

“You can’t let them lock me away whenever you’re afraid or angry! You can’t keep me in a cage if I defy you! I’m not my mother, Aedric!”

Silence stretched between us.

My hands knotted helplessly in the ruined dress as the shaking returned in earnest, harder this time.

For a long moment, he simply sat there, so still he might have been made of stone. Slowly, he rose to his feet.