“I’ve been worse.” A lie, probably. But he doesn’t need to know that. “Sleep. We’re going to need everything we have for what comes next.”
He looks like he wants to argue. Then exhaustion wins, and he nods.
“Wake me if anything changes.”
“I will.”
He settles back against the bones, his eyes closing. Within minutes, his breathing evens out—the deep, steady rhythm ofsomeone who’s learned to sleep when they can, wherever they can. A soldier’s sleep. A survivor’s sleep.
I sit beside him, watching the Heartgrove for any sign of the King’s return. The faces in the bark are still. The roots and vines lie dormant. But I can feel the ancient hunger lurking at the edges of awareness, patient and malevolent and endlessly, terribly focused.
The King is quiet through the trees. Not absent—I can feel it everywhere, patient and waiting. But it says nothing. Just watches, the way something watches when it has decided to let time do the work instead.
That silence is worse than anything it has said.
I don’t respond. Don’t give it anything to work with. Just sit in the darkness with my blades across my knees, watching over the man who’s given me what I thought I’d lost forever.
Hope.
The King can wait all it wants. I’m staying right here.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THAROS
Abone hollow opens beneath my hands like a wound.
I’ve been here before. During the darkest moments of the binding, when the King’s voice got too loud, when I wasn’t sure I could hold on for another hour, much less another year. This place—a cavity beneath Briargrave’s oldest roots, carved by water and rot and the slow digestion of organic matter—is one of the few spots where the King’s influence thins. Not gone, never gone, but distant enough that I can think without the constant pressure of hunger against my skull.
The walls hold the same litany of bone I’ve grown used to in this forest, but here they’re sunk deeper into the clay, polished smooth by decades of Briargrave’s slow digestion. The air is close, humid, thick with the smell of decay. But it’s breathable. And the vines don’t reach here.
“Down.” I lower myself into the hollow, then turn to help Xela follow. She takes my hand without hesitation—when did that happen?—and drops the six feet to the floor beside me.
The space is larger than it looks from above. Big enough to stand in, if you’re not seven feet tall. I’ve spent nights here, curled against the bone-studded walls, listening to the King rage above while I tried to remember why I was fighting at all.
Now I’m not alone.
“Charming.” Xela surveys our shelter, her voice dry despite the exhaustion that’s carved lines around her mouth. “You really know how to show a woman a good time.”
“The accommodations aren’t the point. The King’s reach is weaker here. We can rest without—” I pause, searching for words that won’t sound weak. “Without constant assault.”
“I know what you meant.” She’s already moving, finding a section of wall with fewer bone protrusions, settling against it with a wince she tries to hide. “How long do we have?”
“Hours. Maybe until morning.” I don’t sit. Can’t, not yet. The need to stand guard, to watch the entrance, to protect—it’s instinct now. Bred into me by years of surviving in a forest that wants me dead. “The King expended significant energy in the possession attempt. It needs to recover.”
“So do we.” She’s pulling supplies from her pack now. Bandages. A small pot of salve that smells medicinal. A needle and thread that gleam dully in the faint light filtering through the roots above. “Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”
“I don’t?—”
“Sit.”
The command in her voice stops me. I look at her—really look, for the first time since we fled the Heartgrove. She’s a mess. Blood matted in her dark hair. Gashes across her arms where the vines got through her guard. A wound on her side that’s still seeping, dark against her torn armor. The marks the King put on her tonight will outlast every cut the Consortium scouts ever drew. The ravine I could explain away. This one I have to wear.
I caused some of that. When the King was wearing my body, using my hands?—
“Stop.” Her voice cuts through the spiral of guilt before it can fully form. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop. I can see it on your face.”
“You can’t see anything on my face.”
