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Lyrena waited until we were three turns away, far enough that even the sharpest of fae ears could not follow, before letting out a billowing laugh.
“He’ll have a new streak of gray by tomorrow morning, I guarantee!” she hooted, slapping her thigh as we walked.
I tossed her a half-smile over my shoulder, but kept walking. We entered the first courtyard, the one nearest to my rooms. There was a fountain in the middle, bubbling merrily. Palace guards on each corner. I didn’t linger.
“Are you insinuating I am responsible for Gawayn’s premature aging?” I said once we were inside another covered corridor.
“I’d hardly call it premature. He’s nearing eight hundred years,” Lyrena said.
I hadn’t realized he was so old. A fae of strong magic and power usually lived to a thousand. The most powerful among us might reach fifteen hundred years old. Arran, the strongest fae born in millennia? He’d reach that at least. If I didn’t kill him first.
As for me? I was lucky to have made it to twenty-five.
Or unlucky. Each of those years had been marked by pain.
I could feel the specter of darkness pushing closer, threatening to claim the unusual clarity I’d had since waking. I must not fall back into the pit. Not now.
I forced my attention back to Lyrena.
She still hovered a half step behind, off my left shoulder. Guarding my back.
I waited beneath the arch to the next courtyard. She stopped short, of course.
“Walkwithme, Lyrena. It’s impossible to talk to you when I have to look back over my shoulder.”
I could feel her hesitation. Even without Gawayn here to admonish her, even with her customary irreverence, she was still a Goldstone Guard. She’d been looking after me since the moment I emerged from the water gardens.
Just as she’d looked after Arthur.
Ancestors, he was too present in my mind this morning.
He always hovered there, a spectral ghost just beyond the edges of reality. But today I seemed to see him every place I looked. In Gawayn’s blond hair. In the gold and emerald band that held the end of Lyrena’s braid in place. The one Arthur had gifted her; the same one she’d worn the night of his murder.
Had she been wearing it all these months? Had I really been so deep in my own despair that I hadn’t noticed her subtle, unending tribute to the lover she’d lost? She couldn’t grieve like I could; she had a duty to perform.
So did I, I realized.
Right now.
I reached out, clasped my pale fingers around her golden skin, and pulled her to my side.
She didn’t fight me. This time, when she smiled, it was a softer thing, lacking any of her customary flippancy.
“This is the route you used to walk with Arthur,” she said softly.
Of course, she remembered. I’d been flanked by Goldstones then as well, though they’d been focused on my brother, rather than me.
There was Arthur again.
I had not done it intentionally. But my feet seemed to remember the path, even if my mind had stubbornly forgotten. Arthur and I had walked together nearly every day after my release, arm in arm, finally free to be the brother and sister we’d always been in our hearts. Despite my mother’s determination to keep me isolated, and my father’s cowardly inability to defy her, Arthur and I had loved one another fiercely.
But I was not the only one who had loved him.
The glint in Lyrena’s eyes reminded me of as much.
And instead of leaning into that shared grief, letting our half-friendship grow into something closer—something real—I exploited it instead.
“I know precious little of the goldstone palace, I’m afraid. Only what Arthur showed me,” I said, letting my voice ring with sadness.
