The glee on her face as she wrapped her fingers around the worn leather handle almost made him regret his decision. But her voice was calm as she answered, “Maybe a few times.”
“Show me your stance,” he instructed reluctantly, fighting against his own judgment as he stepped around her, adjusting her feet and her hands, shifting her balance, and ordering she remain on the ground until further notice. Within minutes, Rafe was lost in the movement, time racing as he did something he rarely ever got to do—share a bit of himself with another person.
The hour flew.
Then another, and another, until they were sticky with sweat. Their clothes were stained with grass and dirt. Their limbs were caked in mud. Yet they were smiling, even as their breath came up short and exhaustion overtook them, slowing their thrusts and parries. Still, they didn’t stop. Not until the sun was setting, and Cassi fell to the ground, grunting as her wings got crushed beneath her.
“Enough,” she cried.
“You need to work on your stamina,” Rafe goaded, even as he swayed on his feet. A moment later, he was surprised to land as heavy as a rock on the dirt. His mind was so slow that it took her laugh for him to realize she’d swiped his legs out from under him.
“You need to work on your comebacks,” she said, easing back against the grass to stare up at the sky.
Rafe opened his mouth before noticing she was right, and he had no idea what to say. So, he sealed his lips and followed her lead, letting his head fall against the ground as he blinked at the vast sky—a sight that had always made him feel small in an almost comforting sort of way. As though his problems were small as well.
“I’m hungry,” Cassi stated.
His stomach rumbled as soon as she spoke. “Me too. Come on.”
Rafe led her from the practice fields to the kitchens, quietly noting how her steps resembled the confident march of a native far more than the confused hesitation of a newcomer. She turned when he turned, shoulder to shoulder, at his side and not behind. There was no pause in her movements. No question. As though she knew exactly where he was taking her. The very notion was impossible, and yet Rafe couldn’t quite shake the sense that the owl had been there before.
Don’t be a fool. She’d probably just wandered to the kitchen that morning in search of breakfast after she’d woken alone.
Sure enough, when she asked him for the way to her rooms after they’d had their fill of fresh bread, her strides were different, more like he had expected. Shorter. Unsure. When they rounded the next corner, she stopped dead in her tracks. With his eyes still on her, he bumped into a body he hadn't seen coming.
“Sorry,” he murmured, turning to find the smiling face of his brother. Rafe jumped back. “Xander!”
“Rafe.”
“Cassi?”
“Ana!”
The four of them paused for a moment. A spike of heat shot through Rafe’s chest, leaving a smoldering path in its wake, the undeniable sense that he’d been doing something wrong, but he didn’t know what. He glanced at the owl, but she was smiling at her friend. And though he didn’t want his eyes to follow, he couldn’t help it—they were drawn like a moth to a flame, and what a bright spot she was. Lyana. Standing there in an amethyst dress embroidered with diamonds, her face framed by the golden trim of her cream overcoat, highlighting the natural warmth of her skin.
“What were you two doing?” Xander asked, mirth evident in his tone.
Rafe suddenly remembered the dirt and the sweat, how much a mess the two of them must have looked compared to the crown prince and his princess in matching finery, pristine as royals should be. “I was, uh, teaching Cassi some swordplay.” He couldn’t help noticing how Lyana tossed a confused glance at her friend, but he cleared his throat and straightened his spine, refocusing on his brother. “You?”
“The usual,” Xander smoothly replied with a shrug. “Breakfast with my mother. Meetings with the advisors. Now supper with the traders.”
His eyes were shining in a way that belied the casual tone of his words. As they flicked to the woman by his side, Rafe knew why. He was proud of his mate, proud to show her off to his people, proud to be standing with someone they would love instead of someone they had shunned.
Rafe gritted his teeth, nodding as words escaped him.
“Well, we should probably be going. We’re running late,” Xander said to his mate with a gently prodding expression. She started, forgetting where she was for a moment, but followed him as he maneuvered around Rafe, whose feet were rooted to the ground. Cassi walked on, either unconcerned or unaware that her guide had become motionless.
Rafe waited a moment longer, listening to his brother’s footsteps, each fading sound like a premonition of things to come. His heart sank deeper and deeper into the hollows of his chest.
He’d always known that things would be different after the courtship trials.
He’d always known his brother having a mate would change things.
But he had never realized how much until now. This insignificant moment had somehow flipped his world. It was the beginning of the end.
For the first time, he began to realize that Xander didn’t need him anymore. Not really. He had someone else by his side, someone better. A princess instead of a bastard—a trade up in anyone’s eyes. And it was only a matter of time before his brother saw how much of a useless burden Rafe had become—with the rumors, the strange looks, and the whispers in the dark, which hadn't ended as he'd hoped, but had instead strengthened.
“Uh, Rafe?” Cassi called. She was standing at the end of the hall, her arms crossed once more. “You’re supposed to be showing me where to go?”
“Right,” he muttered, taking a deep breath. “Right.”
Don’t be a fool, he thought for the second time that day as he hurried toward the owl and turned the corner, leading her. Xander isn’t going to forget you. You’re his brother. He loves you, no matter what. Of course he does.
But as he dropped Cassi off at her room and returned to the hall alone, the idea had become harder to swallow. And before he could stop himself, he found he was racing to the nearest balcony and jumping over the edge, wings catching him as he fell, pumping against the wind that whipped around the edge of the isle.
Rafe floated below the castle, to the rooms underground—rooms for the servants and the guards, and then rooms no one mentioned anymore. He didn’t stop until he reached the lowest level carved into the rock, now nothing more than a burnt-out crisp. A thick layer of ash stubbornly coated the surfaces even after more than a decade. He landed on the balcony outside the remnants of his mother’s room, pausing in the same spot he always did, scuffing his boots over old footprints and forming new ones in the dust. Even after all these years, he couldn’t step inside, not fully. Every time he tried, the memory of that snarl, the overwhelming heat, and the acrid scent of their burning flesh, still so strong in the stagnant air, stopped him.
Instead, he walked to the edge and sat so his feet dangled and his wings shrouded him like the curtains that used to hang there. When the corners of his eyes began to sting, he blamed it on the wind and closed them. And when his cheeks grew wet, he imagined there must have been a storm. And when the loneliness became a physical pain clawing at his gut, for a moment Rafe wondered if the dragon had come back to finish the job. But when he opened his eyes, no one was there.
He stood, wiped his cheeks, and flew back to his room at the top of the castle to do what he had done many times before—wait for Xander to return from a dinner he hadn’t been invited to, and do his best to be needed.
39
Lyana
By the time Lyana returned to her rooms that night, she was numb. Numb from all the talking. Numb from the monotony. Numb from the sheer amount of information they’d tried to shove down her throat. Just numb.
“Long night?” Cassi crooned.
Lyana found her friend curled against some pillows by the balcony, an open book in her hands, tan cheeks r
osy from the breeze.
“Long week.” She sighed and collapsed into the nearest chair, dropping her head in her hands. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to call this place home.”
“Ana,” Cassi reprimanded, “it’s only been a day.”
“I know, but everything is just so, so…so different. Everyone gawks at my wings. They stare at me like I’m some piece of art on display instead of a person. The queen is… Well, she’s just miserable. She won’t even allow you to come to breakfast, though I plan on revisiting that later. And everyone is just stuffy, too focused on work, not making room for even the slightest bit of fun. And the prince, he seems to enjoy it! The work, I mean, not the fun. I’m not even being myself—not joking, not teasing, not playing, because I feel so uncomfortable, I don’t even remember how to act.”
Cassi threw her a keen look over the rim of her reading glasses. But Lyana didn’t back down, and after a moment, her friend released an exaggerated sigh as she eased to her feet and left her book facedown against the floor so as not to lose her place.
“It can’t be that bad,” Cassi said.
“It is,” Lyana insisted and dropped back her head to stare at the shadows the oil lanterns made on the ceiling. Even her room was drab—drab and sullen and sulky just like her. “I’m not comfortable in my own skin here. They forced me to have a bath this morning while you were sleeping, like the dead I might add, but didn’t give me a second to grab my own soaps. Now even my skin feels dusty, like it’s thirsty for some excitement. And whatever they put in my hair made it dry and itchy. I don’t know where to find my combs to fix it.”
“Hold on,” Cassi muttered, changing direction midstride as she made for a trunk on the other side of the room that hadn’t been there that morning. Before she opened the lid, Lyana raced to her side, releasing a shamefully pleased breath as she took in the contents.
“Help get me out of this thing, please?” she asked, spinning so Cassi could untie the laces at her back while she worked on the buttons of her overcoat.
Within a few minutes, the formal gown was off, replaced with the silk sleeping trousers and shirt she pulled from the trunk, a set to match the ones her friend was already wearing. Immediately she could breathe again, and she did, inhaling for a long moment, trying to draw the air from the balcony until it was under her skin to keep it there, fresh and wild and full of life.
Lyana untied the messy bun she’d woven that morning, dipped her fingers into the salve her grandmother had given her before she’d gone to the gods, and rubbed it into her scalp. Lyana’s bluebird mother had skin as pale as a raven’s. Her hair was stick straight and easy to brush, more similar to Cassi’s wavy locks than her daughter’s coiling ones. Lyana, like Luka, had inherited her father’s looks—strong traits that Aethios himself gifted to all the doves. At least that was what her grandmother used to say as she gently forced a comb through Lyana's tight curls. The memory brought a smile to her lips as she tried to do the same now.
“Let me.” Taking the comb from Lyana’s hand, Cassi perched on the edge of the bed and motioned to her friend to sit on the floor, as they had often done before. “Small braids this time? So they don’t try to wash them?”
Lyana nodded and sighed as Cassi's fingers began to part her hair, moving meticulously around the crown of her head, weaving her curls into many small sets of braids that Lyana would be able to keep for a few weeks and style easily, without requiring aid from the servants who had tried to help, but had instead made her bitter.
Without anything to do, her mind began to wander.
To her mate.
To his mother.
To the lessons and the advisors.
To the people she’d met.
And finally, to the encounter she’d told herself to ignore, because she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about him, or wondering about him, or asking about him. But she wasn’t. Not technically. Not if she played her cards right.
“What did you do today?” Lyana asked lightly, a little too lightly.
Cassi snorted behind her. “Oh nothing, just another day like any other.”
Lyana tried to glare over her shoulder without moving her head, which was a pretty difficult thing to do. “Nothing you want to talk about?”
“Not really,” Cassi responded, but her tone was too playful by half. “Not unless there’s something you want to talk about.”
“Of course not,” Lyana countered, while silently grumbling in her head.
“Because if there was something you wanted to talk about,” Cassi continued, as methodically as she worked on Lyana’s hair, “something maybe that you expressly forbade me to let you talk about, or someone rather, then we could talk about him. It’s just that you have to tell me, because otherwise I’d be defying a direct order from my princess and, well, we both know what sort of trouble I could be in if I do that.”
“No trouble you haven’t been in before,” Lyana muttered under her breath.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing."
Her tone was sweet, but against the floor, her fingers curled into fists and she bit her lips to keep from talking. Cassi began to hum quietly, an annoyingly cheerful little tune that made Lyana’s blood boil. An image gathered in her thoughts, the image of the raven as he’d rounded the corner, eyes glued to Cassi, so enthralled by her friend he’d smacked right into his own brother, the crown prince.
It shouldn’t have bothered her.
It shouldn’t have mattered.
She was supposed to forget everything about him.
But a sensation clawed at her gut, digging and digging and digging, until suddenly, the words burst up her throat as though freed from some deep, dark place and propelled themselves into the world.
“Fine, fine.” She spat the admission and raced on to the rest, “Why was he training you? What were you doing together? Why were you covered in mud? What did he say? What did you say? Is he— Are you— What—”
“Relax, Ana,” Cassi teased. “Contrary to the sordid thoughts I know are racing through your mind, the raven and I did not, in one afternoon, begin an illustrious affair behind your back.”
Tension oozed from Lyana's body, making her wings droop—in relief, this time. “You didn’t?”
“No!” Soft laughter escaped Cassi’s lips, and Lyana could envision the way she was shaking her head while the rest of her body trembled with quiet mirth.
“Then why was he teaching you swordplay?” Lyana asked. “You know, the thing you did with Luka when I wasn’t around that eventually transitioned into, well, other kinds of swordplay, if you know what I mean?”
The hands against the top of her head fell still.
Lyana winced. She hadn’t meant to bring up her brother. Not really. Not as a weapon against her friend, whose heart was fragile at the moment. The words had just slipped out.
“Cassi—” She tried to turn around.
“Don't move,” her friend chided, tugging at the strands of hair gently, yet hard enough to keep Lyana from twisting. Her voice was more somber as she continued, “I wasn’t—”
She broke off with a sad sound that made Lyana’s soul hurt for her.
“When I woke up, you were gone, and no one seemed interested in me, so I got dressed and wandered the halls for a bit," Cassi said. "Before long, I found myself at the practice yards with my bow, itching for something to do. He was by himself at the opposite side of the grass, hurling a blunt sword into a bag of beans he’d strung up to a post. The other people there seemed wary of him, watching from a distance. And he seemed very lonely, and then sort of desperate as he flung his sword to the grass and started punching the thing with his bare hands. And I had nothing better to do, so I went over. You know I can use a sword. I know I can use a sword. But he didn’t, and he seemed happy to show me, so I just went with it. Then we had a bite to eat, we ran into you, he dropped me off here, and I’ve been in the room ever since, reading one of the books I stole from the crystal palace b
efore we left home. That was it. That was all. And I should’ve said so right when you walked into the room, but…” Cassi paused. “You know how much I love to watch you squirm.”
Lyana gasped and drew back her elbow, searching for resistance. Cassi lunged to the side, wings flapping to keep her from rolling off the bed. Lyana spun, but the second she met her friend’s eyes, all the indignant suspicions faded away, replaced with a bubble in her throat that came out as pure laughter.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Cassi,” Lyana whispered as she pulled her friend in for a tight embrace.
“You won’t ever have to find out,” Cassi replied, voice earnest and certain. “That’s a promise.”
40
Xander
The princess was bored. It had been three days of lessons and meetings and dinners, and with each passing moment Xander saw the light seep away from her gaze, eyes no longer filled with wonder but with fatigue.
He was determined to do something about it.
“I’d like to take you somewhere,” Xander said as he led her out of the dining room after the daily ritual of breakfast with his mother was over. They had an hour before the dressmaker was supposed to fit her for her mating gown, and there was a place he’d been waiting to show her.
Lyana immediately perked up. “Where?”
Xander shrugged, unwilling to betray his hope. “A surprise.”
Her grip on his forearm tightened. “Let’s go.”
They kept the conversation light as he guided her through the castle halls, up and around, closer to the royal quarters, the place she’d call home in just a few short weeks. He was only half focused on what he was saying. The other half of his mind concentrated on holding the enthusiasm for his dreams at bay. He knew, he knew, Lyana’s personality didn’t match that of the mate he'd always envisioned. She was a mover, a doer, not satisfied to sit still when the other option was to fly. But dreams had a bothersome way of ignoring the truth, and hope made the impossible seem within reach. So, as he neared the room, his heart thundered and his mind dared to wonder, "What if?"
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