She smelled different now. There was something else layered beneath—the edge of something god-touched and old. Power that hadn’t fully decided what to be yet.
She turned her head just enough to speak without looking at me. “You’ll manage to control yourself, won’t you?” A pause. “You did so well in the bath, after all.”
My breath caught, just briefly.
“I was… focused,” I said, clearing my throat. “On your condition.”
“Mm.” She faced forward again, adjusting her weight deliberately, hips shifting as if she didn’t know exactly what it did to me. “Of course you were.”
I hadn’t forgotten this morning. The image of her still clung to me—the parting of her lips, the flush rising up her neck, the slow slide of her hand beneath her waistband.
I’d seen her.
Long enough to know what she was doing. Long enough to want to keep watching. I’d forced my gaze to the wall. Cleared my throat too loudly. Given her the chance to cover, to lie. Still, I couldn’t help myself.
“And what do you know about behaving?” I murmured. “This morning you were one breath away from tearing those clothes off just to get your hand beneath them. That’s not how good girls behave… now is it?”
She didn’t evenpretend to flinch.
“Ah, Malachi,” she hummed, voice wicked, “you should know by now I am anything but a good girl.”
“Well, this is cozy,” Santiago’s voice rang out, too bright, too loud. My hands tightened on the reins before I could stop them. “Should we give you two a moment? Maybe a tent? A cold bath? I can fetch one. Or all three.”
Aurelia and I snapped our heads toward him in perfect unison, twin expressions ofshut upsharpened to a point.
Santiago just grinned wider, completely unbothered. “I mean it,” he went on, tightening his arm around Lysara with mock seriousness. “I’ve seen tension before, but yours has actual teeth. These poor horses are going to hate us before we clear the gates.”
Lysara let out a laugh, low, warm, and spectacularly unhelpful, while Gabriel adjusted the final pack with a pointed sigh, the kind that said he’d long accepted all of us as lost causes.
Aurelia shifted in front of me. I tensed, jaw tightening.
“Would you sit still?” I hissed under my breath.
“Sorry,” she said, far too innocently. “Sohardto find a comfortable position.”
Gods. If she shifted against me one more time, I wasn’t sure whether I’d survive the ride.
The castle shrank behind us like a bruise against the mist, its towers bleeding into dusk as we crossed the gate. For the first time in centuries, I didn’t look back.
39
Malachi
We’d riddenwest all morning, the sunless sky never shifting, only deepening, dusk curling in on itself as we approached the edge of present-day Nyxarra. Beyond this ridge, every Nyxarran map ended in blank parchment, as if the land itself had been erased. But I remembered what lay past the ink: the wastelands of our rebellion. Our homes. The small villages scattered along Nyxarra’s outer soil, where we fought and bled until King Talon declared them lost.
That was part of the condition of my oath. The killing would stop, and in return, the land would be forgotten. It was an attempt at peace that never felt like peace at all.
I had tried to return more than once—tried to walk the ground where my blood still stained the earth, boots on stone, breath in my lungs. But the borders never opened. Not even by Veil. Dreamwalkers like me could step between places where we’d spilled ourselves, but whatever Talon sealed here… it closed every door. Even mine.
And yet, this was the way Kaelith told us to travel. There was no other route—no path through the lowlands, no passage across the mountains. Only west. I trusted it only because he would never send Aurelia—his power—anywhere that might cost him.
Aurelia had fallen asleep sometime after midday, her head resting lightly against my chest. She didn’t stir, even when the horse jostled beneath us or Santiago let out a loud, theatrical sigh from behind. At first I thought it was trust—gods knew she had every reason not to give it—but now I wasn’t so sure.
The transformation was draining her.
Kaelith’s blood was remaking her. I felt it in her heat, in the frantic hammer of her pulse, in the way she clung to what remained of her mortal breath just long enough to feel every fracture of what she was becoming. Her body was beginning to shed its mortality piece by piece.
And she was holding herself together through all of it.