Nobody made a sound. Everyone tried to make themselves a little smaller.
“Cadet Max.” Frost turned on his heel. “Let’s go.”
I fell into step beside him, shoulders level, pace steady. Not gloating. Just a cadet following a major.
Chapter 18
Max
Frost drove west through the compound, past the Covenant Hall, a broad-fronted building that served as headquarters for the army’s daily operations. Staff moved in and out with the clipped urgency of people who reported to four heirs and feared disappointing any of them. Then we passed the Greycrown Library, its carved marble façade still bearing scorch marks at the base of the entrance steps where dragon fire had parted for the loyal and consumed the traitors.
I didn’t look at it long.
He drove all the way to the western edge, along the forest line, and pulled up at the curved driveway of a white-stone building half-swallowed by ancient trees. “Elenmoor, Prince Aelindor’s residence,” Frost informed me. I hadn’t known where he lived. Now I understood why—the forest hid Elenmoor. You wouldn’t find this place unless someone brought you.
“The other heirs keep rooms here as well,” Frost added. “They each have their own residences elsewhere, but this is where they convene when it isn’t a war room matter.”
The door opened, and every thought in my head scattered at the sight of Aelindor strolling out.
He wore a white linen tunic with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and gray slacks that fit his powerful thighs well enough to be a problem. Without the silver coat, stripped of rank and formal precision, he looked different—not less, but differently formidable. In uniform, he looked like a king. Like this, he looked like a gorgeous poet who could kill you. His silver hair fell loose past his shoulders, and his forearms were a swordsman’s—corded, built for grip and draw. He was scholar and warrior in the same body, and the combination was unfair and deadly.
He nodded at Frost and came to me. “Walk with me.”
The Fae heir led me around the building to a training ring that backed onto the lake. The scent of pine and damp earth suffused the clearing.
“We shall train here,” he said.
Away from the compound. Fewer eyes. I understood.
His gaze moved over me and stopped at my left side. I was favoring it; the limp from Delia’s blade work was still there, and he clocked it in two seconds. I held his eyes. His said he didn’t like seeing me hurt. Mine said it couldn’t be avoided and that he’d have to get used to it.
“Are you fit to train?” he asked. Straightforward. No fussing. Then, quieter: “If the barracks situation has become untenable, I can reassign you. You don’t have to remain in the standard cadet rotation.”
Heat crept up my neck. The idea that barracks politics had reached Aelindor—who was running a kingdom, coordinating a war on three fronts, and managing whatever the court demanded of him—made something in me curl inward. He already carried the weight of my sister’s extraction on top of everything else. Our two-day timeline for Crimson Ridge had expired the moment we learned Missy was no longer there. Now we were waiting on intel from the eagle shifter the heirs had sentto the Haven, and every day without word was another day my sister spent in the Collector’s hands.
“No, sir. I prefer to stay with the other cadets. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Good.” He moved toward the ring’s edge. “But understand this: you can come to any of us, at any time, for anything. That’s resource allocation, not weakness.”
“Understood, sir.”
He led me to sit on the grass. We faced each other, our knees close enough that I could feel the warmth of him through the air between us.
“What do you know about your own power?”
“Not much,” I admitted.
“Then start from the beginning.”
“Alchemy,” I said. The familiar ground. The one subject I could speak about without guarding every word. “I was born into it, the way you’re born into a language. Coldiron is different in degree, not kind. No one taught me to temper ore at eight. I simply did it.”
“The DarkVeil?”
I shook my head. “I knew nothing about it until I faced it. I heard Coldiron calling from within, and so I entered.”
Unlike Drakken, he hadn’t scolded me for my recklessness.
“The power that subdued Cadet Slade and his gang,” he said. “What was that?”