ARWEN
MY EYES BLINKED OPEN TO a warm swath of blue sky and a cluster of swaying autumn leaves. The air was as crisp as an apple and just as
sweet. I inhaled it through my nostrils greedily—pumpkin seeds, damp leaves, chimney smoke.
And the ground—a grassy meadow, clean with morning dew beneath my head. Blades of grass tickling my cheeks and forearms. My eyelids fell closed amid gentle awareness.
I knew this place.
I knew the view of the small yet bustling town square that would greet me once I pushed myself up to sit. Knew the vibrant sunset colors that would paint the sky in subtle gradations. Yolky yellow, rosy pink, crystal blue.
“Is it just as you remembered it?”
The voice, though I’d never heard it before, didn’t frighten me. I moved from my back to sit comfortably atop the knoll, that view I’d been expecting to stretch below me even smaller, but somehow more comforting than I’d remembered. Sleepy Abbington shone under the colorful clouds. Like ripped tufts of cotton backlit by liquid gold.
The man’s dark brown hair receded a bit up the crown of his head. His heart-shaped face and angular nose were handsome, kind. Inexplicably familiar.
“Do I know you?”
“A complicated question,” the man said ruefully. “No is probably the simplest answer.”
White floppy butterflies floated by on a breeze.
“I owe you many thanks,” he continued, his eyes, too, on the fluttering wings, the watercolor sky, the rolling autumn hills, and the shepherds that tended to flocks grazing atop them. And then down to the town. The handful of shopkeepers and merchants closing up for the evening. Headed home to their families to sleep and eat and start anew tomorrow.
I turned to him once more. “You do?”
“I was not able to return home for a long time. I had done something foolish in the hopes of helping others. Had not used my power in the way it was meant to be used. Your bravery proved it had not been an error at all.” Something brimmed in his eyes. “You conquered a mighty force. Saved many lives. Spared realms.”
But I didn’t feel pride. I didn’t feel like a savior or a queen—I was born in this quiet, autumn town. I was just a girl. “My name is Arwen.”
“I have been looking forward to this day for some time, Arwen.”
Somewhere in my mind I remembered I had slain a mighty dragon. Had combusted in a hail of flame beside him. I looked down at my hands, clean, bare of dirt or blood. Pale in the violet light. “Because I killed him?”
“To meet again.”
“You said I didn’t know you.”
The man’s eyes crinkled. “You don’t.”
I nodded, though I didn’t understand. A swallow warbled out a soft tune and a fly whizzed past my nose. The gentle wind breathed through the soft cotton of my skirts and the man’s white tunic beside me.
“Your husband…” he said after some time, “is very devoted to you.” I smiled. “I know.”
“I’m glad for it. He’s been a good king to your lands.” My brows knit. “My lands?”
“Well, mine.” The man’s low laugh reminded me of wind chimes. “But King Oberon—”
“If you go back to the very beginning…the rightful heir is the child of true Onyx. You.”
Realization dawned on me. Misted in a deep contentment but realization nonetheless. Words a bright-eyed young seer had uttered to me in another life. “My father…the Fae God.”
The man—my father—said nothing. Just appraised me curiously. “What do they call you? Those original nine?”
He shrugged and I thought it funny. A great and powerful Fae God, shrugging. “Some have deemed us Elder Gods.”
“And your power…it birthed Onyx?” “Correct.”
My father. A Fae Elder God. The creators of the sacred Stones, and his, Onyx. The stone of power and strength and darkness. Bequeathed to me, a healer from a farming town. I nodded to myself in deep understanding. “I think it will be wonderful.”
“You take after your mother in that way.”
My mother.
I smiled. “Someone once called it relentless positivity.” “And who was that?”
The town below me was blurring a bit. Trees and bricks and cobblestones becoming spotty blotches of gray and brown and green. “I…I can’t remember.”
“Ah,” my father said. “Time to get you back.”
He stood with a soft groan and I thought the sound very human. I stood, too, and stretched like a cat under the fading sunlight.
“We won’t meet again, Arwen.”
“I know,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how. “You can go home now, though?”
He smiled, and the light from that beaming grin warmed the hilltop we stood on and all the grass surrounding us. “Yes. And you must do the same.”
My heart thumped once in my chest.
Home.
THE EMBERS SIZZLED ACROSS MY feathers.
Molten and liquid—scalding and blistering and scorching each fiber and plume.
And yet it felt like cleansing rain. Soothing every ache, healing every wound, building me back together, piece by piece.
My talons tingled beneath a rising sun, my palms stretched as if awakening from a good, succulent sleep, my wings burning with white flames as they spread wide across the clearing.
I screamed—wind and light and fire burning up as it rose inside my throat. Clearing my chest, bracing myself. And then I shuddered ferociously, shifting and shaking, angling my head, flexing every tendon—
Until all was quiet.
And just a little too cold. Gooseflesh rippled along my stomach and legs as a winter wind swept across me. My face lifted gently from fresh, clean snow. It tasted rich like the morning.
“Arwen…?” Kane’s hoarse voice sliced through my senses and my eyes sprang open.
Watery silver filled my vision.
Tears slipped down his dirtied cheeks. My hands found them and held his face close to my own. “You’re alive,” I murmured.
“Me?” He laughed, raw and rough.
Someone chuckled behind us through tears. It sounded like Griffin.
Kane sat us both up a bit and brushed the ash and snow from my cheeks. But I couldn’t let go. Couldn’t stop grasping at him. When I convulsed involuntarily against the cold, Kane’s eyes left mine and fell elsewhere. Whoever he’d looked at rushed over and placed a warm cloak across my bare body.
The soft reddish fur smelled of clove and cinnamon and… “Mari,” I croaked, sitting up a little.
Mari’s brown eyes were wide. Wider than I’d ever seen them. “Welcome back.”
I scrambled from Kane’s lap, wrapping the cloak tighter, and threw myself at my friend.
“How is this possible?” Griffin murmured somewhere behind us. “We watched her…”
Mari released me long enough to turn to him and Kane. “Her shifted form—a phoenix—will always rise from its ashes.”
“So I…can’t die?” I was in too much shock to wrap my mind around the gravity of those words.
But Mari shook her head and held me to her once more. “Only in your shifted form you can’t.”
And this time I didn’t ask her how she knew so much. I only held her tighter.
When we’d held each other so long my tears had frozen on my face, Kane insisted on taking me somewhere warmer.
Through a tumult of cries for the dead and victory songs, past barrels of ale being rolled across snow and moaning bodies hefted on stretchers, we marched home. Women cried as children embraced their fathers at the knees, and boisterous teens, hanging from the remains of the sentry towers, rained liquor down onto soldiers below.
Shadowhold had survived.
Not without loss. Not without mourners and wheelbarrows filled with fallen men. But when I couldn’t tear my eyes from the blood-spattered brick walls or our beautiful wrought iron warped by salamander flame, Kane took my hand and said, “We’ll rebuild.”
“Ravenwood.”
I turned at that familiar voice, as did Kane.
Aleksander appraised us, ice-blond hair stained red, rusty eyes glowing brighter than usual. “You look like death itself.”
Kane only shrugged his shoulders smoothly.
I said nothing. Too tired to snip with the Hemolich. I knew how much power coursed through his veins with all the carnage surrounding us. I had no energy left for a fight. I wanted to see my siblings.
But Kane spoke first. “The deal we made, you must know—”
Aleksander interrupted with a raised brow. “What deal?” His ruby eyes finally left Kane’s to land on my own with cold curiosity.
“The raven we sent you,” I said. “I never received a raven.”
My mind emptied. Then emptied again. “Then why did you…” But my words trailed off with deep understanding.
Aleksander was silent, his warrior pride lurking behind that solid-ice exterior. I watched him survey the torchlit scene. The hefting bodies, the prisoners of war chained in lilium. And right alongside all the gore and pain, cries of triumph that rent the air. Cheers of merriment.
“She got to you,” Kane said slowly, such pride brimming in his eyes. “Don’t paint me as some changed man. I didn’t do it for either of you. I
couldn’t have that bigoted bastard taking over Rose.”
Kane continued, unbothered, my hand still held in his. “You know what she said to me once?”
Aleksander said nothing, his mouth a flat line.
“Everyone is capable of redemption.”
My heart swelled at the memory, and I peered up at my husband. He was burned and beaten half to death, his eye nearly swollen shut. His Onyx armor shredded at the sleeve, his long fingers blue with frostbite. But Kane had never looked so beautiful.
I’d said those words to him in the dim midnight light of my bedroom, after Halden’s explosion had forced Kane to tell me more than he’d ever planned to. And he’d remembered, all this time.
“Good luck to you, Aleksander,” I said on a sigh. “I hope we never meet again.”
Inside the great hall, banners were being hammered, hung, and unfurled, and bells jangled in the hands of children. Triumph and bereavement and mourning and celebration poured out in the castle like a chalice overfilled.
My brother found me first. I inhaled the tobacco and snow on his clothes as he held me before I’d even seen him coming. He pulled back just long enough to examine my face. “I was so scared—”
“I know,” I breathed. “Me, too.”
Leigh found us like that and wedged her way between us easily. I couldn’t stop the tears then, nor did I want to.
We stayed in that embrace for a long time. Holding one another in peaceful silence.
Peace.
That’s what this feeling was. Somewhere in between the clash of blades and the loss of those I loved and the fiery death of my enemy…peace had found me.
Surely the joy would hit me soon. The relief that we had won. But right now, my still-stiff limbs and reeling, foggy mind just needed this. Tangible, unmoving, pleasantly exhausted peace.
I knew Kane had not torn his soft, quicksilver gaze from me one time since I’d awoken.
Eventually I released my family and turned to face him once more. “Hello,” he said, a crooked grin at his cheeks, tears still in his eyes.
Behind him, the sun crested steadily through the stained-glass windows of the hall and over the snow-draped forest and the peaked mountains beyond. Voices throughout the warmly lit hall rang out, no longer afraid.
“It’s finally over, isn’t it?” I asked, relief flooding me as I grasped his broad, calloused hand. The warmth of his palm simmered through my entire body. Despite being born of ash and snow bare as a newborn, my hand still somehow carried Kane’s signet ring. A gift from my father, I thought.
“For us”—Kane shrugged, thumb dragging softly over my skin—“I think it’s just the beginning.”
Dear Arwen,
I don’t expect, nor see reason, for you to give much credence to the marital counsel of an old, solitary, occasionally cankerous man, but it appears I am compelled to share with you regardless.
It is not news to me that the battle you and Kane plan to wage is unlikely to leave both of you alive. It is a truth that has plagued my thoughts, and I mourn even tonight as I write to you. No man should outlive one child, let alone two.
I was lucky enough to have been married once myself, and we, too, were not given quite as much time as I thought we deserved
together. Now, I am no romantic. You know as well as anyone I won’t fuss over the needs of the heart. So this is the only advice I will share with you ahead of your wedding. Cherish one another. Appreciate the moments you are given, ephemeral as they may be. Do not dwell in
the past or scurry toward the looming future. And be grateful, each day, for the love that you share. I am grateful to have witnessed it.
And one last thing—perhaps not sage wisdom, but as my quill has become loose upon the page and the spirit in my glass empties, I find the words easier tonight than I think they may ever be again.
For years you’ve believed your fears made you cowardly, yet chose time and time again to face those fears, regardless of what might’ve been waiting for you on the other side.
You’ve saved yourself and those who matter most to you. Helped and healed so many in need. You’ve discovered a deep well of power within yourself. Met someone you wish to spend your life with.
You’ve found joy in times of darkness, and helped share that joy with others.
In this war, and in the days I hope will follow, I urge you to
remember this: do not equate bravery with fearlessness. If someone like you has nothing left to fear, it will be your heart I worry for.
Fear is human, and only grows as we come to care deeply for others.
Stones know I’ve become more fearful in knowing you. That’s what love does to us.
You are courageous, Arwen. And I’m very proud of you.
Dagan
