HE GAVE ME AWAY, NOW HE BEGS ME
Chapter 5: What the Night Left Behind
Later, Wren would try to explain to herself how a night that began with swords drawn against the crown prince's own men had ended with Cassian Duskmere's mouth against her throat and her hands fisted in the front of his shirt, and would fail every time to find the exact moment where fear had turned into something else entirely. She would remember only that the turning point had a taste to it, salt and rain and the particular electric relief of still being alive, and that neither of them had said a single word for a very long time afterward.
That night had not begun anywhere near a bed. First, there had been the ambush on the Rivergate road.
They had left the town two days after the breach, moving north along the river under cover of a merchant caravan Cassian trusted, when six riders in the crown's own colors came out of the treeline at dusk with drawn blades and a captain who addressed Wren by her true name before she had said a single word to identify herself.
"Lady Ashdown," the captain had said, reining his horse in a tight, professional circle around them, "His Highness requires your presence at the palace. You are not under arrest, but you are not, I regret to say, being given the choice to refuse."
Cassian had put himself between her and the riders without a heartbeat's hesitation, sword already bare, and the standoff that followed had lasted exactly as long as it took the ground beneath all nine of them to shudder, once, hard enough to unseat two of the horses, followed by the low rolling howl that Wren now recognized instinctively as the sound of the Hollow breaking through somewhere close. The captain's men had scattered to defend the caravan on reflex, training overriding orders, and in the chaos that followed, sword work and fire and the particular controlled violence of people fighting for their lives rather than for politics, Wren had lost track of everything except staying alive and keeping Cassian in her line of sight.
They won, in the end, though win was a generous word for what remained of the caravan by the time the last of the creatures retreated back toward the marsh, two merchants dead, three of the crown's riders wounded badly enough that the captain called a full retreat rather than press his original order, and Cassian bleeding freely from a gash along his ribs that he had clearly been ignoring for the better part of an hour out of sheer refusal to admit it existed.
The captain himself had gone down under Cassian's blade in the final exchange, not killed but disarmed and dazed against a fence post, and in the last chaotic seconds before the caravan's survivors scattered toward the road, Wren had felt something in her own chest answer the danger with an ease that frightened her more than the danger itself. She had thrown fire without thinking, without the careful, banked control Cassian had spent a week teaching her, and one of the creatures had gone down shrieking under a column of flame hot enough to blacken the mud for ten feet in every direction. She had felt, for one dizzying instant, powerful in a way she had never once been permitted to feel as a betrothed bride whose only value lay in a wedding contract, and the feeling had been so unfamiliar it left her hands shaking harder afterward than the fighting itself had.
Wren found the abandoned gatehouse of a burned-out farmstead a half mile off the road purely by instinct, dragging Cassian's arm over her shoulders the last hundred yards while he insisted, with increasing incoherence, that he was entirely capable of walking on his own.
"You are the worst patient I have ever heard of," she told him, once she had gotten him down onto a pile of old straw in the one dry corner of the gatehouse and pulled his shirt open to see the damage properly. The wound was long but not deep, the kind that bled dramatically and healed cleanly if it was cared for, and her hands were shaking only a little as she pressed a strip torn from her own underskirt against it.
"I've had worse," Cassian said, through his teeth.
"That is not the comfort you think it is." She worked in silence for a while, the storm outside picking up again in earnest, rain finding its way through gaps in the old roof in a slow, steady percussion, and became aware, gradually, of how close she was sitting to him, of the heat coming off his skin that had nothing to do with fever, of his eyes on her face with an intensity he usually kept carefully leashed behind duty and command.
"You could have let the captain take me," she said, tying off the bandage. "It would have been simpler. Kastian might even have listened to reason, once he had me in front of him."
"I have spent eleven years failing to protect the last Sovereign of this line," Cassian said quietly. "I did not survive tonight in order to hand you over to a captain who takes his orders from a woman I believe murdered your mother. Simpler is not the same as right."
"That isn't only duty talking," Wren said, watching his face. "I've been trained my whole life to hear the difference. Duty sounds different than that."
Something shifted behind his careful control, the same thing she had glimpsed on the ridge above Rivergate, and this time he did not look away from it or bury it back down. "No," he admitted. "It isn't only duty."
The rain filled the silence that followed, and Wren found herself leaning in without any clear memory of deciding to, her hand still resting against the bare skin above his bandaged ribs, close enough now to feel the unsteady rhythm of his breathing beneath her palm. Cassian lifted his uninjured hand and traced the line of her jaw with a care that felt entirely at odds with the calloused, battle-worn strength of it, as though she were something he had been taught his whole life to protect and had only just been given permission to also want.
"Tell me to stop," he said, low, his forehead nearly against hers, "and I will stop, and we will speak of it exactly never again."
"I don't want you to stop," Wren said, and the words felt like the truest thing she had said since the Hall of Vows.
What passed between them after that was not gentle, not entirely, shaped instead by eleven years of longing neither of them had permitted themselves to name and a night that had nearly ended in both their deaths, but it was, for all its urgency, careful in the ways that mattered, his hands finding the edges of her where she was still sore from the fighting and going soft there instead of rough, her own fingers learning the shape of a man who had spent his whole adult life being strong for other people and had never once, she suspected, allowed himself to simply be wanted in return. The storm outside swallowed whatever sounds either of them made, and the old gatehouse, half fallen and forgotten, became for one night the only safe place either of them had access to in the whole of Virelia, its darkness folding kindly over everything that passed between them until neither the fire in Wren's blood nor the ache in Cassian's ribs mattered at all.
Afterward, she lay with her head against his uninjured shoulder, listening to his heartbeat slow gradually back to something ordinary, and felt him press his mouth once, quietly, to the crown of her head, a gesture so unlike his usual controlled distance that it undid her more thoroughly than anything that had come before it.
"This changes things," Cassian said finally, into the dark.
"I know."
"I am sworn to the crown's protection, not to its bed," he said, and she heard the old discipline trying to reassert itself even as his arm tightened around her rather than loosened. "What happens when the crown you're meant to reclaim is the very thing I've sworn my life to serving."
"Then we will find out together," Wren said, "because I have no intention of letting go of either of us just to keep your oath tidy."
He laughed, low and rough and startled, a sound she suspected very few people in his life had ever been given the privilege of hearing, and for a while longer the storm and the ruined gatehouse kept the rest of the world at a distance neither of them was in any hurry to close.
They did not sleep, not truly, the two of them talking quietly through the last hours of dark about small things that had nothing to do with crowns or bloodlines, the sound of her mother's name in the journal, the farm Cassian had grown up on before the Night Guard took him at fifteen, the particular stubbornness with which Wren had learned to embroider badly on purpose as a girl simply to annoy a governess who had never once let her choose her own thread color. It was, she thought, the first unguarded conversation she had ever had with a man who was not measuring every sentence against what the court would think of it, and she found she did not want it to end even as exhaustion finally began pulling at both of them.
It was dawn, gray and thin through the broken roof, when the sound of hoofbeats reached them, slow and deliberate rather than urgent, a single rider approaching without the caution of a man expecting a fight. Cassian was on his feet and dressed before Wren had fully registered the sound, sword in hand, positioning himself once again between her and the door with the same instinctive speed as the night before, and when the rider came into view through the gap where the gate had once hung, Wren felt her whole body go cold with a recognition that had nothing to do with fire at all.
Kastian Draeven sat his horse alone at the edge of the ruined farmstead, still dressed for travel rather than court, his eyes moving from Cassian's bare blade to the state of the gatehouse straw to Wren's face with an expression she had never once seen him wear in three years of formal betrothal, something raw and unguarded and entirely without the careful control of a crown prince.
"I have been looking for you for six days," Kastian said, to Wren, as though Cassian were not standing armed between them at all. "I need you to come back with me. Not as a prisoner. As the only person left in this kingdom who might actually be able to save it."
Wren felt Cassian's shoulders draw tighter in front of her, felt the full weight of everything that had happened in the hours since the ambush settle uneasily alongside the sight of the man who had once promised to marry her and had instead cast her aside in front of four hundred witnesses. She thought of the journal against Cassian's ribs, of the ember eyes the ward-keeper had sworn he'd seen, of a Dowager Queen who lied to her own son's face without so much as a tremor, and understood that whatever answer she gave the crown prince now would ripple through every version of the next ten years of her life.
"You dissolved our betrothal in front of the entire court because you believed a woman who has never once told you the truth," Wren said. "Give me one reason to believe you've earned the right to ask me for anything at all."
Kastian did not look away from her, and did not reach for the easy, practiced answer she half expected from three years of watching him navigate difficult rooms. "I don't have one yet," he said quietly. "I only have the truth, which is that the Veil is dying faster than my mother is willing to admit in council, and that I would rather beg forgiveness from the woman I wronged than watch my own kingdom fall because my pride wouldn't let me say I was wrong first."