HE GAVE ME AWAY, NOW HE BEGS ME
Chapter 6: A Kingdom of Watching Eyes
Later, Wren would understand that the worst wound of the whole journey came not from any blade or Hollow claw, but from watching Cassian go down in the mud of a hidden hunting lodge with a crossbow bolt through his shoulder, fired by a woman wearing the Dowager Queen's household colors and smiling the entire time she did it. She would remember screaming his name in a voice she did not recognize as her own, and the way the fire under her scar answered that scream with more force than she had ever called before, enough to take half the lodge's roof off in a single furious burst.
That night was three days away yet. First, there was the uneasy truce with Kastian.
Wren had agreed to travel with the crown prince on one condition, that Cassian rode beside her the entire way and that neither of them was disarmed, and Kastian, to his credit, had not argued the point, though the three days of travel that followed were some of the strangest of Wren's life, the man who had discarded her and the man who had found her again sharing a fire each night with a wariness that never quite thawed into anything friendly. Kastian told her, on the second night, everything he had learned since Rivergate, the failed Binding, his mother's flicker of guilt in the solarium, the growing certainty that Seraphine had known the ceremony would fail before they ever knelt at the altar.
"I believed her because I wanted the easiest answer to be the true one," he admitted, staring into the fire rather than at Wren. "You deserved better than a man who let convenience outrank three years of knowing you."
"I don't need your apology to survive this, Kastian," Wren said. "I needed it in the Hall of Vows, in front of the people who watched you throw me away. This is six days too late to matter the way you want it to."
He had accepted that without argument, which surprised her more than an excuse would have, and something in his careful, controlled grief over the whole affair reminded her, uncomfortably, of the boy she had actually fallen for three years ago, before the crown had finished sanding every soft edge off him.
She found herself, against her own better judgment, studying him across the fire in the quiet hours when he thought no one was watching, the tired set of his shoulders, the way he had stopped performing certainty the moment his mother's authority had started to look less like guidance and more like a cage he had never noticed closing. It was not the same feeling that lived in her chest when Cassian's hand found hers in the dark, nothing so immediate or so undeniable, but it was not nothing either, and Wren was honest enough with herself to admit that a small, stubborn part of her still ached for the boy who had once ridden two days out of his way simply to bring her a book he thought she would like, before duty had taught him that gestures like that were luxuries a crown prince could not always afford. She did not know yet what to do with that ache, only that pretending it had vanished entirely the moment he humiliated her would have been its own kind of lie, and she had promised herself, somewhere on the road out of Rivergate, that she would not build her new life out of lies of any size, not even small, self protective ones.
Cassian said little during those fireside conversations, watching Kastian with the flat, assessing patience of a soldier who had not yet decided whether a former ally had become an enemy, but on the third night, when Kastian had gone to check the horses, he spoke low enough that only Wren could hear him.
"He still loves you," Cassian said, without inflection.
"That isn't the same as trusting him," Wren said, and reached for his hand in the dark, lacing her fingers through his in a gesture that had become, in the days since the gatehouse, entirely unconscious. "You know that better than anyone."
"I know that a crown prince who loves you is a complication I did not have to plan for eleven years ago," Cassian said, "and I am trying very hard not to resent him for it while he sits six feet away being useful to our survival."
It was meant lightly, mostly, and Wren had laughed despite herself, leaning into his shoulder while the fire burned low, and it was in that unguarded, almost peaceful moment that the arrow came out of the dark treeline and struck Cassian just below the collarbone, hard enough to knock him flat before either of them fully registered the sound of the bowstring.
What followed happened too fast for Wren to hold in clean, ordered memory afterward. Six of the Dowager's household guard came out of the trees in a coordinated rush, the woman with the crossbow already reloading with brisk, professional calm as though putting an arrow through a man's shoulder was simply the first item on a longer list, and Kastian was shouting something from the direction of the horses that Wren could not process over the sound of her own pulse. She remembered dropping to her knees beside Cassian, his blood shockingly warm against her hands, his face gone gray with a pain he was visibly fighting to stay conscious through, and she remembered the exact moment something in her chest stopped being frightened and became, instead, entirely and coldly furious.
The fire that answered that fury did not come from her outstretched hands this time. It came from everywhere at once, a wave of heat that rolled outward from where she knelt and took the near half of the hunting lodge's roof with it in a single tearing burst of flame and splintering wood, and three of the six attackers went down without her ever consciously choosing to strike them, the fire moving like something with its own will, protective and merciless in equal measure. The woman with the crossbow dropped her weapon and ran. The remaining two followed her example within seconds, and then the clearing was silent except for the crackle of the fire she had called and Cassian's ragged, shallow breathing beneath her hands.
"Stay with me," Wren said, hearing her own voice crack. "Stay with me, do you hear me, I have not survived the last two weeks to lose you to a woman who couldn't even be bothered to fight fair."
Cassian's mouth twitched, some ghost of his usual dry humor surfacing even through the pain. "Bold words," he managed, "from someone who just took a roof off."
Kastian reached them a moment later, already tearing strips from his own shirt with the brisk competence of a man who had been trained for battlefield wounds long before he was ever trained for statecraft, and between the two of them they got the bolt out and the wound bound tightly enough to slow the bleeding, Kastian's hands steady and sure in a way that surprised Wren even in the middle of her terror.
"That was the Dowager's personal household guard," Kastian said grimly, once Cassian was stable enough to be moved. "Not the crown's soldiers. Not even Seraphine's people. My mother sent them herself, which means she already knows exactly where we are, which means someone in my own camp has been reporting our position."
"Devric," Wren said, before she could stop herself, remembering the aide Kastian had trusted with finding Cassian's trail.
"Devric would die before betraying me," Kastian said, but something uncertain moved behind his eyes even as he said it, the first crack in a loyalty he had clearly never before had cause to question, and Wren understood, watching him, that the Dowager Queen's rot had spread further through her own son's household than even he had yet allowed himself to fully see.
They moved Cassian to shelter before dawn, a woodcutter's cottage a mile further into the forest that Kastian swore was known to no one outside his own personal guard, and the days that followed settled into a strange, tense domesticity, Kastian riding out each morning to scout the roads and returning each evening with careful, guarded reports, Wren changing Cassian's dressing twice a day with hands that grew steadier with practice even as her patience for his stubborn insistence on sitting up too soon grew thinner. Cassian's fever broke on the second night, and on the third he was well enough to argue with her about it, low voiced and irritable in the particular way of a man used to being the one doing the protecting rather than the one being protected, and Wren found she did not mind the arguing nearly as much as she pretended to, because it meant he was strong enough to have opinions again, and because the alternative, the memory of his blood shockingly warm against her hands in the firelight, was not one she wanted to revisit any sooner than she had to.
It was there, three days later, with Cassian's fever finally broken and his color returning, that word reached them by a frightened courier that changed the shape of everything that came after. Lady Seraphine Voss had gone before the full court that very morning and announced, with tears that several witnesses swore looked entirely genuine, that the missing Lady Wren Ashdown was alive, dangerous, and in league with a rogue Night Guard commander to overthrow the rightful Sovereign bond by force of stolen, unlawful fire magic. A bounty had been set. A kingdom-wide hunt had begun. And the Dowager Queen herself, the courier said, his voice shaking as he delivered the last of it, had personally offered to lead the search.
Wren listened to the whole account standing at the cottage's single narrow window, watching gray morning light spread slowly over the treeline, and felt the ground of her own careful plans shift under her feet all over again. A bounty made her a fugitive in every town between here and the capital. A Dowager Queen personally leading the hunt meant Isolde had decided the danger of Wren's survival now outweighed whatever caution had kept her hidden for twenty years, which told Wren, more clearly than any journal entry could, exactly how frightened the woman actually was of what a true Sovereign's return would cost her.
"She's not hunting a fugitive," Cassian said from the pallet behind her, his voice still rough with the last of the fever but steady enough now to carry real weight. "She's hunting a witness. Every year that passes without proof, her story gets safer. The moment you're taken alive in front of enough people, that safety ends."
"Then we don't let her take me alive in front of anyone she controls," Wren said, turning from the window, feeling the ember warmth beneath her scar settle into something that was no longer only fear. "We take the fight to a room she doesn't control instead."
Kastian, standing near the door with the courier's message still in his hand, looked between the two of them for a long moment, and something in his expression suggested he had already begun to understand exactly which room that would have to be.
"There's only one room in this kingdom she can't simply seal us out of," he said quietly. "The full court, in session, on the anniversary of the last Binding. If we're going to do this, we do it there, in front of everyone, or we don't survive doing it at all."