HER CROWN, HIS FLAME
Part I: Betrayal, Blood Oaths & Forbidden Feelings
CHAPTER FOUR: THE ROAD TO VALORIA
She had not shown them the whole letter.
Olivia realised it the moment she unfolded the parchment again at the long table the next morning, seven pairs of eyes fixed on her with varying degrees of suspicion, and found the line she had somehow managed not to see the first time, tucked beneath Jullius's elegant signature flourish in a hand slightly smaller than the rest, as though even he had hesitated before writing it.
Bring the marriage contract with you when you come, sealed with your own hand. Valoria's army does not march for a woman who is only a guest in my house. It marches for my wife.
She read it aloud, because there seemed no point in hiding it now, and the silence that followed was worse than any shouting would have been.
"So." Adam's voice cut through it first, flat and hard. "He'll save your kingdom. For a price."
"It isn't unusual," Olivia said, though even to her own ears it sounded like something she was reciting rather than believing. "Royal marriages secure alliances. My own father—"
"Your own father chose his wife after knowing her for years, not after she wrote him a letter demanding a contract before he'd lift a finger to save her life." Adam's jaw was tight. "This isn't an alliance, Olivia. It's a ransom, and you're the one paying it."
"I don't have another army to offer instead."
"Then don't marry a man to borrow his. Find another way."
"There isn't another way!" The words came out louder than she meant them to, sharp with two weeks of grief and fear finally finding somewhere to land. "I don't have the luxury of waiting for a better offer, Adam. I have a stepmother who murdered my father and is telling the whole kingdom I did it. I have exactly one path back to Rone, and it happens to run directly through a marriage I never asked for either."
Adam did not answer that. He simply looked at her, something complicated moving behind his amber eyes, and said nothing at all, which somehow felt worse than any argument he might have made.
❖ ❖ ❖
It was Elliot, in the end, who addressed the part of the plan no one else in the room seemed willing to say out loud.
"You understand that none of us can walk you to Valoria's gate," he said, from the head of the table, his voice carrying the particular weight it always did when he had already decided something and was simply waiting for the rest of them to catch up. "The border between our forest and human land has been sealed by wards older than any of us since the last war ended. If seven of the Fae kin are seen crossing that line, armed, escorting the missing princess of Rone, it will not read as an escort. It will read as an invasion, and every soldier in Valoria will be given the excuse they have been waiting a thousand years for."
"Then what," Olivia asked, "am I supposed to do. Walk in alone."
"Yes," Elliot said, simply. "We will take you as far as the border stones. We will wait there, out of sight, for as long as it takes. But the last mile is yours to walk without us, and you will need to be very sure that Jullius is worth the risk of walking it, because once you're inside those wards, there is very little any of us can do to help you if something goes wrong."
Adam's chair scraped back hard enough to make Olivia flinch. "This is a mistake."
"It is her mistake to make," Elliot said, not unkindly, though his eyes did not leave Adam's for a long moment, some silent argument passing between the two brothers that Olivia suspected had very little to do with borders or wards at all. "We are not her family, Adam. We do not get to decide her risks for her."
"We're the ones who'll be standing outside those wards listening for whether she screams."
"Then we had better hope she doesn't."
Across the table, Theo had said nothing at all, his gaze fixed on Olivia with an expression she could not quite name, and it was that silence, more than either brother's argument, that made something in her chest tighten uncomfortably as the council broke apart around her.
❖ ❖ ❖
They left the following dawn, all seven of them at first, moving through the forest with the quiet, coordinated efficiency of men who had clearly done this before, though none of them explained to Olivia what "this" usually was. Bastian scouted ahead with his heavy hammer slung across his back, silent and watchful. Rowan walked near the rear with his satchel of herbs, occasionally pressing a bitter leaf into Olivia's palm and telling her, without elaboration, to chew it slowly. Lucian drifted at the edges of the group, humming something under his breath that made the light around them bend strangely whenever soldiers' voices carried too close, and Finn ranged ahead and behind in turns, reporting back every quarter hour with a cheerfulness that seemed, more and more, like a very deliberate choice rather than a natural temperament.
It was Finn, in fact, who caught the scent of the ambush before anyone else did, going suddenly and uncharacteristically still in the middle of a sentence about the terrible quality of Valorian ale.
"Down," he said, and the whole company dropped without a single question, which told Olivia, more clearly than anything else could have, exactly how much they trusted his instincts.
The soldiers came from two directions at once, Ellia's colours dark against the pale morning light, and the ambush that followed was fast and ugly and entirely without the strange, orderly honour Olivia had half expected from stories of battle. Adam was a blur of motion at her left, twin blades flashing, Elliot's earth magic tearing furrows in the ground beneath the attackers' feet, and for one endless, chaotic moment Olivia simply crouched where she had been told to crouch, useless and terrified, watching a fight she had no part in.
Then she saw the arrow.
It came from a soldier positioned high in the branches above them, angled directly at her, and she had just enough time to understand what she was looking at before Theo moved, throwing himself into its path with a speed that should not have been possible, the arrow burying itself in his shoulder instead of her chest.
"Theo!"
He staggered but did not fall, driving his own blade up into the soldier who'd loosed it before the man could nock a second arrow, and by the time the skirmish ended, scattered and running within minutes under the combined fury of seven very old, very angry warriors, Theo was leaning heavily against a tree trunk with blood soaking dark through his shirt and a strange, apologetic look on his face, as though the injury itself were an inconvenience he owed everyone an explanation for.
"It's not as bad as it looks," he said, which was, Olivia understood immediately, an outright lie.
❖ ❖ ❖
She did not remember deciding to run to him. She simply found herself there, hands already reaching for the arrow's shaft, Rowan's voice somewhere behind her giving quick, clipped instructions about angles and pressure that she followed without fully processing.
"Don't move," she told Theo, her own hands shaking far more than his did. "Don't you dare move."
"I wasn't planning to." A faint, pained smile touched his mouth even now. "You're very fierce, for someone who was crouching in the dirt two minutes ago."
"Stop talking and let Rowan work."
Rowan worked with quick, practiced hands, murmuring instructions to himself as much as to anyone else, and Olivia stayed exactly where she was, gripping Theo's uninjured hand hard enough to leave marks, some part of her dimly aware that she had never once, in eighteen years of palace life, held anyone's hand through anything that actually mattered.
She did not see Adam turn away.
He stood a short distance off, ostensibly watching the tree line for further danger, but his jaw was tight in a way that had nothing to do with soldiers, and when Finn drifted close enough to murmur something too low for Olivia to catch, Adam's only answer was a short, sharp shake of his head and a silence that lasted the rest of the walk to their camp for the night.
❖ ❖ ❖
They made camp early, given Theo's injury, in a shallow hollow well hidden from the road, and once the fire was lit and Rowan had pronounced the wound clean and closing well enough not to worry, most of the brothers scattered to their watches, leaving Olivia and Theo alone at the fire's edge in a silence that did not feel uncomfortable so much as heavy with things neither of them had said yet.
"You could have let the arrow hit me," Olivia said, eventually. "You didn't have to."
"I've been trying to decide, all afternoon, whether that's true." Theo's voice was quiet, thoughtful, the firelight catching gold in his pale green eyes. "I used to believe humans couldn't change. Not really. Not in any way that mattered. I watched my mother die because a human decided our whole species was a kind of vermin worth clearing out of the forest, and for a very long time, I thought that was simply the truth of what your people were." He turned the arrow's broken shaft over in his uninjured hand, examining it as though it might explain something. "Then a human girl hit a man with a tree branch rather than begging for her life, and cried in Adam's arms rather than mine, and threw herself at a monster twice her size to save a brother she'd known for two weeks."
"That doesn't make me different from every other human."
"No," Theo agreed. "It makes me wonder if I was ever right about the rest of them either."
Olivia sat with that for a long moment, watching the fire, feeling something in her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion. "The old oath. The one that forbids Fae kin from loving humans."
"Elliot believes in it completely. He watched enough of our people die for that belief to make sense to him." Theo's mouth curved, faint and sad. "I used to believe in it too. I am no longer entirely certain I do."
He did not say anything more than that, and Olivia did not ask him to, but something passed between them in the quiet that followed, something neither of them named, and she found herself leaning, very slightly, toward the warmth of him, the way she had leaned toward Theo's voice every night since the first time he had pulled her out of the mud and asked nothing of her in return.
She did not see Adam, some distance off at the edge of the firelight, watching the two of them with an expression he had made very sure, by now, no one would ever catch him wearing.
❖ ❖ ❖
Adam told himself, walking the perimeter of the camp for the third time that night, that he was simply doing his job.
He did not need to watch the way Olivia's hand had stayed wrapped around Theo's for a full ten minutes after the bleeding had stopped. He did not need to notice the particular, unguarded softness in her face when she looked at his brother, the same softness he had spent two weeks trying and failing not to want directed at himself instead. He was fairly certain, by now, that Theo felt something for her too, something that had grown well past the simple protectiveness of a man who'd pulled a stranger out of a river of mud, and Adam had exactly one piece of knowledge that made the whole situation entirely, thoroughly unbearable.
He was not going to be the one to make it worse.
Theo was his brother. Theo had loved without asking for anything in return for longer than Adam had been capable of imagining what love without conditions might even look like, and if Olivia's heart was already leaning toward the gentler of the two of them, toward the one who knew how to speak softly and mean it, then Adam decided, somewhere in the cold dark of that third circuit around the camp, that he would simply have to become extremely skilled at wanting nothing at all.
He was not, he suspected, going to be very good at it. He resolved to try regardless.
❖ ❖ ❖
The wards marking Valoria's border rose out of the morning mist like something half remembered from a dream, pale standing stones half swallowed by moss, humming faintly with a magic old enough that even Elliot lowered his voice when he spoke near them.
"This is as far as we go," he said. "We'll wait here. All of us."
Olivia looked past the stones, toward the distant grey shape of Valoria's outer wall, and felt her heart begin, unhelpfully, to race.
"If you're not back by nightfall," Adam said, not looking at her, his voice carefully, deliberately flat, "I'm coming through those wards myself, invasion or not."
"You won't have to."
"See that I don't."
She looked at each of them in turn, Elliot's grave patience, Bastian's silent nod, Rowan's worried frown, Lucian's uncharacteristic quiet, Finn's forced grin, Theo's steady, unreadable gaze, and Adam, who would not look at her at all, and understood, with a lurch of something that was not quite courage and not quite fear, that this was the last solid ground she would stand on for a while.
Then she turned, and walked past the standing stones alone, the ancient wards parting around her like held breath, and did not look back to see six of the seven watching her go, or the seventh already counting, silently, the hours until nightfall.
Inside the walls of Valoria, in a chamber with no windows and only one door, Ellia smoothed the front of her gown, and smiled at the young man pacing anxiously across the floor in front of her, and told him, in the low, patient voice of a woman explaining something to a favourite pet, exactly how the evening was going to go.
Olivia did not know any of that. She simply walked toward the gate, alone, believing herself finally, blessedly, in control of her own fate.