24. A Future Yet to Be Decided

Until Niklaus anxiously slipped him the coded letter from Aesylt, Valerian hadn't realized it was exactly what he had been waiting for all along.

He'd been chasing her all their lives. As toddlers, in their shared nursery. As adventurous children, through the safe parts of a forest that was almost never theirs. As adults, into a future yet to be decided.

Valerian had never questioned that future would lead to Aesylt as his wife.

Not because she was a Wynter and a political catch.

Not because he was one of the few young men in the Cross worthy of her.

Not even because she was beautiful.

Because he loved her, and she loved him.

And yet, he'd known her promise in the barn was less about love than fear. He hadn't expected to survive his trial, but he wouldn't have held her to her word. That was how he knew he loved her, because he'd never shied away from taking what he wanted. All the beauties of the Cross he'd availed himself of in corners and shadows—who kept coming back for more, even after the thrill had subsided—had been delightful reminders he had something worth offering, something more than being the son of Baron Esker Barynov and the spare heir of Hoarfrost.

The name would take him no further. His father had chosen treachery with his whole heart. No matter how the current conflict resolved, the Barynovs would fall, and far. Valerian didn't care where he landed, only that he was likely to lose what mattered most.

He'd already been losing Aesylt, inch by inch, ever since the scholar had ridden into town, offering the things Valerian could not. Oh, how he'd tried though. It wasn't even pretending, because he'd desperately wanted to share everything with Aesylt; he needed to understand her curiosity about the world, her passion for discovery. And if he hadn't wanted any of it so badly, he never would have learned Old Ilynglass, and he wouldn't be riding to Voyager's Rest on the heels of her desperate plea.

It all had to do with the scholar somehow. When Valerian had learned she'd been sent away with Tindahl, he'd never known such raw jealousy in his life. Such animosity.

But in the end, Aesylt had called for him.

And he hadn't, not for a second, debated whether he would answer.

Drazhan wasn't blind.Nor was he a fool, at least not a great one. He hadn't missed the longing glances passed between his baby sister and the scholar, nor Imryll's almost amusing neutrality on the matter.

Until Rahn had stormed into his bedchamber in a panic, stammering about his "gut feeling" that something was wrong with Aesylt—a gut feeling that turned out to be suspiciously accurate—Drazhan had just never dreamed the man was foolish enough to act on any of it.

It reminded him of how he'd behaved when he'd thought his revenge against the crown had cost Imryll her life. Ten years of careful restraint had shattered at the thought of a world without her.

But Drazhan had let this man into his home and trusted him with Aesylt's safety.

He would deal with the duke later.

Aesylt was missing.

Her note said only I will no longer let our village suffer. If you feel the same way, you'll let me go.

"She cannot... She cannot possibly think..." Rahn rattled the chair he held tight to.

"Why was she sleeping in the keep?" Imryll asked as she fastened her robe. She was unsteady on her feet, having only fallen asleep a bit ago. No chance, however, he could convince her to go back to bed.

"She said..." Rahn's mouth tightened as he inhaled through his scrunched nose. He flicked his fingers. "We had an argument."

Don't kill him. Don't kill him. Don't kill him. "About..." Drazhan braced. "What?"

"She was upset. I... I wasn't as supportive as she wanted me to be." Rahn released the chair. "Does it matter, when every minute she's gone is a minute we lose? She could be anywhere by now."

"Draz already sent for Lord Dereham," Imryll said. "But there's no reason we have to wait for his men to assemble." She abandoned her robe on the bed and started for her bureau, but Drazhan reached for her arm, shaking his head with as much calm as he had left in him.

"Imryll. Please. For me," he pleaded. "I need to know you're safe. You and Aleks—and the baby."

She squeezed her eyes closed in annoyance, but nodded. "How can I help from here then?"

"Wake Uli Castel, and let him know he and my men need to be ready within the half. Then find Lady Dereham and get her to rouse her best chambermaids. We don't—can't know what Aes will need when we find her." Drazhan's head felt ready to implode. Imryll would know what to say to ease it, but that wasn't what he needed. "We have to be ready for anything, love."

Imryll slipped a dressing gown over her shoulders, swiftly kissed him, and whispered, "I don't know what's going on, but he knows her better than we do right now. Listen to him."

She was gone before Drazhan could respond.

The scholar stood at a window, bent over the frame. He looked stiff and aged and lost, all of which reminded Drazhan that the man was too old to be lusting after Aesylt.

On my Ancestors, it will never, ever be this man.

Drazhan rubbed his temples. "Tell me more about this fight."

"It wasn't a fight, it was a difference of opinion." Rahn straightened, his head falling back. "She was upset I didn't speak on her behalf, but it wasn't my place to position my voice above yours and Lord Dereham's."

Clipping his sword belt into place, Drazhan asked, "And if it had been your place, what would you have said?"

Rahn turned. His eyes were shot with pink and red. "You wait for your men, I'll go ahead?—"

"No." Drazhan checked his sword. Sharp enough. "We'll go together. What, exactly, did she say that led you to believe something had happened?"

Rahn tilted his head back again. "It was... a feeling. After she left, the feeling didn't go away. I talked myself into checking on her. She was gone. That's all I know."

"An accurate one, ostensibly. So tell me, what are your feelings telling you now? Where is she? Back in the Cross, you think?"

Rahn lowered his eyes to the ground and shook his head. "I don't know." He glanced up in hopeless defeat. "If I did, it's where I'd be now."

Drazhan laced his boots, thinking ahead to the search. The snow and darkness would be significant impairments to progress. She could already be halfway to Witchwood Cross by the time they saddled and mounted, but if she was still on the road, those same perils would reach her too. "My wife says you know my sister better than all of us. Silence hurts her more than any confession you'll make."

"There's..." Rahn's voice cracked. He glanced away, straining. "If I thought anything I could say now would help us find her, I would hold nothing back. Marek... Marek is still out there, and now, she's... I wish to the gods I knew more. I wish I'd listened, that I'd heard what she wanted me to hear. She was angry and determined when I saw her last, and you and I both know Aesylt is capable of anything."

Drazhan dipped toward the window and checked the sky. It was just past midnight. They still had a full night ahead. Rahn was right about one thing; every minute they spent talking was a minute she slipped farther away. "When Aesylt is safe, you're going to be forthcoming about what's gone on between you two, or you can be sure you will never see her again in this life."

The person standingbefore Valerian was the most exquisite woman he'd ever seen—and also a complete stranger.

She answered the door to her room at the inn with her hood pulled tight. After casting suspicious glances into the hall, she yanked him inside and bolted all three locks before throwing herself into his arms.

And she was crying.

Sobbing.

The last time he'd seen her shed even a single tear had been on the worst night of their lives.

"Hey, Aessy. Aessy, I'm here." Valerian pulled back, holding tight to her shoulders as he choked on his own well of complicated emotions. Right away he could see she'd been through something she might not be willing or able to explain. She seemed older—no, not older, but wiser somehow. The kind of wisdom he attributed to the adults of his life, who had lived through the cycles of peace and war and were always ready for either. In her eyes were a hundred confessions she might never offer.

"You're alive. You're really, truly alive. V, I..." She stepped backward and sank onto a chair, burying her face between her legs. "I wasn't sure you'd come."

"I had to satisfy my curiosity about why Aesylt Wynter is holed up in an inn under an assumed name, sending coded messages through a war zone." Valerian dragged a chair in front of her and sat on it. She was still staring at the floor. "Aessy. Come on, it's all right. I'm here now."

"I used to wonder if I would ever cry again," she said, swiping her face on both sleeves before looking up with a drowsy smile. "Now I wonder if I'll ever stop."

Valerian had wondered the same thing. Memories of that night were never far from his mind. Nor Nik's. The two men had only spoken of the Nok Mora a handful of times since, but every time had been about Aesylt. Their worry for her. The fear of what suffering and denial turned into when buried so deep. "There's nothing wrong with crying, beautiful. Makes your eyes bluer."

"My..." Aesylt's hands flew to her face, which crumpled in playful annoyance. "Did you... have much trouble getting out of the Cross?"

"Hardly any." Valerian shrugged and sat back. It burned him to think of how easily he'd slipped away actually. If he'd ever questioned his role as a pawn in his father's games, he needed to no longer. All the talk of dozens of guards in the halls outside of his room—the show of nursing their baby boy back to health—was just theater. In fact, the only thing his father had done since he'd awoken, aching and confused, was threaten him into swearing fealty to their cause. "Hoarfrost is pretty well guarded, but they mostly leave me alone, unless they need to parade me around town to send a message."

"V." Her expression fell. "How are you feeling?"

"Better. Physically." He breathed deep, blowing out a sharp breath. "Angry otherwise. Aesylt, you need to know that I never told Marek what we talked about that day before I went into the forest. I would never tell him. He's my brother in blood only, always been my tormentor. My lifelong bully. You know that. I wouldn't feed him a secret unless I wanted the world to know."

"I believe you," she whispered, finally peeling her hood away. He was startled at how much she looked like her mother, Sonia, who had been known as much for her nontraditional beauty as her quarter-Medvedev ancestry. Her portrait hung in the Great Hall of Fanghelm, and he had always been taken by it. "But how did he know? The betrothal could have been a fortunate guess, I suppose, but the starwalking?"

"He had help. Feist, my father's koldyna." Even from Aesylt he'd kept his family's darkest secret. He'd wanted to tell her, but for all his father had failed him, Valerian still didn't want to see the man executed. "She and Marek have... a special relationship. I don't know the all of it, Aessy, but she's given him access to magic he has no right knowing. He was there, somehow, we just couldn't see him. And I know this is true because he told me, when he thought I was sleeping. Right before he informed me..." Valerian swallowed and pointed his gaze away to find the words. "That Father wouldn't rest until Marek and you were the new stewards of the Cross. And while no one will admit this to me, I believe it was the koldyna, under the direction of Marek or maybe even my father, who cursed me so the wulves would bring me back." He pursed his mouth. "I just don't think they were expecting me to be alive when it happened."

"Ancestors keep us. Your father..." Aesylt laughed bitterly. Her tongue caught the tears rolling over her lips. "I shouldn't be surprised, but I am."

"Sadly, me too."

"And I would have married you, V. I made that promise because I was afraid for you, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't have followed through. They must know I would gouge my own eyes out and run myself into my sword before I would let your brother anywhere near me though."

"They're not interested in your compliance. They might even be happier without it." Valerian shrugged. "I wish I could tell you when my father went from an ambitious man to a vile one, but the transition was so subtle, I didn't see it until we were already embroiled in a civil war."

"So that's what they want, is it? To topple my brother and take his place?"

He nodded. "If I had known where you were, I would have come to you the moment I woke up."

"Oh, you say that now, but..." Aesylt sucked her teeth with a heavy look at her lap. "It's only because you don't know."

"Don't know what?"

"What I've done."

Valerian leaned in. "And what do you think you could have done that would make me turn away from my favorite person in the world?"

She met his eyes with a bracing look. "Fell in love with another man. Gave myself to him, body and soul."

Her words landed softer than they should have because he'd been expecting them. Some of them anyway. "You've been in love with Scholar Tindahl since the day you met him." He shook his head. "But I didn't think the monk had it in him, honestly."

"Oh, he only ‘had it in him' in the name of science. I never got the chance to tell you, but Imryll gave our cohort one of Jasika's curricula. Coitus." She snorted. "I think she hoped Rahn would come up with some clever alternative to actually performing the experiments, but there wasn't one. It was either find a way or the Reliquary would win. If she had known the two of us... She never, ever would have reassigned it." She sawed her teeth along her upper lip. "I was the idiot who thought it was more. He made himself perfectly clear what it was. What it wasn't. But everything that happened before Wulfsgate seems like an entire lifetime ago, and now I don't know which way is up anymore."

"Aesylt, if you think I would judge you for what you did with the scholar... That would be rather stupid of me, considering how many women I've been with."

"It wasn't just Rahn." She wrung her hands until they were marked with red and white scores and then told him about a place called Revelry.

He'd heard of those secret societies of course, had even considered visiting one. But unlike her confession about the scholar, he was stunned to hear her relate what she'd done in the old abbey. He would cut out his own tongue before letting her see it though. "Ah, well..." He cleared the clog from his throat. "If I had someone who could get me in, I'd have done the same."

Aesylt's eyes narrowed slightly. "You haven't even asked why I needed the grimizhna tea."

"It only has one purpose, Aessy. Well, two, but you wouldn't have requested it now if you weren't already in trouble." He nodded toward the door, where his bag rested on the ground. "I brought it. Niklaus got ahold of some, from a Petrovash vedhma, so you can thank him. I'm supposed to tell you it's more likely that stress has affected your, um, moon flow. If you drink it and you feel fine after, then there was nothing to worry about. If you drink it and get sick..."

"I know." Aesylt nodded solemnly. "I know how it works."

"Do you really think..."

"I'm not only late; I'm unwell. Could also be from stress, but..."

"Right." Valerian's head was swimming. He'd been honest enough about not judging her, but it didn't mean he wasn't shaken by her confessions. Aesylt had lived another lifetime in the months since he'd seen her last. She'd fallen in love, had her heart shattered, and explored her desires with four different men. It should hurt. It would, he suppose, if he allowed himself to dwell on it. But he was her friend first and foremost. "You didn't bring me all this way just to unload your conscience."

Aesylt pushed out of her chair and paced to the other side of the modest room. "I had to tell you everything before I made my proposal. It would have been wrong and unfair to say what I'm going to say next when you still know me as who I was before."

Valerian stood but didn't immediately go to her. "You want to get married, right? To fix what others can't."

She whipped her head up in surprise. "How did you guess?"

"Aessy, Aessy, Aessy." He clucked his tongue, grinning. "Why else would you send for me, huh? Why else would you risk making things worse, unless you had a plan to make them better?"

"I..." She sagged against the wall. "All right. Yes. That's my proposal, that we handle this ourselves. But you need to know what you're getting into if you accept. I do care about you. I love you. You're a part of me, and... You always will be. I will not deceive you, especially about this. I shouldn't love him still, V, but I do. I love him so cursed much, I feel like..." She raised both hands to her chest. "Like I'm cracking open, splitting from the inside."

Valerian went to her and gathered her in his arms. Nothing she'd said had hurt as much as the heartbreak in her voice when talking about the man who had broken her. If there were time, he'd deal with the man himself, knock some sense into him. "He has no idea what he's walked away from, Aessy. No idea. But I do." He kissed the top of her head, sliding his mouth down to her temple.

"It's my fault for breaking the rules. I knew why we were doing it. I knew, and I broke the rules. Me."

"Aesylt, the only question is how he could experience all that with you and not fall in love." On the many hours it had taken Valerian to ride to her, he'd run through every scenario he could imagine, and all of them led back to Aesylt and Rahn. The moment Valerian had met Rahn Tindahl, it seemed as though the man had been made for Aesylt, and Valerian hadn't been able to compete with that. The scholar was everything Valerian was not, but Valerian knew what he had. "I'm not threatened. Not by what you did at Revelry. Not even by the man you love more than... well, more than you could love me. I don't need you to love me that much. I don't believe we're meant to feel that powerfully about anything for long. Marriage is less about love, in my estimation, than companionship. Respect. I respect your love for him, and I respect you. That's enough for me." He cupped her face in his hands with a soft laugh. "So I accept, Aesylt. Because both of us could do far worse for ourselves than a good friend, aye?" He kissed the corner of her mouth. "And you don't need to drink the tea. I'm here for whatever comes."