Chapter 324: Come With Me, Said The Fae Prince
You know who you are, Gavriel Sterling. But you have forgotten who you were.
Gavriel blinked. The air tasted like pine sap and wild jasmine. He was standing in a courtyard of crystalline stone, the arches threaded with glowing vines.
Two boys tore through the colonnade at a dead sprint.
The taller one, dark-haired and lean, was carrying a frog in each hand and laughing so hard his coordination had deteriorated to the point where his left shoulder clipped a pillar and he kept running without acknowledging it. The younger one was three strides behind, holding a stolen bread loaf above his head like a trophy.
Gavriel knew them both. He knew them because the taller one was himself at eight, green-eyed and grinning, with the innate understanding that rules were suggestions.
The voice spoke again.
Your first life, Fae Prince. Before Drakenfell, before borrowed names and borrowed grief, there was Aelindris. You were named Tristan, son of Atlas. Prince of All Fae.
The younger boy moved the way Finnick Shadowclaw moved, if Finnick Shadowclaw were eight years old and had agreed to steal bread as a tactical exercise rather than a moral failing. The jaw was already there. The watchfulness was already there. The loyalty that would outlast kingdoms was already there, visible in the way he ran beside Tristan rather than behind him, matching his pace, covering his flank, a wolf at eight already practicing the position he would hold for the rest of his life.
The voice spoke a third time, but Gavriel had already connected the pieces.
The wolf who walks beside you has walked beside you before. The first wolf king, named Lucian Moon. He was your shadow in a life where shadows were earned, and he earned his before either of you understood what it would cost.
He watched the two boys disappear around a corner, their laughter bouncing off crystalline stone, and he felt something crack open in his chest that he was never going to be able to close.
✦✦✦
The scene faded into a forest.
Gavriel watched himself as a boy, trying to climb a tree, except this wasn’t Drakenfell and he wasn’t named Gavriel.
This was the boy he’d just seen, two years older, covered in mud, and losing an argument with a wolf pup who refused to accept that climbing a tree was a reasonable life decision.
"I am telling you, Lucian, the branch holds. I tested it."
"You tested it by looking at it. From the ground. That is the opposite of testing."
"It held the bird."
"You weigh more than a bird, Tristan."
"A bit."
Lucian Moon stood at the base of the oak with his arms crossed and the long-suffering expression of a ten-year-old wolf who had been friends with the Fae Prince long enough to understand that logic was a currency Tristan spent selectively.
The forest outside the Fae palace stretched for miles in every direction, ancient trees whose canopies filtered the light into green-gold columns that made the air feel alive. It was the kind of forest that existed in paintings and in the imaginations of children who had never been told that forests could be dangerous, which both of these boys had been told, repeatedly, and had chosen to ignore.
Tristan dropped from the branch. He landed in the mud beside Lucian.
"Race to the river?"
"You lost the last four."
"I was letting you win."
"You were wheezing."
"Strategically."
They ran.
Lucian was faster. He was always faster, because wolf blood carried speed the way Fae blood carried arrogance, and Lucian had been outrunning Tristan since they were seven and had never once pretended otherwise. Tristan compensated by talking the entire way, a strategy that accomplished nothing except ensuring Lucian arrived at the river exhausted from laughing.
The river bent around a cluster of moss-covered boulders where the water ran shallow enough to wade. It was their spot. Had been since the summer they were eight and Tristan had declared it a sovereign territory and made Lucian sign a treaty written on a leaf with berry juice.
They slowed at the bank. Tristan’s boots hit the shallows, sending a spray of water across his trousers, which were already beyond salvation.
That was when he saw her.
A girl. Small. Curled on a rock at the river’s edge with her knees pulled to her chest and her face buried in her arms. Her hair was white, tangled, matted with dirt, hanging around her like a curtain she had pulled shut against the world. She was crying. Quiet crying. The kind that children learn when loud crying gets them hit.
Tristan stopped. The mud on his boots, the race, the tree, all of it evaporated. His entire body recalibrated around the small, shaking shape on the rock the way a compass recalibrates around north.
Lucian saw her a second later. His playfulness vanished, replaced by a watchful stillness.
"Why is she crying?" Lucian whispered.
"I have no idea."
They approached slowly. The girl flinched at the sound of boots on wet stone but kept her face buried. She was small. Smaller than either of them, and they were ten. Six years old, maybe. Her dress was torn at the hem, stained with something dark that could have been mud or could have been blood.
Lucian crouched three feet from the rock. "Hey. Are you okay?"
She lifted her head by one inch. Pink eyes, enormous, red-rimmed, wet. They looked at Lucian, then at Tristan, then back at the rock, as if the rock was the only thing in the world she trusted.
She said nothing.
Tristan’s eyes moved to her wrist. A crescent marking was glowing on her skin, pale and raised, the specific brand that Fae kingdoms used to identify property. Slave children.
He knew the mark because his tutors had taught him about the practice in kingdoms beyond their borders, taught him with the careful, clinical distance of men describing something they wanted him to understand was wrong without telling him exactly how wrong, because the full truth was heavier than a ten-year-old prince should carry.
He carried it anyway. He was Tristan Aelindor, and he had never in his life needed permission to carry heavy things.
"We will keep your secret," he said. "Nobody will know you are here."
Her pink eyes lifted. Searched his face. Found whatever she was looking for, or at least found the absence of whatever she was afraid of, and gave a single, tiny nod.
Tristan extended his hand.
"Come with me."
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