Chapter 327: I Would Find You Every Time
Two years in two minutes. That was how the vision moved.
Gav watched a boy who had his eyes and his instincts and his complete inability to leave things alone grow up beside a girl with white hair, and every year the distance between "I’m keeping her" and "I have a crush on her" got shorter, and the boy still hadn’t noticed.
Tristan at twelve. River at nine.
"Give it back."
"Come and get it, Short Stack."
"Tristan Aelindor, give me my scroll or I will tell your father about the frog."
"Which frog? There have been several frogs. You will need to be specific."
"The frog in Seraphina’s bath."
"That frog was there of its own free will. I had nothing to do with it."
"I watched you put it there."
"You witnessed a frog exercise its freedom. That is a very different thing."
She chased him through three corridors, around two columns, and into the training yard where Lucian was sparring with a wooden sword. Tristan held her scroll above his head, which at twelve was high enough that her nine-year-old arms had zero chance of reaching it.
She punched him in the stomach instead.
He doubled over, wheezing, and she took the scroll from his hand while he was busy remembering how to breathe.
"Thank you," she said, and walked away.
Lucian, still holding his practice sword, looked at Tristan on the ground. "She is getting stronger."
"She is a menace," Tristan wheezed. "I am so proud."
✦✦✦
Thirteen and ten. The garden behind the library.
Tristan was teaching her to climb the wall that separated the formal gardens from the wild gardens, which was forbidden, which was why he was teaching her.
"Foot there. Hand there. Pull."
"I cannot reach."
"You can reach. You are choosing to doubt your arms. Your arms are offended."
"My arms are tired."
"Your arms are warriors. Tell them that."
She made it to the top and sat on the stone ledge with her legs dangling, looking out over the wild garden where the flowers grew without permission and the trees did whatever they wanted.
Tristan climbed up beside her. They sat in silence for a long moment, the kind of silence that belonged to two people who had been in each other’s lives long enough that words were optional equipment.
"Tristan?"
"Mm."
"Thank you for finding me."
He looked at her. She was looking at the garden. The afternoon light caught her white hair and turned it gold at the edges, the way it always did, and his twelve-year-old heart did something it had never done before, a single, hard thump that landed in the center of his chest and stayed there.
"I would find you every time," he said.
✦✦✦
Fourteen and eleven. The corridor outside the main hall.
Tristan had his bag over his shoulder and his boots laced and his jaw set in the particular way that fourteen-year-old boys set their jaws when they are trying to look brave about something that terrifies them.
He was leaving for the academy. Two years. The longest he would be away from the palace, from his father, from her.
River stood in front of him, arms at her sides, chin lifted, refusing to cry with the same stubborn discipline she applied to everything. She was failing.
"Two years is nothing," Tristan said. "I will write every week. Father will keep you fed and watered."
"I am able to feed myself."
"Debatable."
A laugh broke through the tears. She hugged him, and her arms went around his ribs with the desperate grip of a girl whose entire world had been a boy with green eyes and mud on his boots since the day he reached out his hand on a riverbank and said come with me.
He hugged her back. Held on for three seconds longer than he planned, because his chest was doing the thing again, the thump, and at fourteen he still had no word for it.
Behind them, Atlas watched from the corridor’s end.
"Go, son," the Fae King said, his voice carrying the warmth he reserved for exactly two people. "We will remember to feed and water her while you are away."
River laughed through her tears.
Tristan pointed at his father. "I am holding you to that."
He turned and walked away. He made it ten steps before he looked over his shoulder. She was still standing there, arms wrapped around herself, watching him go.
He raised one hand. She raised hers.
✦✦✦
Two years later.
She was waiting on the steps.
Thirteen. Taller. Her white hair was longer, braided in a style he had never seen on her, and she was wearing a dress that fit properly and made her look like the princess she now was rather than the girl in a tent dress he had carried through a servant’s entrance.
He crossed the courtyard at a sprint, grabbed her, and lifted her off the ground so fast her braid whipped sideways.
"You grew," he said, spinning her once.
"That is what people do. You taught me that."
"I also grew. Notice me."
"You grew sideways."
"I am going to put you down and walk away."
"You will never put me down." She said it with absolute certainty, and she was correct, and they both knew it, and the laugh that came from both of them filled the courtyard with a sound that the guards would describe to their families that evening as "the prince is home."
Lucian was behind her. Sixteen, lean, quiet in a way that had deepened in the two years Tristan was gone. He stood with his arms at his sides and let the reunion happen the way he always let things happen around Tristan: with patience, with warmth, and with the particular stillness of a wolf who had learned to hold very carefully the things he could never have.
Tristan set River down and pulled Lucian into a hug so aggressive it constituted a minor assault.
"You got taller," Tristan observed. "I find that personally offensive."
The vision held on this moment longer than the others.
Gavriel Sterling watched the three of them laugh, and swallowed a lump in the back of his throat.
He knew that this was the before. Every life had one.
The boy version of himself loved that girl. He hadn’t admitted it yet, but he would.
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