Page 151 of Veinblood
She sits up, swinging her legs around.
“I don’t need?—”
“Ellie,Ineed you to rest.”
She frowns at me. “What? Why?”
I crouch in front of her. “Because there’s a knot in my chest that I can’t ignore.” I take her hand and press it over my heart, where the bond between us pulses. “I can feel your tiredness, and your desire to hide it. But it doesn’t stop it from being there.” I raise her fingers to my lips and kiss them, one by one. “And if you don’t rest,Ican’t rest.”
“Oh …” She twists onto her side and shuffles across the bed, leaving space for me.
I stretch out beside her, and she rolls against me, resting her head on my shoulder. It doesn’t take long for her eyes to close, and her breathing to change. What does surprise me is that I follow her into sleep.
When my eyes open, it’s to sunlight streaming through the small window. Ellie is still asleep beside me, burrowed into my side, her arm a welcome weight across my waist. I take a moment to enjoy the quiet and the peace her presence brings me, before turning my thoughts to the day ahead.
The war is close to ending. I can feel it in the way the Authority is scattering. But wars don’t simply stop, they conclude with violence, with confrontations that determine who writes the history afterward. And my brother still draws breath somewhere in this realm.
“We need to return to Ashenvale,” I tell Ellie when she wakes.
She sits up, blinking at me. “What about Greyhold?”
“Mira will come back with us, but the others will stay here. Once we’re back, I will send reinforcements to relieve them.”
“When do you want to leave?”
“This morning.”
Every hour Sereven remains free gives him more time to gather what loyalists remain to him, or plan some final act of spite that could cost hundreds of innocent lives. The bond between us may have been severed by his choices, but I know him well enough to understand that cornered, he will become most dangerous.
Within an hour, Corwin has his instructions for overseeingGreyhold, and Ellie, Mira and I are ready to depart. We ride in silence for the first few miles. When we pause to rest the horses beside a stream, Ellie dismounts with fluid grace and leads her mount to water. I watch her move, noting how different she is now. The woman I first met has been transformed by violence and necessity, and the change both impresses and saddens me. Yet another person remade by a war that has consumed my life.
“What are you thinking about?” Her hand finds mine.
“Sereven is running out of places to hide, commanders to protect him, and soldiers willing to die for his cause. It won’t stop him. He’s not going to just disappear or give up.”
There was a time when she would have peppered me with questions. Where will we find him, how many soldiers does he still command, what will happen when we face him? But she doesn’t ask any of that. Instead she cuts straight to the heart of everything I’m avoiding thinking about.
“Are you ready for what that will mean?”
Am I ready to kill the boy who once helped me practice sword forms in Ashenvale's training yards? The young man who stood beside me when we fled the burning city? The brother who chose the Authority over family, who orchestrated our parents' deaths, who ordered my torture and imprisonment?
The memories surface unbidden. Sereven at fifteen, laughing as we raced horses through the meadows beyond Ashenvale's walls. His face bright with pride when Father praised his swordwork.
That boy died long ago. What remains is something elseentirely. A creature wearing my brother’s face while wielding power built on the bones of our people.
“I've been ready for years.”
The words are true, but they’re not the whole truth. I'm ready to kill the man who destroyed my family and enslaved my people since he first betrayed me. Whether I'm ready to kill mybrotheris another thing entirely.
We reach Ashenvale some time after high sun. The guards wave us through with deep bows that still feel wrong. Stable hands take our horses with the same mixture of respect and fear that marks all their interactions with me. They want to trust I am not what Sereven claimed, but decades of Authority teachings about Veinbloods and about the Shadowvein Lord in particular won’t disappear overnight.
The city feels different since we walked through it before the official coronation. There's an energy in the air, a sense of anticipation. People move with confidence rather than nervous fear. Children play in the streets without constantly looking over their shoulders. Merchants hawk their wares with voices that carry genuine enthusiasm rather than forced cheer designed to avoid unwanted attention.
Hope, I realize. This is what hope looks like when it's allowed to take root.
Crossing the plaza toward the Lirien Spire, I wave toward one of the guards standing near the entrance.
“Can you please inform Varam we’ve returned, and that I’d like to meet him in my study in the morning.”
