Chapter 436: You’re Not Him, Are You?

Elián;

I didn’t tell anyone about the figure I saw under the tree last night, and I don’t plan to. Telling them about it will only bring them trouble they cannot solve.

They have only just started trying to breathe again. I should let them have that. So...none of them will hear of it.

Not Koda, who’s been watching me all morning with that softness his eyes carry when he thinks I’m one wrong move away from breaking.

Not Zephan, who hugged me twice before breakfast for no reason he explained... and certainly not Queen Selthía, whose eyes found mine across the table again this morning, still troubled, still trying to figure me out like something she suddenly stopped understanding.

I keep the knowledge tucked, and quiet inside my chest...hidden behind the same wall where I keep Bram’s face. Where I keep the sound he made when I killed him—Where I keep everything I’ve decided no one else needs to carry alongside me.

"You’re doing the thing again," Koda’s voice breaks into my thoughts, and my eyes flick to him.

"What thing?" I ask, and his golden eyes hold me in place as he smiles gently.

"The thing where you go somewhere else in your head and forget I’m standing right beside you." He replies, knocking his shoulder gently against mine. The motion is playful... but careful. He’s always so careful with how much weight he puts behind even something that small.

"Come back to me." He adds as he locks his fingers in mine.

I stare at his beautiful face. At the way his healthy blonde hair carries through the wind as we walk down the garden’s stone path.

"I’m here," I say, while forcing a smile that costs more than it should.

He doesn’t look convinced by my lie. He’s never convinced when I do this, but he also never pushes. He just tries something else instead, some new angle, like he’s got an endless supply of them stored away for exactly this purpose.

And of late I find myself wondering what new way he wishes to cheer me up.

"Watch this," he suddenly says as he lets go of my hand, and before I can ask what he wants me to watch, his whole body shudders.

His form shifts as golden-blonde fur bursts across his skin. Claws lengthen from his paws, and his bones shift with a sound I’ve heard enough times now not to flinch at. In the blink of an eye, there’s a full, blonde grizzly bear standing in front of me, wearing an expression that looks... smug?

"Koda—?" I call in confusion, but his name doesn’t even come out fully before he starts dancing.

It is not a graceful or remotely dignified dance. It is a nearly eight-foot bear swaying his hips back and forth with all the rhythm of a drunk man at a wedding. His front paws wave above his head like he’s conducting an orchestra only he can hear.

And he’s huffing and grunting rhythms that are in absolute disarray.

I slap a hand over my mouth in amusement, as I watch.

"Oh, my God." I breathe, but he doesn’t stop.

If anything, he leans further into it...some kind of shimmy that should not be physically possible for a creature his size. The laugh that bursts out of me isn’t the practised kind I’ve been handing out for so long now. It comes from somewhere lower... Somewhere real.

"Stop! Someone’s going to see you like this!" I scold, but he huffs. A low, pleased rumble as he does a full spin, with his claws catching a low branch and sending pink petals pouring down around us both.

"You look ridiculous," I laugh, wiping happy tears, and he looks down at me. He lifts his head slightly, front paws spread wide, as he takes a bow.

For a moment...standing in this garden with a dancing grizzly bear who happens to be my husband, I actually forget. The shadow under the tree stops existing....Bram’s face stops existing...Everything that’s been bothering me vanishes.

There is only this. This moment—sunlight, petals, a stupid dance, and the sound of my laughter, unguarded, and easy...the kind I haven’t heard myself make in weeks.

Koda drops back down onto four paws, tongue lolling, and even as a bear I can tell he’s pleased with himself.

I laugh once again, as I bury my fingers in his luscious fur. He leans into my touch, and I hug him to myself.

"I love you, Koda. I love you so much." I breathe, and his paws caress my back.

I’m about to let myself go completely in the warmth and safety of his embrace, but I freeze when I feel something change.

A...Strange feeling that presses down against my skin, thick and cold, like the temperature dropped several degrees without the light around us changing at all.

Koda feels it too.

He goes still mid-pant, ears flattening, as he covers me completely. His arms bury me in his fur as he looks around for the cause of the change.

"Koda?" I call, and he looks down at me. He can’t speak to me in this form, but his eyes say so much; I don’t need his lips to move.

Every trace of the dancing bear is gone from his aura as he shoves me behind him. My heart, however, fails in my chest as I look past his shoulder.

The flowers along the path...the same soft pink petals Koda just knocked down a moment ago...are wilting. Not slowly. Not the way flowers are supposed to die over days, going brown and brittle at the edges. They are wilting all at once, curling black from the centre outward. The whole bed of them collapses into rot in the space of a single held breath, and I know. I just know it’s back.

Something exhales, low and slow, from the tree line, and despite my plan. Despite my resolve...despite knowing better, I still grab onto Koda in fear.

I don’t see them arrive. I just...blink and they’re already there—cloaked figures, hooded, faceless in dark folds of fabric that seem to swallow the daylight instead of reflecting it.

All four of them stand before us, and I feel my throat go dry.

Four?! The last time, there was just one, and Asa died. Now, there are four!??

I look up at Koda, who’s already growling at them, and I slowly let go of him.

I look back at the figures, and my heart dies in my chest when I see that there are six of them now.

Six!?

Where they step, the grass beneath their feet blackens and dies. My whole body locks up at the thought of the damage they can cause.

Koda shifts to stand directly in front of me. Shielding me from their view. But this only heightens my anxiety. I cradle my stomach as my heart starts pounding. I feel my baby move. It’s almost like she can sense the trouble too.

Koda throws his head back and roars.

I know it isn’t a warning. It’s an alarm, pitched high and long enough to carry across the whole palace grounds, and almost immediately I hear the answer—distant shouting, boots against stone, the palace waking up to what’s happening again in its garden.

Koda gently nudges me back as he takes a defensive stance. He wants me to stay back. I know I should...

Every instinct screaming through me says I should run...hide, protect the baby, get as far from this as my legs will carry me. But...my feet don’t move that way. They can’t. Because Koda is already moving toward the nearest cloaked figure, and I can see... even from here, even without understanding what I’m looking at...the way its magic gathers at its fingertips. Black. Veined with something that pulses like a heartbeat gone wrong.

"Koda, on your left!"

He turns half a second too slow.

The bolt comes fast, crackling with a wrongness that isn’t quite fire and isn’t quite anything I have a word for. I don’t think. I just move.

I throw myself into the space between Koda and the creature that fired it.

"NO—"

The world goes very bright and very cold at the same time.

Then, all of a sudden, a figure of black and white appears right in front of me, and the corrosive magic shatters against it instead of me.

"Elián!" Koda shouts, and my eyes snap sideways.

I see Queen Selthia at the garden’s edge. Hand outstretched, jaw clenched, and another magical orb already gathering at her fingertips.

I don’t get to feel relief before something crashes into me. It sends me flying backwards so hard that my back hits the ground.

I hit the ground so hard, air gets knocked out of my lungs, and pain shoots through my stomach.

"ELIáN!" Zephan’s voice screams with Koda’s growl right behind it. I can hear them running over to me. Both of them are screaming my name across the garden.

I try to move. To get up and not worry them so much, but my body doesn’t listen. The sky above me seems to pull farther and farther away, and somewhere beneath the ringing in my ears I feel a hand...My hand presses protectively over my stomach.

In that same breath, hands close around my arms.

It’s not Koda’s touch...or Zephan’s... These are different.

They’re...Cold, and wrong. Fingers that don’t feel like fingers at all. They close around my arms tightly enough to bruise.

I look over at Koda and Zephan and find them struggling against shadows that have pinned them to the ground, and my eyes widen.

King Whilem on the other side of the garden is battling to stop Queen Selthia’s bleeding chest, and my heart fractures.

How did she get injured??

The bony fingers haul me off the grass and force me to my feet.

"NO!!" Zepan growls, but I don’t move.

I don’t so much as struggle.

It’s happening...Is it actually happening...?

The last thing I see before one of the figures knocks me out with a blow to the face is Koda’s beast. And the look of terror on his face. Raw, animal terror.

He breaks free from the shadows and resumes running toward me. As a screen of black fog begins to consume me, I know he’s not going to make it.

I smile bitterly as a tear escapes my eyes. He growls bitterly as the shadows catch up to hold him in place, and I let out a breath as darkness swallows the world whole.

*****

I wake up somewhere cold. Cold and hard.

Blink slowly and realise I’ve been plopped against cold, damp stone.

The cold and hardness bite into my shoulder blades through thin fabric, and my whole body throbs with a dull, persistent ache.

My eyes soon lock onto a dim torchlight, and shadows crawling slowly and unevenly up on walls I don’t recognise.

My hand finds my stomach on instinct before anything else. Checking that my baby is there, before anything else. Before my own pain, before my own fear.

I push myself upright. But that was a mistake. I did it too fast. The room tilts, my vision swims, and a wave of nausea rolls through me hard enough that I have to plant a hand flat against the freezing stone floor just to stay upright.

Then I hear a voice...That voice.

"At last."

Every part of me goes rigid, and I feel my body freeze in horror.

I know that voice. I’ve heard it before.

I–I know it from fragments. From Elien’s memories bleeding through mine over these past months. It’s the voice attached to hands that broke things just to watch them try to heal wrong afterwards.

Balinar.

My breath catches in my throat, refusing to go out or back in. I force myself to look toward the sound, and my heart stops.

He’s not alone.

There’s someone else in the shadows past the torchlight—a shape I can’t fully make out, robed like one of the monsters who took me.

The figure stands still. Patient in a way that unsettles me worse than Balinar’s voice does.

Balinar is speaking to them. Not to me.

"Now take the soul you asked for, and give me back what belongs to me."

My brows crease at those words. The soul they asked for??

"Rid Elien of that intruder, and let me take him back with me. We haven’t time to waste." Lightning strikes behind my eyes as I hear those words, and horror washes over me.

He knows!! Balinar–Balinar knows our secret. He knows there’s...

He’s not asking for Elien back in some vague, mistaken way. He’s negotiating... Trading. He wants Elien—specifically— and whoever he’s speaking to in the shadows apparently wants something else in return.

Wait. They want me!!

"Wait—" My voice comes out cracked and panicked, but I force it out anyway. Maybe I can still play my way out of this.

I’ll just let Elien take control. Fool Balinar into thinking there’s just one of us at least until this threat passes.

"What are you talking about? What soul—"

Balinar’s head turns in my direction, and one look at those bottomless dark eyes causes my words to stick cowardly in my throat.

His eyes find mine, and whatever calm satisfaction was resting on his face a moment ago sharpens into something colder. Something delighted.

"Oh." He says it softly, almost fondly, like greeting an old, familiar friend he’s missed. "You’re not him, are you?"

I don’t answer. I can’t.

Because underneath that soft, almost gentle tone, I hear exactly what he means—that he’s known for a while now, maybe far longer than I’ve ever been aware of it myself, that Elien’s body has been carrying a second passenger this whole time.

And worse...he’s already made a deal for both of us.