Chapter 717: When The Prince Came Undone

"Fated ties are a rare gift that most dream about and she gave you one. But you won’t unwrap it," River whispered.

Something broke in Tristan’s face. The breaking was total, sudden, the collapse of a composure that had been engineered for Fae court and was being tested in a private alcove by a woman whose tears were doing more structural damage than any political crisis his composure had ever been designed to withstand.

He turned. His hand found a ceramic oil lamp on the recessed shelf beside the window and he threw it against the marble wall with a force that detonated it into a constellation of fragments that hit the floor like a small, angry rain.

"I don’t want the gift!" The roar came from a place deeper than his chest, deeper than his lungs, from the place where love lived when love had been told it was wrong and refused the correction. "I don’t want the tie. I don’t want the woman in my dungeon and I don’t want the veins on my neck and I don’t want my wife standing in an alcove telling me the Goddess made a decision I’m supposed to respect when the decision is TAKING HER FROM ME."

The ceramic fragments settled around his boots. His chest was heaving. His eyes were bright, the green fighting the gray, the man fighting the corruption, the prince fighting the verdict, and every fight was being lost in real time and the real time was a window River was watching through.

She didn’t flinch at the thrown lamp. She hadn’t flinched at anything since she was ten. Tristan had taught her how to stand still when the world was loud.

Instead, she closed the distance between them, took his face in both hands, and pressed her forehead against his.

Tristan’s hands found her waist. The grip was desperate, crushing, the grip of a man holding the last piece of a ship that was going down and understanding, somewhere beneath the gripping, that the holding was the reason the ship kept sinking.

"I love you so much," River whispered against his mouth, and the whisper was wet and broken and carrying the weight of a woman delivering a goodbye disguised as a sentence, and the disguise was insufficient and they both knew it. "I love you in a way that doesn’t need a fated tie or a goddess or a star on my neck. I love you so deeply it has reshaped the architecture of who I am, and I will never be the version of myself that existed before you. I love you, and that will never change, no matter if the room gets dark or the distance gets wide or the gods get involved. I love you so far past the surface that I cannot find the bottom of it. You are my everything, Tristan, and that is why I’m leaving. Because my everything deserves to survive, even if that means I cannot walk beside you."

His forehead pressed harder against hers. His breathing came in ragged bursts that were doing a terrible job of being breathing and an excellent job of being sobs that his body refused to classify as sobs because princes didn’t sob and this prince especially didn’t sob.

"Don’t." The word was hoarse. "Don’t walk away from me, River. Let me fix this."

"I’m walking towards your survival. I need you to see it that way."

"I see a woman I love leaving. That’s the only direction I can see."

Fin’s ghost-hands were pressed against his face. He could hear everything. The matebond was delivering River’s grief through Lucian’s chest and Lucian’s chest was ten feet away. Fin was inside that chest and the grief was a frequency that made his eyes burn.

"Goddamn it," Fin whispered through his hands. The gravity of pulling two people apart who were supposed to be together, and the supposed to was the cruelest phrase in any language because it acknowledged the design and the failure simultaneously.

River pulled back. Her thumbs traced the lines of Tristan’s jaw, memorizing the architecture, storing it in the place where she kept every precious thing she had ever touched.

"Work on getting better," she said, and the words were an instruction and a prayer and a goodbye wrapped together. "Honor your fated tie. Let the corruption recede. Let the green come back to your eyes. Do it for me if you won’t do it for yourself."

"I will do anything for you. Except this."

"Then do the only thing I’m asking."

The silence stretched between them, long and thin and holding the weight of two people whose love was the reason they were being separated and whose separation was the only medicine the love had left to offer.

Tristan’s jaw trembled. Then his hands flew to his neck.

The seizure detonated through his body without warning.

Dark veins erupted beneath his skin, climbing from his collar to his jaw to his temples in a branching network that moved with the speed and the determination of roots seeking water, except the water was his consciousness and the roots were drinking it dry. His body went rigid. His back arched. His eyes rolled upward and the green vanished completely behind white.

River caught him before his head hit the marble.

Her knees hit the floor and his weight hit her lap and her arms went around his shaking body with the instinct of a woman whose love was larger than her frame and whose frame was going to hold him regardless of the physics.

"HEALER!" she screamed down the corridor, and the scream bounced off every marble surface in the palace and came back to her carrying nothing but its own echo. "I NEED A HEALER, NOW!"

Lucian was already moving. The wolf king’s stride ate the corridor in four steps and he was in the alcove before the scream finished its second bounce, his hands finding Tristan’s convulsing legs, pinning them to the marble so the seizure couldn’t throw his body against the walls.

Their eyes met over Tristan’s shaking body. River’s pink, swimming, terrified. Lucian’s gold, steady, carrying the composure that River needed to borrow and the fear she couldn’t see because he was burying it beneath the composure with a speed that would have impressed a gravedigger.

"He’s going to be fine," Lucian said, and the sentence was a lie and the lie was necessary and the necessity was the only excuse he needed.

Tristan’s body seized for forty-five seconds. Forty-five seconds that lasted approximately three lifetimes. Then the convulsions slowed. Stuttered. Stopped. His body went limp in River’s lap, and his breathing returned, shallow, uneven, carrying the exhausted rhythm of a man whose biology had just staged a coup and lost and was retreating to regroup.