Chapter 719: The Fae King’s Greatest Accomplishment

Atlas held his daughter. His arms were steady. His jaw was steady. His eyes, which were aimed at the sky above her head because aiming them at her face would have cost him the composure he was spending on holding her, were bright in a way that Fae eyes got bright when the emotion behind them was too large for the architecture of a king’s face.

"He’ll understand." Atlas’s voice was low, warm, aimed at the top of her head. "He loves you. He will hate this. He will rage about it and blame everyone. But he will understand that you left because you loved him too much to stay."

River’s shoulders shook. The shaking was silent because River’s shaking was always silent, and the silence was a habit installed by a world that had punished her for being loud, and the habit was the cruelest inheritance she carried.

Atlas held her until the shaking stopped. Then he pulled back, took her face in both hands, and pressed his lips against her forehead with the deliberate, permanent pressure of a king sealing a decree. The decree was I love you and the seal was his mouth against her skin and the decree was irrevocable and the seal was warm and the combination was the last official act of a father whose daughter was about to walk through a gate and into a life where his jurisdiction ended.

"You are my greatest accomplishment," Atlas said, and the sentence had zero diplomatic polish and zero royal ceremony and the rawness of it was the point because the point was a father talking to his daughter and the father had decided that the daughter deserved the man instead of the crown. "Every crown I’ve worn, every treaty I’ve signed, every war I’ve won. You. You are the thing I am proudest of, and the thing I will miss the most, and the thing that this palace is going to feel the absence of in every room you’ve ever been in."

Fin’s composure, which had been holding by a thin margin, broke.

"Fuck," he muttered to himself.

Atlas Aelindor’s goodbye dismantled every defense he had left.

River stepped back. Wiped her face. Assembled what was left of her composure the way a soldier assembles a weapon in the dark, by touch, by memory, by the muscle memory of a woman who had been putting herself back together since she was six.

Atlas turned to Lucian.

The king’s hand landed on the wolf king’s shoulder, and the landing was heavy, intentional, carrying the trust of a king transferring a treasure and the authority of a father whose blessing was the only one that mattered in any conversation that would ever happen in this corridor or any corridor anywhere.

"Take care of her."

Lucian held Atlas’s eyes. The gold met the green, and the meeting was a contract, and the contract was heavier than the crown and written in a language that fathers and sons spoke without training.

"I will with everything I have and everything I am, Father."

Atlas’s hand tightened on his shoulder. Once. The squeeze was brief. The squeeze contained a library’s worth of things that kings didn’t say in courtyards and fathers didn’t say in front of armies, and the library was compressed into the pressure of five fingers on a wolf king’s shoulder and the wolf king received every volume.

???

THE ROAD SOUTH

They walked through the eastern gate, and the walking was the heaviest walking either of them had ever done, because every step was a step away from the palace and the palace contained everything River had ever loved and the everything was shrinking behind her with each footfall.

An army waited beyond the gate. Two hundred strong, arranged in formation along the marble road that descended from Aelindris towards the coastal plains.

River walked beside Lucian in silence. Through the matebond, Lucian felt every shade of her grief. But she had chosen this. The choosing was buried under sadness so deep it was going to take months to excavate, but the choosing was there, and the choosing was his, and the his was a word that Lucian Moon hadn’t been able to say until this moment.

He reached for her hand, his fingers finding hers. The contact sent the electricity through him again.

She didn’t pull away.

The absence of pulling was a sentence in a language Lucian spoke fluently. It said I am here and the here includes your hand and the hand is welcome and the welcome is all I can offer right now and the offering is enough if you’re willing to carry it.

He was willing.

He brought her hand to his mouth. Pressed his lips against her knuckles with a tenderness so careful it bordered on worship.

Her pink eyes lifted to his face. The eyes were ruined by grief and beautiful despite the ruin, and the combination of those two things, the ruin and the beauty, was the combination that had been destroying Lucian Moon since he was ten years old.

"My men are going to shift so we can run this stretch in wolf form. How do you feel about riding on me?" he asked.

River blinked in pure surprise.

Lucian grinned.

The grin was involuntary, enormous, and carrying the full wattage of a man who had just made a woman blink in surprise instead of crying, and the making was a victory he intended to build on and the building was going to be the project of his goddamn life.

The grin broke through her grief the way a stone breaks through ice, sudden, irreversible, producing a fracture that let light through. Her mouth curved. The curve was small, fragile, carrying the cautious architecture of a smile that had been through hell and was testing whether the ground on the other side could hold its weight.

"Will it hurt you, though?" she asked.

Fin laughed out loud from wherever his ghost was standing, because OF COURSE she asked that. Of course the woman leaving a palace and a marriage, the woman whose grief was so heavy it had its own gravitational field, her first question about riding a wolf the size of a warhorse was whether the wolf would be in pain.

Lucian laughed.

The laugh was brief, bright, escaping his chest before his composure could catch it, and the escaping was the best sound Fin had heard in this entire vision because it was the sound of a man who had been holding everything being given something that made his chest do the opposite of holding.

Without another word, he shifted into a massive black wolf.

River hesitated, her hand hovering above his fur. "Okay, but tell me if it hurts you."

The wolf huffed.

The huff was a full-body exhalation of indignance that moved his fur. The huff was ridiculous, and the ridiculous was the medicine that produced a giggle from River.

The giggle was small. Broken at the edges. Emerging from a throat that had been producing nothing except sobs and whispers for an entire day.

She climbed onto his back.

Her legs settled against his sides. Her hands found the thick fur at the base of his neck and gripped, and the gripping was cautious, and the caution was unnecessary because the wolf beneath her was never going to let her fall in any direction for any reason under any circumstance in any life.