Nearing her ninetieth year, Fearne is still young by fey standards but already a woman grown when they bring the halfling boy to court.
His father bartered for power and favor from the Archfey, made promises of his own flesh and blood in exchange, and he’s come now to pay his debt. It’s a standard arrangement, so routine that Fearne almost doesn’t pay any attention when the elder Tarrintel presents the boy to the courts of the fey. The Queen will decide if she wants the boy or if she will bestow him upon one of her favored houses.
“He’s Ashari,” the boy’s father says, as though that makes him more valuable. As though it wins him some greater degree of favor to have brought an Ashari child, whatever that might mean. Fearne knows nothing of the world where this boy and the others like him are from. She doesn’t care to know, not when so much of the expansive realm of the fey is still yet unknown to her. Changelings have never been of any particular interest to her.
“Ashari in name only,” laughs the Queen with bells in her voice and malice in her eyes as she stares at him with her knowing, perceptive gaze. “The Tarrintel boy has no magic to speak of.”
“Not Tarrintel,” the boy interrupts her. “My name is Orym of the Air Ashari.”
The words ring out like a warrior beating a sword against their shield, a bright and sharp challenge. A line in the dirt and he daring them to cross it. The boy’s father grabs his shoulder tightly and whispers reproach into his ear, but the boy only stares back at the Queen with brown eyes burning, apparently unafraid and uncowed.
Fearne feels her grandmother shift beside her and realizes that she’s broken protocol to stare openly at the boy, this Orym of the Air Ashari, leaning forward off their bench. She knows the smell of fate when it unfurls on the wind, how it tugs imperceptibly at her the same way that Fearne draws on ambient magic and turns it to her own purposes. And here she smells it again, wrapped around this brave little halfling when he speaks.
Looking down at her with her clear-eyed stare, Morri asks, “You like him?”
She considers a moment before nodding decisively. “I do. May I have him?”
“So it shall be,” her grandmother promises, pushing Fearne back into her place on the bench.
🍃
It’s strange to have responsibility for another person, as opposed to Peepers and Bumpers and Dr. Nesbitt, all of whom react to the new arrival with varying levels of interest. Orym stares at each of them with his back straight, regarding all of them with the same unbending intensity as he had regarded their queen.
But the changeling is her responsibility now that she's claimed him as hers, and so Fearne sets out a feast for him to choose his favorite foods from, deciding that she’ll find out what it is this boy likes and spoil him with them. Dr. Nesbitt was just as mistrustful as he when he first came to Fearne, and a bird can hardly be much different than a halfling.
Orym eats none of it.
She crouches beside him and reaches to graze her fingertips over his hair, blinking with surprise when he turns his face away and swallows. He smells of vetiver and rosemary and herbs of a land she's never seen.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
He hesitates, as though he doesn’t want to tell her the truth. Then, as if unable to help it, he says, “If I eat food from the fey realm, then I won’t be able to go home.”
“Oh,” says Fearne thoughtfully, falling back onto her heels. “I suppose that’s true, but you’re already bound to the realm now. Fey-touched, they’ll call you.”
“Then I’ll never go home.” Orym doesn’t say it as a question at all. He isn't asking. He's only just realizing it and is making himself accept it as truth, even as he looks quietly devastated. “My mother–”
“Didn’t she send you here?” Her head ticks to the side, but something about his expression when he speaks of his mother tugs in her chest. Something she hastens to cover, so as not to think of mothers lost.
Orym doesn’t answer her and he doesn’t eat.
Fearne isn’t sure how long it is after that she asks him, “How old are you, Orym of the Air Ashari?”
His stare is less reproachful and more curious when he says, “Sixteen.”
“Oh,” Fearne breathes. “You’re so young.”
“I’m nearly grown for my people.”
Fearne takes in his simple, well-made clothing and severe haircut. “Ashari?”
The word tastes strange on her tongue, but it has power and meaning to him. Orym sits a little straighter, his mouth twisting into a frown when she says it, as though he dislikes the way it sounds from her tongue.
“Yes. From Zephrah.”
“I don’t know that place. I don’t know any place where you’re from.”
Fearne wants to ask him about Zephrah, about what it means that he’s an Ashari without magic, if it’s a little like being a Calloway without parents. The question diffuses through the air around them like the perfume of the flowers Fearne grows here. Instead, she takes a sharp knife from the table and slices open a fig, offering half to Orym, even though it’s as big as his hand when he takes it.
After staring at her with the fig resting in his palm for a very long time, he finally asks, “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t think I know just yet,” Fearne answers honestly, smiling serenely at him. “Perhaps I’m still too young to know, too. Until then, I’d like to be your friend.”
Orym takes a bite of the fig, but he never tells her about Zephrah or his mother.
🍃
Orym outgrows his Exandrian clothing within a year as he goes from gangly youth to man. Fearne offers him clothes befitting a Calloway, the sort of adornments that mark him as one of their family, but as in all things, Orym hesitates to take them.
Instead, he spends hours tailoring his old clothes, letting out seams and swearing quietly under his breath when there’s no longer any extra fabric to cover the way his chest has broadened. Fearne brings him brocades in gold and green and quietly helps him sew a new wardrobe that fits him the way he likes, although the style doesn’t resemble any of the fashions at court.
Orym is like that, clinging to things from the life he had before. He insists on using his old name, practicing swordplay that is as fascinating to Fearne as it is mysterious. Even the magic he can draw on to light fires or grow flowers tastes different than anything in the fey realm.
“You’re a Calloway now,” Fearne tells him one evening while he quietly braids her hair, weaving in the flowers she grows out of her palms and passes to him. “No one would think twice if you claimed that right.”
“You mean that I’m a ward of the Calloways,” Orym corrects her in his steady, unbending voice, and Fearne tastes his small magic as he grows some flower of his own to add to her braid. “A hostage. A pet.”
She thinks about this, then reaches behind for his hands and draws him around to stand in front of her. The things that tie a family to one another are complicated, sometimes messy, but the difference between all the words Orym is using is very small to Fearne. To Orym, those words must mean something entirely different.
“You are as much a Calloway as I have ever been,” she says, growing soft, pink oleander into a crown that she rests on his hair. “That is how this works. That is the exchange your father made.”
“I wasn’t his to trade,” Orym says with more emotion than Fearne has ever heard from him. “I’m no Tarrintel and I won’t be a Calloway, either.”
The words cut deeper than Fearne expected, even though she already knew how Orym felt, and the flowers in her hand wither. She already knew how difficult he’s found this change, treating his life among the fey as a prison sentence rather than the metamorphosis it is. She wonders if this resistance is common among the changelings, the ones who come from the other planes to become one of the fey, but there hasn’t been one among the Calloways for generations.
Orym reaches for the blackened crown of oleander on his head and looks between it and Fearne’s face with concern. His voice is softer when he says, “I’m Air Ashari. My mother was before me. That won’t ever change.”
It feels cruel to tell him that it already has when he’s looking at her so earnestly, holding on so tightly to what little of himself he could bring with him to the Feywild. Fearne can't bring herself to tell Orym how the light already shifts to form a halo around him, how he now smells to her of sweet mint and primrose.
“Of course,” Fearne lies, growing him a new circlet of clustered, pink cherry blossoms growing in puffs along braided vines. Giving a flower of his own, rather than one of hers, will perhaps soften it.
Orym knows that she’s not being honest, or maybe he’s only tired of resisting, but Fearne thinks there’s something far away and longing in his eyes when he takes the new crown from her.
🍃
Time passes differently for Orym than it does for Fearne, tethered as he is to how his life might have been. He’s twenty-five before Fearne reaches ninety. Though Fearne hasn’t ever treated him like a child, no matter how young he was when he came to her, Orym is now a man grown among the fey.
As the matriarch of their family, Morri presents him at court, draped in flowers and silks that declare him a Calloway among the fey. Fearne watches from their bench with an unsettled feeling in her stomach. Dressed like this, Orym doesn’t look like himself, except for those sharp brown eyes that never move from the Queen’s face as Morri declares him one of theirs.
Fearne thinks of his bold, youthful certainty: I’m Air Ashari. That won’t ever change. How very much she’d like for him to always be that brave young man, no matter what else he might become.
It’s traditional to mark the end of his youth with gifts, and so Fearne chooses for him a sword with vines and blossoms etched into the hilt, a shield to match. For years, Orym has lovingly cared for a battered shortsword he found in the Calloway armory, but Fearne never thought it suited him. There’s an elf changeling from a place called Mirescar who knew the word Ashari. They provided the design to Morri’s favorite bladesmith and she was the one who adjusted it to suit a halfling.
It’s barely fey, as close to something from home that Fearne can offer him.
She waits to present them to him until they return home from court. Waits for Orym to wear his own clothes again, standing in the center of their house. There’s sunlight poking through the canopy of trees overhead, casting gleaming patterns on the embroidered hem of his tunic: cherry and oleander twined together.
Orym is so often quiet that Fearne has come to learn all things his silence can mean. His ears are pink with joy at her gifts, his brown eyes wide and shining as he tests the weight of the new sword in his hand.
Finally confident that this is her Orym, just himself and nothing else, Fearne turns over the shield in his hands so he can read the words she burned on the inside of the grip.
Orym of the Air Ashari, so that Orym might remember who he is when no one else does.
🍃
Their lives have a comfortable rhythm together: rising together and Orym following after Fearne, listening to her stories and telling her haltingly of the world he'd never had a chance to see before his father's bargain brought him here. A companion is rather close to what she’d hoped for when she asked her grandmother for the brave little halfling that didn’t know to be afraid of the Queen.
Orym is a companion to her and more besides, rising with her in the morning and following her into sleep in the evening. A friend in truth and not only name.
He never seems to let go the way the other changelings do, willful and determined to hang onto himself, and it's made him strange even among a land of strange things. But then, Fearne too is an oddity among the fey.
A Calloway with parents in exile and a changeling who won't complete his change, but they have one another.
🍃
There is very little in the Feywild that would dare outright harm a Calloway, but Fearne is nevertheless glad to have Orym beside her when she goes exploring the realm, as she so often does. Fearne has so much to see and Orym has seen none of the lands of the fey, it seems only natural that he would accompany her.
They’re only going to explore an enchanted glade for the day, collecting mushrooms and perhaps visiting the dryad guardian to hear their stories. It's too far to simply walk, and so Fearne carries Orym on her back when they travel through the mists to the edge of the wood. It’s darker than she expected for midday, moss draped over the scraggly trees like torn sheets, but Fearne pays it no mind.
On the other hand, Orym hesitates at the edge of the tree line, staring into the gloom with an overly-cautious expression that makes Fearne laugh brightly.
"There's something off about it," Orym tells her without looking away from the fog-obscured trees.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” she assures him, brushing past with a teasing hand on the top of his head, leaving a trail of sweet-smelling pollen after.
“Fine,” Orym says, drawing his sword from his back and tightening the grip of his shield over his hand before following after her. “I’ll worry enough for both of us.”
There’s no reason to worry, Fearne assures him again when they’re picking their way through the gnarled roots of a tree that stretches so far into the sky that Fearne thinks they could climb it to another plane. Orym is slower than she is on account of his size, but also he's kept his sword out even after returning his shield to his back.
It’s only because he’s some thirty feet behind her, pulling himself over a root with one arm, that Orym gets out his warning cry in time for Fearne to look up.
The tree above them is tangled with giant spiderwebs, which wouldn’t be such a problem if Fearne couldn’t see the web-wrapped form of the glade’s dryad guardian suspended in the center. A rattling noise echoes through the cold air and Fearne finally senses the deep rot in the magic here, the thing that Orym must have known well before they even made it this far.
The rattle of death grows nearer as the spider skitters toward her around the trunk of the great tree, the hollowed-out heart of this forest. The magic here is too thin, too corrupted for Fearne to form a spell with any haste, and she knows that whatever will happen next will hurt terribly.
The air beside her shifts and Orym steps through a cloud of mist that smells of vetiver and sweet fennel, his eyes fixed on the spider above them when he pushes Fearne back between the roots. The last thing Fearne sees is her brave little halfling with his sword raised, bold and unafraid, before she falls through the roots to the musty layer of dead leaves.
There’s a shriek from above, the scuffling sounds of battle, and a soft grunt of pain before the thud of a body much larger and heavier than Orym’s. By the time Fearne comes to her senses and climbs back through, Orym is breathing hard and holding one hand against the long gash across his stomach.
“Fearnie,” he sighs, slumping back against the tree with a battle-drunk smile of relief. “Could we go home now?”
Orym has never called their house home before, Fearne thinks as she lifts him up into her arms and carries him back through the mist. He’s never looked more like himself than he does now, either: neither fey nor whatever he was when he came to the Feywild.
Fearne is still thinking of that hours later, perched in a chair by the fire and watching Orym sleep in a nest of feather beds she built to feel useful while Morri purged the poison from his wounds. Her grandmother sits opposite her, watching the rise and fall of Orym’s chest as though some great mystery is stored there.
“He might have died,” Morri says thoughtfully, swirling blood red wine in the bottom of a blown-glass globe. “For you, Fearne.”
Guilt isn’t an emotion Fearne is familiar with, but the shame of it, of ignoring Orym’s warnings, burns in her gut. “You’re right. He’s mine. I should have been more careful with him.”
“It should have never happened to two Calloways at all.” Morri stands from her chair and abandons her wine on the table beside it.
“He isn’t a Calloway,” Fearne protests, just quietly enough that Morri might ignore her defiance. “I’ve never known anyone like him.”
“I am afraid of what is coming for us. For you.” Her eyes fall on Orym’s sleeping form and Fearne can’t read her grandmother’s expression at all for a moment, even when she bends and kisses Fearne on the top of her head. “I tasted fate in the air that day, too, but I don’t think I understood what it meant until today.”
Glad as she has always been to have Orym with her, Fearne has wondered the same for all these years. She still isn’t sure she knows. “What does it mean?”
“It means that I’m very glad that you’ll have that little Ashari halfling with you when this storm finally breaks over us.”
🍃
Things have changed.
In the fey realm, small changes might reflect enormously in the landscape, entire mountains bursting through the earth over petty squabbles and seasons changing based on the capricious moods of the greater fey. It’s the greater changes, the things that alter the fabric of the universe itself, that are more difficult to perceive unless someone is looking for them. A new river rapid might form where there was once still water, or the air around a small, brave halfling might begin to taste of two places at once.
The next time she visits, Morri brings a new staff for Fearne, with twin snakes coiled around a lantern. Fearne thinks it’s as close to an explicit warning as the Calloway matriarch will issue, but then she gifts Orym with armor of his own.
It’s beautiful. Carved, green leather leaves overlapping like scale down both arms, a pauldron like a flower in bloom on the left side. The chestplate has vines and flowers etched into the leather, and Fearne notices instantly that it extends far enough to cover the new scar across Orym’s stomach.
“You both may as well become comfortable with these now,” Morri tells them in a voice that portends something still too far away for either of them to see.
🍃
Fearne has never directly asked Orym about his life before he came to the Court. It hadn’t seemed important before, except that it matters to Orym that he was somebody else before he was a changeling. She’s curious about the world he comes from, of course, but not so much that she would ask for any of his memories from him. They’re too precious to him and Fearne is beginning to think that for all Orym has brought to her life, she has already taken too much from him.
It’s only because he mentions Ivar more than once on the same night that Fearne finally tells him, “You could ask Ivar to your bed, if you like.”
The hand holding his whittling knife jerks and the blade slips on the wood as Orym looks up with guilt and embarrassment playing over his face. “Fearne, what–”
“Oh,” Fearne looks him over, hardly able to believe she’s only noticing now. “I think I misunderstood.”
Staring up at her with the half-carved wood in his hand, Orym looks like a budded flower waiting to bloom, with his freckles standing out brightly on his blush-stained skin. Privately, she thinks Ivar is a fool, but she can hardly fault Orym if he admires his long fingers when he plays his lyre. She thought he wanted to make a lover of Ivar, but perhaps that’s only what Fearne would do in his position. Orym is gentle and thoughtful and undeniably romantic, and he is very pretty in love.
“Is this the first time that you’ve been in love?”
Orym stares at her with his mouth open, but though Fearne is sorry for embarrassing him, she knows he won’t lie to her. So, she watches as he puts down his knife and rests his burning face in his hands long before he finally answers, “No.”
Fearne slides down to sit on the floor next to him and rubs one hand over his back. “Ivar will never know how lucky he is to have earned your love.”
“I didn’t say I–” Orym peels his hands from his face, somewhere between agony and exasperation. “I don’t want to ask Ivar to my bed.”
In that case, Fearne isn’t entirely sure what it is that’s flustered Orym so much. A lover would do him some good, whether it’s Ivar the fool or someone else. Fearne considers the other changelings she knows. Perhaps Orym would like someone whose notions of romance are closer to his own.
“I see.” Fearne rests her cheek on the top of his head and sighs. “I can hardly help you find what it is you want if you don’t tell me when you want something.”
“Well, I don’t want you to find me a lover.”
“And you aren’t in love with Ivar?”
Orym is staring at her now with a deep crease in the center of his forehead. “No.”
She still thinks he looks like he’s in love, so much that it bends the magic around him, settling onto his skin like the glow of the last hour of sunlight. Fearne doesn’t press him, though, and Orym allows her to hold him against her chest for a long time. His muscles feel tense under her hands though, coiled up with something he hasn’t yet found the nerve to say.
“I would be married by now,” he finally says, rubbing the thumb on his left hand against the fourth finger, as though he’s touching something that isn’t there. “Back home in Zephrah.”
“With the person you loved?”
“We wouldn’t have called it that then. He was my best friend. We were–” Orym stares off into the fire. “Well, I was very young then.”
He was. It makes Fearne’s heart twist that Orym is finally old enough to know how very young he was when they first met.
“But you would have married him?”
Orym looks up at her with an expression she hasn’t seen him wear since the day he last mentioned his mother. “Yes,” is all he answers, with all the steadiness of regret.
For the first time since he came here, Orym doesn’t climb up into his hammock of vines when they retire to sleep. He stands in the center of the room for a few seconds longer than usual and then decisively climbs up into Fearne’s bed and waits for her to pull him against her chest. He tastes of fresh dew on newly-bloomed flowers in spring and feels like the winds of fate curling around the both of them.
And later still, when Orym sleeps heavily on the pillow next to her, Fearne looks up at the stars overhead and wonders why it feels like the familiar sort of thing they’ve done for years.
🍃
Their lives go on as before. Fearne reaches a hundred and eleven years, a magical age rendering her eligible to sit at court without her grandmother’s chaperone. Orym must be somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, but Fearne doesn’t really know anymore and she’s afraid that he doesn’t, either. Asking him how old he is now seems like it will only cause him unnecessary pain when he remembers that he’s been a changeling far longer than he ever was Ashari.
“I know it isn’t as interesting as adventuring,” Fearne tells Orym apologetically one morning, kneeling beside him to help with the buckles of his armor. “But I think that there’s something we could learn by being there.”
“About your parents?” Orym has never learned not to be so direct about the things meant to stay unspoken, but he doesn’t say anything more about them when Fearne holds her finger up to her lips. Instead he grows a vine around his shield arm to signify peace and looks thoughtfully up at the ceiling while Fearne finishes buckling the straps at his back.
Her brave little warrior is always thinking about the threats that might come to her, something that Fearne appreciates, even if it might not be entirely necessary. It’s been years since the spiders attacked in the glade, but Fearne knows that he’s still thinking about what it means. Though Orym still doesn’t understand the flows and norms of the fey, he knows enough to recognize that something has gone very wrong and it troubles him.
It troubles Morri, too. Fearne trusts the two of them more than anyone else, and if they think there is trouble, then Fearne will be ready for it, too.
Fearne bends to kiss his hair before rising to her feet. “About all the things that keep you awake and fidgeting at night.”
“I’ll work on thinking less loudly,” Orym says dryly, fastening the straps that hold his sword to his body. Fearne belatedly realizes that the joke is that Orym does nothing loudly and laughs the entire way to court.
She sits alone on the bench for the Calloways, watching the flow of the court around her. Orym stands beside her with his arms crossed and watches for danger, but not so single-mindedly that he doesn’t visibly flinch when a changeling girl is presented to the Queen. Fearne is focused on Orym, about to reach out to touch his shoulder, and she entirely misses the figure approaching them until she sees his shoulders tense and his chin lift defiantly.
“Calloway. It’s a surprise to see you show your face.”
Fearne doesn’t know the name of the elegant woman standing over her. She’s chosen an elfin form, tall and terribly beautiful with hair like a moonbow through a frothing waterfall down her back. That she is unknown but carries such disdain for Fearne’s family is troubling in itself: a century before, nobody would dare approach a Calloway in court with anything but the respect their family is due.
Now however, with the troubles upon them and Fearne’s parents in exile, it seems that their position has changed.
The simplest response is to meet this woman’s eyes and turn her head away, a slow and deliberate dismissal that suits the Calloway name. But then Orym steps between Fearne and the unknown woman and stares a challenge back at her with those burning, hazel eyes of his. The light shifts around them, bending to his will so that this woman can’t ignore him, and the stranger looks appropriately offended.
“I see you’ve made a fine champion out of your changeling,” the woman finally says, but she’s stepped back in retreat. “And not a moment too soon. The reign of the Queen of Peace is waning.”
Orym is still shaking with fury when Fearne ushers him out of the court chambers later and she knows it’s all too much for him. The changeling girl, the dire warning, the trembling electricity of danger that Fearne can taste like ozone in the air.
At the fire that night, Orym leans back against her chest and asks, “What did she mean: the Queen of Peace is waning?”
“I don’t know,” Fearne answers carefully, although it won’t comfort him. She has learned to only tell Orym exact truths, difficult as they may be for her to say or for him to hear.
Fearne knows too little to recognize this danger for what it is, even less to prepare either of them for it, but even she can taste the storm that’s already upon them.
🍃
Sometimes a storm comes on slowly, rumbling distant warnings long before the skies darken and the rain begins. There’s time to prepare for them, closing windows and settling in until it passes.
This storm breaks suddenly, violently; like a bolt of lightning out of a blue sky.
There’s no time to prepare, no time for shelter, no time to do anything but run.
🍃
One of the Archfey must be in high dudgeon, furious over something or another. Orym’s idea to go to the water gardens to escape the oppressive heat is an inspired one, even if he only sits at the side of the pool with his sword over his knees and watches Fearne as she floats face up with unguarded fondness.
Fearne dips beneath the surface with a kick and emerges at the edge to flick water at him. “It’s hot,” she says, resting her chin on her hands and smiling beatifically up at him. “Come swim with me.”
“Then who will watch for trouble?” Orym asks, looking up at her from beneath his long lashes. He thinks it hides his shy smile, but Fearne knows him too well. She doesn’t need to see all of his face to imagine the expression on it.
“I’d rather swim with you,” she sighs, rolling over so her face is tilted up toward the sky, her torso resting on the side of the pool and her breasts floating on the surface of the water. “But if you want to take a turn, I’ll watch.”
“I don’t mind.” Orym nudges his foot against her shoulder. “Go swim, or I won’t be watching the right things.”
Fearne is still trilling with laughter, licking the sunshine from his mouth when she feels the dissonant bloom of pain in her right shoulder.
As always, Orym is on his feet before Fearne fully realizes what’s happening. Time is slow and heavy and the air is hot and oppressive around them. Orym’s arm is braced on her shoulder with his shield lifted and Fearne is bleeding. It all comes together at once like the delayed crack of thunder.
This is it, the storm that’s been building for years.
The second volley comes down over their heads, smashing against Orym’s shield with such force that Fearne feels it vibrate through his smaller body into her spine. He flings himself back from her to grab his sword, and Fearne draws herself to her full height, soaking wet and dripping with flame.
Their enemies are strange. Dark and fluid, their blows are shattering, but they melt away into pools of black nothing with even the slightest damage. She catches one in her fiery grasp before it comes down on Orym’s back and flings it away.
Fearne doesn’t see the largest of them when it rises up from the ground, but she does see the moment Orym disappears into the mist and reappears in front of her. The blow meant to fell her crashes down on him and his shield cracks down the middle, straight through the place where Fearne wrote his name.
Rage is an unfamiliar emotion to Fearne, but she feels it race through her blood when Orym falls gracelessly in a heap. When he doesn’t get up again, Fearne gives herself over entirely to fire and fury.
There is no trace of the shadow attackers when Fearne comes back to herself, holding Orym’s still form against her chest.
“Orym,” she says, her throat aching from the acrid burn of her own magic. Fearne pulls on the magic in the air around them, that twisted-up thread of fate that’s bound them together all this time, but the flames of her healing spells dance lifelessly over his skin. Her cheeks feel wet, but it isn’t until the first of her tears splash on his still face that Fearne realizes she’s crying.
It isn’t even a surprise to smell belladonna on the oppressively hot air before Morri crouches down beside Fearne and caresses her hair. “Come, child.”
“Not without him.” Fearne looks up at her grandmother in defiance and finds that she’s holding a single, perfect diamond between her fingers.
“No,” Morri agrees and holds out one arm, the spell already half-cast by the time Fearne finally relinquishes Orym to her. “Not without him.”
His eyes blink open, bright and green as grass, and Fearne sits back in shock. After all this time, after everything he’s endured, it feels like an incomprehensible betrayal of his trust in her that he would be changed now.
Morri helps them both to their feet and opens the path through the mist. “It’s time to go, children.”
🍃
The three of them travel through endless night and mist. The journey is long and short, spanning days and years at once, although Orym later tells Fearne that it’s only a few weeks by his reckoning. But then, his tethers to time have always been more concrete than Fearne’s.
Fearne isn’t sure where they’re going, where in the Feywild might be safe for them if the danger is so absolute. It’s only when they’re standing in front of a stone arch and she sees fear and hope on Orym’s blanched face that Fearne realizes what Orym must have known from the outset of the journey.
“Orym of the Air Ashari.”
Even with the shield broken and left behind, the words still carry power enough to make Orym’s shoulders straighten with pride. Perhaps there was never any reason to fear that Orym would forget who he is at all. Perhaps it was only Fearne who needed to be reminded.
“You may no longer recognize the world you come from,” Morri warns. “And you may not recognize yourself in it. I ask this of you, but it is your choice to make.”
Orym hesitates, but then he steps in front of Morri and drops to one knee and Fearne’s heart stops.
“I won’t ask for more than I’ve taken from you,” Fearne says fiercely, reaching out to pull him back to his feet.
“The choice is his.” Morri catches Fearne in the chest with one hand, staring down at Orym with a curious expression. “What do you say?”
His green eyes are fixed on Fearne when he reaches out to grasp that thread of fate and weave it into an oath of power. Choosing for himself. Choosing Fearne.
“I’ll protect her.”