Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The others can call Kit stupid and girly and smitten at their peril, but whatever, she knows there’s few things she likes better than walking hand in hand with Jade. Her hand fits there better than it fits anywhere else in the world, totally perfect. Jade’s longer fingers wrap around the back of her palm, press her own fingers open, a constant reminder that they’re together. It's not like they're walking holding hands all the time, but there's always a stretch of the journey, every day, when one hand silently finds the other. When Kit thinks selfishly that maybe they don't need to rush too much to get home.

They’re even getting the knack of running together, now; there’s a certain way to swing their arms to give themselves a little more speed, and as the desert at the edge of the Immemorial City gives way to another stretch of Shattered Sea which, oddly soon, becomes rolling sandhills and tussocks, Kit’s discovering how much fun it is to race down those sandhills hand in hand. (To pull Jade off balance, throw her down, roll their bodies together on the sand, see who ends up on top–)

They haven’t tried running while holding hands with enemies after them – Jade doesn’t think it will work – but it’s a moot point because no one has attacked them since Elora absolutely junked the Crone. Whatever, Kit’s certain with her hand in Jade’s they can do pretty much anything.

Kit likes it so much. And she’s so, so ready to trip Airk up and sit on him if he ever starts making fun of the goofy expression that keeps creeping onto her face. She’s so ready for him to start paying her back for all the times she’s bullied him (lovingly!) in the past.

Airk hasn’t made a single comment, and Kit watches him impatiently as the landscape turns from sandhills to twisted and wind-stripped trees, searching for some reaction that he notices this new thing about her. This most incredible thing that’s happened between her and Jade.

His teasing would be a sign that Airk is getting back to normal after she’d saved him, and Kit, though she’s trying to distract herself with thoughts of Jade’s hands and all, would really like a sign like that.

Patience doesn’t come naturally to Kit, but neither does openly voicing things that are bothering her. When she thinks about talking to Jade or Elora about the mood hanging over Airk her tongue gets all heavy, her shoulders curl in, figuring they’re just going to point out how moody and miserable and shaken and weak (and every other word Kit has for herself that she only lets herself voice in imaginary conversations like these) she was after what happened when they were escaping the mines of Skellin.

So instead of saying a single thing, Kit keeps reminding herself that like, she nearly drowned in goo, sure, but he nearly drowned in a disintegrating woman’s mouth, that’s gotta be way worse.

Kit still gags, thinking about it. The only good thing about this is that when Jade notices, Kit gets to say things like “remember when Airk made out with the Crone and she crumbled in his mouth” and watch Jade try not to be sick. Pulling Jade into the horrors with her always lessens their power. And she’s cute when she’s green.

She’s cute when she’s laughing, too. Gorgeous, actually. And when she’s sprawled on their bedroll at the end of the day groaning as Kit helps unlace her boots, when did that become sexy? Kit loves her so much she doesn't know how it all fits inside her. Loves watching the firelight on her face at night. Jade's maybe the most adorable when she’s poking the fire. She's got a real thing about it; since they made it back into a terrain covered in damp-but-burnable things, Jade crouches down beside their evening fire with a stick, readjusting the logs, stirring at embers, ‘fixing’ it. Willow tells her it isn’t necessary and Kit bristles when he does, because Jade listens to him and then she stops, and it’s just… it’s just really adorable, the look of relaxed concentration she has on her face when she’s watching the bark peel off her stick in the searing heat. Jade should be allowed to do whatever she wants, that’s Kit’s professional royal opinion.

Although it’s also Kit’s professional royal opinion that it's even better when Jade's sitting between her legs and leaning back into her, the two of them watching the smoke curl up into the night, watching sparks like shooting stars and shooting stars like sparks. More than once, round the fire, Jade has fallen asleep in Kit’s arms and Kit feels so important when this happens. She's Elora's shield and Jade's bedding and both things stir up a sacred sort of pride in her chest. Kit doesn't know what she did to deserve the honour of Jade drooling on her but it is the highest honour and Kit will fight anyone who steps on a stick too loudly and risks waking Jade up. She will snap Boorman’s cleaver over her knee, smother Elora in her flappy trousers. She will defend her girl and her girl’s right to rest to the bitter end.

Kit does not like the way the weather has changed since they got back to dry land. It’s cold. End of winter cold. The landscape becomes one of skeleton trees and black muck that holds a distant memory of being autumn leaves, long ago.

The first settlement they came across – a tiny village built to support a salt farm on the edge of the Shattered Sea – had traded them food and heavier clothes and thicker blankets and unwelcome information like the date. Every single one of them had been unsettlingly quiet when they hit the road again. There’d been an inn, and Kit and Jade had exchanged a look at the thought of putting some walls between them and the others, putting a proper bed at their backs but… there’d also been several hours left of daylight and everyone was itching not to waste any more time.

Since then, the road has been pretty empty, and as the immediate thrill of their victory over the Crone fades, Willow slips deeper into his worst worries. Of all of them he’s the most intense about getting home – back to Mims. Kit keeps her share of sentry duties and she knows how often he spends lying awake with his own dread and how often he's still disturbed by his nightmares.

Elora’s got them, too. There are times she and Willow both wake, simultaneously horrified, and even on nights she sleeps through, anyone with eyes can see the weight she’s carrying. The reason Kit’s feet and back have been aching for the better part of the week is because she refuses to let Elora carry her own pack. Semprum sorceress she might be, that’s no match for the chivalric streak Kit’s really enjoying cultivating.

This morning Elora has slept well enough that she protests, but Kit wins the battle because she’s too stubborn to lose. “If you’re so desperate to carry it,” she calls over her shoulder, already legging it (not very chivalrously) away from Elora. “Then move your flat butt and come catch me, then!”

Glaring at Kit’s back, Elora accepts Jade’s help as she struggles to her own tender feet, though her eyes remain on Kit. “My butt is not flat.”

“It’s not,” Jade says, feeling a little surreal that it falls to her to reassure the divine empress about the shape of her butt, and together they carry on.

They only stop walking to eat, and once when Airk falls so badly he tips sideways into a thornbush, the long wintery thorns tearing open the skin at the base of his thumb, another two long red welts across the back of his arm. He doesn’t make a sound, just stays there on his hands and knees with his bloody palm pressed against the earth, more blood trailing down his arm. “Trip much?” Kit asks, and tries not to outwardly wince when Airk raises his head to look at her without any of his old humour.

Jade patches him up, Boorman hauls him to his feet, and they keep on, leaving the stain of his drying blood marking the cold earth behind them.

Evening falls like an axe in the foothills of Wherever The Hell They Are. It’s chilly, the sky is grey, the trees are going black quickly in the dying light, and their campfire’s burning smokily from all the wet wood.

Even though Elora’s trying to be quiet, Kit can hear her crying softly and knows she's thinking about Graydon. They're alone, keeping the fire alive while the others scout ahead to find a route for the morning (Boorman’s taken Airk to try and jostle some cheer into him by teaching him something useful, Jade's with Willow, and Kit is pretending not to be grumpily offended at her princessy lack of navigation skills while being grateful to be off her feet.)

Cautiously (she’s never been very good at comfort, but she knows she can bully Elora into slightly better spirits if she needs to) Kit shifts closer to the crying muffin sorceress and gives her an awkward pat on the knee. In quick succession, Elora snaps viciously that she’s fine, cries harder, then turns to bury her head in Kit’s neck and begins to sob herself out, cycling through several different flavours of anger before she sinks down into a deep, scary sadness. By the time the others return, Elora has pulled Kit down onto her bedroll and fallen into miserable half-sleep, curled against her.

It hurts, to bear witness to this, hurts Kit in a way she can’t quite understand, but the moment feels too important to let anyone cheapen, so when the others come back, Kit’s eyes are armed. She shoots Boorman a very sharp look warning him not to say anything, and he tosses her a perfectly innocent look back then falls into a discussion with Willow about the coming morning. Jade crouches down to tuck Elora's blanket properly over Kit, giving Kit a soft and tired smile as she runs her hand through Kit’s hair. Kit wants a kiss, but she settles for Jade shuffling their own bedroll closer, so that Jade can sleep at Kit’s back, and Kit has to admit she doesn't mind the warmth of sleeping between them.

Elora passes another whole night without nightmares, though her sleeping face in the firelight isn’t at all relaxed.

It's not that Kit isn't grieving Graydon too, it's just, Elora’s feelings seem to know how to turn into tears while Kit’s remain a confused and painful ball deep in her gut. Kit’s grief makes her snappish, makes her burrow her head under Jade’s chin in (embarrassingly) the same way Elora burrowed under hers, but when Kit does it to Jade, it’s to press her ear against Jade’s consistent heartbeat. It’s to remind herself that though Graydon is dead, Jade isn’t, and Kit isn’t, and Jade’s heartbeat soothes Kit to a better sleep (she thinks, refusing to voice this romantic notion) than clean soft sheets and cozy blankets and a palace mattress ever could.

The next night is clearer than most, the largest moon is almost full, and huge swathes of starry sky are visible between the clouds. There’s a ring around that moon, though. Kit caught Willow wrinkling his nose up at it earlier but didn’t want to ask what that was all about. If she has to listen to another lecture about paying attention to the ‘signs of nature’ to ‘read the weather’ then she’s gonna fall dead asleep from boredom and she can’t sleep because tonight she and Jade have first watch.

They’re settled at a vantage point a little above the others on a slope and a blanket, and Kit’s in her favourite spot between Jade’s legs with Jade’s arms looped loosely around her. Kit can feel it when Jade’s attention shifts from scanning the quiet, empty dark surrounding their sleeping companions to gazing up at the sky, and though she can’t feel Jade’s heartbeat through all their layers of clothing, she knows Jade’s heart’s beating a little easier as she picks out familiar constellations.

Kit glances out into the darkness sometimes, too, but most of her attention is on the lux arcana, as she turns it over and over in her hands.

Until Sorsha had dropped her ‘Bavmorda’s spirit lives on in you’ bombshell, Kit had been convinced that her mother had cleansed the whole city of magic, including her own bloodline. Sure it sounds like a dumb thing to believe now, but Sorsha's will could be like that. This conviction meant that, growing up, Kit never imagined there was, or could ever be, anything magical about her.

But now she has the lux arcana and it has her, Kit can't quite get enough of how connected she feels to it. It lives on Jade's belt, and true, most of the time that Kit’s eyes stray down Jade's body they aren't interested in the lux, but Kit still checks in on it daily. It's like taking care of her father's sword, and… okay, there's no manual about how to care for an ancient fey stick thing, but Kit gets the feeling it likes being touched.

When it's just in her hands there's a faint, faint, barely visible glow, but Kit nudges Jade to get her to pay attention, and Jade, understanding the nudge, wraps her own fingers over Kit’s. With both their hands touching it, the lux glows beautifully, like it’s aching to reconnect with the cuirass, to become that point of connection between Jade’s hand and Kit’s heart and the ancient shield against darkness. Even on the longest coldest days, making it glow like this gives Kit comfort, and how gooey and sentimental is she for that? Ugh, it's embarrassing, but also it's so, so cool.

It glows under their hands, together, and Kit leans back against Jade. "It’s kinda like, it knows us," she says, weirdly happy despite having the world's worst blister on her heel. She feels like (and she knows this is stupid so she’s never going to say it out loud, even to Jade) it’s been lonely, maybe for a long, long time, but when they’re both touching it, it isn’t anymore. She feels like (and she’s definitely never ever saying this out loud either) she knows how it feels.

“Kinda like it does,” Jade agrees, turning her head to kiss Kit’s temple. She loves this about Kit, Kit’s endless buckets of wonder when it comes to the lux. Mostly, Jade loves that there is something in the world that shows Kit she’s special, something ancient and powerful and as legendary as Jade’s own love for her. If Jade was in charge of the world, she would have bullied it into giving Kit something to convince her she was important a long, long time ago. And not just princess important. Proper important.

But, Jade’s not in charge of the world, never has been.

Ballantine had told her that once. She’d been so much younger, and shaking with anger and the terrifying pressure of years of suppressed tears that threatened to crack her open. You’re not in charge of the world, Jade, he’d rumbled, a gentle reminder to hold her back from trying to channel her anger into something so dangerous that the unchangable world would be in trouble.

It was supposed to be reassuring, to guide her toward accepting her place and focusing on the power she did have, not the power she didn't, and in some ways it had. Jade did focus, and intently, on what she could control.

But the injustice of what she couldn't never left her, it smouldered inside her like a banked fire.

Jade knows she’s not in charge of the world, but if she was, this moment is part of the world she would have created; Kit in her arms, toying with a relic that proves to her she’s as worthy as Jade’s always known she is. And alright – in Jade’s world, Graydon would be with them still, and the Wyrm would be nothing more than a scary bedtime story and not a very real, very pissed off enemy who knew their names, their fears, their desires. In her world, it would just be her and Kit and this moment.

Kit had told her that she was looking for something, and though they never spoke about what that was, as Jade watches the way Kit smiles to herself while she plays with the lux and Jade’s fingers like they’re both equally magical, Jade feels like she’s pretty sure Kit’s found it. And Jade’s heart just swells with adoration for her girl. Need, too. It’s the kind of aching, physical need that Jade knows she should figure out how to control, because when they reach home and the rules kick back in it's going to be a problem, but… out here, right this moment, Jade lets her need command her.

“Why don’t you put that away?” she whispers in Kit's ear, then adds, lower, because Kit is between her legs and all: “and princess? Pull the blanket up a little more.”

Maybe Jade can be in charge of the world a little.

Kit’s eager breath trips over itself at the suggestion, she passes the lux to Jade who slips it safely back in her pouch, then returns both her hands to Kit’s body beneath the blanket.

Jade’s lips, too, need to be touching Kit, can’t stop touching Kit. Her love demands that Jade trails her kisses in an insistent exploration from Kit’s temple over the shell of her ear. Kit makes a small, pleased hum as Jade claims new territory by catching her earlobe, very gently, between her teeth. Another hum, deeper, matching Jade's need with her own, escapes when Jade presses an open mouthed kiss against the soft skin of Kit’s neck, her tongue drawing her desire over Kit’s pulse. “Shh,” Jade cautions her, and her breath sends a wanton shiver all the way down Kit’s body.

The next time she kisses Kit, brushing the fine hair from the back of Kit’s neck to press her mouth against the top of Kit’s spine, she can feel Kit restrain her moan, coil it up inside her, and release it as a sigh instead.

And oh, how much Jade enjoys making Kit react like that, and oh, how much Jade enjoys watching Kit test her restraint. She slides her hand underneath Kit’s top, feeling Kit tense beneath her cool fingers at first, and then silently melt back into her. Impressive, Jade smiles to herself, beginning to explore Kit’s stomach with slow sweeps of her hand, circling her bellybutton with a finger. When she teases at the even warmer skin just beneath Kit’s waistband, it draws a lower, urging noise from Kit’s throat and she twists her neck back to seek out Jade’s mouth for a kiss.

Jade catches her jaw and guides it away, and Kit turns her noise into a whine. “Eyes forward,” Jade whispers, barely audible in Kit’s ear. “We’re on watch.”

“Jade,” Kit whispers back, and it’s true that her voice is no more audible than Jade's, but Jade can still hear the sweet frustration in it, loud as anything. She grins a little against Kit’s neck, teeth pressing against the skin there as her hand creeps up to cup over the soft curve of Kit’s breast.

Kit drops her head back against Jade’s shoulder and whimpers.

It’s soft, and there’s been no peep or movement out of the others for some time now, but there’s no wind and Jade’s too aware of how sound carries on still nights like this. “Kit,” she breathes a warning. Or, maybe not a warning – Kit doesn't respond to warnings, after all, but she can't resist a challenge. Jade twists the corner of her mouth up, squeezing her hand a little tighter and purring into Kit's ear. “If you make another sound, I’ll stop.”

“Oh my god,” Kit mouths in the moonlight, and Jade aches to kiss her, feeling the want coil in her belly. Wanting makes her reckless, no, wanting Kit makes her reckless, and she hunts out Kit’s nipple for the pleasure of touching Kit so intimately and making her whole body stiffen as she tries to fight her instinct to cry out.

While Kit huffs sharp little puffs of breath through her nose, Jade’s hand keeps playing, exploring, teasing, though her eyes do lift to make sure there are no signs of danger out beyond the edge of the firelight, no signs of anyone waking beneath them. There isn’t, so Jade allows herself the luxury of watching Kit’s beautiful neck exposed to the moonlight as she pillows her head on Jade’s shoulder, watching a hard swallow shift in her throat when Jade’s hand does something particularly delicious. Some days, still, Jade can't believe she's allowed this close to Kit, that Kit wants her this close. She presses another open mouthed kiss to Kit's throat, savouring each moment, each squirm of pleasure of the princess in her arms.

Kit has loved, absolutely loved, sleeping curled tight with Jade, waking up sprawled all over her every morning. It’s better than waking up in her bed at home, although the ground is hard, and there’s no privacy apart from what can be found under the thick travelling blankets they bought at the salt farm. And they’re good blankets, heavy enough that hands moving underneath them aren’t completely obvious, but they’re not soundproof, so there’s been very little opportunity for Jade’s hands to venture as far south as Kit wants them, as far south as they’re venturing now.

She pinches her eyes tightly shut, bracing, and yet is completely unprepared for how Jade intends to unravel her. A short cry breaks out of her and Kit cuts it off quickly but Jade’s reactions are just as fast and she jerks her hand away. “I meant it, Kit,” Jade whispers, and there’s a little plea to her voice, embarrassed colour in her cheeks. She wants this, but it's theirs, not for the ears of anyone else, and if Kit can’t keep quiet—

Kit nods, her eyes wide and solemn and her mouth so desperately alluring as she places a finger across her lips, swearing herself to silence.

And Jade cannot resist her. Succumbs to what they both want. Learns she cannot bear how beautiful Kit is with her hand pressed tightly over her mouth to silence herself as she comes apart under Jade’s fingers in the moonlight.

Afterwards, they’re both quiet as they catch their breath (Jade feels like she’s run a marathon, which is silly because all she’s done is a bit of nimble wrist action, but Kit has her heart racing like nothing else ever could.) “I think I left teeth marks in my palm,” Kit comments, like it’s the most casual observation in the world and not the most erotic thing Jade has ever heard.

Apart from, a moment later: “You wanna swap places?” Kit turns her flushed face to kiss Jade on her neck, and oh, Jade really, really does, but then there’s movement from below, and she lifts her head to watch.

“Alright, Airk?” Jade calls down, in the most normal voice imaginable. Kit twists her neck to quirk an eyebrow at her, amazed that she can sound so clear and steady when not so long ago she’d had her face pressed into Kit’s neck, holding her through one of the hottest and hardest challenges of Kit’s life. But when Jade turns to meet her eyes, there it is, that smile, conspiratorial and perfect and so not normal at all.

“Just finding a tree,” Airk says, stumbling off into the darkness. Kit waits till he’s gone before kissing Jade softly, needing the gentle pressure of Jade’s mouth on hers while she’s still feeling so open and boneless and sated and like they’ve both gotten away with something absolutely devious. The slide of Jade’s tongue against hers is perfect and warm and Jade pulls her closer, both arms wrapping around her stomach, and Kit sighs into it.

“Meant it about trading places,” she murmurs into Jade’s neck. “Want you.”

“I know.” Kit can hear the crooked smile in Jade’s voice. “Do I trust you to keep watch though?”

“Were you?”

Jade has her dignity. “Of course, princess.”

Kit huffs a little, sceptical. She's pretty sure there'd been a few long minutes there when Jade was focused on nothing but devouring one particularly sensitive spot on Kit's neck.

Also, she's heard the sounds Jade makes when Kit kisses her. “You just don’t think you’d be strong enough to keep quiet because my hands are so good.”

Kit’s exactly right, but Jade’s not about to admit it. “Keep telling yourself that,” she says instead, giving Kit a tighter squeeze around the middle.

It’s not long after that – between their third and fourth long kiss – that another one of the dark lumps on the ground jerks, sits bolt upright.

“Airk?” Elora’s voice is the edge of frantic, held back only with a little self doubt. She’s a girl who is… not at all sure she’s still dreaming.

“He went to relieve himself,” Jade says, behind Kit’s ear, and Kit scowls a little in the dark because now two other people are awake and she doesn’t want to wait for them both to get back to sleep but now she’s going to have to. Stupid brother. Stupid Elora.

But then Elora says, “no, he didn’t,” with a deep frown, shedding her blankets as she stands. Jade gives Kit a sharp squeeze and is up almost as fast, and Kit stumbles up with legs as shaky as a baby deer, her own blanket falling at her feet.

“What, then?” Kit asks, getting her legs under control by the time she’s back down at the campfire, already aiming herself toward the path Airk disappeared off down.

“I– I don’t know,” Elora winces, mad at her own uncertainty. “I just have a feeling, okay?”

And Kit nods her okay without any argument, because information would be nice, but it’s a luxury she’s lived without when it comes to Elora before, so she’s not gonna wait around for more. She has her sword, Jade’s at her back, she’s not afraid. In fact after what Jade just did, Kit feels like her blood's pumping bright and beautiful in her veins, her whole body brilliantly awake.

Elora rouses the others, but Kit and Jade break away from the group first, single file down the narrow moonlit path near the trees. They’re thin trees, closely spaced, but there’s enough moonlight to see between them. It’s when the path splits that they share a look.

“Stay within shouting distance,” Kit decides, and there’s a moment of hesitation from Jade, but Jade trusts her to handle herself, these days, and in any case, the paths don’t split that far apart.

And they haven’t seen any enemies since defeating the Crone.

And the most powerful sorceress in the world is like, within spitting distance, and Kit knows she can definitely chuck her lightning further than she can spit.

So, she’s not worried.

Not till she finds Airk, kneeling in the moonlight.

“Oh hey,” she says, dropping the point of her sword and her brow along with it. He’s on his knees before a stone pillar as tall as Kit’s waist, some marker or other for travellers on the road (Kit had not been paying attention to Boorman as he explained it, earlier) and there’s a —

Okay, there’s a tang of blood in the air? Kit wrinkles her nose and steps closer, just as Airk lifts his hand – unbandaged, Kit can see now – and drags the freshly re-opened wound down the stone face of the marker. In the moonlight, his blood leaves a long, black smear. Kit’s bite mark on her own palm throbs in sympathy with her twin as she tightens her grip around her sword.

“What the shit, Airk?” Kit asks, her voice higher and thinner than she’d like. She strides over and shoves his shoulder, pushing him away from the marker and forcing him to face her, because she needs to see his face.

She needs to search it, scanning his eyes in desperation for any other answer than the first that comes to mind: that there's something very wrong with him, that she lost him already, that she'd been a naive child to believe she had saved him in the city. Panic sends hot tears to sting at her eyes and she lunges forward to slap him in the chest. “I asked you a question!” There’s a quaver in her voice she likes even less than her pitch. “What the shit are you doing?”

“Calling the others,” Airk smiles at her and it sends a jolt of horror through her body, because he also raises his hand, and she can see how deep he’s scratched his thorn wound open, blood is falling like a curtain down his wrist.

Kit… very much does not like the sound of that. “What others?”

“Do you even know what power lies in our blood?” Airk asks his sister, who makes a deep and involuntary gagging sound, and shifts her foot back into a steadier position, though she doesn’t yet raise her sword. She can’t, she… Elora’s so close, she can suck this bullshit out of Airk the same way she sucked it out of Graydon, they can fix him, they were supposed to have already fixed him!

Airk scoffs at her, and as always, that hurts. “No, of course you don’t, you refused his light, didn’t you? You refused his knowledge, like the stubborn and ignorant child you are. Our blood–” he says, and he speaks it with the same kind of awe he used to speak about girls and Kit didn’t think she could feel much sicker about this but apparently, she was so freaking wrong “– is the same blood that ran in the veins of the first six to ever turn to his light. The first six to be enlightened. The most wise, the most powerful–”

“Okay, shut your mouth,” Kit says, waving the point of their father’s sword at him. “Just shut up, get your stupid butt back to camp right now or else I’m going to slap you even stupider with this.”

“You don’t understand,” Airk says, and there’s a crackle of red lightning that hits the ground through the trees back in the direction of camp, and a scream of rage. Elora’s rage. For a second, Kit stops breathing. She has her sword, but the cuirass is in her pack, and she’s too far away to help Elora immediately.

“Kit!” Jade calls from her left, and Kit turns, sees her shape through the black trees. Sees Jade all lit up with another flash of red lightning, then green, just as bright, as Jade races across the distance between them.

Airk moves fast, hooks his arm tightly around Kit’s throat.

“Sorry sis,” Airk says in her ear, his neck craned up so when Kit snaps her head back to headbutt him his face is out of danger. “But as the true king, I gotta do what’s right for the kingdom. The world is hurting. Infected. We can save it.”

He spins her round and – stepping into the clearing from the opposite direction as Jade – she sees who he means by we.

“Hi fiancee,” Graydon says, and smiles at her with his weird goof of a smile.

Kit stares at him with such shocked focus she doesn't see the knife appear in Airk’s bloody hand.

Jade does, but by the time she breaks into the clearing, it's already too late.

The knife is long and curved and goes in between Kit’s second and third ribs like it's the trick they used to play as kids, stabbing each other under their arm and staggering dramatically back till they collapsed on the floor. But the sound Kit makes (the sound it makes in Kit) is no trick, and when Airk pulls the knife from his twin and plunges it next into her stomach, Jade knows it’s real. That she's never seen anything more real in her life.

Airk lets her drop and Jade doesn't get there in time to catch her.

She throws herself onto the earth beside Kit, sword abandoned like the worst knight ever, and rolls Kit's dead weight into her arms. Hot blood coats Jade's hand as she presses shaking fingers over the wounds. They're deep. Blood is soaking into her pants from where the tip of the knife pierced through Kit’s back.

Jade’s entire world narrows down to her princess, bleeding out in her arms.

Kit’s making rasping, gasping sounds, body fighting for life as her lung collapses in her chest. Jade cups her hand to Kit’s cheek and the blood she smears across is so thick, all Jade can do is deny it, the horror swelling up in a cascade of pleading No no no Kit please no— over and over and over again. Kit’s eyes can't focus on her, but she's trying, struggling as vicious twitches jolt through her body and Jade tries to comfort her, screams for help so loud and rough it tears her throat, curls back over Kit to kiss her forehead, swear her love, apologise again and again.

The fear in Kit’s eyes rips Jade to shreds, proof of Jade’s absolute and total failure. Frantic, she begins to lie, promising she will be alright as Jade holds her and strokes her bloody hand so gently over her hair but it kills her to think the last thing Kit will ever hear from her is a lie. So she tells her she loves her. She tells her she's good, she’s brave, she’s wonderful. She swears to her that she will not leave her side.

Hot tears cut paths down her face, falling onto Kit, whose face is bone white in the moonlight. Bone white where it isn’t defiled with the dark stain of her blood.

"Jade," Airk kneels before her and lifts her chin with his hand. Revulsion lurches up from her gut, impossible to reconcile the face of her friend with the act he's just committed.

"We can save her," he says, pressing his other hand over Kit’s stomach where his fingers are instantly coated in blood. "You can save her."

And then Elora appears in a flash of red. "We can save her," she echoes, and Jade's sob breaks her because she has never, in her whole life, needed anything to be true like she needs this. "Do you believe in me, Jade? Will you do as I say?"

There’s no question. There can’t be any question, not when Kit— "I do," Jade's voice cracks. "I will. Please, please."

"Swear it."

She knows. Part of her knows who the woman standing before her must be, but she cannot hesitate to question her if hesitating is going to mean losing Kit. "I swear it! Please, Elora. Please."

"Go with Graydon," Elora tells Jade, pulling Kit toward her with the gentleness of a mother goddess, stroking her hair back with all the soft kindness in the world. Jade does hope, when she sees that love. Jade does believe.

Because the other option is—

Graydon takes her arm and hauls her to her feet. "Everything will be alright," he promises her, his arm around her waist. "You'll see. She's incredible. She's going to fix the world, starting with Kit."

Jade is hardly able to hear him. There’s nothing left in her to spare for the memory that he disintegrated. Kit is—

"Jade," Graydon says, his voice clear and firm. "You swore."

She turns her head toward him, sees the hand that isn't holding her is holding a goblet. Even though her vision has narrowed into a horrible tunnel, Jade’s world suddenly becomes sharper and she does understand exactly what’s in that goblet and exactly what's expected. She blanches, jerks away from him.

“You swore oaths to Tir Asleen too,” Airk reminds her, stepping up to Graydon’s side. “As king, you’re sworn to me. Be my good little knight.” Disgust twists in Jade’s stomach at his words, his smarmy tone, his description of himself as king, the wrongness of absolutely every part of the world she’s falling too fast into.

Jade run— her mother’s voice screams in her head. Run!

But Jade cannot run because Elora is going to save the world starting with Kit.

It’s the oaths you keep— says Ballantine, and Jade chokes on a sob.

She swore to Kit, swore she wouldn't leave her. The only truth left is this: Kit needs saving, what else matters?

I really do, love you—

Kit needs saving, nothing else matters beyond that, so Jade snatches the cup from Graydon and drinks down to the last drop.

Chapter Text

Kit knows something's wrong, or everything is wrong, or she's wrong, or–

Kit knows fear, overwhelming fear, and hardly anything else. The whole world is too dark and too bright like her eyelids are too thin to keep out the searing sun, but she can’t blame her eyelids – she’s not even in her body. She’s not in any place at all. She’s blinded by the bright-dark and infused with a panic born from a need to run, to fight, to protect herself, but she has no legs to run with, no sword, no shield.

There's only one thing she knows for certain, and it comes from somewhere deep and primal within her: wherever she is, she isn’t alone.

It is not a good knowledge. It is a very, very bad type of not-alone. It’s a ‘get out of here, there are monsters’ atavistic and all-encompassing kind of fear and Kit wants very very badly to get out of here before it catches her–

And then – hope, a desperate sliver of hope cuts through the fear as she becomes aware of another presence. Jade? Jade, somewhere… Kit can hear her, feel her, and she reaches out frantically, her whole mind screaming for help.

“Hold her still,” Elora says, as a spasm runs down Kit’s right arm, her fingers grasping at the air. It’s not an instruction Jade needs; already she’s catching Kit’s rogue hand, linking their bloodstained fingers together.

Kit's fingers twitch, then go limp in her grip.

Jade has gathered her fallen princess into her arms, sitting behind her in a position not dissimilar to how they’d spent much of the last hour. Kit’s legs sprawl on the ground and her weight has fallen back against Jade’s front, her head collapsed on Jade’s chest, and just like those last few beautiful moments with Kit, Kit’s gasping, her breathing shallow and laboured.

Jade is agonised and awestruck to learn that Kit on the brink of pleasure sounds so like Kit on the brink of death.

Before Kit can reach blindly out again, Jade captures her other hand too, pulling both Kit’s arms close to her body to stop her thrashing. Though it’s to keep her safe, Kit’s too far gone to understand, and a long, thin whine of frightened protest escapes the back of her throat to break Jade's heart.

“I’m here,” she murmurs into Kit’s mussed up and blood-caked hair. She'll comb it for her later, work out the blood she streaked through Kit's hair with her own frantic hands. She'll wash every stain from her skin till she's perfect again. “I have you, Kit," she swears, a reassurance, an oath, whispered into Kit's ear. "I have you.”

Elora’s led them to a cave not far from the site of the battle, and sent Airk and Graydon out to lay a false trail for the others to follow. Now here in the dark, the three girls are alone.

Elora lowers herself onto Kit's legs to hold them down, and pushes up Kit's shirt to expose her wounded belly. Jade cannot take her eyes off Kit laid out like this, her helpless, vulnerable, darling princess, as though Jade’s eyes alone have the power to keep her alive.

They do not, but Elora…

Elora presses a beaten copper bowl against Kit’s skin, watching as it collects the slow river of dark blood oozing from Kit's wounds. Jade opens her mouth to ask but – Elora’s already dropping into a low chant. There’s a twisted music to her voice, off-key and haunting and bristling with power.

It’s a power that surges from her hands, and as Kit’s skin begins to knit itself back together Jade's bone-deep gratitude surges with it. The feeling is so potent it might burst open her ribs as it breaks out of her body. She’s desperate to watch, to grip onto that reassurance that Kit’s life is being saved, but the magic hurts her eyes. Elora’s red light burns and seethes and pulses in time with her chanting and it’s not for eyes such as hers, so Jade slides her eyes away to something she does understand. Her gaze falls, instead, on the knife.

(It doesn't occur to her how easy it is, now, to see in the dark.)

The curved dagger lies on a flat stone a few feet away, on a white piece of cloth, elaborately embroidered with symbols of power. Kit’s blood coats it right up to the hilt.

Jade becomes a beast of ravenous want. Fury and passion and vengeance too, but overpowering all of those is pure want.

She wants to obliterate that knife out of existence. To shatter it with her teeth. She wants to use the blade to carve through anyone who dares to threaten her princess. She wants to cut herself open and pull Kit inside her where she’ll be forever safe and protected by the cage of Jade’s ribs.

“Hold out her wrist,” Elora says, peeling herself back from Kit’s stomach.

It takes Jade a moment to drag herself out of her thoughts, but Elora's commanding voice has her on a leash.

With great care, Jade shifts her princess’s limp body in her arms, her hand cupped beneath Kit’s delicate wrist to support it as she offers it out to Elora.

She does know, now, that this is not the Elora she travelled with to the edge of the world. Graydon’s goblet opened Jade’s eyes to everything she refused to see before, and she understands: This Elora is the balance. Where one Elora is uncertain and green, this Elora is steady, sure. One's very young, the other's as ancient as the Mothers. They’re not total opposites either; they're both massively powerful, they both want an end to all pain. But one Elora doesn’t know how to fix the difficult world – she wants it to continue as it is – and the Elora before Jade now is as clear-sighted as the best general with the ruthlessness to carry out any strategy.

Most important of all; this Elora, not the other, can give her Kit's life.

Elora dips a slim finger into the bowl of gathered blood, stirs it six times, then draws a dark sigil on Kit’s wrist.

It’s not for Jade to question a general, but for Kit, Jade makes every exception. “What are you doing?” Jade asks, watching the mark take shape over Kit’s veins. It sweeps down, a continuation of her lifeline, crosses darkly over the rivers of her blue blood flowing beneath her pale skin. The rune spreads wider as it sinks out of sight beneath Kit’s skin.

“Waking her spirit,” Elora tells her, nodding toward Kit’s left without further explanation. Jade does not need it. Kit’s spirit was the thing Jade fell in love with first, it can only be a good thing if that wakes up. “Now the other.”

As Elora repeats the process, Kit’s head twitches violently back, cracking against Jade’s collarbone. Elora has Kit's wrist in her own grip now so Jade wraps her arm across Kit's front, her hand curling around the back of Kit's skull to hold her head secure against Jade’s chest. Kit squirms, unconscious but unhappy in this hold and Jade is struck with the urge to press a quieting kiss down onto Kit’s clammy forehead, her nose, her pale lips. She doesn’t fight this want, hushing her softly, though Kit’s lips don’t react beneath hers.

Kit is absent, her jaw slack, a slit of white visible between each set of eyelids, but Jade has perfect faith she will come back to herself, and Jade will guard her body relentlessly till she does. When Elora returns Kit’s wrist, Jade takes both Kit's hands and wraps Kit up so she's hugging herself, Jade's arms over hers as she holds her closer, pressing another soft kiss on her forehead. As she pulls back, Elora leans so close and draws a symbol over Kit’s third eye, the very spot Jade’s lips just left.

Beneath Kit’s eyelids, her eyes begin racing, her forehead pinching with tension. Elora frowns softly. “Tell her not to fight it,” she says to Jade.

“You can’t tell Kit that,” Jade says, slowly swaying Kit in her arms. “If you want her to do something, you have to convince her that’s what she wants.”

“Well,” Elora smiles openly and knowingly at Jade. “I’ve chosen the best person for that job, haven’t I?”

Jade smiles as she rocks. It’s true, and it warms her from the very pit of her stomach for her love to be seen like this. There’s no one on this earth who knows Kit better than Jade.

Elora drags two fingers through the bowl in preparation. “Her heart next,” she tells Jade. “Undress her.”

Kit feels it, though has no measure of what it is – something invasive, pawing at every opening. She's trapped and held down and her mind is screaming that she just wants it all to stop. Desperate, desperate, to push out everything wrong inside of her, vomit it up, cut it off, just get it OUT!

Kit falls into some deeper kind of sleep once Elora has finished marking her, and with her eyes on her next move, Elora leaves Kit in Jade’s care. Alone in the cave, Jade lays them both down on her cloak, pulling Kit into her arms so she can rest her head on Jade’s chest, so her heartbeat can soothe Kit even in sleep.

But Jade’s heartbeat isn’t enough to fight the restlessness that grips Kit’s body. Her muscles twitch beneath her skin, sometimes with a violence that forces Jade to hold her even closer. She does calm for a while when Jade smooths her thumb over Kit’s forehead, where the mark has disappeared into her skin, but even her presence can’t soothe Kit entirely. When Jade kisses her eyes she can feel the urgency of Kit’s nightmares trying to burst through the delicate, delicate skin of Kit’s eyelids.

So Jade tends to her as best she can as they lie together. Taking care not to tug, Jade’s hands work through the dried blood in Kit’s hair, rolling each crusty strand together between her fingers till the blood flakes off and Jade can comb it away in her hands. She continues till Kit’s hair is as clean as she can make it, and then she keeps combing, because she knows how it makes Kit purr when Jade plays with her hair and she hopes it calms her, even in sleep.

Her own fingers, Jade notices, are also unclean. Kit’s lifeblood is thick around Jade’s nails, has dried dark in each crease of her finger, spilled through each gap as it poured over her knuckles when Jade tried in vain to hold Kit’s blood inside her body.

Without shifting Kit from her pillow on Jade’s chest, Jade slides her fingers between her lips.

She moves slowly, drawing each finger out of her mouth several times, closing her lips around her own flesh and sucking, hard. Beneath the metallic tang of blood Jade’s tongue finds the heady taste of Kit’s sex still clinging to her skin, and her other hand curls a little tighter in Kit’s hair at the sweet ache of that memory. This feels just as intimate now, and though she does not want to disturb Kit as she sleeps through her recovery, she does wish that Kit was awake. She wants to see those beautiful blue eyes watching her, like they’d watched her while she pressed her hand firmly over her mouth to smother her wonderful whimpers of pleasure.

She wants Kit to witness Jade’s own pleasure, coursing through her as she erases all traces of Kit’s death from her skin.

A fierce heat blooms up Jade’s body as her teeth gnaw at the sides of her fingers, dragging her sharp canine beneath her blunt nails till each of them is flawless. Her tongue plunges into the webbing between her fingers, cleaning her palm, sucking each knuckle, and finally licking away a long, dirty stain where some of Kit ran down her wrist.

Her heart is racing so fast it’s a wonder Kit doesn’t wake up.

Her poor, beautiful, bloodstained, sleeping princess.

It’s with the gentlest touch that Jade shifts Kit’s head from her chest and rolls her onto her back. Rising, Jade takes her place on her knees at Kit’s side, and dutifully, worshipfully, Jade raises Kit’s bloody fingers to her mouth. By the time the others return, Kit’s hands are as clean as Jade’s.

“Ew, really?” Airk says from behind Elora, and Jade pulls Kit’s finger from her mouth and snarls at him through vicious teeth.

“Back. Off.”

Her eyes never leave Airk as she lays Kit’s hand carefully down. Following the same woman they may be, but Jade will tear Airk open from navel to nose if he takes a step closer. Her oaths to his mother are irrelevant, Tir Asleen is irrelevant, Kit is the only Tanthalos that matters to her now.

Airk begins to speak, but Elora raises her hand, dismissing him to watch the mouth of the cave. Jade watches his back and imagines what she’ll do with the knife he buried in Kit if he turns toward her again.

Be my good little knight, he’d said, but Jade is not his.

For years, Jade’s devotion has been unmatched. Unmatched, but penned in by the iron bars of her old life. The cage is smashing now, she’s climbing out and freedom is delicious. There’s not a power in the world that can get between herself and Kit. Her princess, her charge, her chosen one.

The threat of Airk might have stepped away, but Jade turns instantly to Graydon.

Hi fiancée he’d said, and Jade will rip off her own ears before she allows herself to hear those words spoken about her Kit again.

“She’s mine,” Jade tells the reborn Prince of Galladoorn, her eyes burning like a razed village. He looks at her oddly, and Jade shifts, planting her arm over Kit’s body. She is Kit’s protector, and it only feels right that she is shielding her from Graydon with her own body, just as she did in the throne room, before they left for the quest, long ago.

“Your engagement is off,” she growls through fiercely gritted teeth, freed from the fear of his position, from any ramifications in insulting his kingdom.

There is no room for fear left in Jade anymore, she is far too full of love. What's the power of a kingdom held up against that?

“Kit is mine.”

Elora steps up behind Graydon, running her hand through his hair. “You’ve nothing to fear from Graydon, Jade. He’s not for Kit anymore. He’s going to be my king.”

Jade releases a barely controlled breath through her nose, but Elora she listens to. Elora, who freed Kit from death and Elora, who is now promising to free Kit from the last, lingering threat of marriage by marrying Graydon herself. When Elora speaks again about the better world they are going to build together, truly, Jade believes in her.

“Have you ever seen a forest fire, Jade?” she asks, stepping closer. “They look like total devastation, but they are not. We’re going to burn the old kings and queens of this realm away to give the new room to grow. Yes, that means no more engagement,” she smiles at Graydon, who smiles at Elora, then they both smile down at Jade and Kit. There’s a lot of smiling suddenly going on in the cave. Jade slowly unbares her teeth.

Alright, Jade thinks. Perhaps she does not have to cut him. Not in this world, this better, dawning world.

“Graydon may be at my side, but Kit has her own place with us at the table,” Elora steps over, crouches down on the other side of Kit’s prone body. “I know that you think what Airk did was an act of violence, and... It’s true,” she admits, unashamed. “It was. But do not waste your anger on him, he didn’t do it to hurt her—” Jade cuts her off with a sharp huff of furious air through her nose, only partially quelled by the look in her general’s eyes.

But Jade doesn’t apologise, and Elora doesn’t ask her to. She simply continues to explain, dropping her eyes to Kit, trailing a pale finger down Kit’s arm. “Many beautiful things in this world are violent. Birth is violent, and all that comes before it; a mother’s body invaded, stretched and twisted and filled till the point of pain before the new life fights her way into the world. But birth is not evil, is it?”

Jade regards her for a moment, she cannot deny Elora is right, birth itself is not an act of evil. But… her eyes drop to Kit, and a glorious knowledge fills her; Jade has the power, now, to stop Kit ever being forced into carrying an heir. Jade has the power to stop anyone else touching Kit ever again. And that, that is wonderful.

Kit is going to be so happy.

“Jade,” Elora’s voice calls her attention back, but Jade doesn’t stop smiling down at Kit till Elora reaches over and hooks a finger under her chin, guiding her eyes up. “Forcing your rebirth into my light was violent, but don’t you feel better, now, Jade? Don’t you feel beautiful?”

Jade feels sharper. Jade feels focused and clear and true and extremely strong. Elora’s right, it does feel better. The years of holding herself back, silencing her want, of loving Kit more and more as the moment they would have been separated grew closer and closer – all of that powerless agony has burned off in Elora’s light. Elora continues to speak of the power of Kit’s potential, of the beginning of her rebirth, and Jade… Jade wants that for her too. Kit deserves the power to re-shape the world.

“Of course it is painful,” Elora echoes wisely, kindly, at the end of her speech. “Just as the war will be painful, but on the other side of that pain, I promise you, an eternal end to all your suffering awaits you.”

Kit feels like she’s running from the Gales again, relentlessly pursued and frantic to stay one step ahead.

She feels like she’s in the middle of an urgent, endless fight – something dangerous is attacking her and blow after blow after never-ending blow keeps coming. She doesn’t know what it is, she only knows it wants her defeated. Invaded.

She feels like she’s drowning again, the same kind of trapped, near-futile struggle for her life. The violation of something trying to force its way in through her mouth, her eyes, her skin. The seductive idea that if she stopped fighting, the horror would be over. The endless trying and failing and trying, over.

She can hear a voice, it’s deep and frightening and Kit doesn’t know what’s worse, that it feels like it’s coming from within her, that it knows her name, or the fact that she’d heard this voice once before.

Or maybe, probably, the fact that it calls her 'grandchild'.

It’s warm when Kit wakes up crying.

They are quiet, exhausted tears, and her chest is heaving with great, shaken gulps of air that taste of metal and smoke. But— she's awake, she's awake, and the relief of that is a miracle that draws out another burst of tears.

She's warmer than she’s been for a long time, and waking is difficult and slow, like she’s tucked tight into a familiar bed. In some ways, she is – she recognises the shape of Jade’s body immediately, and when her mind sends out a flare of warning, Jade's soft and steady presence tamps it down. Jade is curled into her back, her knees tucked behind Kit’s knees, her arm wrapped around her, and their hands tangled together. It’s the same way they’ve slept many times before, there’s a safety in it Kit hasn’t found anywhere else, her whole life.

A small fire burns a few feet from her, the heat close enough to sting the sensitive skin of her face. Jade, at her back, is almost as hot. Kit drags her thumb over her wet eyes before anyone can notice she was crying in her sleep – something she hasn't done in Jade's bed since they were kids, well, maybe a little older than kids. Not for years, anyway, and it's definitely not something she wants anyone to see now. With a grunt, Kit licks her dry lips, annoyed that her mouth is just as dry. Dry and crusty and gross. Ugh, Kit hates waking up gross.

She groans as she tries to sit up and search for her waterskin – nearly pitches sideways as a wave of dizziness spins the world.

Jade catches her shoulders before she can tip over, then slips a hand behind her head and guides her back down to the ground. “Easy, Kit, easy,” she purrs.

Kit’s thirsty. She’s thirsty and too hot and so tired opening her eyes is borderline impossible, and so she does what comes naturally when it’s just her and Jade, she whines in complaint. “Jaaaade, waaaater?”

Jade laughs softly, and it soothes the last bubbling of uneasiness. Jade wouldn’t be laughing like that if anything was wrong. “It’s right here, your highness,” she says, taking Kit’s hand and guiding it toward her waterskin. “Lemme help you sit up, slower, this time, Kit. I’m not losin’ any piece of you to that fire.”

Kit groans as Jade helps her sit, partially from the weight in her body she’s too weak to fight, partially because it feels like the ground tips one way then dramatically back the other, but mostly because sitting up is such a normal thing to do and she shouldn’t need help to be normal. Yet, without Jade’s strength supporting her spine, without Jade’s arm curled around her shoulders, Kit’s not sure she could sit up on her own. Jade doesn’t need to know that, though.

Ugh, it’s awful. But at least there’s water, right in front of her. Jade pulls out the stopper for her and lets her take it, watching closely as Kit takes a mouthful. Just one, to start with. Kit holds the water in her mouth like she’s trying to remember how to swallow, but when she does it’s chased by a small hum of relief. “That better?” Jade askes, and Kit nods and grunts and drinks a few more mouthfuls down. There’s not much left.

“What happened?” Kit croaks, offering the water to Jade, who shakes her head and presses the opening toward Kit’s mouth again. Still parched, Kit takes it, drains the skin dry. Kit feels so terribly drained herself that a few mouthfuls of water shouldn’t make any difference, but it does help a little.

Her head’s still so heavy it’s falling forwards though, the weight of it pulling painfully at her back, her hair shielding her pale face. Even seeing the movement of her hair makes her dizzy, and Kit has to close her eyes again. Jade’s hand grows tighter on her shoulder, or maybe Kit is just leaning harder into it, she can’t tell; the ground still feels like it’s pitching back and forth. She’s never really been hungover, but maybe this is what it feels like?

“You were hurt,” Jade says, and the uneasiness Kit fled from upon waking gallops back with those words. “Elora healed you, do you remember?”

Kit frowns, and the tension throbs behind her eyes. Yeah, she remembers something about Elora with her hands on her stomach. Not much, though. Her hand twitches, curiosity driving it to the place where it aches in her gut, and her fingertips graze over the unfamiliar shirt she’s wearing before a knife of fear wards the curiosity off.

And Kit… lets it. Whatever is waiting for her under this ugly shirt, it’s too much to handle right now. Kit lets her hand fall again like she doesn’t even care.

Jade catches it before it slips to the ground, lacing their fingers together once again. Kit breathes a little easier. It’s always been this way; even when times are at their worst, Kit breathes a little easier when Jade reaches for her.

“Yeah kinda,” she mutters, vague enough she hopes Jade won’t ask again, and looks up at her and… oh, Jade. Her Jade, right here at her side. Relief fortifies her heart, and gives Kit the strength to fight the fatigue in her arm. She reaches up, and presses a clumsy hand against Jade’s cheek. “Are you okay?”

“Love, I’m perfect,” Jade reassures her, covering Kit’s hand with her own and leaning into Kit’s touch. “Not a scratch.”

“Good,” Kit says, and she can hear the protective streak in her own voice, just as she can feel it rush through her chest. She can handle this pain so long as she knows Jade’s okay.

Kit struggles to get her arms up and around Jade’s shoulders, and Jade pulls her in closer for a long hug, her fingers sinking deep into Kit’s hair, her other hand stroking long and slow over Kit’s back, over and over. There’s one particular spot on Kit’s back that’s far more tender than the rest, and her front aches, but a sick, low ache, more like cramps than anything else.

Jade’s hand keeps soothing, her warmth soaking into Kit and easing the way back to sleep. With a deep sigh Kit begins to melt into Jade’s arms and, for a moment, looks over her shoulder, only now taking in the fact they’re in a cave.

She doesn’t look for long, too tired and dizzy to care. On the jagged, uneven rock wall, the fire casts their entwined shadow selves into something endlessly shifting and monstrous.

Kit closes her eyes against it, and Jade rocks her gently back to sleep.

Next time Kit comes to, she finds herself straddling a horse, a firm arm across her chest to bind her to her captor – Kit jerks back to herself in a rush, both hands shooting up to claw through the arm so she can escape.

"Oi, oi, Kit, it's me," Jade says from behind her, and Kit freezes as the rush of adrenaline filters through her confusion, then promptly sluices out of her like she’s a sieve and her flight or fight response is nothing but water. Her body starts trembling in its absence, uncontrollable and totally mortifying. God, what’s wrong with her?

"Jade?"

"It's alright, princess, you're alright, I got you," Jade keeps promising, readjusting the reins so she can wrap both her arms around Kit. "Take a deep breath, you're alright."

"I know how to breathe," Kit insists, though her lungs are doing her best to prove her a liar, taking short, shallow gasps instead. Her head hurts, a sick ache throbbing away at her temples. Her body hurts, her neck where it's been bent from the ride so far, her muscles across her stomach and back like she's worked them too hard. She takes a deeper, experimental breath to stretch her belly, and winces —

It… hurts isn't the right word, but it's not totally wrong either.

There's a squirming restlessness under her skin, up her spine, down her arms.

In her gut.

“I might, um, I might be sick though,” Kit says, and Jade barely manages to get her off the horse before Kit’s choking out the contents of her stomach into the scraggly wet grass on the side of the path. “Ugh,” she groans in self-disgust, holding her trembling hand back to stop Jade getting any closer. “Don’t look.”

“Kit,” Jade says, with endless patience. “I can handle a little sick.”

Kit groans again, wipes her mouth, and sits back on her heels with her eyes closed. “S’gross,” she mutters. She hears Jade release a soft puff of amused air, and lets Jade help her back to her feet before any of the others can see. It’s only once she’s standing that she realises there are no others, not on the stretch of path behind them, leading out of a scrubby patch of woodland, nor on the path ahead, leading somewhere much more sparse.

“Where is everybody?” she asks, reaching out a hand to grab onto the saddle of the horse for support, her mind stumbling at that, too. “Where— where did we get a horse?”

“Elora gave us the horse,” Jade says, keeping her hand against the small of Kit’s back. “The others are fine, we split up because two people are harder to track than six. We’re all going to meet back up at the Mother’s Gate."

Kit can't get her head around that – splitting up does not feel right, and did Elora just like… magic them a horse? But then Jade leans closer, her hand brushing back the dirty hair from Kit’s face, her golden brown eyes soft and so, so lovely in the morning sun. “It might be just you and me for a while.”

Wrung out as she feels, guilt makes her tense up. She’s supposed to be with Elora, protecting Elora. But sitting alongside the guilt is the unpleasant truth that if they were attacked right now, Elora would just end up needing to save her again, and ugh, Kit’s dignity is already on its last legs. What if Elora had seen her throw up? Would Kit ever be able to live that down?

Instead, a few days of just her and Jade? With the tender way Jade is stroking her hair, Kit can't deny that yeah… yeah okay, she could be into it. Kit smiles, crooked through her exhaustion. “That’s good,” she says. “Don’t want anyone else seeing me in this shirt. It’s hideous.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Jade asks.

“I dunno,” Kit says. It’s fine, she supposes, it’s warm. But it’s not hers. It’s also heavy and a little scratchy like it’s made of something cheap. “It’s brown.”

Jade snorts softly through her nose. “Alright, princess,” she says fondly, letting it go. Keeping them both on the move is more important, anyway. “Do you want to ride again, or are you going to stubbornly try and walk?”

“I’m going to stubbornly try and walk,” Kit mutters. She has more questions, but the most pressing of all is to find out exactly how damaged her body is, exactly how quickly she can force it back to normal. It was sparring on the Shattered Sea that finally made her feel like Kit again; she remembers the way her strength began to pour back into herself as she wielded her father's sword (though pinning Jade to the ground and kissing her until they were both sated and sandy, that had helped too.)

She would like recovery to happen much, much faster this time, please.

Kit doesn't give herself time to think about it; she lifts her shirt and bends her head down to inspect where it aches. The scars are a surprise at first – like they’re fake – but as she looks longer, realisation in the form of a deep sense of horror begins to seep through her.

They’re both wide, one between her ribs, the other a little offside of her belly button, and a gutting flash of terror hits her mind when she touches the ridge of scar tissue. The terror doesn’t stick around to explain itself and Kit doesn't try to chase it, because the horror isn’t budging and that's plenty to worry about. “Elora healed these?” Kit asks, her voice a ghost of itself. “They’re… they’re real big, Jade.”

“She’s the greatest power in the world,” Jade says, taking Kit’s hand and drawing it away from the scars. “Of course she did.”

“But…” Kit doesn’t know what she’s trying to argue. It feels wrong that a wound the scars hint at could be healed, that Kit could still be on her feet after. She should just be grateful that she is. That Elora saved her, again. “What do you get someone who’s saved your life more than once?” Kit grumbles, trying to lighten her mood. “Silver gravy boat?”

Jade drops her head, and when she presses a kiss between the two scars a complex jolt of feeling zaps through Kit. Jade’s mouth is hot on her skin and her hand is firm at her back; the intimacy of it is enough to pull a small whimper from Kit’s throat, but her stomach feels too vulnerable in the open air, it makes her want to squirm away from Jade’s mouth as much as it makes her want to push toward her. Shamefully, the fear wins, and Kit tugs her own shirt back down.

Jade rises, and for a long moment Kit looks at her and—

And god, all Kit can think is that she’s gorgeous. Maybe it’s Kit’s brush with death but Jade’s more breathtaking now than she’s ever been, her skin glows with life and her eyes are soft and devoted and her hand reaches up to hold Kit’s face like she’s the most precious thing Jade’s ever seen. Kit's captivated by every one of her freckles, most especially the ones on her lip.

“I nearly lost you,” Jade whispers, her eyes drinking in every aspect of Kit’s face. “If Elora hadn’t been there, if – I can’t, Kit. Can't live in that world." Her voice cracks, and it makes Kit’s own heart want to break, all she can do is twist her mouth into her best smile.

“Okay, well, maybe you buy Elora a gravy boat, then,” she says, and Jade laughs like she’s about to cry, and that’s when Kit kisses her.

It’s like coming home. It’s every ache carried in her body from a long day suddenly shucked off like stiff boots as she settles somewhere comfortable with a sigh. It’s the relief of being so deep in the Canyon Maze that it’s going to take everyone a long, long time to find them and bring her back to her lessons. It’s familiar and daring and perfect, Jade’s kiss is a haven, and Kit takes them both deeper in. Kissing is the perfect way to remind and assure Jade she’s alive, and the perfect way to remind and assure herself.

Oh yeah, kissing Jade is definitely gonna heal her faster, Kit thinks, and then Jade pushes her firmly up against the horse.

But – it causes a sharp twinge beneath the scars on Kit’s stomach, taking over her entire torso. It's not really the pain that spins her mind, it's the weakness and dizziness that comes with it. Pain she can deal with, but weakness is really not sexy. Kit grunts an ‘ugh’ and turns away, because she can imagine the worry or worse, the guilt on Jade’s face and even thinking about it is far too much to handle.

“So,” Kit says, grinning to cover it up, refusing to meet Jade's eye and almost entirely relying on her grip on the saddle to keep her on her feet. “Any food in our mystery horse’s saddlebags? I could eat a – well, no offence, big boy,” she says, giving the horse’s black flank a gentle rub. “But at least half of you.”

They're barely another half-league on before Kit starts feeling like she isn’t going to make it much further. The cold wind stings at the sheen of sweat on her face, and long before she gives up, Kit stops talking. Step after step after shortening step, she fights for as long as she can, pushing through on sheer stubborn force of will and pigheadedness.

Another hundred steps then I’ll rest, she counts, as the edges of her vision crowd in around her, and then another fifty, then just ten, and–

Elora’s voice swims toward her through a murky swamp of pain, and when Kit tries to unstick her eyes she finds her vision filled with red curls. Jade. Jade’s shoulder is pillowing her head, Jade’s arms are round her back and under her knees as the group leaves the cave. Graydon – Graydon? – is speaking: "You have to take it with you,” he says, worried and earnest, but Kit barely grasps what he's saying because she's so confused by the fact that he's saying it. He sounds real but like – she saw the Crone waste him. “We can’t risk anyone else finding it."

But then Elora’s speaking too, and… that’s okay, Elora’s okay.

“It can be overcome,” Elora tells him. “As with all things, to truly destroy it, it must be eaten from the inside.”

Graydon’s next words are stolen by the wind, and Kit feels a cold shudder run through her. Jade holds her closer, warm and strong, and Kit turns her weary head to bury her face in Jade’s neck, and lets herself be carried away.

Next thing she knows the sky’s growing dark, and she’s slumped forward over the horse again. “Shit,” Kit mutters, lifting her head. She’s drooled on the horse. Great. Awesome. What an absolute champion she is.

Jade’s walking at her side, her hand on Kit’s back, keeping hold of her belt so she doesn’t slip. “You’re alright,” Jade says, still holding on even as Kit pushes herself into a stiff seat. “You were muttering in your sleep. Dreaming?”

Kit wrinkles her nose as snippets of the dream come back. Elora, Graydon, things being eaten from the inside, ugh. She’s dreamed of Graydon a few times since the Immemorial City, and hasn’t admitted a single one of them to Jade (because like, what’s Jade going to do, unexplode him?) so she’s not about to start now. Instead she grunts as she presses her hands against her spine and tries to bend it backward, stretching out the damage that being flopped on a horse for who-knows-how-long has done. (Jade probably knows exactly how long, but Kit refuses to ask. If she doesn’t know, she can pretend she was only asleep for a few moments.)

“Hungry,” Kit says, ignoring everything except the gnawing, constant need inside her. “If you can like, whip up a roast chicken for dinner, I’ll love you forever.”

There’s no roast chicken, but as the afternoon light bleeds out, Jade makes a fire. She hangs a pot of icy river water over the flames, stirs in the last of their dried meat, and lets it boil away with some carrots they split with the horse. Kit lies on their bedroll by the fire, watching the wind shift the twiggy trees overhead. Jade’s near enough that her hand finds Kit’s closest ankle, and she reaches back and holds on as she builds up the fire.

Beneath the heavy weight of her cloak, Kit's hands explore her scars. Tracing the hard scab on each one makes her fingers feel twitchy and restless, like there’s some energy building up inside her and yearning to bust out. It’s kinda like she’s been indoors trying to focus on lessons for too many hours and all her hands want to do is grab a sword. That, but inside her, where usually, back at home, the old restlessness had been a feeling that jiggled her leg and shivered twitchily over her skin. This is deeper. This is worse. But Kit still feels like swinging a sword at something would help—

“Jade,” she blurts suddenly, scrambling to sit up, the edge of panic in her voice. “Jade, where’s my sword?!”

“Airk has it,” Jade says, turning from the fire, her hand rubbing Kit’s ankle. “You weren’t fit enough to fight and he was, it made more sense that he take it.”

“Oh— Fuck sense!” Kit splutters then snaps, but the anger only lasts a blazing second before she’s burnt herself out, leaving a charred, smoking shell of despair in its wake. She can’t blame Jade, or Airk even. Kit was the one useless enough to get stabbed, to need saving. Kit was the one who didn’t realise she’d lost another part of her father till after it was long, long gone.

Kit takes a few short breaths to try and stop herself from crying but her eyes are already wet, her defences worn so thin her eyelashes don’t stand a chance to hold the emotions in. She’s such a mess and she hates it. “What about the Cuirass?” she asks frantically, eyes dropping to Jade’s belt. She can feel the sob in her throat, just waiting to break her open as soon as she discovers she’s lost this, too. “The Lux?”

“We have it, Kit, it’s alright,” Jade soothes, but nothing’s going to soothe Kit till she’s yanked open the pouch at Jade’s hip and is clutching the Lux between her hands. She lies back down, gripping it tightly. The Lux eases the twitch in her hands like maybe this is what they wanted, and Kit pulls the cloak right over her head to shield herself from the world. With the Lux held snug against her chest, her entire body curls protectively around it, like it’s her turn to be its defender.

Mothers have mercy, if Boorman could see her now she’d never hear the end of it.

Kit feels Jade give her another rub of her ankle, then feels her press a kiss against the top of Kit’s shin. She knows Jade wants her to come out but… Kit isn’t ready. She needs to curl up here in the dark and just… just hold on, for a while. That’s all she can handle, right now, a few long moments of holding on till she can figure out how to be a person again instead of a frazzled ball of nerves and shit.

Even under the cloak, Kit imagines she can feel Jade’s eyes on her. It’s probably just in her head, though, more likely that Jade’s turned her head back to the fire to play with it, to poke the meat and see if it’s ready. Kit doesn’t peek out of the cloak to check, because if she makes eye contact with Jade, Jade might ask her how she’s feeling, and that is the last thing Kit wants to talk about. She would much rather stay a great lump under a cloak than expose the raw mess that she is to the outside air.

She’s achingly tired, but at the same time too wired and upset to sleep. In the little pocket of air she’s made, her breath slowly warms her face, and she twists and turns and fiddles with the Lux while she thinks. It glows faintly green and comforting, turning her cloak into a Kit cave, and it makes her think of the ones she used to make under the covers with Airk when they were little enough to share a room.

Stories were just better when they were shared beneath a blanket, and back then, it’d always been like pulling bedclothes over their heads transported them to a place where nothing in the castle could get them. Kit could make up any epic tale she liked, and she’d believe in her own stories completely, so long as she didn’t have to look at the stone walls and royal banners and all of the princess paraphernalia of her stupid life. She could be anything, when she was hidden like this.

It’s different, here on whichever route Jade’s found that will lead them back to the Mother’s Gate. The cloak doesn’t exactly keep the real world out the same way childhood blankets did, but Kit does feel a bit braver. Brave enough to creep her hand under her shirt and keep exploring the landscape of scars she isn’t sure she should have lived through.

The Lux glows a little more fiercely when she’s holding it and touching her scars. And just a little brighter again when she draws it closer to her body. Kit can’t begin to guess why. It’s recognising Elora’s epic magic, maybe. Bit weird of it, since it’s never glowed aggressively at Elora before.

The weirdness, it… unsettles her.

The wind in the trees… the crackle of the fire… suddenly they both sound like whispers, like a language heavy on consonants and spitting. Like the language she refuses to admit she hears in her dreams, one that tries to twist her sleeping tongue around words that feel like they’d crack open the sky.

It’s just her imagination, though. It is just her imagination, and she summoned it by thinking about how weird she felt and now her mind’s just trying to tell her ghost stories or something, the way she used to tell Jade and Airk the worst (most brilliant) things she could imagine to try to freak them out. There’s no voices. Her dreams are whack because she was stabbed, and nothing is out there, despite what the hair standing up on the back of her neck is telling her. If anything was out there, Jade would impale it on her sword before it could get close.

But as hard as Kit tries to pretend, the deep sense of wrongness inside her keeps growing.

It reminds her of lonely, unhappy nights before the quest. Some nights, the worst nights, Kit used to find herself trying to ward off a nebulous feeling of wrongness. The only thing that ever helped her sleep on those nights was escaping her quarters and crawling into Jade’s bed.

She never put words to the feeling, never wanted to acknowledge it because it was the worst – and the wrongness grew bigger and bigger and harder to speak about as her wedding grew closer, till it snapped into place and she knew, knew she had to climb in Jade’s window one last night, kiss her goodbye, and run. Run or let herself be chained to a life that would gradually choke all the Kit out of her.

That feeling of impending wedlock was bad but this is worse.

But– Kit is so, so tired, and the exhaustion (reality) is even harder to fight than the wrongness (imagination). Exhaustion takes full advantage of the fact she’s lying down in the dark; it besieges her, and drags Kit to sleep long before their dinner is ready.

She’s holding the Lux tight against her stomach when she drifts away, the faint, green glow of it catching in the crystal of her necklace, refracting out, and pulsing in rhythm with her heart.

By the time each new night finds them, they’ve covered what Kit is willing to admit is a pathetic amount of distance. Truly Jade, and the horse they’re calling Gravy, are doing all the work. Jade’s the one navigating them through this unknown country toward the Mother’s Gate, Jade’s the one finding them food, water, secluded places to sleep at night. Yet, it's Kit’s body who feels like she’s the only one paying for it. Jade never slows down. Jade hacks through undergrowth with her own sword in one hand and the horse’s reins in the other while Kit uses all her energy not to slip off his back, and Jade doesn’t even break a sweat. Jade vanishes off the path sometimes and returns with broken necked birds and bloody bunnies and once, spectacularly, Kit swears Jade’s barely gone a second and she’s dragging back a fawn.

Kit doesn’t want to look too closely at it. It’s a baby, the top of its head looks velvety soft and its back is speckled so sweetly with white. But her own body is constantly running on empty and fresh meat is better than dried and so Kit just closes her eyes while Jade prepares dinner.

She wakes up briefly to eat her fill then falls asleep to terrible dreams of her own twisting tongue and a bubbling pressure building in her gut. In the morning, the carcass is gone.

Kit, who never wondered before the quest where her food came from or what happened to it after, and Kit, whose dreams are growing worse and worse the closer they get to the Mother’s Gate, and Kit, who is putting all her energy into trying to shake the feeling that someone’s creeping up on her to hook their arm tightly around her neck, does not ask about the deer.

Three days in, and night’s falling as Kit leans back against Jade, bone-weary. She can’t believe her bones are tired, like she’s one of the fifty year old dukes who never leaves the castle because they’re like, too busy tending their gout or whatever. At least she has Jade, though; Jade makes the best furniture a girl could ask for, perfect to lean back against while Jade closes her arms around her, Kit snug and warm and safe and cherished between her legs. This is the longest they have ever, ever been alone together in their lives and despite how terrible Kit feels, that thought is precious.

Seeking comfort, Kit lets her head drop back onto Jade’s shoulder, where it’s found a home so many times in the past. A home Kit wants to believe is her future, too.

“I’ll be better tomorrow,” she tells Jade, gazing at the sky and willing strength back into her body with her words, gaining even more of it because she can feel Jade’s smile pressed against her exposed neck. “You’ll see, soon you’ll be the one riding to catch up with me.”

“I’ve no doubt,” Jade purrs indulgently, nuzzling Kit with her nose. She kisses Kit’s cheek, the edge of her jawbone, the fragile skin over her pulse. “You’re exceptional, love. So special, so precious.” There’s wonder in her voice, wonder that stuns Kit with its depths, makes her a little nervous, even. “The most important person in my world, Kit. I love you so much.”

It’s silly to feel nervous around Jade, and Kit’s shoulder shrugs up to protect her neck like Jade’s lips are tickling, though it’s not really her neck she’s shielding. She doesn’t feel important, she actually feels more like a miserable and annoying sack of old potatoes most of the time, and precious is such a weird thing to be called when all you’re doing with your day is trying not to fall off a horse.

But Jade pulls Kit’s self-disgusted thoughts off course when she starts to play with Kit’s hands. Her strong hands squeeze Kit’s, massaging the aches out of them, working her way up each finger one at a time. Her thumb digs into the middle of Kit’s palm and Kit groans, softly; relaxing further back against Jade’s front. She closes her eyes again to enjoy the feeling of Jade’s fingers circling her palms, the heat of her against Kit’s forever-cold hands is as delicious as sinking into a hot bath.

Jade’s fingers slide over Kit’s wrist, tracing a pattern down and across her veins, and it sends a strange, sick tingle up Kit's arm. She twists her hand away, murmuring “tickles,” as an excuse although ticklishness can’t explain why the shape is making her heart start to pump so rapidly.

“Is this better?” Jade murmurs in Kit’s ear, tugging the hem of her shirt from her belt so she can slip her hands against Kit’s stomach and – oh.

Kit’s breath trips like it’s rolled on a loose rock, it takes her a moment to readjust. If she’s feeling a little vulnerable tonight, her belly’s even worse, and she winces at the touch, and hates herself immediately. It’s Jade’s touch, it’s Jade. And Jade has touched her more intimately than just smoothing her hands across the scarred skin of her stomach before, so why does it feel so…

And then Jade’s fingers press over the biggest scar and she’s soft and she’s careful and fear shoots through Kit anyway, followed instantly by a shame that tenses every muscle in her body. “That’s–” Kit says, struggling to find the words. It doesn’t hurt, but something in her feels very… very squirmy about Jade touching her there.

With a stubborn, jaw-clenching swallow Kit shoves the feeling away. It’s Jade, she wants Jade to touch her everywhere.

When Jade presses her hot lips against Kit’s neck again, Kit makes a little sound, like she might be able to relax into the familiar feeling. Her shoulders are knotted as hard as the salt-stiffened ropes on their skiff used to be, but Kit still manages to force a shoulder down a little, tilt her head away a little, so Jade has more access to her neck.

Jade’s tongue against Kit’s skin burns like a brand and Kit opens her mouth to ask if she feels alright, but… Kit’s the sick one, isn’t she? Kit’s own temperature is probably just all off, and she doesn’t need to give Jade more reasons to worry about her. It’s not like Jade’s tongue doesn’t feel exciting, anyway, as it presses flat against her neck and licks a wide stripe up to her ear. The damp skin prickles in the cold air, and Kit feels a shiver run from her belly up to her neck, like her belly’s trying to warn her neck it’s just as delicate and vulnerable and stabbable– and then Jade’s teeth bite into Kit’s neck.

Kit gasps, and Jade moans a little at her reaction, pulling her even tighter into her arms. And… Kit loves it when Jade makes that noise, when Jade gives her any sign of losing her inhibitions, when Jade really grabs her. It’s wildly hot, it makes Kit feel sexy to be the only person who can free Jade from her own self-control; it makes her feel powerful, and Kit would very much like to feel powerful tonight.

So, “Jade,” she whispers to the night, bringing up her hand to bury in Jade’s hair, to hold her closer. Jade’s mouth presses into her, hungrier than before, her tongue lathing Kit’s skin before her mouth closes down to suck a lovebite onto the most sensitive spot on Kit’s neck. It curls her toes in, curls her legs in a little closer to her body, curls her hand tighter into Jade’s hair and her other bunches into a fist in the fabric of Jade’s pants

Jade growls Kit’s name into her neck, breathing through her nose as though her mouth is no longer meant for anything so ordinary as breath; Jade's mouth is intent on nothing more or less than devouring Kit whole. The next bite is hard, and Kit cries out sharply, and all of Jade’s fingertips dig deeper into Kit’s body and drag her roughly up against Jade’s body and it – it freaks Kit out.

Kit tries to ignore the sudden awareness that she is completely disarmed and Jade has her completely surrounded, clutched so tightly in her arms, between her legs. Kit can’t move, can’t fight, can’t meet Jade’s eye with a cocky joke. She can clench her own fist harder into Jade’s hair, though, and try to pull her away from her neck – maybe they can make this into a scuffle, Kit’s good at scuffles, but the yank of Jade’s hair draws a voracious moan from Jade and—

It’s not the pain that’s wrong; Kit can handle a little pain, especially when it’s accompanied by Jade pressed up against her. It’s not Jade’s strength; Jade’s always been stronger than her. It’s not the sounds she’s drawing from Jade, or the shiver that runs down her at the sound of Kit’s name in Jade’s mouth – it’s the fact that Jade has always been the one to withdraw first; from tapping out of a grapple she thinks she’s taken too far or breaking a hug before Kit is ready to let go, Jade’s never the one who keeps pushing.

And she’s always, always been responsive to Kit’s moods, to the point of over-sensitivity. Jade’s a great reader of Kit, and the fact that some stupid idiot part of Kit is freaking out now, is starting to scream silently in a way that scares her so much it’s bringing tears to her eyes – the fact that Jade doesn’t notice this feels like the whole world has tipped.

“Jade–” she says, a plea in her voice that Jade doesn’t hear, just purrs Kit’s name back to her like Kit’s cry is one of passion. And it should be, Kit knows that, it should be, if she was normal she’d be pleading for Jade to touch her, enjoy her, make her feel alive on this cold, cold night when all she’s been feeling for days is wasted.

“Jade–” Kit tries again, and she doesn’t want to say stop, not out loud, because what if she gives in to this moment of irrational fear and Jade stops and she never starts again, Kit doesn’t want that, she just—

She just wants Jade to hear her, to hear what she’s not saying, to stop because she wants to stop, to stop and… and then it wouldn’t be Kit’s fault and—

“I have to pee,” Kit blurts, because bladders are blameless.

Time stops.

Kit’s breathing stops.

Her heart is jumping like a rabbit caught in a snare and her mind is blank because she has nowhere to go if this doesn’t work and then – and then Jade’s teeth slowly disengage from her neck, and Kit’s skin throbs in time with her racing heartbeat in the sore spot she leaves behind.

Kit flees on shaky legs, picturing, absurdly, the speckled baby deer.

It takes a long time to catch her breath, leaning against a tree with her back to their camp, her eyes squeezed shut. Head spinning, heart racing, Kit finds she can’t actually keep herself up, and slides down to the root of the tree with a hollowed little sob.

She feels so, so unbelievably broken.

And away from the fire, she’s so unbelievably cold. Her shakes might have started as crying but soon Kit can't tell if the jolts that wrack her body are sobs or deep, frozen shivers – either way she's overtaken till the only warm thing about her is the wet heat smearing her eyes. A distant voice suggests she should get back up and return to the fire, but the thought of crawling weakly back to Jade, sobbing and shaking as she is… it’s too unbearable. Freezing to death seems like the easier option and Mothers help her, all Kit wants is for something to be easy tonight.

Death is not an option while Jade's nearby, though, and Kit jerks in shock as Jade’s fingers curl around her wrists and pull her hands away from her tear stained face – she didn’t even hear her coming. And then Jade’s telling her it’s okay, which is so clearly isn’t, and Jade’s crowding forward to kiss away her tears, which should be devastatingly embarrassing but cracks something else within Kit, this deeper, desperate need to be looked after. Jade’s kisses on her face are so soft, her hands running up and down Kit’s arms so steadying, it’s as though Jade’s drawing poison from a wound and drinking it down herself.

When Jade puts Kit’s arms around her neck and picks her effortlessly off the ground, Kit lets her, gripping onto the back of Jade’s shirt with two meek fists, ashamed face buried in Jade’s neck, legs loose around her waist. She doesn’t speak, not one word, as Jade sets her down again near the fire, fastens her cloak around her shoulders to keep in whatever body heat she hasn’t lost yet, and encloses her completely in her arms.

Kit’s cries and shivers and shakes escort her directly into her worst dream yet.

They’re back in the dusty heat of the Immemorial City and Kit’s fighting the onslaught of Airk, fighting for Elora, fighting for her life. It’s hard it’s fast it’s brutal it’s heartbreaking, and her cruel memory makes her suffer again and again through the worst sentence she’s heard in her life: I'm gonna kill you to get to her. Her brother, promising her death.

She dreams she's under the water watching the ground close up above her, and she's fighting for her life, and she’s reaching for Airk, and she’s failing over and over again to reach him in time.

She dreams she's in the cold dark woods, and Airk’s arm is hooked so tightly around her throat, as he drives a dagger deep into her soft gut, and she’s fighting for her life –

Kit's scream rips her from sleep, bolting out of her bedroll so fast she’s on her feet before the echo of her cry bounces off the cliff back to her. The fire’s almost out and the solitary moon is too new to give much light, but there's a weak trace of dawn on the horizon. She can barely see anything, so when a dark shape moves inhumanly fast across the space toward her, Kit runs as fast as she can.

Not for a moment does she consider the shape might be Jade, Kit’s body is long past thinking and is running on pure instinct. When a branch too close behind her snaps like a neck, Kit spins around – and a bolt of electrical blue lighting smashes down from overhead and splinters a tree between her and Jade to pieces.

What

The

Fuck.

Kit most definitely does not faint, but her legs give out in shock and Kit finds her ass on the ground as she gapes at the tree. She blinks and blinks and every time, lightning flashes across the inside of her eyelids. The real world is so dark in contrast, the moon thin and curved and pointed as a knife, glinting a little light down so she can see the shape of the tree, and against the black bark is the gentle, orange glow of embers trying to take hold of wet, soaked wood.

“Kit,” Jade crouches down at her side, and Kit looks at her with wild, lightning-seared eyes. Recognition only takes a moment. “Are you alright?”

“Did you see that?!” Kit blurts, gesturing wildly at the tree, too struck to think of anything else. “We were nearly toast!”

“I saw it.”

“Out of nowhere! Like, it’s not even cloudy, what the fuck, Jade?!”

“Hey, hey,” Jade takes Kit’s face in her hands, gently easing her face toward her. “You’re incredible, love,” she says, and Kit isn’t sure what that has to do with anything but then Jade’s kissing her, and Kit lets her, because she’s way, way too stunned to do anything else.

Jade pulls her to her feet, and Kit’s shaking hard again and cannot take her eyes off that tree. The embers are almost out already, the cold and damp of the wood winning out against the smouldering heat, but it's impossible to say if the tree itself will survive the strike.

Kit can't care about the tree though, because—

Because fuck, it was Airk who drove the knife into her side.

Airk who used his blood to call a wrong Elora and an unexploded Graydon right to their camp.

Airk who wrapped his arm around her neck and stabbed her.

Kit can't breathe as if it's all happening again. Her brother, her twin.

"Airk," she gasps, twisting sharply out of Jade’s grip, one arm held straight out to keep Jade at bay. "Airk, Airk stabbed me?? Airk? Why didn’t you say? Why didn’t you fucking say?!"

The world hovers on the edge of collapse because Jade said she’d given Airk Kit’s sword and and and Kit is petrified by where following that thought might lead and—

And then Jade shatters the world completely, with a soft voice like Kit has just woken from a nightmare and all she needs is a gentle touch: "It's alright, Kit, this was always the plan."

Kit feels like her throat has been cut.

She can’t reply to that, though her mouth drops open, forming silent ghost words in denial. Her brother, her twin, her Jade?! Kit's never felt so dizzyingly or violently abandoned in her life.

"Before you freak, let me explain—" Jade begins, and Kit’s voice comes back in a rush.

"Before I FREAK? You're gonna EXPLAIN why my BROTHER trying to GUT ME is part of a PLAN?!" She’s rising into furious hysteria, and Kit wishes she had something – her sword, the Cuirass – shit, even a rock, but she's completely unarmed, shielded by nothing but an ugly brown shirt and a hastily fastened cloak.

“Kit,” says Jade, and Kit scrambles away, backwards, frantic, hand behind her to feel for trees and eyes on Jade. On Jade who’s not – who can’t be – who can’t be – Kit can’t even think it, even as all the pieces are falling into place.

“Please,” she gasps, still moving back and back, her hand giving up on blindingly groping behind her so she can pull her arms up in the closest approximation of the most basic defence pose.

Jade just keeps coming, steadily, and Kit’s searching her face for signs she’s turning into a monster but the only sign is the primordial fear Jade’s awoken in her blood. Kit stumbles as the ground dips out beneath her foot and her arms flail, she feels so clumsy it’s a miracle she gets her balance back.

But that’s the only miracle – because behind Kit, the ground drops away. Kit glances down; it’s not as dramatic a drop as the ravine at the Barrier, but it’s a long and steep slope that promises to roll her head over heels for some time.

Caught between Jade and the drop, Kit thinks, for a moment, falling would be easier—

Then Jade grabs her by the necklace, and with a rush of heat through both their bodies, pulls Kit closer. Jade’s fist squeezes around the cord above the pendant, closing it around Kit’s neck, and every part of Kit goes cold and hopeless.

“What did they do to you?” Kit whispers, feeling her neck press against the cord as she swallows. “Jade, what did they do?”

“It’s not what you think,” Jade promises. “Please trust me, Kit.”

Kit whines, because her heart wants nothing more, her wonky survival instincts nothing less. “Please,” she says in return, trembling, desperate. “Jade, please don’t break my heart–” and then Jade’s tugging her forward by her necklace to kiss her, whispering between one kiss and the next that Kit’s heart is safe with her, is loved by her, belongs to her, and she would tear the world apart before she let anyone harm it.

Kit’s too stunned to close her eyes, so Jade doesn’t close hers either, and Kit can't miss the hunger in Jade's eyes as Jade claims her bottom lip, and knows for sure letting herself fall would be easier.

"I love you, Kit," Jade swears, her hand gripping emphatically tighter to the necklace. “Please don’t fight me.”

Kit shudders, deeply, and with another whimper she closes her eyes and leans into Jade’s kiss. Parts her lips to let her in, let Jade’s tongue storm her mouth.

Kit drags her hands up Jade’s strong arms, curls all her fingers around the balls of Jade’s shoulders–

Kit twists–

And pushes Jade right over the edge.

Chapter Text

This is the worst moment of Kit’s life.

Worse than realising her father was never coming home, worse than Sorsha telling her she was to be married, worse than Jade confessing she was leaving, worse than being dragged away from her father's voice, than screaming her bleeding heart open at Elora and then drowning. Worse than the last worst time – holding two swords to her brother's throat.

(She’s yet to figure out where the stabbing sits in this ranking, but right this second with raw guilt shredding her insides, she’d rather be stabbed again than do what she just did.)

Jade disappears over the edge and into the dark and Kit regrets her actions instantly, every stretched-to-snapping fibre of her screaming in panic as her vision tunnels towards the edge of the cliff. Strangled by this feeling, Kit can't do anything but throw herself toward the edge, barely breathing, eyes scanning the drop with her hand reaching out like she wasn’t far too late to stop Jade from falling.

Even with the moonlight and the faint touch of dawn, the light is not good. From the ravine, fog is beginning to creep over the ground and Kit's eyes can't pick out many details. The slope is littered with stubborn bushes and uneven rocks all so dark grey and misty she can barely tell one from the other, and as it drops it just gets darker and she can't see the bottom. She can hear, though, the scrabbling, the rolling of loose rocks and something larger. No scream though, no yell, no voice at all. But Jade's always had it in her to be a quiet, focused fighter.

Kit's never been so sick with herself or hated herself more.

Who is she, that she did that? That she was able to do that?

Please, Kit thinks, an aimless prayer that burns like stomach acid in her throat. She's never found it easy to believe that mythic forces of the universe have the power to help her, but her frantic mind screams the plea anyway. Please be okay, Jade.

If Jade's… if…

Kit can't think it.

She's not breathing, she's sure her blood is no longer circulating, the only thing she can feel in her body is the way her stomach is falling and falling and falling. Despair hasn't even reached her heart yet (self-loathing is so much faster) but it's coming.

The scrabbling falling nightmare goes quiet, save for the gentler rain of gravel till it all comes to a rest. Kit swallows, tries to remember she exists in a body and not a nebulous stormcloud of regret, and summons her croak of a voice. "Jade?" She calls, shaken and hoarse from her earlier tears.

A moment of too-silent tension, then, winded – "Kit?" – from the darkness.

Thank the Mothers.

"Kit," Jade sounds deeper. "Stay there."

Okay – thank the Mothers, but also – shit.

"Um," Kit panics, words rushing out of her mouth before she has a chance to think. "No, thanks um – you… stay there! That's an order! That's a – royal order!"

"Kit," comes the disembodied voice from the bottom of the ravine. Patient. Cool. "Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not the one talking about Wyrm plans and stabbing me!!” Kit snaps, shrieking down the slope. “I'm not the one being ridiculous!!" Kit feels so much more than ridiculous. Totally sick with relief and terror and a disjointed grip on reality, still desperately trying to deny Jade could ever –

Fuck, she wants to cry. Scream, wail, smash something to pieces. Rail against the universe till it reverses direction and takes them back and back so that next time she can protect Jade properly.

That power exists in the universe. Kit’s had it offered to her before. Everything the way it was. She can almost feel the warmth of her not-mother’s hand against her cheek—

But now, as then, Kit fights the feeling off like it’s trying to climb on top of her and choke her. Her eyes are stinging brutally, her arms weak as she shoves herself up from the ground, but she does it. Finds her feet again. Steps back from the edge.

She can't stay here. Kit knows immediately she has to find Elora and Willow and they can do that purgation thing. She thinks of Jade chained down like Graydon was and her mind spins with how much she hates that image.

Instead she thinks of Elora, leaning over Jade, filtering the corruption from her body as she did with Graydon, the most magical, beautiful thing Kit has ever seen. She needs that image, needs the powerful magic of the Semprum Sorceress–

She just needs to find Elora, that's all. She knows where Elora will be – everyone was heading to the Mothers' Gate, Kit just has to figure out where that is and get there before Jade catches up with her.

The plan, light on details as it is, bolsters her.

Kit has absolutely no idea where she is, but even through the gathering mist the sun is rising, and the last few mornings they’ve been walking into the sun to get there, so, that’s all Kit needs to do. Follow the light. And unlike Miss Ravine, Kit has a horse.

Simple.

She can make it.

Has to make it.

Kit sets her jaw, holds tight to her mission, and charge-stumbles back toward their little camp.

The first week Ballantine took Jade under his wing was hard on her. Though she’d been a fit young thing, used to work, by the end of the week her muscles ached in places she didn’t know she could ache. Her hands, already hardened from the stables, were tender from the hours of practise with a quarterstaff. She wasn’t going to mention it, but Ballantine specifically asked.

“It hurts,” she admitted, because he was honourable, and he had chosen her, and Jade was not going to lie to him.

“There's pain that makes you stronger and pain that weakens you,” he’d told her, opening her palm to inspect her hands, nodding with a quiet satisfaction that was the target Jade's heart had been aiming at since his first offer. “You learn to tell the difference by listening to your body.”

At the bottom of the ravine, Jade is very much in pain. Her teeth have torn the soft parts of her mouth to shreds and she can feel the cracks in her ribs, feel the bruises that will blossom on her back and hips and limbs. Worst of all, her left arm hangs wrong, and the pain in her shoulder is a burning fire, made worse with each vicious muscle spasm that shoots down her arm. Her right arm has fared better, she kept it tucked close to her body, Kit’s broken necklace clutched tight in her hand, her hand held firm against her heart.

Jade shifts the pendant into her bloody mouth, freeing her hand to walk her fingers over the ball of her shoulder, feeling the gap beneath her skin between where her shoulder sits and where it is supposed to. With her other forearm closer to her face she can smell the fresh tang of blood; her sleeve is in ribbons and she wears a series of ragged cuts from a thornbush, running from elbow to the back of her wrist. They’re barely oozing blood, though. They’re nothing.

Her joint moves beneath her fingers through no conscious will of her own, and suddenly there's a sick internal pop as her shoulder resets. It's a sound that would have turned her stomach once upon a time, that and the way her body shifts as though it does not belong to her anymore. Now though, Jade has a new understanding of the world. Of magic. Of what she promised to Elora in exchange for Kit's life and the way that Elora's will, the Wyrm's will, is at work in her body. Jade’s shoulder resets and Jade has never felt so connected to a greater power. It thrills and stuns and awes her, and it hurts – fuck does it hurt – but as her joint realigns, so does her mind.

With her eyes closed, Jade focuses on the feeling of Kit’s necklace pressed between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, focusing on the thought of reuniting it with Kit and not the pain in her shoulder. That’s her objective, her purpose. With Kit in her mind, the abnegation of pain is simple.

The necklace, when she drops it into her open hand, is covered in blood. It’s fitting. Her blood, and Kit, bound together.

As Jade had carried Kit from the cave and arranged her on Gravy’s broad back, Elora had explained to her how they, Kit and Jade, had been bound together by oaths and blood since before either of them was born. It’s beautiful, knowing their past stretches back further than their own lives, that the future they could create together will last long past both their deaths. It’s fate. They’re fate.

Kit's clasp has broken, but Jade loops the necklace around her own neck anyway, tying the bloodstained cord into an efficient little knot. Carrying it for Kit feels like an unspeakable honour.

Rolling her shoulder around in its tender socket, Jade checks herself. Pulls a stick from her hair, spits blood onto the earth, and pats the hard pouch at her hip where the Lux was jammed into her side, again and again as she rolled down the hill. She cracks her neck, presses her tongue into the deepest split in her lip. All's well.

Jade sets her sights on the top of the ravine, where Kit’s silhouette disappeared, and starts to climb. She can feel the uncommon strength in her hands as she grips a rock, pulls her body higher. It does hurt, but the pain will make her stronger.

Ballantine taught her many lessons, and she remembers this one now. As she pulls her way to the top she thinks of his dedication, his strength, the gifts he gave her.

She does not think of his end.

Their tiny camp is not hard to find, their little fire is a beacon through the trees in the fading dark. Kit is too frantic to feel relief, but a destination to go hand in hand with her plan makes the pressure on her chest ease up. A little.

Gravy is where they left him, a dark shape beyond the fire who – Kit hasn't realised till this moment – reminds her of Jade's horse Shadow. Lovely Shadow, who Jade had spent so many hours taming and training and riding and loving, who had seen them as far as the Pitiless Pass. In Kit's hopeful imagination, Gravy and Shadow have become interchangeable – the loyal steed who will take her to Jade's salvation.

Gravy and Shadow are not interchangeable.

The second he sees her he charges with a scream, and Kit staggers backward. It’s an ungodly scream, no, worse – it’s unhorselike. It’s so unhorselike Kit is certain that if she just listened a fraction harder she could make out a curse in his angry cry, but Kit is not focusing on listening, she’s focusing on backing up as fast as fucking possible out of the way of those hooves.

She ducks behind a narrow, straight tree as Gravy rakes a violent gash through the dirt. The tree is too skinny to hide her from those eyes, set deep in his enormous face like two burning coal pits, and she cannot tear her own eyes away. Had she really been so out of it that she didn’t realise what they were riding wasn’t a horse?

She doesn’t know what he is – even after everything she’s seen her mind doesn’t want to believe in the horror stories of nuckelavees and kelpies and demonic horse-things out of old tales – but whatever he is, just look at him, his muscles straining like ropes beneath his coat, his mouth unhinging much, much wider than she ever could have believed – a maw of a mouth. There’s no way she can ride him.

The brutally efficient removal of that hope leaves her reeling, heart slamming against her chest like it’s a trapped and desperate thing determined to shatter her bones and escape.

It feels like her whole torso pulses and aches. Kit presses her hand shakily against her stomach, but it doesn't help. Nothing helps. Kit’s eyes fall to the meagre possessions they’d brought with them, scattered around the ground. The saddlebag with the last of the food, her water skin, and – sitting beside Gravy’s saddle, the Cuirass. Her breath hitches – hope is not lost.

The Cuirass, that’s the hope her father left her to find. She paid for that piece of armour with like, all the pain of her childhood – she can’t abandon it after everything that has been sacrificed to find it.

Okay – fuck his maw-mouth and coal pit eyes, Kit needs that armour. She grits her teeth and strides out from the tree, waving her hands in the air – it yanks at her scabs, but the pain only adds to the volume of her wordless “RAAAH!”

It would have startled any normal horse, made them back off just enough that Kit could dart forward and snag the Cuirass, but Gravy rears up and he’s so massive suddenly, Kit screams a “NO!” in childish panic. Screams a frantic: “BAD GRAVY!!” like this will make him behave. It doesn’t, and Kit darts back behind a tree, the edge of hysteria in her mind is a sharper and more threatening drop than the one she pushed Jade down.

She swears she can feel the quake of the earth beneath her feet when he slams his front legs into the ground again. Once again, Kit wants to cry.

He stares at her, and when he peels back his lips to show off his jagged teeth, Kit is certain he’s thinking about eating her and she – she is absolutely and vividly aware of how easily he could tear her delicate flesh from her bones.

Giddy with fear, Kit has no choice. She can’t take on a monster barehanded, no matter how much it kills her to leave the Cuirass.

It nearly killed her to leave Jade, too, but if she finds Elora, right, she can keep them both?

No atheists on the eve of a battle she’d heard one of the grizzled men of the Pacalcade say once. She’d thought it was dumb, like, surely it made more sense to believe in your own skill than anything else? But Kit gets it, now. She feels desperate and small and very stupid but with her whole heart she sends a prayer to all the Mothers and moons and fates there ever were: please let me find a way to keep them both.

With one last glance at the Cuirass, guilt twists sickly in Kit, and even though running feels like the only shot she has, she also can’t help but feel she is making a terrible mistake.

The sun is dragging itself with wounded grace from behind the nearest mountain, bleeding light through a thickening gauze of low cloud by the time Jade steps back into their campsite.

Gravy huffs a soft foggy breath through his nose in greeting when Jade approaches. She rubs his nose, leaving marks of blood and dirt from her shredded hands on his dark hair.

Kit’s gone, but this isn’t yet a failure, not at all. With a waterskin that decidedly does not contain water in one hand, Jade walks a careful circle around their campsite, sipping from it till she finds Kit’s clumsy tracks. The liquid burns like cleansing fire in her shoulder and ribs, prickling sharply over every inch of scratched up skin. Sharpens her ears, sharpens her teeth. Jade feels as though she’s growing, filled with power and purpose and love and every good thing her young heart has ever desired.

She saddles up Gravy, collects their belongings, the heavy blanket and food Kit will need by the time Jade catches her. She gathers the Cuirass, straps it to the saddle, checks that Kit’s pendant still hangs at her throat, and kicks some cold dirt clods over the fire to snuff it out.

The sun rises on a colourless landscape; clouds rolling down from the mountains meet mist rising up from the valley, and the earth is bleached with frost. Little by little the sky becomes a brighter shade of grey, but the exact location of the sun itself is completely obscured.

The list of things Kit’s had to abandon keeps growing. The decision to head toward the sun. The Cuirass. Their food. Jade.

Jade – Kit heart aches like the worst bruise. And her neck. Jade’s bitemark throbs with every heartbeat and Kit lifts her hand to press her frigid fingers against her skin, hoping to soothe it. She can’t help but remember Jade’s hot tongue scaling the face of her neck, can’t help but picture Jade scaling the cliff face toward her. Kit shivers, at both images, and it’s then with her hand on her bare neck that she realises her necklace is gone, too.

Direction. Armour. Food. Jade. Necklace.

A thin, stupid giggle escapes Kit’s mouth. Like, of course! Of course she’s lost that too!

It’s only one short moment of a giggle, though. The sound fades, and is replaced with a dull feeling of loss.

Of course she’s lost that too.

Kit’s legs do not want to be climbing up, but since Jade – Kit’s mind bucks when she remembers what she did – since Jade fell down, Kit’s gotta tackle the sloping ground, right? This feels like strategy. She struggles to keep her mind focused on what remains of her plan; put distance between herself and Jade, find the barrier, find the Mothers' Gate, find Elora. Even without the sun… maybe she can figure something out.

It’s the first part that’s ripping her heart up the most, though. Wanting distance from Jade feels unnatural. Instead, she wants to stop, to turn back, to find Jade, help Jade. Grab her by the shoulders and shake her and scream everything wrong out of her. Gather her face in both hands and kiss her till she’s her Jade – but Kit’s mind bucks again as she thinks about the way Jade had grabbed her and refused to let go. Kit doesn’t know how to fight that. Kit doesn’t know if she can.

Sniffing hard, Kit grits her jaw and blinks back stinging tears and forces herself to move faster, till exertion is grinding those tears out her eyes and her whole body hurts enough that thinking about Jade becomes only another part of this terrible building storm inside her.

Jade hates this, truly, she never wanted to be forcing Kit to run through the woods alone. But she knows Kit inside out, and knows that so long as Kit still has strength in her she is not going to stop.

Jade could make lists of all the things she loves about Kit – she has done, in the past, lying on her narrow bed and putting herself through the beautiful torment of trying to decide what she loves best – but too many aspects of her vie for top position. Her wild heart, her passion, her equally endearing and frustrating stubbornness? (And more, since Kit first kissed her, though these were no longer a torment to think about, these warm her, make her flush, make her want: Kit’s biteable lips, the warmth of her body as Jade sleeps against her, the way she curls the corner of her mouth up that makes Jade want to curl her fingers deep inside her till she gasps Jade’s name, lost in pleasure.)

There are endless things about Kit for Jade to adore.

And so no, Jade will not be so brutal as to throw a kicking and screaming Kit over the back of a horse – or a… well, over Gravy’s back. As Kit had told her, she was going to stubbornly try and walk, so Jade is going to guide her as best she can, and Jade is going to let her walk until she cannot go any further on her own, and then Jade is going to scoop her up in loving arms and carry her the rest of the way.

The trees Kit pushes past are thin and twisted, a little like the trees they saw when they first found land again after returning from the Shattered Sea. Those trees were bent backward by sea winds, but these, far inland, are twisted by something else. The higher Kit climbs toward the top of the hill the more the trees bend back, away from the summit. Like they were all trying to escape something that came over that hill once, long ago.

The more the trees bend back, the more a growing feeling urges her onward. It’s as though two helping hands are tugging at both wrists, drawing her on, and on, and up.

The hill is not one easy, gentle rise; it’s a lumpy mass of dips and slips barely held together by weak roots, but her attention lands on a narrow road. She almost misses it, would have missed it, but the same insistent feeling tugs her eyes in its direction, and her heart says yes with a certainty Kit is too tired to question.

Her heart whispers come home and home is what Kit wants.

With constant, jumpy glances behind her, Kit follows the narrow clear strip through the trees. There are faint indents on either side where the wheels of carriage or cart once ground into the earth, and at the bottom of each track is a filthy layer of ice. Her footsteps breach the frost on the ground with soft crunches, and with each step they get a little closer together, a little slower.

She’s not complaining about the ugly shirt now. With both sleeves pulled up over her hands and her cloak crossed tightly across her body, Kit is trying to become as small as possible against the cold. Each puff of breath is visible, and adds to the encroaching cloud.

It’s… luck, she thinks, that she raises her eyes from the ground when she does. Terrible or wonderful luck. The road ahead follows the gradual incline of the hill and fog creeps its fingers through the trees, and rising above the fog, standing still and not facing her, is the dark silhouette of Gravy and Jade.

Jade’s here. She’s alive. She’s okay.

Relief hits first, and panic only follows when Kit remembers why she’s running. Kit shoots off the road without picking a direction and prays she’s not in Jade’s line of sight by the time Jade turns around. Deeper among the trees, the frost thickens and thickens till it’s a hard layer of snow. Kit’s footprints are dark shadows but… there’s nothing she can do about it.

Nothing she can do about any of it but keep moving.

In the far, far distance, Kit can hear a baying in between her crunching footsteps. For one brief and bright moment, her heart lifts with the thought that it might be hounds from Tir Asleen, seeking her out, leading the familiar colours of the Pacalcade her way.

One brief and bright moment only, she’s not so naive to let it last more than that.

A little way off, Jade hears them too, and raises herself up in the saddle to listen. Her ready fingers reach for the hilt of her sword, her considering tongue finds the sharpest point of her sharpest tooth. She recognises their calls from the night of the Gales’ attack, but that pack served a purpose. Jade doesn’t trust these calls, coming down from the mountains, to be anything but hungry, and Kit’s body is so very, very delicate.

So delicate, and belonging to a girl who is likely to take on a pack while dual-wielding nothing but attitude and a sharpened stick, and bring herself to ruin.

She’s lucky she has Jade on her side.

Kit has stumbled across another, thinner path, and whether it’s animal or human made, it seems deliberate. Each one of her breaths rasps into her tormented lungs, and she’s getting so close to just leaning against a tree to rest when Jade cuts her off again. This time the hoofbeats are behind her and catching up so fast they strike a live terror in Kit, so sudden her head swims with it, nearly cuts her loose her from her body.

Part of Kit will never be scared of Jade, not her Jade, but another part of her, some primal part, understands she's being hunted.

She’s wounded prey and Jade has some of the sharpest tracking skills of any person Kit’s ever known. Jade was always so at ease out in the wild, comfortable in a way she never was within the city walls, and Kit used to love watching Jade point out evidence of deer, reading a story in broken twigs and footprints that barely look like footprints. Kit remembers how she felt when Jade was asked if she could track the Gales, remembers her instant affirmative reply, and even though Kit had been overrun by every annoyance that day she still felt the warm swell of pride: that's my Jade.

The thought that Jade is using those skills against her makes Kit want to scream.

Makes her want to go very very still and very very silent.

She does neither. Up one side of the path the land rises at an angle that a regular horse would have trouble with. Kit can only hope it slows down Gravy, but maybe demon horses climb like mountain goats and she’s gonna feet his teeth rend her flesh open—

She’s just gonna have to be faster. Sprightly. Thinking her most uncatchable thoughts, Kit grabs a tree root and starts scrambling, climbing on all fours with both wounds on her front screaming, mind screaming worse.

She doesn’t look down.

Doesn’t look back.

Doesn’t hear her name but she can feel Jade’s closeness like a hand on the back of her neck.

(It never crosses her mind that hunting is not Jade’s aim, but a much gentler act; herding. Jade would never, ever want her dead. Jade only wants her home.)

Kit hits the top of the hill and starts running down the other side on heavy, jarring feet, searching for a place to hide before Jade finds a way over the top. Spots a low circular wall not far off and aims herself at it, clambering over it and dropping herself inside.

Heart thumping, and sucking icy air roughly through her throat, Kit ducks low, pressing back against the cold stone. She tries to stop gasping, tries to calm her heart so she can hear over the roar of blood in her ears. She strains, listening for hoofbeats, for footsteps, for Jade calling for her in a way that Kit fears and aches for.

Though it should be what she wants to hear, there’s no relief in the awful silence that follows. Far from being reassured, Kit remains plagued by the feeling that she isn't alone.

As the adrenaline drops, a new urgency yanks at Kit’s mind. Her hand is wedged against her throbbing stomach and when she pulls her palm away, her skin is streaked with blood.

“Come on, really?” she whines, gritting her teeth together. Her thick scab has split from her skin and blood oozes out from beneath it, though most of the scab clings tightly on. With a wince of disgust, Kit digs the ball of her hand against it like she could will it to mend with her mind.

She raises her other hand to check her ribs, and at least that wound isn’t leaking. Kit feels a faint flicker of gratitude before it is utterly demolished by a blaze of anger.

World's greatest sorceress her royal ass!? Why couldn’t Elora have healed her properly?! Is skin really more difficult than growing a bush? Are her insides really more complicated than sucking the Lich out of Graydon??

“Ugh!” Kit growls out loud, as the bitter resentment she’d left behind on the Sea returns in a dizzying rush. “Amateur!”

Kit pulls her hand away again to glare at the blood like she can read meaning in the pattern, and a horrible realisation smacks her between the eyes: Elora didn’t want her healed.

If… if that were true, then this shitty healing job, just like her stabbing, was… was what Jade meant when she said this was always the plan.

A gag makes her throat and stomach clench at the memory of Jade’s voice echoing the same words they’d heard on the dying, crumbling, gross-kissed lips of the Crone.

What plan? The question starts Kit shaking and she can’t stop, deep trembles rattling through her body. Why almost kill her then save her life? Why only heal her enough that she can move but barely run?

And worse, oh so much worse: What happened to Elora?

Because if the Elora Kit knew wanted her healed, Elora would have done it properly. Kit can't believe she ever doubted it; Elora would never leave her like this. Not unless–

Unless something has happened to Elora the same way something had happened to Jade.

Which means Kit has let both of them down.

And it absolutely means Elora can’t help save Jade.

Direction. Armour. Food. Jade. Necklace. Elora.

Kit’s short blaze of anger gutters out into something rotten and hollow. She doesn’t think, ever in her life, she’s felt so out of reach of hope, or of help. Doesn’t know how many times she can keep falling into this hole before the will to climb out of it leaves her for good.

Her hand drops, the strength evaporating out of her limbs, and her head falls forward onto her knees. The shakes are even stronger, now, but her body only wrings one rough, solitary sob out of her.

She doesn’t know what to do. And it’s so cold. She remembers Jade their first night out of the city, shaking her head as Kit arranged her bedroll – we're sleepin’ on the ground, Kit. We need more blankets underneath us than on top. It sounded ridiculous, but Jade was right (she is so smart, Kit misses her so, so much) and the earth is draining her body heat just as greedily as the air.

Kit closes her eyes, like the darkness behind her eyelids might be warmer. She closes her eyes, strength slipping faster and faster and—

–A crash rings in her ears as a huge warrior, broad and ginger, throws open two iron doors at the end of her hall, and his severe footsteps echo up toward the cavernous ceiling before he throws himself at her feet. She stands tall over him on a dais, and inside her, power and pride and vicious satisfaction fight for dominance as he promises his undying fealty, his people’s loyalty and service. He looks up at her with familiar brown eyes, swearing everything in exchange for freedom.

He slices open his skin to seal it in blood and Kit hears her own deep voice claiming mine–

–And finds herself again in her own bleeding body, on the frozen ground, her limbs so stiff it is a struggle to move them.

Cold leeches up from the ground and it's like a magnet holding her down; she's so, so weak, and her body is so, so heavy. There’s no sound but her own heartbeat and breath and the echo of the voice that was hers-but-not-hers in her head.

Mine. Kit can still feel that intense possession in her heart, can feel an alien desire coursing through her body. It’s intoxicating. It’s awful. She wants more. She hates it.

But the pain in her gut is worse in a very dangerous real-world way, and the cold only highlights the fact that she has to push all weird dreams aside and deal with the choice in front of her: keep moving, or stay here and freeze?

Raking the unbloodied side of her hand against her frozen nose, Kit heaves herself to her feet with an audible whimper. She glances over her shoulder toward the crest of the hill, the empty, Jadeless hill, then begins the slow trudge down into the valley. Mine echoes in her head, distant, now, but no less imagined than the faraway cries of the dogs.

Her hand leaves a dark smudge of blood on the shattered stone that was one the base of a watchtower, hundreds of moons ago.

Kit is a princess who grew up in peace, and Kit is exhausted and terrified and bleeding sluggishly and very alone, and in this state she does not recognise a landscape scarred by an old war. She doesn't parse the difference between trees that die back in winter and these black and twisted things that have been dead longer than she's been alive. The only thing she notices about the trees is there is less snow between them, and though they’re thin, she tries to keep to them, and the tiny bit of cover they afford.

When the land flattens out, the cover runs out as well, and Kit traipses instead over barren, ruined earth, none of it so covered in snow that the cold should have choked all life out of it. But though there was once, there is no life here anymore. The few signs she sees of habitation are long-rotten fence posts or the torched remains of little houses, and when she steps around an old well her only thought is a short stab of thirsty devastation that there’s no bucket she can drink from. It’s almost too cold, anyway, to notice the toxic stink in the air.

Another Kit might recognise these things, a Kit who isn't running for her life (or only trudging for it, now, since the energy for running left her in the ruins of the tower.) A Kit who isn’t wounded by knives, by cold, by a heart shedding its broken pieces every time she looks behind her. A brighter, alert Kit who had studied the maps of beyond the Barrier could have put death and ruin together and realised whose badlands she was walking through.

Kit can only focus on putting one foot in front of the other, keeping herself upright, and digging her iced fingers under her arms to ward off the pain in them. She can’t do anything about her other pain except try not to collapse again, but that challenge gets harder with every step.

Jade presses her hand against the bloody stone, in the very same spot Kit’s had been, aching for a connection with her girl. Her skin comes away tacky, and she rubs her thumb through Kit’s blood on her palm. It pains her that Kit is putting herself through this. If she’d just stop, stop running, Jade could take care of her, and Kit so badly needs Jade to take care of her.

She must be so tired, so cold and hungry and thirsty and sore and scared and alone. She can’t go on much further, can she, before falling back into Jade’s arms? Jade hopes not. She misses Kit in her arms. Kit belongs in her arms.

Jade is not tired. Nor is she hungry or thirsty. Jade hasn’t been these things for several days; the drink Elora gave her is a miracle like that. Gravy now, he needs to eat, but Jade is used to taking care of her steed and Gravy cracks down bones with the same eagerness as Shadow munched down carrots, feeding him isn’t a difficult ask.

In fact, she’s discovered she likes the hunting.

There’s only one spot of physical discomfort. Elora’s drink has completely soaked into every point of pain in her body – bar one. Her hip. Her hip where she carries the Lux, where it hammered and hammered into her on her journey down the ravine. It aches like a bruise, it irritates, it – it fucks her off, is what it does. More than once, she nearly hurls the hateful thing straight into a ditch.

Winter has sunk its teeth into this valley deeper than any other place Kit’s ever been, and she can’t tell if the oppressive sky is getting brighter or darker. She hopes not darker. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, come nightfall. Pained feet keep crunching through the snow and she thinks – maybe there’s a village, nearby? A little settlement? A single, soliday warm house?

Keeps hoping that, but keeps thinking of the haunted look on Elora's face when she spoke about the woodcutters, eating their lunch. Even now, in the emptiness of everything, with as much as Kit longs for help, that look haunts her.

That’s not all that’s haunting her, either. The more she worries about it getting dark, the more strange lights keep dancing at the edge of her vision, tinted the blue of buried veins but vanishing when she looks straight at them. She wants to see them clearly, but the jerking of her head makes her dizzy so it's hard to catch them in the act.

Madmartigan used to tell her stories of will-o-the-wisps, fey that lured travellers to their death. They’d never been Kit’s favourite stories – the death was interesting, sure, but enemies called wisps? Ugh. Tell me about a dragon, she’d whine instead. Something with teeth, dad!

Grief squeezes her heart at the thought of her father. Every time, the hurt hits her when she thinks she doesn’t have any more to lose. His promise to always be with her rings so hollow, now, and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts.

The ache of that loss, and the sudden, unbearable weight of her body sinks Kit to her knees. Instantly, the snow bites through her trousers and into her bones.

Her dad’s voice doesn’t come to her like it once did. Here, in her most dire hour of need, there’s nothing, and she feels its lack so strongly. She has nothing. She’s lost her father. She’s lost his sword and her armour. She’s lost her brother, her friends, and the women she wants to shape her entire future around.

No one to curl into. No one to hold her. Kit folds in on herself, her hands pinned beneath her arms, the closest she can get to giving herself a hug.

She shivers and shivers and continues wanting to cry, her face a mess of tension, but no tears escape her pounding head, no sobs. She is so, so tired, and she hurts. And there’s no one around. No shelter. No warmth.

Kit feels about a million years old.

And with the quiet inevitability of an executioner signing her death warrant, the first snowflake falls on her frozen cheek.

Kit exhales, the ghost of the bitterest, blackest laugh.

Arrogant of her, wasn’t it, to worry about what was going to happen when night fell? There’s no way she’s going to make it that long. The clouds are so thick the fresh snow will fall and fall, and the winter will take over, and these thoughts of how deep she can dig her aching fingers into the final remnants of her body’s warmth might be the last ditch effort to hold onto life she ever makes. If she tries to keep going, she will only fall over again, face first in the snow, and she won’t be able to get back up.

In the end, the thought that she might not wake up is not… suicidal.

It’s just… inevitable.

Kit’s head sinks down toward her knees, so low her hair brushes the thin crust of ice over the snow. There’s a dampness where her stomach presses against her thighs she knows is blood. When a fatter snowflake touches the back of her neck where her cloak gapes, she doesn’t even shiver. She’s so tired. She could just sleep.

Kit thinks, vaguely, that it’s a better death than drowning.

Long before the frozen wasteland has its chance to claim Kit, there’s a crunch of leather boots against the snow. Kit very almost doesn’t lift her chin.

But she does.

Jade watches her, from two dozen feet away. “Oh love,” she says, stepping forward.

Death is not an option while Jade's nearby.

Kit cranks her spine into straightness, just enough to hold out one arm. “No,” she croaks, arm visibly shaking with exertion. “No no.”

“Kit,” Jade speaks her name like a prayer, and suddenly she’s standing right in front of her.

The same fear shoots through Kit’s belly as last night when she wanted Jade to stop and Jade did not stop, and it is fear enough to compel her to move. The only strength she has left is the strength to crawl, so Kit crawls, hand over hand and on her knees through the snow.

Jade takes three short steps and her fist closes around the cloak at the back of Kit’s neck, and Kit’s forward momentum pulls the fabric tight across her throat. Her panicked breath strains through her windpipe and dread shoots all the way down her body, but the choking only lasts a moment before Jade’s grip loosens, and she kneels on the frozen ground at Kit’s side.

The dread remains, though.

“Easy,” Jade calms, splaying her warm hand wide on Kit’s back. Kit gasps in unhindered breath before Jade’s other hand finds her face and turns Kit’s chin toward her, and then Kit stops breathing altogether.

“Please,” she whispers, but she has no idea what she’s pleading for. Please leave her here to die? Please help? Please be different? Please just be Jade again?

“Oh, my Kit,” Jade says, pressing the back of her hand against Kit’s cheek with a gentleness that undoes her. It’s too much, this small act of softness hits her deeper than Airk’s knife, and to Kit’s great shame she starts to cry.

“It’s okay, little one, it’s okay,” Jade croons softly, guiding Kit’s body toward her, shifting her, so Jade might more comfortably take her in her arms. Kit pushes against her, whimpers against her, closes her eyes and squeezes them even tighter against what is happening to her.

And Jade hushes each whimper and protest, kisses her forehead with lips that feel like she’s burning feverishly up, and Kit’s tense face crumbles at the tender touch.

Jade lifts her up out of the grip of the snow, her arms under Kit’s knees and around her back. She radiates heat, fiery but oh, so so welcome.

“Come here, love, turn your face toward me, warm yourself up,” Jade urges, lifting her chin to create the perfect little nest for Kit’s face, and Kit… Kit’s head seeks out a place where she can hear Jade's heartbeat, steady in its rhythm, where she can feel the burn of the skin at Jade’s throat against Kit’s numbed face… and the scent of Jade, achingly familiar and so terribly missed… how can this not be welcome?

There are no words to describe the smell. It’s… it’s just Jade, it’s home.

“You’re so cold,” Jade breathes, and it’s true, Kit’s so cold, and against Jade’s neck she gives the smallest grateful whimper, and it’s Jade, not Kit, that shivers down her spine.

“You did so well,” Jade praises, such pride on her face as she carries Kit across the snow. “You came so far, love, you’re so strong. But I’ve got you, now. I can carry you the rest of the way. Shhh, shhh, my little one. We’re nearly there, my love. You’ve done so well.”

She continues to murmur sweet comfort into Kit’s hair, and Kit keeps her eyes closed. With Jade’s voice, as familiar as home and twice as safe, spinning a blanket of comfort around her, Kit can pretend, Kit can so easily pretend that nothing is wrong, and let Jade carry her burdens, because Mothers know Kit can’t carry them anymore.

Gravy is waiting for them, and it’s the metallic smell of him that tugs Kit’s eyes open again. Against the white of the snow he looks even darker, even more enormous, and he paws the ground as Jade gets closer.

“Stop,” Kit rasps, trying to twist out of Jade’s arms, and “no, no please,” as Jade holds her tighter. “Please put me down, please, Jade, put me down, I wanna walk.”

“But you don’t have to,” Jade reminds her. “Kit, you’re hurt, you need to let me look after you.”

Kit’s voice, then, comes from the cavernous mines somewhere deep within her, low and rough and growling as it cracks into the open air: “Put me down!”

She almost doesn’t know what to do with herself when Jade does. She struggles to get her frozen feet under her, but Jade keeps her arm locked securely around Kit’s back, she couldn’t fall again if she wanted to. It’s so familiar, Jade holding her up, like their long, long walk awake from Skellin when they took each step together, Kit stumbling, Jade holding her steady.

Kit’s body knows she can rely on Jade’s strength and for a moment, her mind’s too wretchedly shattered to argue. Then Jade reaches up to readjust Kit’s hood and protect her face from falling snow, and with a “just stop fussing, fuck!” Kit raises a clumsy hand to bat it away, wriggling out of her grip.

Because there’s nowhere for Kit to go, Jade lets her. She knows Kit sometimes needs a little space to breathe before she’s ready to be sensible again.

Kit does take the moment to breathe, but it doesn’t make her feel any more sensible. Her teeth are still rattling in her skull, she still feels stabbed all over by knives and cold. Lethargy still threatens to crush her whole self like it’s a leviathan on her shoulders.

“Where are you taking me?” Kit manages to ask, glancing at Gravy over Jade’s shoulder. He glances back; his eyes slit like a goat’s. Kit is chillingly certain they weren’t like that before.

Kit half expects Jade to lie, as she must have been lying about heading toward the Mothers’ Gate, meeting up with their friends. She’s braced for a lie, so the truth nearly takes her out. “Nockmaar castle.”

“Oh of course. Nockmaar castle. We had so much fun there last time,” Kit’s voice is paper thin. “Why?”

“There’s a ritual Elora knows, one that can make you strong again,” Jade says, another truth that strikes a colder fear into Kit’s heart. “A restoration. A rebirth.”

Kit’s laugh, too, is paper thin. “Elora already tried to restore me and, oh look,” she opens her cloak, the dark stain obvious where seeping blood glues her shirt to her skin. “Fucking failed at that, didn’t she?” She’s not sure that trying to talk logic to Jade is going to achieve anything, right now, Kit’s not even sure if what she’s saying is logic, she really is only saying words because talking is the only thing Kit can think of to do. If she’s talking, Jade isn’t hauling her onto the back of that horse monster.

“If I ordered you to take me to Tir Asleen,” she hates the sound of hope in her voice, even as she can’t help but try it on. “Would you even listen to me?”

“Tir Asleen is not going to fix you,” Jade says, and Kit closes her eyes and pulls her cloak tighter. Yup, right, resounding no it was, then.

“And Nockmaar is? Jade, that’s where Bavmorda tried to like, rip Elora out of existence! It’s not a place for restoration!”

“It’s the perfect place for it,” Jade counters, putting a hand behind her to rub Gravy’s flank as she speaks. “Elora can explain it better. Nockmaar – the High Tower – she says it acts as a fulcrum. A place to balance the biggest forces in the world. Great destruction, great restoration.”

“Great bullshit,” Kit nods, and nods, taking little steps backward. “Just the best bullshit that’s ever come out of your mouth, Jade. Can you even hear yourself?” Her voice quavers, a plea that Jade will just snap out of it and see herself. Come back to herself.

Jade purses her lips together, and steps toward her, and Kit panics and screams “DON’T!” so loud it ravages her throat, pieces her ears, with so much force her vision tunnels for one lightheaded moment.

When her vision clears, Jade’s demeanour has changed. Her head’s dropped, her teeth are bared and terrifyingly sharpened, and her pupils dilated because, quite suddenly, they are no longer alone.

Kit jumps as the first Death Dog steps into her view, huge and dark and smooth of limb, every one of his teeth bared as dangerously as Jade’s as he swivels his thick neck between the two of them. Kit freezes, because on her other side there’s another, and another and another, more than a dozen of them in a circle that’s growing smaller and smaller. One snaps at the edge of her cloak and she can see the strength in its jaw, the way it must lock into the flesh of its prey, but this one's jaw does not lock, and its raised hackles settle back as it looks up, and meets her eyes.

Kit does not know – is too frightened to know – what it sees in her eyes. She can feel every last drop of blood draining from her face as the dog turns from her and steps between her and Jade, as the pack moves as one and closes Kit out of their circle, all attention centred on Jade.

Jade snarls so viciously it wrinkles her nose, her eyes two raging fires. She pulls a long, curved dagger from her belt, and she and the leader dive straight for each other's throats without hesitation, without mercy, without a scrap of fear.

It’s mindless instinct, not conscious thought, that makes Kit turn and run. Blindly, heavily, each jolting step total agony.

Even if she could think, there’s still no way to tell, over the harsh panting of her breath, if the screams behind her are animal or human.

Kit knows she’s not going to make it far but despite that knowledge – or in spite of it – she keeps trying, and trying, till out of nowhere – or from everywhere – a sharp peal of laughter cuts through her ears. It’s a perilous sound that promises a certain end, like rotten ice cracking underfoot.

Kit stumbles badly, knees slamming into the ground. She drags her head up to look around; the laughter is so close, so loud, but there’s no one near and the world is spinning.

It’s in her head. As loud and clear and real as her father’s voice had been back in the Immemorial City. It’s in her head like the ’mine’ but this time she’s awake.

Kit whimpers, presses her palms over her ears, but that’s useless as ears have nothing to do with it. Fear gives her a final surge of energy and Kit digs her hands against the snow and pushes herself up and – her vision gives out instantly, the witchlights that were floating in the corner of her eyes burst now through the dark, till the whole world is nothing but blinding bright-dark.

There’s a sharp tug on both wrists, on the spot between her eyes, and sharpest of all is the hook in her heart. From all four, Kit feels herself pulled—

And finds herself in a tower.

It’s no tower she’s ever stepped foot in before but the same feeling of possession is imbued into each stone, every glass jar on each shelf and every open book. Out of the thin, narrow windows she recognises the landscape of Tir Asleen (mine, her mind sings) but her eyes pull away from the window and drop to her hands.

They’re her hands, but they’re not Kit’s hands; they're older, and larger, and spreading open a scroll. The words on the page aren't the language Kit grew up with, but she’s seen them before, scrawled in blood at the garrison of the Mothers’ Gate, scribbled in a satyr skin volume. This time, she can almost understand them, as though the letters are part of a kaleidoscopic picture and the meaning is just waiting to form.

She turns from the scroll and opens a small cage, and then suddenly she’s holding down a very large, very squirmy, very angry rat. Something deep inside Kit revolts at that; it’s not as gross as the were-rat but at least she didn’t have to touch that with her own bare hands.

But the rat is the least horrifying part of this – Kit’s mouth begins forming words that feel like poison, her tongue and lips twisting around them, gripped by an unnatural force she has no control over. Worse still is the rush of power from some well inside her as it rushes down her arms, and oh—

Oh, nothing has ever felt like this before.

A savage joy thrills through her, the edge of fear making it that much more exciting, and the rat in her hands is encased by the most beautiful – horrible – crystal she’s ever seen in her life.

Pride blooms in Kit's chest and she bathes in it, longs for an audience, needs to be witnessed. Needs…needs so much more. Ambition and rage surge within her, and the will to go far beyond rats. Bigger. Better.

A person.

People.

A whole kingdom, hers forever and ever.

Kit presses her face as close to the crystal as she can. Inside it, the rat still lives.

She feels her mouth twist into a smile. She is going to be the most magnificent creature the world has ever seen.

Kit screams herself back into her body, her back arching as she sucks in a harsh gasp of air. She scrambles to her hands and knees, the visuals and emotions of the dream still vivid in her mind but the feeling of the magic pouring through her even clearer. The feeling of being in a body utterly outside her own control makes her gag, and she twitches her hands and rakes them against the layer of snow on the ground, reminding herself she still has the ability to puppet her own muscles and bones.

Barely, though. Just barely.

The cold grips her fingers like a vice, closing around each one, and the pain becomes more and more agonising. It hurts so much that even through the shackles of exhaustion, it's motivation to crank herself back on her knees. With a dry, pained sob, Kit uses a nearby rock to pull herself back to her feet, her head swimming so badly she has to close her eyes again, and the living eye of the crystalised rat is vivid beneath her eyelids.

“What,” she whispers through a dry mouth. And, "the fuck," just to hear her own voice. The swearing is the tiniest, tiniest comfort.

But through the fog in her head comes another whisper, fainter now that she is awake, but still chillingly real. Blood of my blood it whispers, she whispers, and Kit wants to scream her denial. Her wounds ache, so very deep inside her.

Child of my child, my little sorceress—

Kit does bark out a scream then, rough and sudden, but the voice is her own, and in the hard light of day, it drowns the other voice out. “Fuck off,” she snaps for good measure, voice broken and feral, and pulls her cloak even tighter around her like the wool could be her armour. The denial feels good, feels right, feels like her, so Kit continues muttering viciously to herself as she picks her way downhill.

“Not a sorceress, fuck you. Not part of your fucking plan. I’m a–” she hesitates, as no great title comes to mind. Princess is hardly strong enough. Princess fits her like a ball gown, restrictively tight in some places, too loose and exposing in others. It never fit her well enough for her to draw any true strength from it. Not like—

“I'm a shield,” she says, voice solid, though it still cracks from weariness at the edges. “I'm a shield, and you're a dream. You’re a dead old woman, a nothing. I’m a shield.”

She pushes away the memory of her mother’s final warning, of enemies without and within, and a grim, shared vision that Bavmorda’s spirit would return and destroy Tir Asleen. Because what did visions even know? A dumb vision predicted Elora would die if she fought the Crone, and she didn’t.

No way her mom’s stupid vision is gonna come true, not if Kit has anything to say about it. Come on; she is at least as unpredictable as Elora Danan.

She sets her jaw. “I’m a shield,” she hisses again, sharp as the whispers that spit in her head. “You can’t touch me.”

Even without the perfect fit of the Cuirass surrounding her, saying this out loud gives her a little strength, though the words alone don’t stop her feeling horribly exposed and very, very touched. Kit grits her teeth and perseveres, gathering every scrap of anger into her chest and building it up like a campfire. Like a bonfire. No, a wall of fire burning all the way around her so nothing unwanted and corrupt can slip through.

“I am – Kit Tanthalos – of Tir Asleen,” she pants to herself, heavy footfalls punctuating her words, her intent stronger than her failing body.

“I am sword – and shield – against the dark bullshit of the world. I am – daughter – of Sorsha, and Madmartigan–”

Saying her mom’s name makes her heart ache in dreadful and childlike need, but her dad’s name is another fierce burst of fire for her wall and Kit screams into the falling snow, blazing brightly and shaking with the feeling despite the sharp sting of tears in her eyes:

“–I hope you’re giving it fucking indigestion, dad!”

The anger feels better than the sick and wonderful thrill of the power shooting through her arms and into the poor rat. The anger is hers. It’s hot. It’s vicious, and Kit knows this feeling is exactly what she is going to use to wrestle Jade back from the eternal, world-eating darkness. She is going to dive into its gullet and make it choke on her rage, she is going to claw it all open, she is going to pull Jade from its steaming corpse if it’s the last thing she ever does.

When a solid gust of wind throws a heavier helping of snow in her face, Kit snaps at it. When a warning rumble of thunder rolls across the sky, Kit snarls at the sky and swears at this too.

The sky hardens above her, like plate armour, heavy and solid and grey. The wind becomes a third knife, slicing through her cloak and leaving her open to the elements. Each new snowflake pierces like an arrow and the mass of them begins to eat up the distant landscape, till it’s like she’s walking through a void – but walking through a void on feet as numb as they are painful. The air is so bitter it cuts at her throat, the vice grip it has on her fingers shifts up her arms, clamps around her ankles, bites deep into the back of her neck.

It’s… it is too much, too bitter, the cold excoriating and cruel. But Kit, Kit has always been too much herself. Too brash, too clingy, too distant, too contradictory, too stubborn, too emotional. Kit’s used to being too much. She can use being too much. She clenches her teeth as the headache (as unbearable as the cold) and the pain in her stomach and chest (as unbearable as betrayal) and the awful, awful exhaustion strip layer after layer from her, but no matter how many layers it tries to strip, she’s not yet stripped down to nothing.

There’s too much. Kit’s too much. She will not be nothing.

That’s when she hits the river.

She’d seen it, when she was further up the valley, this shadowed stretch of water cutting through the land, jagged like a scar. Inasmuch as she could, she’d been trying to head toward it. Toward water.

Kit winces as she lowers herself to her knees – one hurts badly, a low throb that had faded into the background till she dared to press it against the hard, broken black rocks that line the river. There’s nothing she can do about it – all the rocks are sharp and she’s too thirsty not to crumble toward the only water she’s seen all day. The best she can do is shift her knee slightly so the most aggressive point isn’t jabbing right into her, and persevere through this, too.

The water is brutal and Kit grits her teeth as she dips her hand in, drinking down the little pool from the cup of her hand. It’s freakish, but beneath the freeze of it there’s a strange taste, one that makes her think of home. Not Tir Asleen but… home, like this is her river, her land, like the mine from earlier is so all-encompassing it’s soaked into every inch of this country and she’s drinking it in through chapped lips.

But by the second mouthful her lips and tongue are so cold she can’t taste anything. Dull but intense pain bangs behind her eyes like the cold is ramming the butt of a knife up through the roof of her mouth, but she’s still so thirsty.

By the third scoop of water, the cold has penetrated so deep into her it feels like her hand is on fire. By the fourth, another dry sob heaves through her, the simple act of drinking turning into a torturous ordeal, and her shaking hand loses most of her fifth attempt. By the sixth, her hand’s so numb it refuses to curl, refuses to hold water, and Kit rocks back on her heels, digging her wet hand under her arm to save it. The cold pierces from her fingers deep into her armpit, and she presses the back of her other hand against her lips to warm them, too. Her lips feel like a stranger’s against her hand. Like a corpse’s.

From behind her a loose rock rolls against another, and Kit’s stomach lurches as she forces herself back to her aching feet again.

Jade’s back.

At the edge of the expansive, stone riverbed, Jade watches her, bathed in blood. It coats her chin, her neck, and her hands and clothes are dark with it. For a moment, Kit’s body freezes, and then she is running.

The fastest route away from Jade is across the river and Kit doesn’t think, she just runs. It isn’t deep, rocks break the surface all the way across, but the cold of it hurts so much she actually shrieks.

“Kit!” Jade growls, bolting toward her. “Enough! STOP!”

“Bite me!” Kit screams back without turning her head (or choosing her words) focused only on where her feet are going next.

“Kit!” Jade charges into the river. The water hisses when it touches her skin. The falling snow melts against her like it’s trying to die.

Something has changed within her, surging into vivid life and preternatural power with each beast she sliced and tore through on her way to get to Kit. She is honed down to a singular purpose now; catch Kit. Every muscle, every beat of her heart, every thrilled tingle electrifying her skin is there to serve this purpose.

She’s never felt more pure or driven as she does when she pounces Kit and rolls her body to the ground. Kit screams in impotent rage as her face is forced into the snow, thrashing beneath Jade’s weight till Jade wraps a hand around each of Kit’s wrists and spreads open her arms, stretching Kit’s shoulders in her joints, pinning her firmly into the ground with Jade’s chest pressed into Kit’s back.

Kit strains, vocally struggling to pull her wrists from Jade’s iron grip, her toes scrabbling uselessly for purchase against the ground. She feels another hot burst of blood against her stained shirt as the futile twisting rips more scab from her stomach.

And then Kit feels Jade’s teeth pressing into the skin on the back of her neck, and Jade’s steaming breath as she whispers “stop” through the hairs standing up in petrified alarm. The sharp smell of blood is overpowering and visceral and meaty and–

Kit stops. Her mind has never gone this blank, and she goes so very, very still, the only movement her racing heartbeat. She’s not even sure she’s breathing.

Jade is though; short, heavy, hot breaths panting against the back of her neck, Jade’s chest heaving against Kit, and from the ancient, predator depths of her comes a low growl, speaking of hunger and a craving Jade has never fully given into.

Kit’s seen gentler traces of it though, from time to time. A taste of it in the Wildwood, the promise shimmering in the air between them when Jade suggested kissing her and never, ever stopping. Another helping on the Shattered Sea, Jade’s moan into her mouth when Kit kissed her, then later… Jade’s louder, longer moan the first time she sank to her knees before Kit to taste her, the way her eyes darkened in endless want as she pushed Kit open with her wonderful tongue. It’s every time Jade looked at her for too long across a crowded ballroom or over a feast table piled high with food she had no appetite for. The reason Jade insisted on wearing a mask to spar, as though that would hide the secret longing in her eyes.

It’s all that, unleashed.

It’s a craving for Kit, and Kit’s heart fights against every screaming warning in her mind that is trying to drive home the understanding that if Jade is a predator, she’s prey, because whatever her mind is saying, Kit’s heart has always longed to be craved.

There are times when her desire for Jade and to be wanted by Jade feels like the only things that are truly, purely her own, every other thing she’s wanted in her life has always been too tangled in kingdom and position and family. In escaping who she was born to be to find who she truly was.

Kit knows she’s found something real and something really hers in Jade, in this friendship they’ve always had and this greater, brighter thing they were starting to create together. She knows Jade’s found that in her too, through the tangle of other things Jade wants from her life; to defend what’s good, to find a place in the world to exist of her very own.

Kit’s seen the way Jade looks at her when they kiss, when Jade laughs, when Jade’s wryly appraising her or checking she’s alright – like she’s the centre of Jade’s world the same way Jade is the centre of Kit’s. The heart of every adventure. Kit’s seen it, felt it, Kit knows Jade feels the same. It is, right now, the last hope she has to hold onto.

And so beneath Jade’s frightening weight, trapped by her strength, captured beneath her teeth, Kit moans softly, in want.

A dozen shakey heartbeats pass before Jade’s lips pull back across her teeth, and Kit’s whimper shivers through both of their bodies. Jade’s open mouth drags heavily across the top of Kit’s spine, presses a kiss to her skin. Her hips shift against Kit.

“Please Jade,” Kit rasps, pulling just the one shoulder back, tugging at her wrist. Jade’s weight shifts again, this time pressing into her knees on either side of Kit, freeing her only enough that she can painfully wriggle onto her back.

Her body still making a cage over Kit, Jade stares down at her, her Kit, shivering and whimpering and caught, and a wildly deep breath swells into her own lungs and belly. Lights all her blood on fire.

Kit stares back, frozen in more ways she knew it was possible to freeze. Jade’s eyes are unblinking, the warm familiar brown completely eclipsed by the insatiable black of her pupils. Above Jade’s stained but unharmed throat, splatters of blood have re-written the constellations of her freckles across the entire landscape of her face. Her parted lips are as messily painted as the first time she’d been wheedled into letting Kit attempt to colour them for a ball – Kit can’t remember, now, the joke she’d told Jade that night, but she remembers Jade giggling so much she couldn’t hold still, Kit had to sit on her to try and finish painting her lips.

Now, lying in wait beyond Jade’s lips are bloodstained, monstrous teeth. The back of Kit’s neck has not stopped tingling.

Yet, the feeling surges through Kit’s chest, winded and wounded as it is, and it’s warm and it’s potent and it’s unfreezing her – she loves this woman, she loves her so much the flesh-and-blood constraints of her body can’t possibly hold it all in.

What is the point of overflowing with so much love if she can’t reach out and envelop Jade in it?

“Tell me you love me,” Kit pleads, through brave and chattering teeth.

Jade blinks at her like it’s incomprehensible Kit would ever need to ask.

“Kit,” Jade replies, her head at a birdlike tilt, her hand reaching to cup the cold flesh of Kit’s cheek. Her palm is so hot it makes Kit gasp, and she sees Jade’s lips part wider in response, feels the shift of Jade’s body over her.

“My Kit, I love you,” Jade swears it, and Kit knows. She’s in there.

Her Jade is in there, somewhere, beneath the animal of want that has taken over her body. Her girl is in there, and all Kit has to do is rescue her.

Kit pushes herself up on her elbows, lips parted and scared stupid, but love makes her so, so much more stupid than fear. Her eyes drop to Jade’s mouth, and though they have done this so many times before, this time it feels like Kit is closing her eyes and stepping out onto thin air. Some survival instinct screams at her to stop.

Kit doesn’t stop.

Kit closes the first tentative inch of the distance between them and Jade descends upon the rest like a hawk. Her mouth against Kit’s is rapacious and hot and bloody, and Kit’s own heart's blood is pumping like she’s mid-battle, everything moving so fast. She wants to scream. She wants to cry. She wants to claw away every tainted piece of Jade’s mind with her own searing kiss. She’s not unarmed after all, her tongue is a weapon, her teeth pulling Jade’s lip into her mouth are her weapons, her love is a weapon and with it she is going to fight off the darkness. She kisses Jade until she is dizzy, her fists bunch so tightly in Jade’s torn sleeves her knuckles strain against her skin.

“I love you too,” Kit gasps, and Jade slides her hands deeper into Kit’s snow-soaked hair and curls them into two fists, kissing her with such a hunger and such a need that Kit can’t breathe. Though her skin wherever Jade is touching her is now very, very hot, another low growl from Jade’s throat breaks Kit’s skin into gooseflesh as fear grasps its fingers deeper into her.

“I love you,” Kit insists, refusing to let fear change her course, and grips her hands around Jade’s head, though her own fingers are clammy and weak, she holds on anyway.

“My Kit,” Jade rasps, and grinds her hips down against Kit’s body with a looser, but no less animal sound of pleasure, one Kit swallows up in her mouth. Jade’s next thrust is sharper, and it forces Kit harder against the ground and a jutting piece of rock jabs into the most tender part of her back – Kit yelps in pain as it lances through her, both her stab wounds suddenly on fire. Jade swallows this sound in her own mouth, responding with an eagerness Kit struggles to break away from.

“Jade, ow, stop,” Kit pants, jerking her mouth away. “It hurts, please,” she presses her forehead against Jade’s, closes her eyes as she breathes in Jade’s breath, wishes she could smell or taste anything but blood. “I’m so cold, please.”

Jade’s fists soften in Kit’s hair, and her hands slide slowly down Kit’s neck to rest on her heaving collarbones. When she draws back, it’s Kit’s necklace that swings in the air between them. Kit’s eyes widen in surprise, and Jade’s eyes follow hers to the stone. Jade runs her tongue quickly over her lips.

“I kept it safe for you,” Jade smiles down at Kit, proudly. “I know what it means to you.”

“Thank you,” Kit whispers, winces, her head too heavy to stop it falling back to the ground, her body trembling. It’s the smile, Jade’s smile. For a moment, everything cold and sore and overwhelming is softened by that smile, and Kit wants to believe it. Jade knows her better than anyone, Jade loves her more than anybody. Kit needs to believe that’s going to be enough. “Can you – you do one more thing?”

“Anythin’,” Jade promises, her burning lips kissing away a tear Kit was too far gone to tell had fallen. “Always.”

“Help me,” Kit breathes, and closes her eyes as Jade’s weight shifts off her body. There’s a moment of the worst cold Kit’s ever felt, but then she’s being lifted into Jade’s arms again, her mouth opening in a silent cry at the pain it causes. Jade holds her close, settles her head to rest on Jade’s shoulder.

Despite the cold, everything still smells of blood.

But despite the cold and the blood – Jade’s with her. Anythin’. Always. That’s what Kit has to hold onto, has to find a way to hold onto, with all of her tiny might.

Jade carries her fallen princess back across the choppy river, speaking to her the whole way. It starts with “I have you,” a reassurance and a promise, and though Kit doesn’t reply Jade knows she can hear her. Kit’s eyes are almost closed, but her hands continue to paw at Jade, her cold fingers clumsily tangled in the cord of her necklace. “I won’t ever leave you,” Jade’s voice is a gentle, constant murmur. “We’re nearly there, my little one, we’re so close now. I’ll look after you, I’ll warm you up. You’re going to be okay, better than okay. We’ll fix you up, and you’re going to be great.”

It’s an effort for Kit to lift her eyes to look up at Jade, even more of an effort for her to lift her hand from the necklace and touch Jade’s bloody cheek instead, but Kit needs to tell her. Her Jade, somewhere in there, needs to know.

“I’m gonna save you, Jade,” Kit vows, even as her eyes slip out of focus.

“Oh, love,” Jade smiles, pressing a kiss to Kit’s forehead, perfectly centred between her eyes. “You’re going to be the most magnificent creature the world has ever seen. You’re going to help save us all.”

Chapter Text

Whispers rake over the inside of Kit’s mind, the words itching and clawing like scrabbling bugs behind her heavy snow-stung eyes. They’re louder when she closes her eyes, but the fight to stay out of the dark behind her eyelids is a constant battle as Jade carries her across the freezing churn of the river. Even with her eyes open, though, the whisper of Magnificent comes echoing back to her in Jade’s voice.

That word, in that voice, would have once had Kit preening because it meant Jade had seen something great in her, but the way Jade purrs the most magnificent creature twists the words into something wrong.

The most magnificent creature – it’s a description that feels unsettlingly like Jade isn’t talking about her at all. Isn’t even seeing her.

Maybe she can't see her. Maybe whatever’s twisted Jade’s mind has twisted the way she sees Kit and Kit, who has been bashing at other people’s perceptions of herself all her life, should be better at dealing with the clash of them against her own reality, but when it’s Jade? It hurts beyond the telling of it to be twisted by Jade.

By something that sounds like Jade.

Through the exhaustion and the bitter, bitter cold Kit forces her eyes up, and Jade looks down at her and smiles. Her pupils are wide and her teeth are bloody and she’s beautiful and dreadful and Kit’s body is going to crack open because it cannot contain the need, powerful as heartache and ferociously urgent, to twist them both back into shape.

And she’s gonna. She’s gonna save her. Kit will not accept that no part of Jade can see her. Jade loves her, and she loves Jade, and – and Kit thinks of Elora, of their shared belief about what is truly powerful. Thinks of all she’s done and the worlds she’s crossed and what she’s chosen to live for.

Love is going to help Kit claw the blindfold off Jade’s eyes and love is going to help Jade claw her way out of the evil that’s got hold of her.

She's going to fight for Jade, and Kit knows how she’s gonna do it; she’s going to get to the Lux. To the Cuirass. They chose her, the Lux sunk into her chest and changed her, she can’t forget what it felt like to become a shield. To root her feet in the ground and push back the darkness.

It chose her, it changed her. She’s a shield.

Jade chose her too. Kit holds onto that; in the Wildwood, and every day since, Jade chose her…

A scream cuts through the air, pierces Kit’s fragile and nascent hope and sets a terror in her – a ragged animal scream of a horse that is not a horse. Fear bursts back into life through her whole body like lightning exploding a dead tree and it obliterates her thoughts and reduces her to nothing but the will to save herself from being torn apart.

She hears herself shriek and doesn’t have the presence of mind to hate herself for it. With her last remaining shreds of strength she tries to scramble higher up Jade’s body like a kitten fleeing the snapping jaws of a dog, but she can’t manage anything more than tightening her fist in Jade’s torn shirt. Fear burns acid bright in the back of her throat at the sight of Gravy, rearing up as Jade carries her closer.

Fear, swiftly followed by anger. A surge of it, swift and blinding.

Like the worst arguments she ever had with her mother, it chokes out of her throat in a sob, but out it comes all the same, unstoppable.

Fuck this horse-beast! Fuck his ragged teeth and meaty breath and fuck the way he screams and fuck the way he chased her down and fuck him, he will not!

Outraged fear overcomes her, flooding her with the same potent force she’s felt in her awful, recent dreams, and through the haze of exhaustion and pain this dire feeling channels into a command.

The order comes out broken – she’s shaking too hard to speak clearly and besides, it’s not a phrase her waking mind knows. But her lips snarl and her throat spits it into being anyway, and the sound is expelled from her body as so much more than just a sentence. It’s a force that bursts from her with a pressure like a shattered dam and it is, in that moment, the clearest, most certain, most powerful thing Kit’s ever felt.

She doesn’t know what she’s saying, but she can feel the shape of its meaning coming to life on her breath: submit to me. It is unquestionable.

Submit to me, I will not be below you!

Her voice carves a tunnel through the air, rough and scouring, and Gravy’s ears and lips slide back as it hits him. With a snort that sends hot air billowing out from behind his teeth, Gravy gives his enormous head a shake, and then without a scream, without rearing, without pawing the ground or showing any sign that he questions this, Gravy bows, low, to the both of them.

The wind snatches the last of Kit’s scream away and with it the feeling recedes. Kit is just Kit again, shaken, shaking, and staring at him from her safe spot curled up in Jade’s arms. She’s caught there, caught between the terror she feels for what he is and the horror at how much more terrible she must be that he bows to her. From the depths of her throat, she can hear her own scared whimpering.

Jade steps forward, toward him, and all Kit can do is close her eyes and press her face harder against Jade’s neck. Whatever she just did (and she doesn’t want to think it was magic any more than she wants to think it wasn’t really her) has left her body gutted. Her soul, gutted.

Kit wonders…if she closes her eyes tightly enough, might everything just… go away?

She flinches when Gravy swings his great head around and mouths at her arm with muculent lips. Her stomach heaves, but what escapes her mouth isn’t acid from a sickened, empty stomach, but a laugh. She’s too weak to laugh but she can feel the alien will tugging at the edges of her mind. It doesn’t feel like her own. It feels triumphant and Kit – flinching, shaking Kit – doesn’t feel triumphant at all.

(She doesn’t want to think about it. She’s too tired to think about it.)

Her body laughs.

Jade presses her lips against Kit’s forehead, whispers “Incredible,” against her skin, and exhaustion hits Kit like a landslide. The laugh bleeds out of her, the spasm of it devoured by her shivers.

Kit hears the shifting of Gravy’s solid weight as he lowers himself to the frozen earth, and it is a simple thing, then, for Jade with her newfound, effortless strength to climb with Kit onto his wide back and find her place in the saddle. She keeps Kit in her lap, and Kit hasn’t ridden side-saddle since she was very young but what can she do about it, right now? She’s doll-limp in Jade’s arms. Neither her eyes nor her mind are able to focus.

Gravy heaves himself to his feet, and Kit’s stomach lurches with the vertigo, but Jade’s grip is tight enough for the both of them. Jade’s arms never slip, and Kit remembers all the times she’s ever thrown herself on Jade, riding her back like a pony when they were kids, wrapping her legs around her waist well after they’d left their childhood behind. Jade had always been strong and steady which wildly increased the joy Kit found in discovering new ways to make her lose her balance. There’s one particular spot on Jade’s neck that makes her knees weak when Kit kisses it, every time.

Kit can’t imagine anything making Jade buckle, now.

It's a bad ride. On Gravy’s back, when they pick up speed, the wind begins to peel her alive. It’s so cold, it’s so painfully cold.

One of Kit’s clumsy hands is curled in her necklace around Jade’s neck, the other paws weakly at the wet and bloody leather at Jade’s front. Both hands feel like they’re on fire. Her feet hurt so much it’s like they’re being stabbed through with dozens of sharp, thin needles and she can’t ungrit her teeth and the snow is razor sharp against the skin of her face. Her wet clothes surround her and everything hurts, her cheek, her arms, her back, her bones, her stomach all hurt and hurt and hurt till the pain and the cold are screaming louder than the whispers that have returned to her head.

They drown out her childish whim to be Jade’s hero. They can’t not. She hurts.

All she wants, all she can want, is relief, and slowly that desire eats away at everything. Nothing she remembers matters, nothing she wants matters, nothing she fears matters anymore – all her mind is focused on how terrible she feels and how badly she wants it all to stop.

Jade is warm.

Jade is warm and strong, and Kit cuddles into her; that is the biggest and most important part of the world right now.

Jade is warm, and Kit cuddles into her, even as the blood from Jade’s neck smears into Kit’s hair and snow keeps falling, swirling around them. The strength to speak is eaten up entirely by her body's need to shiver and shiver as the pain of her soaked clothes gnaws eternally through her skin. Jade is warm as the snow keeps falling and falling.

Kit cuddles into her. There's nothing heroic about it.

Gravy carries them across the final plateau and through the pain Kit can feel what’s coming, even with her eyes closed. Nockmaar; she knows it’s there like knowing where her bed is in the dark. And yet knowing still doesn’t prepare her for seeing it when she pries her eyes open against the endless pelting of the snow.

The stronghold rises before them, leviathan large, and something in Kit stops. Not her heart – that's racing faster, not her breath, tripping in panic over itself like each breath is desperate to flee her lungs, fighting as she fights to haul freezing air back into her body. It's her thoughts, her mind that stops. Freezes harder than the cold has frozen her body. She can't summon words. She is reduced to a panting, trapped thing in Jade’s arms.

Something bad's gonna happen in that castle. She can feel it. Like if she goes in she isn't coming out.

She can’t shout this down. Knows this. Nockmaar is a thing hewn from ancient stone by ancestral magic; it is not a thing she can make submit.

"Please," the plea escapes her numb mouth before her mind catches up. She's twisting uselessly in Jade's arms to break free, sick with not-wanting and stiff with cold. "Please, please Jade no, not here, not this, please."

"It's alright, little one," Jade soothes, tightening her grip just a little. Strong, gentle, leaving no risk of her princess sliding from Gravy’s back as they continue, without pausing, on their path toward the gate. “I have you.”

Kit flinches, the disconnect between Jade's words and reality hitting her like a lash. It's not alright. It's not alright and nothing has been alright for days and if they go in there nothing will ever be alright again and suddenly Kit’s chest heaves and she’s crying – hot tears stinging her eyes.

“It’s alright, love,” Jade echoes, stroking her hand over Kit’s hair. “Here’s where we make you warm again. Here’s where we make you strong again.”

Kit wants to throw up from how badly she doesn’t want this.

“You said,'' Kit squirms, pushing ineffectively at Jade, her vision tunnelling to her hands as they shove against her. Jade doesn’t budge, doesn’t release her, doesn’t stop Gravy stepping forward. “On the sea, you said. You said you wouldn’t drag me home. Don’t you remember? Jade, please remember. Don’t drag me here. Please.”

“Love,” Jade says, patient, firm, without a trace of annoyance in her voice. She curls her hand firmly and perfectly fitting around the back of Kit’s head and presses her face closer to Jade’s throat. “You need to warm up. You’re weak, you’re hurt. You’re going to let me look after you.”

The whimper that trembles out of Kit’s throat brings more tears, and a deep sense of shame at her weakness and fear, shame at the way she is reduced to begging and begging.

And Jade doesn’t listen. Doesn’t stop. Doesn’t do anything but run her fingers through Kit’s wet hair and purr sweet soothing nothings as her lips move against the top of Kit’s head, and every stroke of her hand makes Kit want to shrink - shrink and shrink away till she’s nothing, till she’s too small to be touched.

But Kit cannot shrink, and Jade does not stop touching, and when the gates of Nockmaar castle gape open like they’ve been waiting her whole life to swallow her up, all Kit can do is turn her head to hide her face against Jade’s front, and hope uselessly that someone else might appear and save her.

Hope saps her. Or, the act of pleading and pleading and it coming to nothing saps her. Or the last countless days sap her or the act of passing beneath those waiting gates – it doesn’t matter what the final straw is, really, but Allagash was probably right, it’s hope unfulfilled.

Jade and Gravy carry her into the belly of the castle and something in Kit gives in.

The air within is not warm, but at least in the shelter of the fortress the wind and snow can no longer reach them. It shouldn’t be a fair trade off but there’s a hollow relief in Kit’s heart anyway.

It’s a betrayal of a feeling. Between the razor cold wind or the dark, cavernous halls of Nockmaar, a noble little part of her knows she should want to escape, but escaping means the wind and the snow again. The only truth that matters right now is that it doesn’t hurt so much inside.

Gravy is hot beneath her, Jade is hot at her back, and she’s pathetically grateful that the cold no longer hurts so much. They pass through a courtyard, through an armoury still stocked with heavy weaponry, through a long room full of low, wide cages and into a twisting maze of dark corridors, Gravy’s hooves echoing loudly against the otherwise silent stone. When the noble little voice in her head tells her to watch where Jade’s taking her so she can find her way out again, Kit lets the thought float by her, shrinking away from it like it’s a floating, bloated corpse.

They dismount Gravy at the foot of a set of wide, sweeping stairs near the centre of the castle, and Jade starts to climb with Kit still cradled in her arms. There’s not even any relief to be found in leaving him behind, but maybe that is because he doesn’t feel left behind.

He feels like he’s… hers. There’s a connection that doesn’t sever when he’s out of view.

It’s how she used to feel about the Lux, always knowing where it was on Jade’s hip, and now? Maybe it still is, but Kit can’t tell. Can’t twist her head to check. Too scared, too weak to ask.

How pathetic she is. How unworthy now of its magic.

Kit misses it. Feels stupid for missing it. She wants to cry again but more than anything in the world she just wants to be unconscious.

The stairwell is lit with a greenish light, pulsing from a crystal set in a sconce like the rock itself is a flame. The green turns Kit’s already disturbed stomach; it’s the same green that enclosed the rat in her dream, the same green, she knows, that encased all of Tir Asleen for so many years. Her grandmother's speciality.

There’s a strange welcoming warmth to the glow, like a light left on in the window.

Kit hasn’t forgotten how the castle spoke to her, last time. She can’t forget the cries of the tapestry that were seared into her mind when the whole thing caught fire. The face she saw in the threads, the dragon, the past-future.

She hasn’t forgotten the way the staircase shifted beneath her feet, throwing her to her ass as it swung toward a door that had been hanging midway between floors, inaccessible till that moment. Kit hasn’t forgotten the way the door creaked open when she stepped toward it, or the voice that called from beyond it, or how the staircase had tried to eat her when she’d turned and bolted in the opposite direction.

She doesn’t like feeling like the lights seem to be greeting her the same way that door did, doesn’t want to think about it. Doesn’t have to think about it either – she’s too fucking done.

She’s too done for fear when Jade kicks open the door to an enormous bedroom. Too done to do anything but curl into herself when Jade sets her down on the edge of an enormous bed, hands digging under her arms for warmth, head bowed, shoulders hunched up to her ears. Jade tugs firmly at the thick and dusty smelling covers, opening up the bed for her.

“It’s time to get undressed, Kit,” Jade says, and Kit doesn’t move. Can’t move.

“Kit,” Jade says again. She stands before her, Kit’s small shoulders caught in her strong hands. “You’re freezing, love, you need to warm up.”

Kit’s shaking too hard to deny it, but all she can do is shiver and stare up at Jade. Her breath swirls in the air between them; Jade’s does too, but Kit’s is coming out a lot faster.

Jade’s breath breaks up the smaller clouds of Kit’s as she sighs, then lowers herself to her knees at Kit’s feet. She smiles up, helpful and kind, and then starts to unlace the wet laces of Kit’s boots. The knots are tight and Jade tugs, shifting Kit’s numb feet as she does, and then Jade is prying her boot off, and Jade is peeling off the wet sock, and Jade’s warm hands are curling around Kit’s painfully blue foot and the warmth hurts. She hisses through her teeth but doesn’t pull away because the relief feels so desperately necessary.

“Better, love?” Jade asks, pressing her lips to the top of Kit’s foot. Her eyes shimmer, dark in the witchy light. She curves her hand into the arch of Kit’s foot, wraps her fingers round her toes, rubs gently to bring the circulation back, and something inside Kit cracks.

Instead of a reply, she starts to cry in earnest.

They’re slow at first, the tears. She doesn’t have the strength in her to cry as deeply as she needs to; there is something bad rooted deep in her soul that a big cry might stand a chance of rending out, but all Kit can manage is to drop her head forward and let the tears fall into her lap.

“It’s okay,” Jade says, her voice warm and soft like there isn’t still blood coating her neck and flaking off the underside of her jaw. She has, at least, licked it all from her lips, wiped it off her chin with the back of her hand.

And as Kit’s eyes blur with tears, she can’t see the blood on Jade anymore anyway.

Jade’s strong thumbs press into the base of Kit’s foot and the feeling that comes back into it makes Kit whimper. “I’ve got you,” Jade promises, and this sends more tears tumbling over Kit’s cold cheeks.

She wants Jade to have her. She wants her stupid burning-cold feet not to hurt anymore, please, please, and slowly Kit’s want is coming to pass under Jade’s ministrations and Kit hates it and needs it and keeps softly crying about it.

The wind howls around the curve of the tower, screams in through a crack in a window where the glass was broken long ago, makes the dark twisted tapestries seem to come to life. Kit doesn’t look. Is barely listening.

Her whole body feels like a battlezone, more than ever before. When Jade peels off her second sock and cradles her foot in her warm hands it’s so soothing, it makes Kit ache so badly she can’t breathe properly. Her lungs shudder, and suddenly she's falling forward and Jade is there, catching her shoulders, setting her right.

Jade’s sure hands undo the clasp of her cloak and pull the cold, wet weight off Kit’s body. Kit’s shirt is next as Jade tugs the ugly, brown, soaked and blood-smeared fabric up, forcing Kit’s weak arms to lift as she pulls it up over her head.

The movement tugs at her wound. She’s almost too tired and cold to care, but the pain low on her stomach is a dull echo and a bright spark. Kit winces.

Jade’s nostrils flare and her teeth bare at the sight of her perfect girl’s marred and wounded skin.

Jade throws Kit’s cloak and shirt away, and they hit the floor near the empty fireplace with a heavy squelch, and then Jade is scooping up Kit’s legs to lift them and place them on the bed. She lays a warm hand on Kit’s bare shoulder, and eases her down onto her back. Kit flops, bonelessly, rolling her face to watch Jace crawl up beside her and inspect her wound.

The white-green light from the crystals set around the room washes Kit’s already pale skin out, darkening the ooze of blood from the cracked scab on her stomach to the deepest reddish-black. Jade leans closer to it, and Kit’s skin prickles at the way Jade’s lips part just inches from her naked stomach.

"It's not very deep," Jade reassures both of them, though there's an edge to her voice, haunted by the horrific memory of when it was. "Elora healed the worst of it,” she adds, for herself as much as for Kit, echoing the reminders to herself; Elora healed the worst of it, Elora pulled Kit back from death. She’s okay, her Kit’s okay.

Jade swallows thickly, hovers a soft hand over Kit’s wound, feels the radiating heat trapped beneath her palm. It’s nothing. Jade refuses to acknowledge that anything so banal as an infection might ever take Kit from her. It’s nothing. “You just cracked the scab open again when you ran."

Kit turns her head and stares at the distant wall instead. It’s shadowed and dark, and her eyes blur it all into nothingness. Kit craves nothingness. Craves the rest in it.

Jade swipes a finger low across Kit’s stomach, soft against her skin, sore against the wound. Though much of Kit’s blood has dried, there’s still enough wetness around the scab itself that she can gather some on her fingertip and lift it to her face for inspection.

“You’re going to be okay,” she swears, her voice a ragged growl, as she reaches for Kit’s wrist. It’s tiny in Jade’s grip, her fingers wrapping firmly around Kit’s wrist with her thumb in Kit’s palm pressing her hand back, exposing Kit’s veins. She touches her bloody finger against Kit’s skin, right on her pulse, and traces an echo of the mark Elora had drawn in that very same spot.

A wordless protest bursts from Kit’s throat and she tugs away, a useless gesture against Jade’s superior, gentle strength.

“What are you doing?” Kit’s voice rasps, the feeling of wrongness swelling again under her skin. She rolls her neck to face her wrist, eyes picking out the symbol Jade’s drawn and the feeling intensifies; Kit’s whole body squirms in her attempt to escape.

“Elora showed me how to help you,” Jade explains, still holding her wrist so she can’t smudge the mark, which is, to Kit’s unending horror, disappearing as it sinks into her skin. “You’ll sleep soon, and wake up stronger. Elora said you’d wake up stronger.”

She releases Kit’s wrist, and Kit pulls her arm toward her, cradling the unmarked skin against her chest. It doesn’t feel like strength; it feels like a cold slime is seeping up the inside of her arm. If it felt like strength, she’d be able to stop Jade reaching for her other wrist and repeating the sickening art with another careful blood-gathering swipe of Jade's fingers across her stomach.

If it felt like strength she’d be able to do more than squeeze her eyes shut and tremble as Jade pries both of Kit’s arms away from her chest. She does manage a pained–

“Jade, don’t–”

– but Jade doesn’t even pause. She gathers both of Kit’s wrists in one hand and presses them into the bed just above her head, leaving Kit open and unprotected, the canvas of Kit’s frantically heaving chest ready for her to draw a third mark right over her heart.

If it felt like strength, she’d be able to swear at Jade, scream at her, fight her, but instead Kit’s voice shatters.

“Jade stop, you’re – you’re freaking me out,” Kit hates to admit it, but is desperate for this to end, and that’s stronger than the shame she feels admitting it. “You’re scaring me.”

She’s never said such a thing to Jade before, and Jade – Jade laughs, not a cruel laught, but one like Kit has told her a funny joke. Like it is surreal and impossible, the idea that Jade could ever scare brave, wonderful Kit, and Jade laughs and leans in and kisses her lips in delight and all of Kit’s blood turns to ice.

She pulls back sharply, looks at Jade in anger and horror and fear, and there’s nothing in Jade’s return expression that says she sees any of it.

It’s like looking up at a stranger. All Kit can manage is a single, terrified, rough little sob.

A ripple of concern wrinkles across Jade’s forehead. Tears, it seems, she can see.

“Oh love, don’t cry,” she says, drawing Kit’s wrists from their trap against the sheets and returning them to where Kit had been holding them against her chest. “Kit, Kit, it’s alright, don’t cry. I’m here. I’m here, and you’re doing so well.”

She strokes her hands over Kit’s hands, down her forearms, feeling the chill under her skin and frowning at it. Strokes them slowly past Kit’s elbows and up her biceps, cold, so cold. Jade cups her face, thumbs passing through the tears covering Kit’s cheeks. “You’re going to be so, so well.”

Jade presses her lips against Kit’s salty cheek. She wants to lick every tear from Kit’s face, to warm her lips with another kiss, breathe her breath and reassure herself that Kit is getting stronger with each one. Jade aches to reassure herself over and over again that she has saved her.

She has saved her, brought her here where Jade can care for her until her strength returns in full.

Saved her from the knife, saved her from the Death Dogs, saved her from freezing in the wilderness alone.

Is so, so close to saving her from the fate of passing through life without ever feeling the warmth of His light.

“Are you ready to sleep?” Jade asks, and Kit whimpers with how much she aches not to be awake anymore, gives a tiny, tiny nod of her head, and Jade’s so proud of her she can’t stop herself leaning forward to press her lips against Kit’s forehead.

“Good girl,” she whispers, and starts to undo the fastenings on Kit’s trousers.

Fear twists the knot in Kit’s stomach tighter, and she pushes her thighs together but it’s not enough to stop Jade peeling off the wet fabric, which clings to her legs all the way down. “So cold,” Jade breathes, and it almost sounds like awe as she brushes her hand softly over the goosebumped, flinching skin of Kit’s legs, fingers still damp with Kit’s tears. “Not for much longer, love.”

Kit just squeezes her eyes shut tighter. Jade’s fingers trail all the way down to her ankles before she frees Kit’s legs from the wet clothes, and then there’s only a sliver of relief when Jade pulls the heavy blankets up over her. They’re no warmer against the bare skin of her legs at first; heavy and chilled as stone.

“This too,” Jade insists, her fingers creeping under the edge of Kit’s breastband, stained with the horror story of too many days of sweat, yellowing beneath her pits like ancient paper.

Kit whimpers. Jade counters; “It’s wet, Kit, it’s leeching your heat.”

She eases Kit’s uncooperative but ultimately limp arms aside, and tugs up this final piece of ruined clothing. Another long breath escapes Jade’s open lips, visible in the cold air as it breaks against Kit’s skin. Her nipples are as hard as they’ve ever been, they look painful, and Jade so longs to soothe that pain with her hot, soft mouth.

But Kit’s hands yank up the weight of the blanket, dragging it up to her chin. She feels so awful and so, so tiny, so gawky and fleshy and far too touchable, far too seeable even after she’s covered in weighty wool. They’re useless as armour. They can’t protect her from the dread crawling around under her skin. Kit heaves the blankets up even more, presses them against her wet eyes.

“Hey, hey now,” Jade says, and she’s shedding her own clothes now, sliding beneath the blankets. “Don’t be sad, Kit. I’m here.”

Sad. Sad isn’t what Kit is. Everything Kit is feeling cannot possibly be contained in a word so small as sad.

She wants to close her eyes and pretend she isn’t here, lying naked and shaking in what is obviously her grandmother’s bedroom with Jade, who terrifies her, with Jade, who loves her.

Kit wants to hold Jade’s gaze, to swell herself big with bravery and look Jade in the eyes and search out the Jade she remembers, the Jade she first kissed – no, the Jade she kissed in the sand on the Shattered Sea, a Jade smiling and waiting for Kit to lower her mouth onto Jade’s, warm and tentative and without barriers. And for a moment, Kit does – look at Jade, at least, and it hurts because she’s so beautiful even beneath the blood, even beneath the smile on Jade’s face that just… isn’t quite Jade.

She’s kidding herself – the smile isn’t Jade at all. The way that Jade strokes Kit’s cheek with the back of her fingers, it is Jade but it isn’t. The way she drops her hands to tug Kit up against Jade’s too warm body, the way she slides a warm leg over Kit’s and the heat seeps down into Kit’s bones, it’s her… but it isn’t.

Her Jade wouldn’t ignore her pleas not to enter Nockmaar and her Jade wouldn’t hold her down and scrawl blood on her chest and her Jade wouldn’t be smiling like this while she snuggles in close, fingertips brushing through her hair.

Her Jade’s not here tonight. Kit’s naked and alone with a stranger.

She moves so stiffly she feels like her bones might snap, her shoulder coming up hard and tense to protect her neck as Kit rolls away, the covers still tightly bunched in the two fists beneath her chin. Behind her, Jade snuggles in with a pleased little hum; a stranger who fits her body against Kit’s back, as warm and as familiar as home.

The worst thing is that if Kit closes her eyes and pretends as hard as she can… it could be nice. Everything is so soft, and so warm. Jade’s breasts and stomach press against her, their bodies slotted together like they were made to fit, Jade’s strong arm holding her close. Jade’s breath is a caress at the back of her neck as Kit’s wet hair dries in a tangled nest, her mouth is a sweet brand as Jade presses it softly against Kit’s shoulder.

The worst bit is Kit aches for this warmth and closeness so badly she can’t think of anything else, and she unfists one hand from under her chin… and searches out Jade’s arms. With the last of her strength, she grips her own icy cold fingers around Jade’s forearm, and holds on, and holds on, and starts crying again but only holds on even tighter as Jade rocks her, and strokes her skin, and reminds her, over and over, that Kit is my Kit, my Kit, my princess, my queen till Kit messily, wearily, inevitably cries herself to sleep in Jade’s arms.

The last thing Kit feels is Jade’s fingers escaping from the blankets and rising up to trace a final, careful mark on her forehead.

She sinks deeper as sleep pulls her in, heavy on her aching limbs, heavy on her weary spirit. She sinks, and is finally free from every fear. As the world fades, it no longer matters that the woman wrapped around her terrifies her out of her mind, that they’re back in Nockmaar and that Kit is – despite the arm locked around her middle and the knees curled up behind hers and the breath on her cheek that still smells like the blood of a Death Dog that dared to put itself between Kit and Jade – desperately alone.

For a moment there’s peace.

But then light fills the bedroom and Kit’s eyes fly open.

At first she thinks it’s moonslight swamping the bedroom, but it’s not – the sky she can see through the thin slit of a window is still heavy and low and thick with snowstorm. Instead, the blueish glow is emanating from the soft witchlights that had teased her peripheral vision out there in the snow, though these are larger, sweeter, and they pulse eagerly in recognition when she notices them.

She doesn’t know how she knows they’re eager, how she recognises that they recognise her. The how doesn’t matter. Kit’s never been able to wrap her head around the how of magic anyway.

One floats closer as Kit rises to sit, her movement making Jade’s naked arm slip from her waist. Kit looks down, expecting Jade’s watchful eyes to be on her, as they have been constantly, constantly on her.

But Jade’s asleep. Her hair is a wild mess of snow-soaked and air-dried curls. They look so soft, those curls that aren’t crusted with blood. Her bruised lips are parted, her bare chest rises and falls.

Kit slithers out of the bed and Jade doesn’t stop her.

The cold stone of the floor doesn’t bother her – in fact, it feels warm, heated by forces unknown to the same temperature as the soles of her feet. It feels as though she’s walking on nothing, almost. It feels as though she’s one with the castle itself.

Also, her feet don’t hurt.

Nothing hurts.

Kit, naked in the moonslight, breathes a deep breath, straightens her spine, lets her shoulders finally fall. She feels… good.

One of her witchlights – and she can feel the truth of it now, here, having slept in this bed, having drunk the water from the river that cuts through this country; they are her witchlights – hovers closer, drawing Kit’s eyes to the foot of the bed. Spilled across the covers is a dark puddle of fabric, and Kit steps toward it and scoops it up; it’s a robe, and heavier than it looks in her slim hands.

But she pulls it on, because it is hers, because it is meant for her, and it slips around her body like no dress ever has before, a befitting and regal weight over her shoulders and down her arms, wrapped around her hips, voluminous and liquid in the skirt that swishes when she moves. It’s an announcement of a robe, and it’s black in the way some beetles are black, an uncanny iridescence shimmering over the fabric where the witchlight touches the folds.

Kit strides out of the bedroom door and the robe and lights move around her like subjects, low at her feet and eager for approval, their only purpose in life is her elevation.

It’s only natural that she makes her way to the high tower. There’s no question of why in her mind, it is simply where she must be.

The door flies open before her like it, too, is a subject grovelling to please her, and within the round stone room, sudden daylight illuminates everything.

Within and without.

Beneath the mullioned window, spreading out from the base of her fortress like a dark stain, is an army. An army that roars to life at the sight of her watching them proudly, pleased with all she lays eyes upon.

Her army. Kit’s eyes take them in, the whole malefic host gathered for her and awaiting her command, Gravy at the vanguard, saddled and ready for her to lead them all to a devastating victory.

Behind her, a presence tugs her awareness, and Kit turns to see Jade waiting for her in the arched doorway. She’s also wrapped up in a robe, her hair bound tightly back and there’s a cord around her neck, its pendant hanging between her breasts. Where Kit’s robe hangs thick and warm, Jade’s is bordering on sheer, and Kit smiles at the shadowed curves of Jade’s body beneath it, watching the way she moves when Kit raises her hand and beckons her closer.

There’s a crown cradled in Jade’s hands, and Kit straightens a little taller to see it, to see Jade cross the room and raise her hands high and lower the crown softly down around Kit’s temples. It’s heavy, but just like the robe it is a weight that was meant for her.

Kit catches Jade’s chin in her hands and stares into her face. This, too, fits her well. This jawbone her thumb presses into, this freckled cheek that yields to the force of her fingertips. The corners of Jade’s lips are as pointed and curved as Kit’s crown, and the darkness that swells in Jade’s eyes summons a dark desire between Kit’s legs.

“My Queen,” Jade breathes the words in awe and lust and perfect submission, and Kit’s hand drops to the delicacy of her neck. Jade tips her head back, offering her throat without question and parting her lips, though no sound, no breath, nothing escapes them, and Kit takes her lips with the same force as she’s taken her neck, revelling in the race of Jade’s pulse in her grip.

From there, Kit’s hand slips lower, wrapping around the jade pendant and feeling the magic throbbing like a heartbeat beneath her palm. All it takes is one whispered word of power and the crystal spreads, a thin band of it blooming up the leather cord and circling around the skin of Jade’s neck in an exquisite, delicate, unbreakable crystal collar, a masterwork of control over her regained power that fills Kit with a vainglorious thrill to see.

She runs a finger across the front of Jade’s neck, playing with the soft skin and the thin, hard stone that binds it; a little game of join-the-dots with the freckles she has trapped there, still visible but tinted green between Jade’s rapid pulse and Kit’s crystal.

Kit’s other hand pulls open Jade’s robe to reveal another subject more than ready to serve her, who – by the bruises in the shape of Kit’s mouth that she wears on her body like rows of medals – has already served her over and over again.

Kit grins widely, and pulls Jade down onto her knees by her throat, letting her own robe fall open, her body ready for the proof of Jade’s neverending devotion.

This is so close, whispers a voice as intimately in her head as Jade’s tongue is between her legs, as powerful as the building cries of the army below, as needy as her own hedonistic growl.

You are so close. You can feel it coming. This life, this future, this devotee worshipping at the altar of you. All this is yours, and all you have to do child– Kit can feel the truth of the words, her pleasure wrapped in a stranglehold by the knowledge that this is close, it’s close, it’s so achingly close –is submit.

With a cry of ecstasy that echoes through the freezing bedroom, Kit wakes sharply, mouth gasping for air, body wracked with the final tremors of – Jade, her Jade.

For a moment it’s sweet, and Kit is all flushed cheeks and overheated body and the comedown into a longing to sprawl panting and sweaty over Jade who’ll hold her close –

And then the slimy feeling of dread about who she was in the dream catches up and turns her stomach, oozing through her body. She was going to command an army, the Wyrm’s army, and suddenly the heat and the slickness between her legs is a condemnation, and Kit tries in panic to ignore it –

But cannot, because Kit turns her head and looks up, and staring down at her is her grandmother’s grinning face, looming right there over the bed.

This time, Kit’s scream is nothing but horror.

Jade’s fingers close around Kit’s arm the second she starts to scream, jerking Kit’s eyes away from the face above the bed. Relief crashes over her at the sight of Jade, and Kit grabs onto her, holding as tight as she can. It’s not the first time she’s woken from a nightmare on this quest, hyperventilating and reaching for Jade, but it’s the first one in which she’s been stark naked in her grandmother’s bed.

Her grandmother – Kit squeezes Jade’s arm tighter, sucks in a shaken breath that barely graces her lungs with air, then drags her eyes away from Jade to look up again.

It’s not Bavmorda’s face – it’s a mirror, hung directly over the bed. It’s tarnished with black spots and a little warped, but it’s her own face looking down at her, hair tangled and lips chapped and shadows of exhaustion like bruises around her wide eyes.

She looks very small to her own eyes, and very pale, and very naked. Jade leans closer and presses a kiss against her bare shoulder, and her lips cause a spark of heat. It’s a feeling that beats between her legs as fast as her racing heartbeat when the memory of Jade in her dream rushes back. The image is so vivid she blushes deep and hot and all the way down.

Kit tries to will it away with a full body shudder, but the desire, tainted by the nightmare, leaves the taste of shame in her mouth. Pulling the blankets up doesn’t help one bit. She needs to scrub it all off in a very hot, very deep, incredibly well lit bath to even get close to feeling clean.

Kit squeezes her eyes shut, but despite the sickening feeling of corruption gripping her insides, the images of Jade and her collar, Jade on her knees, Jade and her tongue – they are all too vivid. She cannot bear it, and reality – cruelly, ridiculously – is less awful than what’s seared into the inside of her eyelids, so she opens her eyes again. The dream is written over her body in ways she can’t pretend away, and she squeezes her thighs together to try and make it stop, squirming in discomfort.

It doesn’t help, really, just condenses the pulse into something tighter, but in squeezing her muscles she does find more strength in them than she had yesterday.

That’s something, at least.

Blankets still held tightly to her heaving chest, Kit sits up, and there’s a little more strength in her spine, too. Cold air bites in her back and she groans at the ache from every rock-shaped bruise, each one digging deep beneath her skin. “Fuck,” she says, and that feels a little stronger, too, so ”fuck” she says again, her voice a low, crackling fire.

Jade’s fingers trail over the expanse of her bare back, and her touch sends a shiver down Kit’s spine that has nothing to do with the cold air in the room. Jade watches it happen, enthralled by the play of Kit’s muscles beneath her fingertips, and can’t resist another touch, stroking her fingers along the shiver’s path. Kit’s skin is a tapestry of bruises, her muscles a mess of tight knots Jade can feel when she flattens her palm over the sharpness of Kit’s shoulderblades. Kit squirms again. She’s so beautiful. Jade wants her to have everything.

“Princess,” Jade’s fingers find her face and draw it toward her, Jade’s eyes sinking into hers, and even after everything Jade has done Kit finds herself comforted by her closeness. She swallows, her throat tight, and then Jade shifts quickly and straddles her, and Kit stops breathing as comfort flees.

The weight of Jade’s body presses down on Kit’s thighs, pushing them harder together and oh gods, Kit’s mind goes blank for an overwhelmed second, before Jade speaks:

“For you, my love.”

She reaches up behind her neck and unties the necklace she has carried with her, out of ravines and over a half dead landscape, through a wild pack of Death Dogs and across a frozen river to bring it back to Kit.

“I kept it for you,” Jade breathes, tying it back around her trembling princess’s neck. “I kept it safe for you.”

Kit’s throat is so tight, vividly remembering Jade’s clawed hand ripping it off her neck in the first place, when she fell. When Kit pushed her.

Kit reaches up to grip the crystal, and relief floods her, flowing over her body like clean bathwater warmed just this side of scalding, just how she likes it.

Maybe it’s stupid to be relieved about such a little thing, but it’s the first thing Kit has touched in so long that feels like it’s truly hers.

It gives her the strength to scowl.

“What happened to my clothes?” Kit’s voice is rough, she makes it rougher to pull Jade’s wandering eyes away from the necklace, which sits higher than it did before, resting on Kit’s naked collarbones. Jade’s not naked anymore; she’s wearing the same long shirt without her armour, the stained sleeves rolled up and the waist untucked and loose over her trousers. At some point she must have washed; her skin is clean. It almost glows.

Kit – feeling filthy through and through – is getting a little pissed off about all these imbalances. She straightens her stiff spine and sets her jaw in a hard, regal line. The scowl remains. Jade looks at her like she’s a goddess.

“Ruined and gone, princess,” Jade says, climbing off the bed, though she leaves her hand on Kit’s thigh till the last moment. “But I found something much better while you were sleeping.”

On bare feet, silent against the stone, Jade crosses the room and throws open the doors of a great wardrobe. The handles are carved with the same creatures that twist up the four posters of the bed, bodies entwined in positions of sensuality or pain – Kit is refusing to look at them almost as much as she’s refusing to look up again at the mirror.

Almost as much as she’s refusing to look at the chains, pooled on the floor beside the bed. That, along with the mirror looking down on the sheets, brings back the appalling memory of Boorman telling them her grandmother liked to romp.

There’s so much about everything Kit doesn’t want to look at. The wardrobe is perhaps the lesser of several evils.

The gowns inside are all dark, all heavy, all touched with hints of dark red, indigo, glimmers of silver threads on heavily embroidered cuffs.

“No,” says Kit, still clutching the blanket over her chest. “No fucking way am I wearing her clothes. Give me mine. Where’s my shirt? I want my pants, Jade! I’m not wearing my evil grandmother’s stinking old gowns!”

“They’re warm,” Jade says, with the same note in her voice she used when telling Kit she should tie back her hair when they sparred. Be practical, Kit.

Kit – still convinced her short hair is plenty practical, thank you very much, is as unimpressed with Jade’s reasoning now as she was then.

Jade sweeps up an armful of gowns, and lays these offerings down beside Kit on the bed. She reaches out and brushes Kit’s hair back behind her ear, takes the opportunity to stroke her hand over Kit’s stubborn jaw. “There’s no point fighting this, little one, your old clothes are gone. You can wear one of these, or you can wrap yourself up in rumpled sheets.”

Kit jerks her face away with a sharp glare, trying to find solid footing by ignoring how goddamn vulnerable it feels to be naked. “Don’t call me that,” she demands, hating the petulant note in her voice. “I’m not little.”

Jade smiles at her, dropping her hand to squeeze Kit’s thigh through the blankets. “I’m sorry, princess,” she says, the smile never fading. “But until you can come into your full strength, I’m stronger than you. You are my little one.” There’s a tease in her eyes, the same competitive fun that used to dance between them when they were sparring. It makes Kit’s empty stomach heave. Her heart feels so small and so afraid and so lonely and Jade keeps smiling and Kit’s so angry.

She reaches out to snatch a stupid gown, but only because dressing herself will make her feel better than getting about in a sheet, but her heart falters when her eyes drop.

It’s the robe from her dream.

Dark and iridescent and horrific – it’s exactly the robe from her dream and Kit hates what that means. Hates that she understands now that divination is one of the four – what did Willow call them, pillars of magic? Hates that this thing building inside her is getting harder and harder to ignore, but goddamnit, she’s going to keep trying.

Her hand jerks and she throws it aside, but the feeling of the silk lingers against her palm, and it doesn’t leave when she wipes her hand on the blankets.

Jade crouches to rescue the robe from the floor, but Kit can’t look at her, can’t risk picturing what Jade looked like as she lowered herself to Kit’s feet, lips parted, brown eyes warm and worshipful as she pressed her mouth closer.

Kit forces herself to remember Jade refusing to listen to her pleas about coming here, instead. Forces herself to remember the chase. She holds onto that anger, channels it.

“A little privacy, please,” she snaps at Jade. “Turn around.”

Jade blinks at her, slow, and turns, just as slow. Kit doesn’t like the way she obeys. Doesn’t trust it. It – everything – feels too much like a nightmare to be trusted.

With a disgusted grunt, Kit drags on a dark underdress, yanks on the plainest kirtle she can find and struggles to lace the bodice closed with her sore fingers. It’s burgundy and black, with a simple spiral lacing that is only difficult because her fingers are shaking too much to guide the burnt gold aglet through the small holes with any degree of accuracy, and as she does–

Her stomach twists, the hands dressing her suddenly not her own, wrinkled skin but bones as strong as iron, unshaking as they pull the lacing tight. Rings of dark silver encircle the fingers, power imbued in each one. Kit knows what those hands have done. Kit remembers what those hands have done.

The vision – the memory – is short, but it clings to the inside of her throat like cold bile. Kit’s own hands – smoother, younger, far less sure – are trembling harder as she drops them from the laces. The cuffs of her sleeves gape loosely around her wrists; the buttons are twisted gargoyle faces, screaming in pain. She can’t bear to look at them, because it’s as if even the sight of a screaming mouth makes the memory of screaming ricochet around her head.

Her hands fall and hang like dead weights at the ends of her arms. She’s as heavy-limbed as she is light-headed, and the dress hangs too voluminously on her small frame. Even her heart beats a discordant rhythm.

Jade stands motionless, facing the wall, where she’s stood since Kit told her to turn around. Kit’s eyes linger a second but… but looking at Jade feels discordant as well.

Kit sucks a breath into her tense lungs, trying to remind herself they are her lungs. She wants a belt around her waist, a sword at her hip. Her hand closes again around her necklace, thumb pressing at the point of the crystal, letting it dig into her skin in the hope it will ground her. Jade was right; the gown is warm, and the thick layer of silk lined wool is at least better than being naked. And she has her necklace. She’s still her, no matter what stupid dress she’s wearing.

(No matter what voice whispers in the back of her head: without me, you’re nothing.)

Kit clenches her fist tighter around the pendant, knuckles straining under her skin. What’s the point of a youth spent stubbornly holding onto the heart of herself when her mother dressed her up in shiny heavy robes if she can’t just as stubbornly hang onto herself when she’s dressed up in musty baggy ones? Evil ugly buttons can’t be that much worse?

It is worse, of course. A thousand times worse. And all the worse is hammering Kit smaller and smaller and she doesn’t know how much worse it can get.

But the jade pendant is small and hard in her fist, and no matter how hard she squeezes, her fist can’t damage it.

Maybe the smaller she is, the harder she will be to break.

I’m not nothing, she thinks defiantly, her breath an angry puff out of her nostrils into the cold air of the castle. The Cuirass chose her, above all others, to be a shield against the dark.

Slowly, Kit begins to take stock of what she’s got. A necklace, a dress, and there by the end of the bed are her own, still-wet boots. She’s not so cold anymore. She’s not nothing.

And through a narrow door in the wall, she finds a privy.

The absolute relief briefly erodes all thoughts of weapons; she’s far too pathetically grateful not to have to find a corner of the castle somewhere to piss instead. Too grateful for the wooden door she gets to close behind her, and for the removal of one aspect of terrible pressure on her body. All this gratitude comes out in one long deep groan of relief, and it nearly undoes her.

She wants her mom, she realises with a pang. And not because Sorsha grew up here and could find her way out, and might be able to explain more about how ’Bavmorda’s spirit survived’ in a way that would help Kit fight, but simply because this one glimpse of relief makes her want more, and she wants a hug A long, strong hug from her mother, who she hasn’t seen in moons.

Kit crosses her arms stiffly, waiting for the thoughts of her mother to turn from a longing kind of loneliness to a familiar, aching distance. It helps to remember she’s angry at Sorsha for not telling her enough; helps numb it all out, at least.

With her arms still crossed like a breastplate of her own flesh and bones, she steps back into the bedroom.

Jade is waiting for her, just on the other side.

“I need water,” Kit demands, trying not to look at Jade as she attempts to channel some useful element of her mother. She straightens her back a little more (it aches) but leaves her elbows pointy and petulant and protective. “I need something to eat. And then I need you to tell me what the fuck you think is going on.”

Jade smiles. (Kit can’t not look at her).

Jade smiles like it’s easy, like all of those demands are easy. Kit should have asked for a weapon, is still considering it when Jade presses a goblet into her hands and Kit’s dry mouth opens automatically. At least she manages to find the wherewithal to make sure it’s actually water, no shimmering orange gunk for her.

“The last of our food is in our saddlebags,” Jade says, as Kit drains the cup, tipping it up till every drop is gone. “I unpacked everything while you were sleeping.”

Kit sets the cup down as soon as she’s done – keeping her hands free just in case, and instantly, Jade holds out her own hand to lead her away.

Kit hesitates, anger and fear both bristling over the surface of her hard, tough heart. Over what she keeps wishing was a hard, tough heart. Jade does not drop her hand, Jade does not stop smiling and waiting. It’s the exact same gesture they’ve repeated over and over on the journey home, one of them holding out their hand, the other taking it the moment it’s offered.

No matter what, anger and fear can’t overwhelm the promise she made to Jade, and nothing can numb it out: I’m going to save you.

The oath cracks through Kit like sunlight through the narrow, spiked windows. This is Jade before her, her Jade, the first friend she ever had and the epic love of her life. She can be angry and terrified and hard and small and still so, so in love.

Kit reaches out and takes her hand. It’s warm and it’s wonderful and none of it changes the fear about where that hand’s going to lead her.

With Kit’s hand in hers, delight bursts over Jade’s face. It’s beautiful, and hits Kit like vertigo. Jade’s never looked happier in her life, her face sweet and soft and blissfully content, and it makes Kit ache. Jade’s eyes are too bright, and beneath those freckled lips are hard white points of too-sharp teeth.

Jade lifts Kit’s hand, presses her lips slowly against the back of it, then places a lingering kiss over each of her knuckles, one, two, three, four. Kit grips Jade’s hand even tighter, because it doesn’t feel wrong, because the warmth those kisses inspire in her feels like it could, maybe, have the power to make everything okay, as Jade keeps swearing she will.

Hand in hand, Jade leads her up the stairs, but already they are out of sync: Jade’s steps are faster than Kit can comfortably match. Kit pushes herself, channels the pain of it into the glare on her face. Remembers the righteous sword of her anger. Remembers the armouring strength of her stubbornness.

Those kisses might want to make things okay, but they can’t. Kit’s going to have to find a way to fix this all on her own.

“Why-” Kit is unable to stop herself from gritting out, half way up and already sweating, embarrassingly trembling with the effort. “-Did you unpack in the high tower?”

“It’s a place of power,” Jade says, voice plain and sensible, eyes turned toward the door waiting for them at the top. “Can’t you feel it?”

Kit’s trembles turn into a full body shudder. She hates that she can. The room is full of memories of Kit’s whole world shifting as Elora saved Graydon, full of the dread clinging to her from her awful dream, full of the knowledge that the room is the place where her grandmother died or – as it’s getting hard to deny – didn’t die, but was banished somewhere she’s clawing her way back from, using Kit as her ladder out of the abyss.

Willow called this place a portal to the netherworld. Jade called it a fulcrum. Kit doesn’t really understand portals, but a fulcrum is the pivot point on a trebuchet, and the reason why heavy, destructive things can be flung impossible distances. Fulcrums are about balance, and about upsetting that balance to smash shit through castle walls.

Kit always wanted to see one in action. Not so much anymore.

“These stairs can get fucked,” she snaps her answer, kicking her stupidly heavy, too-long skirt out of the way of her feet. “That’s what I feel.”

Jade turns her head, notices that Kit is a pace behind her, out of step and red in the face. She rearranges her hands so she can press one against Kit’s back and guide her up, but Kit slaps at her. “I can do it,” she growls. “I can fucking do it.”

There’s not far to climb. Bavmorda’s bedroom is set only one level beneath the goddamn netherworld. Kit can make it.

And she does want to. She wants food. Answers. But she’s grouchy enough to become a pain in Jade’s ass till she gets them.

“Real cool of Elora not to heal me up properly,” she grits out, hand against the stone wall of the tower, the other against her stomach. The wound’s not leaking anymore, she doesn’t think. There’s no wetness between her skin and the dress. It still throbs, though, and it feels sick beneath her hand. “You two have fun, crouching over my unconscious body, working out just how weak to leave me?”

Jade looks at her sharply, disbelief on her face, and pain, too, that Kit could think such a thing of her. “Fun?” she echoes. “Kit, that was the worst night of my life.”

“Of your life?” Kit bites back. That was her worst night, though to be fair, there are several recent nights vying for position at the top of that particularly depressing list. “And it didn’t make you think, oh, the Wyrm’s not all great and powerful after all, if it can’t even heal Kit?”

Jade presses her lips together. “Real healing takes time,” she explains, the way that Elora explained it to her. “It’s a process.”

“Uh huh,” Kit grunts, unimpressed. “And drawing on me with blood is part of it? You see that’s a fucked up kind of magic, right?”

“I see what it’s doing to you,” Jade’s voice is patient and steady and very annoying. “It is doing just what Elora said it would do. It’s opening you up; you’re getting stronger.”

Kit hates that she does, actually, feel a little stronger, although the feeling of being opened up isn’t worth the strength. She moves her hand from her stomach to her necklace to clutch it, to remind herself who she is. Kit Tanthalos, of Tir Asleen. Sorsha and Madmartigan’s daughter. Protector of the Empress who is, somehow, going to have to figure out a way to rescue said Empress, as soon as she’s rescued Jade. The jade stone presses hard into her palm, and the task ahead of her is a mammoth one.

She’s going to have to face it the only way she knows how, with a combination of knee-jerk reactions and a certain dogged obstinance.

“It feels like you're poisoning me,” she looks up at Jade, eyes hard and narrow. “It’s making me sick.”

“It won’t feel like that for much longer.”

“Because you’re going to stop,” Kit insists, her eyes a lot harder than her voice can manage. Her breathing strains, each onward step punishing her body, reminding her how far and how hard she’d run before she’d collapsed in the snow. “Don’t do it again, Jade. It’s fucking with my head. The nightmares–”

Dogged obstinance can only take her so far; Kit can’t bring herself to elaborate on her nightmares. The words congeal on her tongue, feel like cold phlegm when she swallows them down. She has to take another break, a dozen steps short of the high tower door. It’s not just the nightmares of crystal rats and armies and – and a collared Jade on her knees – it’s not just those… it’s the way the waking world is behaving around her. It’s Gravy lowering himself to her at the command she didn’t mean to give, the Death Dogs crowding protectively around her legs, the feeling that she is known in this land, in this stronghold; that she’s awaited.

Kit never wanted to be a princess, but this is worse. She absolutely does not want to be this, and speaking of the nightmares – daymares – aloud, feels like it will make them stronger.

She’s just a dead old woman, Kit reminds herself of the words she clung to, out in the snowy wild. I’m a shield. I’m a shield. She can’t touch me.

Fuck, she wishes that felt true.

“What did Elora tell you it was going to do?” she rasps, raising her chin, looking up toward the door. It swings itself open, waiting for her. Cool.

“It’s waking your spirit and your strength back up,” Jade says. Her eyes are not on the door, Kit can feel them watching her instead. “The strength that’s been repressed in you all your life, stymied by your mother’s choice never to let you learn magic. It’s paving the way for the ritual that will complete the process, tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?” Kit echoes in alarm, snapping her attention back to Jade, eyes wide under her dirty, stringy hair. Jade’s hand lifts, and cups her cheek.

“Tomorrow,” Jade promises, like it’s a comfort. “She said she should be here with your mother and Airk by moonsrise. She said the blood of the six in triplicate will make the energy flow back into you so much easier.”

Suddenly Kit can’t breathe. It’s like the first time she fell off a horse and slammed down onto the ground, the wind pulverised out of her, trying to gasp for air that just refused to get back in her lungs. Her mom? Airk? And the she must be Elora and how is Kit supposed to save all of them?

The feeling that overcame her yesterday returns with a vengeance; the feeling that if she stepped into Nockmaar she wouldn’t leave. It’s back. It’s worse. Because now the doom encompasses her whole family and Kit doesn’t know how to stop it.

Her head spins with the lack of air, with the panic, but Jade catches her when her legs give out. It’s only through a wordless sound of protest that Kit gets across the notion that she doesn’t want to be carried, so she gets to keep her feet on the ground while Jade wraps her arms around her.

“We have to get out of here,” she manages to say into Jade’s warm neck. Tears of dread are stinging her eyes, heart shuddering like a caged thing. “Before they get here, Jade, we have to go.”

“Be brave, my love, be brave,” Jade says softly, running her hand down Kit’s spine and back up, gathering her face in both hands when she pulls back to look at her.

“Nothing good is going to happen tomorrow! Last time I saw Airk he stabbed me!” Kit snaps, pushing Jade away. It’s not – that’s not the reason she doesn’t want Airk here, but the words slip out of her mouth so easily, she can’t deny the panic has more than one root.

The memory of Airk with his Kit-stained hands brings a thundercloud over Jade, and she snatches Kit’s hands from the air and presses them against Jade’s chest. Kit’s on the verge of crying again but it’s not just despair, it’s nothing so easy to identify – it’s a heart in denial and a stomach falling through the floor and the urge to scream that comes from the world turned upside down and why can’t she just stay strong?

One hand still over Kit’s, holding Kit’s palms pressed against her heart, Jade takes Kit’s chin with her other and forces Kit to look at her. “Kit. I would rip his head from his shoulders before I ever let him hurt you again,” she swears. “Can’t you feel it? Every beat of my heart is for you. Every drop of my blood, yours. Every breath in my lungs I breathe for you.”

Kit feels a stupid tear fall down her cheek, burning hot. Her list of things she needs to have a good freak out about is ever growing but she tries to stay focused. The past is bad; the future looks worse. And Jade is looking at her like she'd never hurt her but she has still not promised not to scribble evil runes into Kit’s skin.

Still won't leave with her.

"If you really mean that, then come with me," Kit tries again, though she can feel the futility of it. "Let's get the food and go!"

Her feeling is right; Jade shakes her head. "We have to wait for Elora. We have to finish the ritual."

“So I’m a prisoner?” Kit blurts, eyes going wide under high eyebrows as she pulls away from Jade, though there’s nowhere to go but back into the curved stone wall. She wants to make Jade say it, because maybe if Jade says it she’ll hear herself. “You’re actually keeping me prisoner, are you?”

“No, love,” Jade says, reaching for her hands again, but Kit stuffs them hard under her armpits. Jade takes her forearms instead, looks at her with soft, earnest eyes. “I’m explainin’ this all wrong.”

Kit’s snort is vocal and incredulous, bordering right on the edge of hysteria. “You sure as shit are.”

“Alright, let me try again,” Jade says, looking up at the spiderwebs on the ceiling for a moment, blowing in the breeze curling up the staircase. “The world is on fire.”

“What–”

“Before the quest, Kit, there was an awfulness to all of our lives. You can’t deny it. This world where… where we couldn’t be in charge of anything,” Jade’s voice rings with an ache that drags at Kit like a tide. There is true pain there still, muddying the waters of Kit’s feelings, because Kit does struggle to deny it. “You were going to be traded into a loveless marriage, I was a kidnapped child raised to hate my first family, to swear myself to the legion of the country who enslaved them. If the Wyrm hadn’t saved Airk, we would have been trapped in those lives forever–”

That word, though, bursts with clarity. Kit has no fucking problem denying that one. “Saved?”

“The world is on fire,” Jade repeats. “But it needs to burn, so the new world can be born from the ashes. I’ve seen the future, Kit. Graydon will take Galladoorn from his parents, and won’t that be better? Airk will take Tir Asleen from Sorsha, and they can tear down the barrier as the empire spreads. Graydon and Airk will catch up with Willow, and he, too, will show his people the way. And Kit—” Jade says, guiding Kit’s face back toward her because she can see her Kit is spinning out.

Kit is spinning, but she’s trying to ground herself because there in the darkness is a tiny spark: will catch up with Willow means they haven’t caught him yet–

And Jade hasn’t mentioned Boorman yet and please, please, let him have escaped with Willow, let them be concocting a plan.

But Jade pulls her focus back, and spins her head even harder as she continues to speak. “Nockmaar, Kit, is yours to remake. And I’ll be there, yours to command, through every moment as we spread through the Wildwood till your empire meets theirs, till this whole land comes together as one. Isn’t it our duty, my love, to save this world from the pain the old ways forced us to live? And isn’t it a kindness he’s given us?”

“A kindness?” Kit echoes, the vision of herself at the head of the Nockmaar army terrifying her so much she can barely hear her own voice over the pounding of her heart.

Jade hums, and with Kit’s face held firmly in her large, warm hands, she presses a kiss to Kit’s forehead. “A great kindness,” Jade assures her. “In the way of the Wyrm, there’s no need for forced marriages.”

A short, sharp giggle tangles out of Kit’s throat. Everything Jade is saying is getting crazier and crazier and tension has a vice grip on Kit’s guts that cranks tighter with every word. “I got stabbed,” she squeaks in protest. “And you know what? It felt a little forced!”

“I know,” Jade’s voice cracks, holding her face like the most precious thing. “I know. Elora told me there’s a magic in you. Buried deep. Buried by your mother who refused to accept you had any power of your own. The fastest way to wake it up was through pain. I hate it too,” Jade is suddenly fierce, her hands sliding up to take Kit’s whole face in hers, her eyes wide and dark and there is true fear in there from what she witnessed. “I hate that it hurts you, my love, but I promise as soon as the ritual is complete, nothing will hurt anymore. I promise. Look at me!” A beam bursts across her face, hopeful and bright. “I fell down a ravine and felt nothing.”

Kit’s laugh surprises her, it’s high pitched and sudden as a hiccup, disbelieving and deeply uncomfortable. “You have fucking lost it, Jade! Listen to me–” she says, grabbing Jade’s wrists to drag her hands away from her face. “You’re delusional if you think I would ever want to be some magical fucked up queen of Nockmaar. I do not want this! The thing that’s waking up, it’s not my – my me, it’s Bavmorda! I keep dreaming about Bavmorda! She’s in my dreams and she’s in my head and it’s – It's gross! Can you understand that, or are you too Wrym-fried to function?”

Jade looks affronted. “I’m not Wyrm-fried, Kit.”

“You are so goddamn Wyrm-fried!” Kit can feel her voice climbing high again, the frantic notes she hates to hear but can’t stop, is so far beyond being able to stop. “You chased me down through the snow like an animal!”

“You ran! I wasn’t going to lose you again!”

“I ran ‘cause you said Airk stabbing me was part of some plan!”

“It is!” Jade tosses her head back in a gesture Kit’s seen many times before, it’s frustration at Kit and frustration at herself and when she does it a bitter, mean little part of Kit can’t help but think good. If Kit’s frazzled – and that’s the mildest way possible to describe what Kit is right now – then sure as shit Jade should be too. It sets them on more of an even keel and that’s something Kit’s desperate to hold onto.

“Violence isn’t always evil, Kit,” Jade tries to reason, like the Wyrm-fried knight she is. “You just need to look at the bigger picture.”

“The Wyrmy picture!” Kit shoots back. “The picture we’re trying to avoid, remember?! That we went on a whole quest trying to stop!”

“We were wrong!” Jade snaps at first, so sharp it makes Kit flinch, not at the sudden volume of her voice but her conviction. It feels like Jade slaps her, hard enough to bring tears stinging to her eyes. They were not wrong, Kit’s belief in that is bone deep. Being confronted with Jade’s belief in the opposite is like running headfirst into a castle wall.

Jade closes her eyes, takes a long breath in through her nose and when she opens her eyes on Kit again, they’re softer. Her voice, too, turns gentler, coaxing Kit like she’s Jade’s new, unbroken foal. “All that time, Kit, we were so blind. Living our whole lives in the darkness, and I know you’re still in the dark, my love, I know how much you hate not understanding, but you have to trust me–”

“I’ll only trust you if you say you’ll leave with me. Right now.” There’s a pleading shake to Kit’s voice, but it doesn’t stop her trying. “That we’ll get the food and our stuff and we’ll go, before anyone else gets here. We’ll go and we’ll find Willow before Airk and Graydon do, and we’ll burn the Wyrm right out of you.”

“Please don’t,” Jade says, and she almost sounds sad. “Please, Kit. This is how it’s supposed to be, how I’m supposed to be. The strength he’s given me, the understanding. Kit, I can see everything. I can see how you can be so much more than what you are.”

Hurt flickers across Kit’s face, even now. She can’t help it. “You used to like what I am,” she says. “Quite a bit, actually.”

Jade moves instantly, crowding Kit back against the stone wall over the tower, searching her face. “How can you think I don’t love every little bit of you, Kit?” She asks, her hands sliding up Kit’s shoulders and neck to cradle her face. “I worship you. That’s why I want to see you grow.”

For a terrible moment, Kit considers the possibility of pushing Jade right down these stairs.”You want to see me grow into my grandmother?”

“That’s not what’s going to happen.”

“You’ve been lied to, Jade! The Wyrm lied to you! How could you think the Wyrm would do anything but lie to you?!”

“If you could feel what I feel, and see what I've seen, you wouldn't be saying that. Kit, Elora's with him, and you're alive because of Elora. I have you, because of them."

"I wouldn't have needed saving if Wyrm-fried Airk hadn't stabbed me in the first place!"

"No, you'd be married to Graydon, getting ready to bear his babies, away from me! The Wyrm is the only reason we're together—"

"Oh FUCK THAT!" Kit screams. "FUCK that, Jade, and GET OFF me!" She shakes Jade off, and storms – the only place there is to storm, into the highest room of the high tower.

It’s daylight in the tower, too much like her dream. All of the candles that had been burning around Graydon and Elora are still there, but they’re out, and many have toppled. Spiderswebs gather in every window, and the floor is littered with broken rocks and shattered glass. Papers have piled up in one corner like dead leaves, ruined by two hundred moons of weather.

Here it is, this place of power. The fulcrum. Kit can feel it the way she could feel the Immemorial City waiting for them at the base of the waterfall. Things are gearing up to tip based on what happens right here in this tower.

A place to balance the biggest forces in the world. Great destruction, great restoration, Jade’s eerie words are called back into Kit’s head when she sees the Kymerian Cuirass is lying on the altar, the same altar where Kit had eased Elora away from the vision of her baby self. Kit’s stomach lurches, and then so does she, throwing herself toward it and dragging it into her arms like a lover.

It’s then that Jade realises she’s made a mistake; she’s left the Lux beside it, and Kit has already grabbed it. Kit is pressing it flat against her chest where it glows, the light of it refracting off the necklace and into Jade’s eyes. The very light of it hurts.

Jade knows she should never have taken it off her belt, it was just… nothing hurt, in Jade’s whole body, no matter what she put it through. Nothing but the pulsing bruise of her skin where the pouch that held the Lux touched her, nothing but the aching muscles beneath, nothing but her bones, protesting at the proximity of this ancient, evil thing, convincing her with every toxic ache that Elora had been right; the Lux needed to be undone.

“Put it down, Kit,” Jade’s voice growls out of her body.

Kit laughs softly, the same way she used to laugh whenever Jade would point out that the sun was getting low, that it was time to head home. No it’s not, the laugh used to say. No, I won’t, it says now.

“Not gonna do that” Kit tells her, gripping the Lux tighter in one hand, the Cuirass in the other. “It chose me. It’s mine. My father found it, it’s mine.”

“Oh, my corrupted princess,” Jade says, and there’s a heartbreak so real written across her face. Even though Kit knows that Jade’s heart has been swallowed by something else, she can’t help but feel guilty for causing it. There’s pain Jade wears because of Kit’s words and it hurts, it shouldn’t, it’s dumb, but Kit hurts any time she breaks Jade’s heart.

Jade steps forward and Kit skitters back, keeping the altar between them. Launching herself like a panther across it, Jade grabs at the Cuirass, wrapping her fingers tightly into the armhole. Kit swears at her, but Jade’s stronger, and jerks the armour out of Kit’s grip so hard it hurts Kit’s hand.

With a low snarl, Jade throws the suit behind her without even looking, and continues advancing on Kit.

A fire rages in Kit’s eyes, and she can feel it burning pure in her body. It’s a righteous anger; that was her armour, this is her Lux, and Jade has no right to take either – the Wyrm has no right to take either! Kit’s fury swells hot inside her, and she hears herself growl back, low in her throat. The Wyrm had no right to take Jade. To take Airk. To take Elora, or Graydon. To threaten to take her mother and Willow. To threaten the lands, her lands, her people, with its empire.

Jade slams into her so hard it knocks the growl – and the wind – right out of her, pressing her up hard against the wall with Jade’s body. Jade’s hands close around the Lux and Kit hears a hiss at the contact, she can’t tell if it’s Jade’s voice or her flesh that hisses, and then Jade’s fingers are peeling open Kit’s, and Kit has no choice but to snap forward and bite down on Jade’s neck as hard as she possibly can.

Jade’s tightened tendons shift under Kit’s teeth but Kit doesn’t let go. She won’t, till Jade lets go of the Lux, and Jade won’t do that. Even when Jade’s skin breaks. Even when blood bursts into Kit’s mouth, coppery and just as hot on Kit’s tongue as Kit’s tears are on her face. Jade’s breath is ragged and hot in Kit’s ear, Kit’s breath is huffing through her nose and the smell of blood is as thick as the taste of it.

With another growl, Jade yanks the Lux right out of Kit’s hands, and Kit bites down harder at the loss. Bites so hard it hurts her jaw.

The skin of Jade’s neck rips open more as Jade pulls back, so triumphant to have retrieved the Lux that she doesn’t even seem to notice she’s bleeding. One of her forearms presses firmly against Kit’s chest, pinning her to the wall, and the skin of the other hand fizzes disgustingly where it touches the Lux.

With a short, sharp huff, Jade pulls her arm back, and hurls the hateful, hurtful thing right out the window.

And oh, it feels good to be free of it, even if it does draw the most heartbreaking, despairing wail out of her girl when it disappears from view.

Elora’s not going to be happy; Jade’s going to have to go down and search the foot of the tower to find it before she returns, but for the moment she can breathe a deep sigh of relief.

“You’re a fucking monster,” Kit’s voice breaks under the weight of this betrayal, and Jade’s attention turns back to her. Back to her lips, stained the brightest red from Jade’s blood, her teeth coated in it, tear tracks cutting clean down her face. Both of Kit’s small hands are fighting against the arm Jade’s using to pin her to the wall. It's only now that Jade notices the claw marks Kit’s fingernails have dragged into her skin.

Jade keeps Kit pinned, but she lifts her other hand and wipes the blood from Kit’s mouth with her thumb. It smears red across Kit’s cheek, too much to wipe away. “I’ll be anything you need me to be, your majesty.”

Everything about this – down to the title – is wrong. Is a lie. Hurts to hear. Makes her angry. Causes a crackle of electric heat in her chest and the palms of her hands. Kit stares straight into the eyes of her love that the Wyrm has stolen from her, trembling as adrenaline lances the despair out of her. Without releasing Jade from her stare, Kit turns her head, and spits a messy mouthful of Jade’s blood onto the stone floor.

“I need you to give me my Jade back,” she declares. “And then wither and die.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere, Kit,” Jade promises, searching Kit’s face to find some way of making her understand. “I’m right here, I’m with you, always, and neither of us is going to die.”

“You are,” Kit promises right back, through pinkish, bared teeth. “I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna get Jade back!” Her voice rises in volume, lowers in pitch, as she starts to thrash to break free from the trap between Jade’s solid arm and her grandmother’s solid wall. “I’m going to get her back! And my brother! And Elora! And then I’m going to CLIMB DOWN YOUR THROAT till you CHOKE ON ME and I’m gonna make you SPIT UP MY DAD, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! I AM NEVER GOING TO STOP FIGHTING YOU! NEVER NEVER NEVER FUCKING EVER!”

“Then I’m sorry for this,” Jade says reluctantly, and releases Kit from the wall, only to wrap her arms around Kit’s middle and pick her bodily off the ground.

Kit fights. She kicks her feet out in vicious lashes and scratches till her nails bend back. She thrashes her head so hard the force would crush Jade’s nose if Jade didn’t have her head cranked back out of Kit’s reach. And Kit screams till her voice breaks. Wordless and furious screams that fill the high tower, and when Jade starts to drag her down the stairs her screams echo, bouncing off the stone walls all the way back down the bedroom, where Jade throws Kit unceremoniously on the bed.

Kit sprawls, her legs tangling in her heavy skirt, and she opens her mouth to tell Jade to go fuck herself – but Jade has followed her instantly onto the bed, and shoves her down hard enough to push the curse right out of Kit’s lungs.

Kit turns into a wildcat, scratching and spitting and screaming and squirming to fight Jade off, and won’t listen to the warning Jade tries to give: “Oi Kit — stop! Stop or I’ll make you stop!”

No, Kit doesn’t listen. She claws at Jade’s clothes. Snags a handful of Jade’s hair and yanks it hard. Snaps at her again with furious teeth.

Jade shuts it all down by shooting out a sudden hand and clamping it down tight on Kit’s throat.

Kit’s body freezes. Her mouth bursts open as her breath is cut off. Her thoughts go blank. Her vision blurs as her eyes cross and a visceral fear shoots through her body, every nerve ending on edge. Jade’s fingertips and thumb curl into her tearable throat and her palm squashes pressure down on what Kit’s survival instinct has suddenly realised is a very crushable windpipe. Kit’s hands stop attacking Jade and instantly go to her throat to try and pry Jade’s impossible grip off her.

She rakes at Jade’s hands blindly, catching her own throat with her nails. Jade huffs a visible billow of hot breath into the frigid air and shifts, releasing Kit’s throat.

Kit gasps frantically for air, hauling it into her body. It’s hampered as Jade moves to press her heavy knee down into Kit’s sternum instead, her hand pinning Kit’s wrist against the bed.

The howl that rips out of Kit is a ragged thing, ragged as the nails she uses to claw at Jade. Her fingers find a Death Dog tear in Jade’s shirt and rip down through her entire sleeve to the freckled skin underneath, but Jade doesn’t stop. Kit bashes and bashes at her ribs but it’s like punching a wall.

Jade reaches over and retrieves the chains that hang beside the bed. Kit hears the metal of the shackle scrape against the stone floor, the chains clank as they’re lifted.

“Jade–” she pleads, and sees the muscles in Jade’s bloody jaw tense. “Jade don’t–”

Kit screams – sharper, now, more like a yelp – as Jade clamps the thick band of metal around her wrist, so cold it feels like it’s stabbing nails of ice through her delicate bones. Jade shifts again, snatches Kit’s other hand out of the air, and wraps a second shackle around it.

Kit jerks her arms, but it’s no use. The freezing iron holds her, arms spread wide open on the bed.

There’s enough give to the chains that they don’t pull her open enough to put constant strain on her shoulders; that’s the only mercy. Kit gasps in her choked breath, even her lungs are tightening from the sudden shock of cold. She’s not thinking of mercy.

They hurt, so cold that Kit’s wrists feel like they’re on fire and it’s burning up her hands and down her arms. They’re heavy, and the chains clank as she struggles fruitlessly against them, though they do not clank as loudly as the blood roars in her ears.

“Hush,” Jade soothes, and catches Kit’s face in her hands to stop her thrashing. Blood from Jade’s throat drips down onto Kit as Jade murmurs sweetness and comfort and worry to her. “Come on now Kit, hush, be still.”

Kit’s filthy face crumbles into filthier sobs in Jade’s hands. It’s like she’s slipping away into despair, into a place Jade can’t reach – and Jade’s stomach drops. It’s almost the worst feeling in the world. Kit’s life slipping away was worse, but Kit crying like this is a close second. Jade kisses her forehead to make it right, pours all her love into the soft gesture as blood continues to pour down her front.

“I’m sorry, love, I had to, but you’re alright, you’re alright. Look at me,” her voice cracks, as she strokes her fingers over Kit’s face, wiping away blood and tears. “Look at me, Kit, you’re alright.”

But Kit does not open her eyes. Her whole face is scrunched up tight, like she’s trying to stop something crawling in. Jade lowers another softest kiss onto the tensest forehead. She hears Kit suck in a sharp breath through clogged nostrils and it breaks Jade’s heart to see her like this. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers against Kit’s skin. “I didn’t want it to be this way.”

“Fuck you,” Kit sobs out, turning her head away. “Very very much.”

“Here…” Jade shifts, gathering one of the pillows that had been cast to the floor in the heat of the struggle. A couple of short little puffs with her hands and it’s as fluffed up as a decades-old pillow is going to get, but it’s the best she’s got. Kit’s head doesn’t want to move, but it’s barely effort at all for Jade to slide her hand under Kit’s skull and lift it up, slipping the pillow under Kit’s head.

It’s only when she pulls back a little more than Kit opens her bloodshot eyes. Jade smiles at her sympathetically. “Comfortable, love?”

“No,” Kit’s voice grits out, rough as a gravel pit, deep as a mine. Bracing herself as best she can – twisting her hands to grab at the chains – Kit aims a kick at Jade and catches her painfully on the hip that still hasn’t recovered from its long encounter with the Lux.

Jade’s embarrassed that she yelps.

She’s embarrassed that she has to resort to shackling Kit’s ankles, too, but the way that Kit thrashes, Jade is afraid she is going to burst her wounds right open again. This way, bound in chains and secured to each post of the bed, Kit is at least safe from doing herself a mischief. Jade is safe from losing her again.

If only Kit could see that. But her stubborn, impossible princess has solidly proven that she won’t. She won’t see. It makes Jade ache in sympathy; Kit’s going to feel so, so embarrassed by her behaviour when this is all over and she realises Jade was right.

“You just have to trust me, Kit,” she says, sadly, laying a hand on Kit's heart, stroking down her stomach. “That’s all you have to do.”

Kit can’t look at her, won’t look at her, and in her effort to look anywhere else she forgets what is suspended above the bed, and looks up. Clear as day, Bavmorda looks down at her, her breath panting in time with Kit’s, her mouth open and eyes as wide as Kit’s, but above her, Bavmorda’s mouth turns into a smile, and Kit’s mostly definitely doesn’t.

The light changes, from the green of the ever-glowing crystals to a paler blue. Bavmorda leans closer, as though she’s on the brink of crawling right out of the mirror. In the hammering of her heartbeat in her ears, Kit hears her voice.

“Listen to your lover, child,” her grandmother purrs. “Stop your absurd little battle. You were born from me, made for me, you are nothing without me. Fighting your fate is pointless. Remember your visions, how good they felt? Don’t you want to feel good again? Don’t you want everything to stop hurting?”

It’s true that Kit hurts, and that each shallow exhale of her breath drags out a rough whimper of complaint.

“All you have to do,” Bavmorda croons at her, as witchlights float closer to Kit like they’re reaching for her, a soft blue, a familiar blue. “Is submit.”

– A familiar blue?

There’s a dissonance that tugs at Kit’s attention. Something that doesn’t make sense. The floating balls of light are blue, the same colour as the eyes she’s seen in the mirror all her life.

But not this mirror, she realises with a start. That’s what’s not making sense. This mirror picks up Kit’s body in her grandmother’s dress and it twists her reflected face into her grandmother’s smile, but in the mirror there’s no bed, no shackles and chain. In the mirror, Bavmorda is free.

But down on the bed, Kit is bathed in blue. Bathed in a soft light that only touches her; it has no equal on the other side.

It’s because the light does not belong to Bavmorda at all. Kit doesn’t know how she knows this, only that she does. Somehow, actually, the light is Kit’s.

Kit gasps shocked breath into struggling lungs, and in response to her attention, her desperation, her need, her own warm witchlights start to burn a little brighter, like torches, lit, on the eve of battle.