I was free for the first time in six years, but I greeted the dawn alone. The tunics had burned—my brothers would not stand as men in the morning sunlight.
I gathered up the deserted Kingstone fragment with trembling hands and slipped it over my head. It was a hollow victory to wear it again without my brothers beside me.
I turned to the Ri, who stared at where the rift had closed, like a man stunned. Of course he was stunned. He’d seen his witch-mother in her true form, and I’d been the one who sent her back to the Otherworld.
But my brothers!
I ran to the Ri, motioning to the empty lake. Where are they? Where’s Carrick?
“We didn’t go to the cave immediately, Lady Ryn. We couldn’t afford to lead my mother’s men there. Finn and I led them from it and then disposed of them well away from Ionwyn and Carrick. We didn’t reach the cave till after dark. Your brothers fought valiantly against the other soldiers who were already there, but—”
I saw the grief on the Ri’s face.
I didn’t want to hear the end. I rushed to the lake and waded into the shallows, the mist curling around me. I slapped the water, calling them as I had so many times.
No answering trumpet. No sound of wings.
Nothing.
I almost shouted for them but stopped. I didn’t want to speak if my brothers weren’t there. Perhaps that was a good thing. There were some stories that should never be told.
“Lady Ryn.” The Ri took me by the elbow, tugging me back from the water.
I pulled my arm free and waded farther into the lake. I’d let him tell me all that had happened soon. But I couldn’t hear it now. I needed to stand in the water, skirts billowing around me, till I was sure my brothers wouldn’t return.
“Lady Ryn!” He caught me again.
I pressed farther into the water. If I looked at the Ri, I might cry and never stop.
“Ryn!” a voice shouted.
I didn’t believe my ears at first, but I stopped, the water past my knees.
“Rynni!”
I swung to face the sound.
Aiden stepped into the clearing. He wore a nettle tunic.
No. I gulped in a shuddering breath. No, it couldn’t be him.
I looked back over the lake and saw that the sun had truly risen, the horizon a wave of light behind the trees.
“Ryn,” said the Aiden-ghost, “we’re here.”
I heard the Ri shouting something about it being over as I dashed from the shallows.
I didn’t care.
Only a fool would walk toward the Queen’s enchantment, but I did. The man looked so like Aiden, and the others who stepped from the trees looked like my brothers. But they couldn’t be.
They couldn’t. She’d burned the tunics.
Aiden-ghost stopped in front of me, chest rising and falling as rapidly as my own. But he just stood there and let me look up at him.
Brown eyes. Carrick’s eyes. He seemed taller in the dawn, my forehead only reaching his shoulder.
I touched the tangle of stitches on the right cuff of his tunic. I hadn’t had time to rip the rows out and make them straight, for it was the first tunic I’d made. I’d simply finished the sleeve, working a few extra stitches into the gap so that Aiden wouldn’t be left with feathers on his arm.
I stepped back, hand pressed to my forehead. I saw the tunics burn!
I closed my eyes, trying to remember. No. I saw Cadan’s tunic burn. Had the Queen only found Cadan’s and used that to threaten me? I opened my eyes, looking behind Aiden at the figures emerging from the trees.
No. Please, not Cadan—
He, too, stepped from the trees.
“Ryn? Ryn!” he shouted and ran up to me. “Didn’t I promise I’d always call for you?”
I watched him approach, shaking my head. When he stopped in front of me, I gripped his tunic in both hands. I saw it burn!
“Ah,” he said and smiled down at me. “The Queen showed you mine, did she?” He nodded to the trees, to Ionwyn and Carrick. “Ionwyn—now there’s a fine woman!—dropped the satchel in the last desperate run to the cave. She discovered later that she had gathered up all the tunics but mine. No time to snatch it up before the Hunters reached it. It’s a good thing she had your nettle cape, isn’t it?”
I looked closer at his tunic. It had no embroidery and was cut, the sides joined in a rough seam. One of the sleeves fell down over his hand, and he shook it back, pushing it farther up his arm. He winked. “I think she was worried she’d cut the sleeves too short and I’d be left with half a wing—”
But I didn’t believe my eyes. I closed them against the dream, shaking my head to clear it.
The Ri was talking to Aiden, telling him it was over, the Queen was gone.
“Rynni,” said Owain, using my pet name, “you’re not dreaming.”
When I looked again, I saw Ionwyn. She held Carrick in her arms.
Finally I turned back to the Aiden-dream. I lifted a hand to his cheek and touched his tunic one more time and felt his warm arm beneath the sleeve. He wasn’t a ghost risen from the grave to break my heart.
He was real.
“It’s me, Ryn,” he whispered. “I promise. I’m so sorry we were late. We fought so long and traveled to the castle as soon as we could, but the Queen had already brought you here.”
I covered my face with my hands and cried.
But he wouldn’t let me cry, oh no. Aiden crushed me to him and laughed into my hair, that soft chuckle of his that let me know all was right with the world.
The moment he released me, Cadan held me at arm’s length. “You were right, Ryn! Right about the nettles and the tunics and maybe even your bargain with the Queen, do you hear me?” There were tears in his eyes too. They he caught me up with a whoop and swung me in circles. “I’ve never been so glad for nettle-nonsense in my life!”
And then to Gavyn and Declan and Owain, dear Owain who had grown so much taller than me. But I threw myself at him and felt him lift me high. He’d been a boy when this started, a boy with smooth cheeks who thought he’d outgrown his twin.
Finally I turned to Mael. He pulled me close.
I felt the brush of feathers and looked down.
Mael had wrapped a black wing around me.
No.
Mael shook his head and smiled. “The tunic was perfect, Ryn-girl. But it was torn in the fight at the cave, and I didn’t notice until we were running here. And I wasn’t about to make them stop and find some solution. We guessed you might have only seconds, and we were right, Finn says.”
I shook my head.
Mael swiped away my tears with his thumb. “None of that. You gave us six years. A wing is nothing, you hear me?”
Then he glanced over my shoulder at my brothers gathered near and smiled. “It’s your turn, Ryn. What do you have to say?”
I looked up at him, my breath stuttering in my throat. For six years, I’d waited to speak. I’d imagined what I’d say a thousand times, the words I’d throw at the Queen, the curse I’d send out into the world.
I’d given her six years of speech. I wouldn’t let her have those first words too.
The first light spilled over the treetops and across the land until my brothers were blinking in it. Aiden held a hand against the sunrise but didn’t look away. It was the first time he’d seen daylight in six years.
I walked to him and spoke his name, nothing more. “Aiden.”
It was enough.
The wind didn’t roar over us to pull them away. They didn’t turn back into swans.
I could speak!
I turned to Mael, grasping the front of his nettle tunic in my excitement. “Mael.” Then the rest of my brothers: “Declan. Gavyn. Cadan. Owain.”
Each name was like a spring thaw, melting my frozen throat after all these years.
I turned back to Carrick, still in Aiden’s arms, and took his dear face in my hands. “Carrick!”
His eyes opened wide and he held his arms out to me. I took him, and he buried his face in my shoulder. “I have so much to tell you,” I whispered against his hair. “I want to tell you about Tanwen.”
I closed my eyes against the tears. I’d longed to speak her name to Carrick for so long.
“Andaryn.”
I kept my lips against Carrick’s soft curls, even though the Ri’s voice made me want to laugh and cry, run and stay all at once.
“Andaryn. That’s your true name, isn’t it?”
I turned to face him, and Aiden plucked Carrick from my arms.
Oh, he belonged in the sunlight! He was gold all over, the sun warm on his skin, his hair looking like the spun gold of Ionwyn’s stories.
The Ri—Corbin—glanced at Aiden and dipped his head as a sign of respect. Aiden nodded.
So they’d spoken already. I’d expected my brothers would demand an introduction, that I’d have to tell Cadan to behave and Mael not to kill him—
Suddenly I wished I could, just so I could get used to words on my tongue before having to talk to the Ri.
The way he smiled at me made it hard enough to talk anyway.
“Ryn,” began Cadan, and I turned to him, relieved at the reprieve. But Cadan was mock-scowling at me. “You can talk now. It may just be me, but I think he’d love to hear what you have to say”—Cadan saluted the Ri—“and frankly, I think he’d be happy with anything you have to say.”
He gave me a gentle shove toward Corbin.
Corbin still held the spindle in his hand.
“Princess Andaryn.” He winced at the unfamiliar title, then shook his head. “Forgive me! Leaving you was all I knew to do.” He half-smiled. “You told me you had six brothers, and when . . . my mother mentioned the six men you traveled with—I knew. I knew I had to hunt them to save them. I thought it was what you’d want.” He shrugged, shoulders bending under his sadness. “Didn’t I tell you I envied you the memory of your mother? That I knew what it was to have a heartless one?”
I nodded.
He looked down at the spindle, tossing and catching it in his hand. Finally, he held the spindle up. “Do you want it?”
It would be almost like a talisman. I’d hang it over the door to remind myself that the Queen had been thwarted, that I’d carried her undoing with me the entire time.
Then I looked back. Cadan lifted his hands as if asking why I was taking so long. I looked at my other brothers, at Carrick held in his father’s arms.
I had all the reminders I needed.
I held my hand out, and Corbin gave me the spindle, his fingers brushing my palm. I strode to the shore and hurled the spindle as far as I could, watching it tumble and spin before it splashed into the lake.
I’d planned to tell him so many things! But all I could manage was, “I don’t want to see it again.”
I saw the rise of his chest when I finally spoke to him.
“What do you want, Princess?” He shook his head. “Ah! I say that word and I think I’m talking to another person. What is it you want, my Lady Ryn? For that’s who you are to me. I know what I want.”
Run. It was as clear as it had ever been, the command like thunder inside me.
With my last bit of strength, I ran. I didn’t stop as I neared him, and he opened his arms the way a castle throws open its gates.
He caught me, half spinning me, his arms around my waist.
“Are you sure, my Lady Ryn?” he asked, then glanced at my brothers. “Are you certain, Princess?”
“Yes,” I whispered, resting my palms against his chest. “Yes, Corbin.”
I’d wanted to say his name for so long.
And perhaps he’d waited just as long to hear it, for he grew perfectly still.
And then the words came as thick as rain or tears, and I couldn’t stop. “I wanted to tell you so many times, but I didn’t know how. There was no way to draw my story. And what if I hurt you? What if she—?”
He rested his forehead against mine, his arms tight around my waist, as if I was his home, his castle. “She’d cut me long ago, my heart. Long ago.”
For six years, I’d longed for speech, but now that I could speak, I didn’t know what to say. “She turned them to swans six years ago—and I agreed to it, six years of silence if she’d just set them free.”
“Your brothers told me everything.”
I nodded. “But I want to tell you. I want you to hear it from me. Besides, Cadan exaggerates.”
Corbin peered over my shoulder. “Which one is he?”
“The loud one with the tunic made out of the cloak.”
“Ahh.” And he smiled down at me. “Tell me your story, Lady Ryn.”
So I did.
* * *
I filled the next hour with speech, though I wished for silence all over again when I had to tell my brothers about Father.
The one small consolation was that he died as himself and not as the Queen’s pawn.
By the end of the day, Corbin had arranged provisions so that the next day we could return with soldiers to Lacharra to set things right. Our country had made many enemies with the Queen’s constant battling. We couldn’t afford to leave it without a ruler for long.
After my brothers went to their beds, I lingered by the hall’s fireplace, tracing pictures in the soot, grateful for the familiarity of it. Everything—almost everything—I’d longed for had come to pass. The old life I’d fought to reclaim had been won. Why did I feel like a stranger in it?
“Lady Ryn.”
I turned to Corbin.
When the last of the fire’s light flickered over his face, I saw the concern. “My lady Ryn, you’ve told me your story, but you’ve not yet told me how it ends.”
“I must return to Lacharra,” I said.
Corbin nodded slowly. “Of course.”
“But first—” I stepped forward, suddenly uncertain.
“Yes?”
I stamped my foot, angry at my cowardice. “I told you what I wanted to do the day I could speak, but now that it’s here, now that we’re alone, I don’t know if I can. I have to go back to Lacharra, you see.”
The side of his mouth twitched and he stepped forward. “You already said that.”
“Because it’s true! And it’ll take months, and—”
He grinned.
I kissed him. And when he kissed me back, every word flew from my mind. And he wasn’t nearly close enough. I looped my arms around his neck and then I kissed him the way I’d wanted to for so long.
Because sometimes, words aren’t enough.
* * *
I returned with my brothers to Lacharra and remained there long enough to slip the shard of rock back into the Kingstone. It didn’t fit perfectly. Six years had worn off the sharp edges so that anyone could see the violence that had happened, even after the Kingstone was whole again.
Before I returned to Corbin, I visited the library. The nobles told us that Father never visited the library after he’d banished his children, and I believed them. I found The Annals of Lacharra on the table where I’d left it years ago, buried under other books.
I sat one last time in Father’s chair and opened it.
I smelled the faintest scent of cloves.
And I traced the figure of the Cynwrig crest at the top of the page.
I hadn’t come here to mourn the time lost between Father and me. I came to celebrate his return to me, even if it had only been for a few moments.
I gathered six years of memories, moments as small as cloves, as common as nettles: my childhood in Lacharra, the Queen’s curse, six years of hiding with my brothers.
They were all my Before: a story that could not be stolen or silenced.
I read aloud:
“The flight of swans, bearing swords . . .”
The library’s silence fell away. I could hear Father’s voice above and below mine, the way the rush of the ocean fills the empty spaces between words.
I heard Owain-the-hen’s low, rolling clucks.
I heard Tanwen’s voice, fire and laughter.
I heard Cadan saying he’d always call for me.
I heard Corbin calling me Lady Wyn when others had seen only a mad girl.
My voice filled the library, strong and sure. When I reached the end of what Father had read, I marked the page with a strand of nettle yarn I’d cut from one of the tunics, and—
“Ryn?” Cadan poked his head in the library door. “I’ve been looking for ages! Carrick—”
He stopped when he saw me at Father’s old place.
I motioned him to go on. “Carrick?”
Cadan raised an eyebrow. “Carrick walked into the kitchen and proceeded to eat every single sweet those soft-headed women fed him. He’s crying fit to bring the walls down, and his new nursemaid doesn’t know what to do. Aiden’s in a meeting with his top lords, Mael is flirting with Landon’s oldest daughter, who doesn’t mind a black swan wing half as much as I predicted—” He drew a deep breath and hurried on: “Declan’s trying to sing Carrick calm while Gavyn checks his books to see if anyone ever died from eating too many sweets, and Owain—”
Owain, sporting a beard that even Aiden would admire, joined Cadan at the door. “I was sent to discover what was taking Cadan so long!”
I laughed and didn’t once think about holding it inside me. “I’m coming! Half a second and I’ll be there.”
I closed The Annals of Lacharra, leaving the nettle yarn pressed between its pages.
“Hurry, Ryn!” said Cadan. “Or Declan will be crying too.”
“I’m ashamed to call you my brothers, every last one of you!” I called back. “I used to comfort that little man alone. And without being able to make a sound.”
One last glance out the library window, past the forest, to where the island of Eyre lay beyond the horizon. In a week, I’d begin my journey back to Fianna. And Corbin.
My future lay ahead of me.
“I’m coming,” I said.