The Firefly’s Burden-Chapter 55: Tent of the Fates

The Firefly’s Burden-Chapter 55: Tent of the Fates

The mystic tent hunched at the far edge of the festival like it had been waiting centuries for me and already regretted it. Veils shivered across the frame with no wind to move them, colors bending wrong in the torchlight. Everything about it whispered trap.
Which of course meant Cassie wanted to go in.
“No,” I said flatly, my fingers drumming three beats against my thigh. “It’s theatrics. Some veiled hack with riddles and props.”
Cassie tilted her head, blue eyes catching firelight sharp as glass. “If you’re not afraid, what’s the harm?” She let the pause stretch, dagger-sharp. “If you
are
afraid, that’s the point.”
My sleeve seam was already between my fingers, rolling back and forth, back and forth. “You sound like a pamphlet for a doomsday cult.”
Her smile was infuriating. “Relax. You love rhymes. Half your insults rhyme when you’re nervous.”
I nearly groaned. “Do you
practice
being unbearable, or is it natural talent?”
Behind us, the others lingered in the glow of stalls. Lucien sulked like it was his calling; Alina’s hand tethered him steady. Naomi and Kess were laughing too loud at some riddle game. Good. Let them stay out here.
Roran, of course, was not staying out here. He was iron planted at my shoulder, molten-amber eyes steady. “You are not going in without me.”
My teeth clicked. “You don’t get to argue.”
“My duty is to keep you safe,” he said, voice like tempered steel.
“And my duty,” I snapped, tapping three beats sharper now, “is to make sure people actually follow my orders. If you won’t, no one else will.” I pressed a teleportation stone into his palm, then a sending stone, the weight of both final. “If anything happens, you’ll know. You can burn the tent down if you have to.”
The shimmer of his heat-shield wavered faintly, catching torchlight like warped glass. For a heartbeat I thought he’d dig in. But then his jaw clenched, and he stepped back, silent but seething.
Cassie’s smirk tilted. “Bossy looks good on you.”
I rolled my eyes and shouldered past the veil. “Shut up.”
The world outside cut off like a blade.
Festival noise—gone. The scent of roasted fruit and smoke and sweat—vanished. My ears rang with the absence. The air inside pressed close, incense-thick: sage, stormwater, and a metallic tang that clung at the back of my tongue. Each breath lagged a beat behind, like I’d stepped into time that didn’t want me.
Veils of fabric hung like smoke caught mid-drift, whispering though nothing touched them. Violet flame lamps guttered in bowls, their light bending shadows too long. Ash-fogged mirrors leaned at angles, faint words glimmering and vanishing before I could read them. Rugs overlapped underfoot, uneven, as though the ground remembered other steps and refused to forget.
And in the center, the Mystic.
Veiled face, robes heavy with charms that chimed too softly, like water swallowed in sand. Their scent was impossible to pin down—every spice at once, then none. When they spoke, the sound carried like two notes struck together, just off enough to grate.
I forced my shoulders square. This was ridiculous.
Cassie’s hand brushed mine, steady, grounding. “Breathe.”
I wanted to snap at her. Hated how much that one word helped.
The Mystic tilted their veiled head, like they’d been waiting for us to finish our bickering. The layered voice cut through the incense-heavy air:
“Anchors first.”
I blinked, confusion sparking. My mouth opened, ready to demand what that meant—
But Cassie was already stepping forward.
The Mystic’s hand—thin, veined, age unreadable—swept toward the low table between us.
Three objects waited there like a dare: a shallow bowl of saltwater that breathed mist; a dish of ember-dust glowing faintly as if a coal slept inside it; and a lantern with a moth pressed still against its glass, wings folded like parchment.
“Anchors first,” the Mystic repeated, voice vibrating like two notes played against each other.
Cassie gave me a look that said she knew exactly what they meant. Saints. Of course she did.
I tapped three beats against my thigh. Once. Twice. My seam was already rolling between my fingers again. “This is absurd,” I muttered.
“Absurd is your specialty,” Cassie murmured back, and before I could grab her wrist, she reached for the lantern.
The moth stirred. Its wings flared once, twice, then shimmered gold-bright—firelight caught in living form. Not a moth anymore. A firefly. Its glow surged until the whole lantern flared white-gold, searing like a miniature sun.
I sucked in a breath, hand halfway up to shield my eyes.
The Mystic shuddered. Their voice cracked, too many notes at once: “Too bright. Anchors aren’t meant to burn.”
Cassie froze, hand still on the lantern’s handle. I felt her confusion like static in the air—her shoulders stiff, her breath sharp.
“Cass,” I said quietly, but the word came out softer than I intended.
Her head turned just enough for me to see the flicker in her crystalline eyes. She’d heard it—the label, the truth—that whatever she was to me wasn’t just politics. It was structural. Necessary. She was my tether, my anchor. And anchors weren’t supposed to blaze.
But she did.
I let the seam of my sleeve go, fingers curling tight instead. Pride swelled, hot as the ember-dust. Pride, and something sharper—fear. Because if they could see her, then others could too.
I straightened, chin high like Selene had taught me, even as my pulse thudded unevenly in my throat. “Guess you’ve never met this anchor before,” I said, and forced my mouth into a smile I didn’t feel.
The lantern’s glow dimmed slowly, the firefly settling back into a sleepy pulse. Cassie let go of the handle, her hand trembling once before she tucked it behind her back.
The Mystic’s veil shifted as if they were studying her. Then me. Then both of us together.
And I hated how much the air suddenly felt like judgment.
The lantern’s after-image still pulsed behind my eyes—a white-gold echo that made the violet flames look bruised. Cassie eased her hand off the handle like it might bite if she let go too fast. She tried to hide the tremor in her fingers by raking them once down the seam of her gown; her face stayed schooled, cool as glass. Only I got the ripple—her scent shifting a hair brighter, citrus nicking sweet vanilla at the edges like a struck match.
“Too bright,” the Mystic had said. “Anchors aren’t meant to burn.”
My jaw was set too hard. Three taps into my thigh. Again. My fingers found the sleeve seam and rolled it until the fabric warmed beneath the friction.
“Now you,” the layered voice murmured. Two notes, imperfect unison. A tilt of the veiled head toward the low table. “Queen.”
The ember-dust on its dish breathed like a sleeping creature. The saltwater bowl shivered once as if something had exhaled beneath it. The lantern, sated, threw a smaller halo now, the moth-that-wasn’t-a-moth tucked quiet against the glass—no, not tucked. Watching.
“This is theater,” I said, because if I didn’t put steel in my mouth it would all taste like fear. “Clever smoke and timing.”
“Doors,” the Mystic said serenely. “Paint if you like. They remain doors.”
Cassie’s hand brushed the side of mine. Easy contact, light as a silk thread, and still it cut the static in my head. “Breathe,” she said, the way you tell a storm to simmer.
I breathed—and the air came in sage-thick, stormwater, iron-sour. It tasted like the moment before a blade is forged: heat waiting, metal remembering its future.
Fine.
I set my palm into the ember-dust.
Heat lifted up the map of my hand in clean lines: the long path of the life-line glowed first, bright as day over snow; the heart-line flared second, a swift, tender burn; a diagonal struck the center like a comet path. Not red. Not orange. White. White like the inside of a star. Pressure built under my skin, not pain, not yet—more like the exact second a bow is pulled to its perfect tension.
The tent quieted. Veils sagged and stilled. Violet flames narrowed to thin ovals, like eyes squinting. Every mirror fogged thick in one breath—ash slurring across glass—and then, all together, they began to write.
Not drift. Not fall.
Write.
Soot darkened into strokes that looked like letters I have seen in dreams and not in books. The script flexed between alphabets—half-runic, half-glyphic, then clean Sylvan lines, then something older that made the spot between my eyebrows ache. The writing circled itself, doubled its lines, decided what shape it wanted to wear and stitched itself into it. Small flakes lifted and resettled, like snow that remembered being fire.
The Mystic’s hands hovered over the nearest mirror. Not touching. Just feeling the heat like a door someone had placed their ear against.
“Listen.”
The command didn’t ride their voice alone. It pressed down from somewhere above the tent’s poles, from some note humming underneath the visible world. The hair along my forearms prickled. The ember-dust under my palm tightened, brightened.
The mirrors spoke.
Not
with sound—there was no voice to hear—but the words arrived anyway, heavy and exact, and I knew them as they formed, the way you know a name you’ve almost remembered:
From cinders she rises, flame-tongued and unbroken,
Ash upon ash, the marrow laid bare.
Burn, O Cinderborn—let all be consumed,
That from the hollow, the world may breathe anew.
The first line struck like a bell under my ribs.
From cinders she rises.
I saw myself in a dozen flames—under a chandelier’s glass rain, on a school stage with a lantern shaking in my hands, in a winter court with snow hissing against my heat.
Flame-tongued and unbroken
—that sounded like something I would say to a mirror to trick myself into standing straighter than I felt.
The second line scraped.
Ash upon ash, the marrow laid bare.
My mouth filled with the taste of my own magic—cinnamon smoke over copper coin. I could feel bone in the word
marrow
, a private vulnerability, as if the prophecy wanted to peel me to the white core and decide if I deserved to keep it.
The third line was the one designed to be quoted by enemies.
Burn, O Cinderborn—let all be consumed
—and I could hear Zyrella saying
Cinderborn
with polite venom, could see the headline fonts already gleaming. I could taste the relief of anyone who wanted me to be the fire they feared: If the girl is a weapon, the threat pre-existed her. If the girl burns, we only had to point to the page.
The last line did not belong to optics.
That from the hollow, the world may breathe anew.
Something in my shoulders relaxed a measure I hadn’t realized was clenched. This was not ruin as spectacle. It was ruin as surgeon. Fire used to burn rot out of roots. Fire used to open pinecones. Fire used to clear the choking underbrush so new things could live. The line did not ask for my personal obliteration. It asked for a hollow where old poison had been—and air returning to a place it had been denied.
Three taps. I eased my fingers open where they’d clenched the seam to ache. Up close, I could see a fine dust of ember specks glittering over the web between my thumb and forefinger. My magic hummed like a forge that hadn’t fully dimmed.
Cassie’s fingers sought mine under the table—pinky hooking to halt the tap, her thumb finding that spot along my wrist and pressing in a slow circle. The cuff-glide. I could have laughed at the absurdity—that our private grounding playbook worked in a place where mirrors wrote in ash—and instead something hot and humiliating pricked behind my eyes. I did not cry. I let my breath go slow and deliberate through my teeth.
“You okay?” Cassie asked, pitched for me alone.
“Define okay,” I muttered.
The ash-script thickened, as if the mirrors wanted to write the lines again. The letters sank deeper, carven darkness across pale fog. The violet flames on the lamps leaned toward the glass like courtiers to a favorite story.
“Everyone’s going to quote the middle,” I said out loud, because if I didn’t say something cutting I would start believing this was for me. “All appetite for doom. None for air.”
“No one’s ever accused courts of nuance,” Cassie replied dryly.
I could hear the smile in her voice. I didn’t risk looking at it. If I looked long enough I would put my forehead to her shoulder and forget how to be made of edges.
“Maybe it’s not doom,” she added, softening around the words without making them less precise. “Maybe it’s a burn to heal. They used to do that, you know. In medicine. Burn out the infection.”
“You want a prophecy to be a clinic.” The joke was a shield. It still came with relief attached.
“I want a reason,” she said. “If something has to hurt, I want it to fix what it touched.”
I closed my eyes for a beat. Opened them on the soot again. “I don’t want it to be me.”
Her hand squeezed. Just once. “I know.”
We stood there with it—security theater of the soul—until the ash lightened, the script blurring into illegibility, as if the mirrors had decided we were done studying their handwriting. Flecks lifted from the glass and eddied into the lantern’s glow. The ember-dust let go of my skin at last, and I peeled my palm away. The lines across it throbbed faintly—no marks, no burns—just that held note vibrating through bone.
“You have another,” the Mystic murmured.
“We’ve met your stunt team,” I said, because bravery thrives on sarcasm. “Do they have merch?”
A tilt of head. “Stunts are what you do when you worry the world might not be watching.”
“We worry the world might never stop,” Cassie cut in, and I loved her and I wanted to kiss her and I wanted to shake her for saying what I could not.
The lamps narrowed to needles and then widened again, like pupils adjusting. The air shifted cooler; the iron tang loosened its teeth at the back of my tongue. From somewhere near the seam where night-blue fabric met sun-gold trim, a small light prowled loose.
The moth in the lantern woke. Not the frantic wing-beat of a trapped thing. A measured unfurling, a hinge settling into motion. It stepped across the inside glass, abdomen pulsing once, twice—then a third time with a brighter push. Light seeded light. One firefly became two, became five, became a dozen. They slipped through the lantern’s seams like vapor through cloth, lifting into the tent’s higher dark. They didn’t flit away like ordinary bugs. They
arranged
themselves in patient dots, angles between them sharpening until the whole made lines my mind wanted to trace.
Cassie breathed in, audible only because my ears had learned her like music. Her scent brightened—citrus sharpened, vanilla warmed, the camellia note tightening clean. Pride raised heat in my chest like a hearth lately stoked.
The Mystic’s voice kept low. “Listen.”
Where ash had written on glass, light wrote on air:
Where night is a bridge and the sky is a door,
A spark learns to carry the sun.
Star-veiled child, be beacon and blade—
Guide them through dark till the dawn can be born.
The first line unlocked something I had learned to label
itch
just so I could ignore it.
Where night is a bridge and the sky is a door.
Not a ceiling. Not something that smothers. A span. A threshold. I remembered lying on my back as a child in the Quinveil backyard, Elias pointing out constellations with a penlight because the city had stolen half the stars—and the sudden, horrible-pleasant sensation that I was looking
through
something with no bottom. I had learned to call it vertigo and blame the angle. The truth felt older: the sky as a door I was not yet invited to open. The idea that darkness itself could be a tool, a passage, not an abyss—I didn’t know how to want it and I wanted it anyway.
A spark learns to carry the sun.
I gave a laugh that wasn’t a laugh. The fireflies drew a thin circle at the top of their pattern and held it there. Carry. The word pressed against the tenderest part of me. A crown is weight; a weapon is weight. A sun is a different order of heavy. You do not
carry
a sun unless you mean to change how people survive around you.
Star-veiled child, be beacon and blade—
No titles. No crowns.
Child.
The tenderness of that, and the ruthlessness. A child tasked to be a lighthouse and a knife. It suited me better than a sermon. I fight better than I pose. Still,
beacon and blade
felt like the first honest instruction I’d heard in months. Light without a cutting edge becomes spectacle. Blade without light becomes cruelty. Together, maybe, you could lead people somewhere that wasn’t a pit disguised as a palace.
Guide them through dark till the dawn can be born.
My throat closed. Not because of the pressure. Because I knew exactly who
them
was. Not the nobles outside counting ways to box me. Not the high fae who pronounced
Your Highness
as if their mouths were full of salt. The small ones who had put a crown on me without asking permission from anyone larger. The mortals who lit lanterns and made wishes and bargained with pennies and song, because that was the currency left to them. The children whose scraped knees Briony fixed with dew. The lantern Liora carried like a heartbeat. The people who had decided I could be theirs whether or not the court stamped approval on it.
The lights held their pattern a beat longer, then loosened—stars unhooking themselves from the shape they’d made. One drifted down and landed on the web between my thumb and forefinger, pulsing a quiet hello like it had rights to my skin.
Cassie’s voice was almost reverent. “That one sounds like hope.”
“It sounds like a test,” I said. My voice came out thinner than I liked. I cleared it. “Like… pick a door, princess. Burn, or carry.”
Her gaze slid to the ash-dark mirror, then back to the soft-lit air. “Two prophecies,” she said, cautious, as if the tent might grade her. “Two paths.”
“Mutually exclusive,” I said quickly, before anything gentler could tempt me. “Cinderborn is ash and ruin. This—” I flicked my fingers at the fireflies, forcing a smile that tasted like iron. “—this is the poster they’d put on a fundraiser.”
Cassie frowned, thinking like she does in debate rounds—quiet, precise, brutal. “If they’re asking you to
guide
people through darkness, that doesn’t leave much room for… consuming them.”
“Exactly.” The relief that came with being wrong in a way that kept me safe was almost dizzying. “They can’t both be true.”
She nodded slowly, eyes still on the lights. “So which one is yours?”
I hated that the question made the air feel thinner. My sleeve seam had already rolled itself half to ruin; I let it go and pressed my palm flat to the table to stop the shake. “I don’t know.” It cost me to say it. “I don’t want either.”
“You don’t get neither,” she said softly, not unkind.
“I could,” I snapped, then dragged the edge off it. “I could decide not to be anyone’s prophecy.”
“And the world could decide to stop spinning to make it easier on you,” she said, deadpan. “How’s that going?”
A humorless breath left me. “Terribly.”
We stood between ash and light while the tent listened. I stared at the mirror until my reflection blurred; stared at the fireflies until my eyes watered.
“Maybe it won’t be up to you,” Cassie said, so quietly I almost pretended I hadn’t heard.
The words hit like cold water. “Great,” I said. “So I’m either the torch they follow or the flame that eats them, and fate gets to pick at random.”
“Not random,” she said, and I wished she’d lie to me. “Everything about you right now is a hinge. Choice still matters. But…” Her throat worked. “If it
is
one of these… doors—then I will keep you from the wrong one.”
I stared at her. “How exactly? Tackling me at the threshold?”
“If I have to,” she said, and didn’t smile.
I looked away first. The lights were thinning, drifting toward the lantern again in little patient commas. I didn’t know how to be someone’s dawn on purpose. I knew exactly how to burn a room down by accident.
“Do you think my mother knows which one I am?” I asked, hating myself for asking.
Cassie’s jaw went tight. “If she thinks she does, she’ll sell the answer to the highest bidder.”
“Reassuring.”
“I’m not here to reassure you,” she said, and then ruined her own sentence by hooking our pinkies together, easy as breath. “I’m here to keep you breathing.”
I shut my eyes. Opened them on something I could manage. “Then help me make a rule,” I said, low. “If anyone asks, we know nothing, we believe nothing, we owe nothing. Two prophecies walked into a tent and left with no witnesses.”
“Deal,” she said instantly. Then, after a beat: “But between us?”
I swallowed. “Between us… I don’t want to be the ash.”
“Good,” she said, like a verdict. “Then we plan for the other. And we watch everyone who tries to shove you toward the first.”
“Easier said,” I murmured, because my hands were already empty and still felt heavy.
The Mystic had been silent long enough to become the furniture again. Now their layered voice thinned to almost one note. “A third thread—”
“Pass,” I said, fast. The mirrors darkened, as if offended.
Cassie shifted half a step in front of me on instinct. “We’ve heard enough.”
“The shadows listen,” the Mystic said, and something in the way they said
shadows
made the skin at the back of my neck crawl. “I cannot—”
Everything went black. Not a lamplight blown out—
absence
, sudden, complete. Cold slid through the tent like a hand dragged across wet stone. I reached for Cassie and found her at the same time she found me, palms to jaw, foreheads pressed hard enough to knock. “I’m here,” I said.
“I know,” she breathed. “Don’t move.”
“Not planning to.”
We didn’t. The dark considered us, decided we were beneath its interest, and left.
Light came back sulky and thin. The lamps were needles, then bowls. The mirrors no longer reflected anything but a dense, featureless black. The fireflies had tucked themselves back into the lantern with impossible neatness. The mark on my hand—tiny soot-firefly—beat twice in time with my pulse, as if ensuring itself.
“You have your pieces,” the Mystic said, voice scraped raw. “Leave.”
“Gladly,” I said, and tried not to show how much my knees wanted to reconsider that plan.
At the threshold, Cassie’s eyes caught mine. “One or the other,” she said, firm now, like she’d made herself choose as a placeholder until I could. “If they try to make you the ash, I will drag you to the light.”
“Bossy,” I said, because if I didn’t, I’d do something worse, like thank her.
“Effective,” she said.
We stepped out into the roar of the festival. Roran’s heat-shield shimmered hard enough to blur the air. The world was suddenly noisy and dumb and blessedly alive. I checked my palm again. The mark held. The heartbeat held.
Cassie watched me watch it. “We keep this between us,” she said. “And we don’t make meaning until we have to.”
“Later,” I said.
“Later,” she echoed.
Behind us, the tent gave no sign it had ever contained a choice at all.
We slipped out of the tent into the roar and color like we’d stepped from a church into a riot. Heat hit first—honeywine breath, roasted fruit, bloom-sweet smoke. Then sound: drums in the distance, laughter ripped too bright, hawkers calling over each other like it was a sport. The world had the nerve to be ordinary.
Roran stood ramrod at the flap, heat-shield shimmering so hard the air bent. His eyes cut over us once—took in whatever the tent had done to our faces—and the shield thickened with a hiss I could feel along my teeth.
“,” he said, too level.
“No blades,” Cassie said. Her voice was paper-thin, but steady. “No blood. Just… words.”
“That’s worse,” Lucien muttered from behind him, already moving. He took one look at me and forgot to be cool. “Mira.” The name was a crack. Alina was with him in the same breath, hand landing warm at my elbow. She didn’t ask anything; she just… anchored. Human gentleness in a place that smelled like old magic and new money.
Naomi and Kess materialized a second later like they’d been orbiting for the last five minutes, hungry-eyed and lethal, one quiet, one already broadcasting mischief as distraction.
“Tell me you punched a fortune-teller,” Kess said, too bright by design. “Please. I need this.”
“Alas,” Cassie said, trying for dry. “We were the fortune.”
“Bleh,” Kess said, but the lightness worked—stretched the elastic of the moment so it didn’t snap. Naomi’s pale eyes scanned our faces and then the crowd beyond, cataloging threats the way she breathes. Her shoulder brushed mine for half a heartbeat; it was almost nothing. It helped anyway.
I opened my palm. The soot-mark firefly winked once, twice—keeping time with a heart I suddenly didn’t trust. No burn, no pain, just the soft insistence of a brand no one else could claim.
Lucien stared at it, color draining. “What is that?”
“Marketing,” I said, because if I didn’t reach for a joke I’d fall into something I couldn’t climb out of.
Cassie leaned in, crowding my space on purpose, citrus cutting through the sugar-thick air. “So,” she said, voice pitched for our little circle, “good news: you’re either savior or arsonist.”
“Why not both?” I offered, but we both knew it was armor. The corner of her mouth twitched like she wanted to call me on it and kissed the urge dead instead.
Alina’s hand tightened, then gentled. “Sit,” she said softly. Not a command. An invitation. The word brushed that tender, stinging place in my chest.
“Five minutes,” Roran allowed, already shifting people with the subtlety of a tide. He planted us against a hawker’s stall stacked with glass charms that sang faintly—Brindle’s, and wasn’t that a circle I didn’t have the patience for. He posted himself two paces out. Heat-sheen widened. Naomi mirrored him, Kess took the flank, and Lucien became a wall at my knees with all the jagged grace of a sixteen-year-old trying to be older. Alina slid to my side with quiet competence like this had always been her job.
“It’s just words,” I said, because that’s what you say to make words smaller. “We can throw them out with the fruit peels.”
“Mm,” Naomi said, which somehow communicated I was both seen and full of it. Her eyes flicked past my shoulder. “Heads up.”
Across the flow of bodies—past silk and armor and flashbulbs—Zyrella stood with a fan she didn’t need and a smile she did. Cursed ivy glinted at her throat. Her scent reached even here—jasmine sugared to cloying, citrus sharpened until it bit. She didn’t approach. She didn’t have to. Predators in courts know patience is a kind of knife.
“Ignore her,” Cassie said, low enough that it qualified as a wish.
“Trying,” I said. The firefly mark pulsed once, like an answer.
Another current moved under the crowd—a colder one that smelled like violet crushed beneath a heel and jasmine at midnight. I didn’t have to look to know Daevan Nightvine was near; Cassie’s new instincts tightened the air around us a fraction. Her hand found the inside of my wrist like she meant to measure the world by its pulse.
Roran noticed, too; the shield shimmered hotter. “Eyes,” he murmured. “Left quadrant. Do not engage.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Kess said, all teeth.
Lucien made a soft, unhappy sound. “Why are they staring like we’re… like they’re waiting for—”
“Because they are,” Alina said gently. Her gaze went to my face, not the crowd. “You don’t owe them anything.”
I looked at her because it was easier than looking at the arc of people who had decided my tomorrow was a sport. The pity in Alina’s eyes wasn’t pity; it was a warm place to sit down for a second. I let my breath out slow through my nose. The soot-mark winked again.
“Tell me,” Lucien said suddenly, not bothering to hide the edge. “Tell me what they said in there.”
Cassie’s hand shifted—pinky hooking mine, the quiet signal that she had me if I needed to jump or laugh or run. It steadied me enough to be honest the bare amount.
“Two verses,” I said. “Two doors. One with ash, one with stars.” I kept my tone bland, as if I were reciting a recipe. “Pick one.”
Lucien’s jaw worked. “So don’t,” he said. “They’re always wrong.”
“Not helpful,” Kess murmured, and then—because she refuses to let anything sit too long—she hooked a candied petal from a passing tray and held it under my nose. “Briony's favorite,” she lied, terribly. “Eat your feelings.”
I took it. Sugar cracked between my teeth, heat blooming over my tongue. The world slotted a half-inch closer to normal.
“Look at me.” Cassie’s voice pared down to the clean edge that still had velvet in it. When I did, she gave me the expression she reserves for battle plans and me. “One or the other,” she said, like we’d agreed. “If anyone tries to push you into ash, we make them choke on smoke.”
“That’s not how smoke works,” Lucien muttered.
“Debatable,” Kess said, pleased.
Naomi’s gaze flicked again across the crowd. “We should move,” she said. “You’re being triangulated.”
“Language,” Kess hummed, impressed.
Roran’s shoulders settled into a decision. “Two minutes,” he said to me, not Seara’s princess but the person he’d pledged to keep breathing. “Then we melt.”
“Fine,” I said, though my knees had refused to remember how to be legs. I let my head tip until it touched Cassie’s shoulder for a beat too long. She did not move. She didn’t comment. She just existed like a wall where I could lean. The bright-citrus edge of her scent softened to something warmer, safer. I let my eyes close for exactly one breath.
When I opened them, the world had shifted a hair. Not kinder. But at least named. Zyrella had turned back to her knot of nobles, sugar smile flashing like a blade. Daevan’s perfume-predator drift had moved on, or pretended to. The drums rolled nearer, festival laughter riding their backs.
“Ready?” Alina asked, the way you ask before peeling a bandage.
“No,” I said. “But we’ll go anyway.”
Lucien blew out a breath and shoved to his feet. “Stay by me,” he said to Alina, then caught himself and flushed. “I mean—if you want—”
“I do,” she said, and tucked her hand into his elbow like it had been waiting for the space.
Naomi and Kess flowed forward, playful and deadly, carving our path before Roran had to. The heat-shield narrowed to a more comfortable shimmer—the kind you forget until something hits it and doesn’t hit you. Cassie slid her palm along mine as we stood. Our fingers laced without ceremony. We moved like that—tethered, defiant—through a sea that had lots of opinions about how I should drown.
We made it three steps before the ache landed. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t some doom-bell left over from the tent. It was smaller and uglier and truer: the sudden, childish urge to find my mother in a crowd and let someone else be tall for a minute.
Saints. I almost laughed at myself. A queen’s spine and a child's want, living in the same bones.
I didn’t say it. I didn’t have to. Cassie’s thumb pressed once against my pulse, as if she’d heard a word I hadn’t spoken. Roran adjusted his position until he was the windbreak for a storm only I could feel. Naomi and Kess widened, a wing on either side. Lucien looked back just once and rolled his eyes at me in that rude, perfect way that meant
I’m here
.
“Let’s be seen,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake.
We walked. The firefly in my palm beat along, inconvenient and undeniable, like a heartbeat I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t surrender. And I let the want for my mother sit there, small and hot and private, while I did the thing she had raised me—by love and by pressure—to do: keep going.

.
!
Chapter 55: Tent of the Fates