Neither of us had bodies, not really, though it didn’t feel that way at first. It felt like standing. Cold stone under feet I couldn’t see when I looked down, torchlight moving across walls that had no business existing anywhere near a bedroom in Glenfrost. I couldn’t hear Damian’s voice. I understood quickly that this wasn’t a place either of us could speak from. What I felt instead was simpler than that: his emotions, arriving in me like weather, sudden and total, with no warning before each change. The stone room came into focus slowly, some kind of workshop or cellar cut into rock, shelves crowded with jars and dried herbs, and at the centre of it, hunched over a small fire, was a boy.
I knew him instantly. He was younger than the Damian I knew, unlined, open in a way five centuries had long since worn off him. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and he was stirring a small copper pot with a long wooden spoon, murmuring under his breath, half incantation and half nervous habit. The liquid inside kept changing, clouding, clearing, settling finally into a deep, sparkling purple that seemed to glow from somewhere inside itself. He grinned at it. Small and private, entirely pleased with himself.
“They won’t let me watch tonight,” he said, to no one, or maybe to the pot itself.
“Antonia says it’s not for eyes like mine. But I made this. Whatever it’s for, I made it, and that has to count for something.” Devotion moved through me then, so total and uncomplicated it made my chest ache. Nothing about it felt like love, not the way I understood the word. It felt like the devotion of someone much younger than the world had any business letting him stay. The boy set the spoon down, wiped his hands on a cloth at his hip, still smiling at the light in the pot. Then his smile faded.
The purple deepened, sliding through violet into something wet and red, and the colour drained out of his face to match it. His eyes went wide. I didn’t see the men come out of the dark behind him. I only saw the knife. It went in clean, between his shoulder blades, and he was dead before he hit the floor. No lingering, no sound, just there and then gone, the light in the pot flaring once before it dimmed. I felt shock tear through me that wasn’t mine, and underneath it, a horror five hundred years old, arriving as though for the first time. The men who’d killed him didn’t linger.
Three of them, robed, faces hidden, and one snatched up the little pot, the liquid inside going purple again the instant his hand left it. They were gone through a passage in the rock within seconds. The room went quiet, just the boy’s body and the dying fire, until footsteps came fast from the passage, and she was there. Antonia was beautiful in a way that made the word feel small. Skin like warm almond wood, dark hair loose past her shoulders, a pale, sheer gown that moved like water around her. She looked like something a civilization would build temples for.
I felt jealousy rise in me before I could stop it, and almost as fast, something answered it, warm and certain, flooding in from the other side of whatever connected us. It didn’t use words. It simply said you, only you, never her, and the jealousy went quiet. Antonia saw the body. The sound that tore out of her wasn’t composed or ancient. It was raw, an animal sound, and she dropped to her knees and gathered him against her chest like she still believed grief alone could argue him back to life. I felt realisation move through the bond, slow and stunned.
She loved him. Not devotion returned. Something he’d never once let himself notice while he was alive to see it. She cried a long time. Long enough that whatever came next had clearly cost her everything she had left. Her eyes changed first, going dark all the way through, no white left anywhere. She lifted her face to a low, swollen red moon outside the window and began to chant. I didn’t understand the words, but the shape of them was unmistakable, old and heavy and without any mercy for the person speaking them.
She pulled the knife from his back with her bare hand, blood running from her own torn palm into the wound it left, and the blade simply vanished somewhere in the motion. From a fold of her gown she drew a small glass vial, dark liquid inside, thick and wrong in the torchlight, and poured it into the same place. The chanting rose. The air itself began to move, circling, and somewhere beyond the cellar walls I could see leaves stripping from an old, broad tree, joining that current like something being called rather than blown.
Then it broke, all at once, a silent detonation that passed straight through whatever we were made of in that place. I felt something grip tight and hold on beside me, the way I was holding on too, both of us anchored to nothing but each other. Antonia was gone. Not dead in any way that left a body behind. Simply gone. Somewhere else in the castle, a woman screamed, and under the scream, a child’s first cry. Wonder moved through me that wasn’t mine, tangled with grief. A birth, the very same night, and he’d never once known it. The boy on the floor began to change.
The wound closed. Old scars faded from his arms, his jaw, and his face sharpened into something colder and far more beautiful, a face built to be looked at rather than simply seen. Voices came from the passage, careful, several sets of footsteps. Silas first, younger but unmistakable, and behind him a dark-haired woman with cold eyes who could only be Octavia, and two others I didn’t know yet. They moved like soldiers clearing a room, wary even of the still air, and I understood, watching them, that even they were afraid of whatever had just happened here.
“He’s ready,” Silas said, crouching by the body.
“Get him up. We move before whatever did this comes back.” They lifted him between them, careful, almost reverent, and carried him toward the passage. I felt a desperate pull from the bond, some need to follow, to finally see where this went. We didn’t get further than the doorway.
“Mum?” A small fist on real wood, breaking through the stone and the cold like paper tearing.
“Mum, are you there? It’s really bright outside, can we go feed the ducks?” The cellar dissolved, and I opened my eyes onto our own ceiling and Damian’s face above mine, both of us gasping like we’d come up from actual water. Noah’s voice carried faintly through the door, patient, oblivious, waiting.
“One minute, baby,” I called out, my voice not quite steady, and heard him thump back down the hallway, easily satisfied. Damian hadn’t moved. He was still braced over me, breathing hard for no reason his body actually needed, staring at nothing.
“Hey.” I touched his face.
“Where did you go?”
“I keep trying to understand what I felt in there.” His voice was rough.
“Watching her. I never once let myself consider, while I was alive, that she might have loved me back. I told myself it was devotion, only ever devotion, because devotion was safe. It didn’t ask anything of me I wasn’t already giving freely.” He looked down at me.
“I never expected it returned, Sarah. That’s the truth of it. I gave everything I had to a woman
I never once believed saw me as anything more than something worth teaching.”
“I was jealous of her.” I said it plainly, no longer ashamed of it the way I had been in the vision itself.
“The second I saw her, before I even understood who she was. She’s beautiful in a way I don’t think I could ever compete with, and some old, stupid part of me went straight to comparing.”
“I felt that.” He tucked a strand of hair back from my face, achingly gentle.
“I felt it happen in you before you’d even finished having the thought, and I don’t think I have ever wanted to correct something faster in my life.”
“You don’t have to keep correcting it. I know it’s not fair to her, or to you, being jealous of a woman five hundred years dead.”
“It isn’t about fair.” He kissed my forehead, then the corner of my mouth.
“I loved her the only way a boy that age knows how to love someone who’s saved him and taught him and never once treated him like he was small. That isn’t what this is, Sarah. What I feel for you isn’t devotion. It’s not gratitude wearing a nicer coat. I have had five hundred years to learn every difference there is, and I am telling you plainly: I love you. Only you. Nothing about what I felt for her, then or now, touches it.”
“Say it again,” I said, quieter now.
“I love you.” He said it against my mouth this time, soft and certain.
“I love you, and there is no version of that history back there that changes it.”