Chapter 625: The Boy With Two Forms

"None that walks among us. The Moon Goddess has blessed this child with the Spirit of the Wolf. A mantle spoken of in the Scrolls of the First Age, belonging to an age when the gods walked among Fae. The Spirit is dormant now, but will awaken when his body reaches the age of readiness, and when it does, he will be able to take the form of a wolf."

"A wolf," Atlas repeated.

"A wolf, My King. The Scrolls of the First Age promised an era where wolves walk among Fae. The Goddess will bind the Spirit of the Wolf to a worthy soul, and that soul shall have the ability to wear two forms. The Spirit grants the shift."

Atlas looked at the boy. The boy looked back at him with gold eyes that were six years old and carrying a gift that was older than the stone they were standing on.

"Can I go play now?" Lucian asked.

The priestess’s mouth twitched. Atlas’s did the same.

"Yes," the king said. "You can go play."

Lucian launched himself from the temple. Whatever patience he’d been running on had just hit zero, and his legs took over with the enthusiasm his manners had been suppressing. His feet slapped the marble path. His dark hair caught the morning light. He was gone around the corner before Atlas finished exhaling.

"Protect him, Your Majesty." The priestess’s voice was quiet. "What lives inside will change the world. The world will have opinions about the change, and the opinions will be divided, and the division will be dangerous."

"He is mine," Atlas said. The sentence carried the same finality it had carried in a corridor six years ago when a queen had pointed out that they already had a son. "He has been mine since the night he arrived, and no division, divine or otherwise, is going to change that arrangement."

Fin stood in the temple and watched a king claim him for the second time, and the watching put a pressure in his chest that had nothing to do with the vision and everything to do with the understanding that he had been chosen twice.

Once by a goddess. Once by a father.

✦✦✦

AELINDRIS — THE FAE PALACE

The childhood came in bursts. Bright. Chaotic. The kind of memories that existed in primary colors and operated at maximum volume.

Tristan and Lucian at six and seven. Both of them wedged inside a laundry cart, being pushed down a corridor by a serving girl who had been coerced into the arrangement through a combination of Tristan’s charm and Lucian’s gold-eyed stare, which at seven was already producing an effect on palace staff that the staff couldn’t articulate and couldn’t resist.

The cart hit a corner. Both boys went airborne. The serving girl screamed. Tristan landed on a tapestry. Lucian landed on Tristan. Neither was injured. Both were delighted.

At seven and eight, a more sophisticated operation. Tristan had discovered that the palace kitchen stored honey pastries in a locked cabinet, and the locked cabinet was an affront to his constitutional rights as a prince and as a person who wanted honey pastries.

"The lock is Fae-warded," Lucian observed, examining the mechanism the way he examined everything: carefully, systematically, and with a tactical mind already running three years ahead of his age.

"I noticed."

"So your plan is to defeat an adult-level Fae ward to steal pastries."

"Our plan. The plan is ours. I am the visionary and you are the logistics."

"The logistics say this is a terrible idea."

"The logistics have been overruled by the visionary."

They defeated the ward. The method involved Tristan distracting the head cook with a question about soup stocks that he fabricated on the spot and delivered with the sincerity of a boy who had never once in his life cared about soup stocks, while Lucian, who was already quieter than any eight-year-old had a right to be, slipped behind the counter and applied the one Fae technique he’d mastered, sensing the ward’s frequency and finding the seam where the magic met the mechanism.

He opened the lock in four seconds.

They ate seven honey pastries between the garden wall and the training yard, consuming the evidence with the urgent efficiency of criminals destroying documentation.

"Your face," Lucian said.

"What about my face?"

"There is honey on it. On all of it. You look like you fell into a beehive."

"I look incredible."

"You look like a crime scene."

At eight and nine, the escalation continued. The frog incident. The goat would come later. The stolen crown, which Tristan would take credit for and Lucian would take the blame for, because taking blame came to Lucian as naturally as breathing. Tristan was the crown prince. The crown prince’s punishment meant lectures and restriction. Lucian’s punishment meant Tristan apologizing to him privately, and the private apology was worth more than the public consequence.

Fin watched the two boys and recognized himself in the smaller one with an ache that was specific and personal and belonged to no other person in the room.

Lucian was quieter. The quiet was innate rather than learned. He listened before he spoke, observed before he acted, processed before he responded. Every room the two boys entered, Tristan filled it. Lucian mapped it. The combination was devastating.

He also recognized Tristan.

The recognition built slowly, then arrived all at once. The green eyes. The restless energy. The specific, incandescent charm that made every room he entered slightly more dangerous and significantly more interesting. The way he talked. The way he moved. The way his mouth curved when he was about to say something that was either brilliant or catastrophic and couldn’t tell the difference.

Gavriel.

The Fae prince from Gavriel’s past life. The one the ancestors had described. The soul that had been the original Dragon King, the Ember-Crowned King, the man who had earned dragons rather than inheriting them.

The boy stealing honey pastries and blaming the logistics division was Gavriel Sterling.

Fin let that settle. The settling took a while because the settling involved reconciling a green-eyed Fae prince with a green-eyed Gamma who apparently had a matebond with his mate.

He filed it. Moved on. The memories were faster now.