Chapter 627: Of Course Tristan Set Shit Ablaze

At seven, Tristan gave her a wooden practice sword and declared he was going to train her.

Tristan’s training method consisted of swinging at her and expecting her to figure out the rest. This approach had the pedagogical rigor of throwing a child into a lake and calling it swimming lessons.

The cycle repeated four times before Lucian stepped in, because someone had to, and Tristan’s teaching method was just cheerful encouragement from a safe distance.

"Your grip is wrong." He crouched beside her and repositioned her hands on the wooden hilt. "Here. Three fingers around the base. Thumb on top. Your other hand guides beneath the pommel."

"Like this?"

"Closer. Rotate your wrist. Now your elbow stays tucked. If your elbow flares, your swing follows your shoulder instead of your core and you will hit nothing except the ground, which you have already demonstrated."

"I hit Tristan once."

"You hit Tristan’s sword once. Tristan held it in front of you on purpose so you would feel accomplished. I watched him do it."

River looked at Tristan, who was across the yard pretending he hadn’t heard that. She looked back at Lucian.

"Show me how to hit something he does not hold in front of me on purpose."

Lucian’s gold eyes warmed, brief and completely involuntary. River had a talent for making that happen.

"Swing at my hand. Full speed. My hand will move. Try to follow it."

"What if I hit your hand?"

"Then I will learn to move faster."

They trained for an hour. River hit his hand twice. Lucian moved faster both times after.

Tristan watched from across the yard with a sour expression on his face. He had been supplanted by Lucian, who was producing results with a patience Tristan found both admirable and personally offensive.

✦✦✦

The realization hit Fin the way realizations always hit him, quietly, completely, without the dramatic fanfare that Tristan would have given it.

Fin was watching Tristan at eleven, standing in the courtyard with both hands extended, green magic erupting from his palms in chaotic bursts that scorched a practice target and missed the wall behind it by inches.

Tristan was grinning. Green sparks cascaded from his fingers. A training dummy caught fire.

Beside Lucian, River looked down at her own hands.

She turned them over and examined the palms, then the backs. Lucian had just done something remarkable and she was checking her own hands for evidence that the remarkable might live in her too. The quiet disappointment on her face said it didn’t.

"It hasn’t come for me either." Lucian sat beside her on the bench. His voice was matter-of-fact, carrying zero pity and zero false comfort, because both of those things were insults he would never deliver to a girl who was smart enough to see through them. "Tristan’s manifested early. Most Fae develop at thirteen or fourteen. There is nothing wrong with being on schedule."

"What if mine never comes?"

"Then we will have something in common."

She looked at him. The pink in her eyes caught the afternoon light. The trust on her face was complete. She had decided that Lucian told the truth, and the decision had been made permanently, the way children make decisions when they’ve found someone worth believing.

"Yours will come, Lucian."

"Maybe."

"The priestess said so."

"The priestess said many things. Some of them will be right and some of them will be prophecy, and the difference between those two categories is less clear than adults pretend."

She almost smiled. Almost. The smile lived in the corner of her mouth and didn’t fully commit, a visitor that had arrived at the door and decided to wait on the step.

"If yours does come," she said carefully, "will you still be the same?"

The question was carrying weight that a nine-year-old shouldn’t have needed to carry. Will you change. Will the gift change you. Will the thing that makes you different make you different from me.

"I will always be the same person, River. The power changes what I can do. It changes nothing about who I am."

She leaned her shoulder against his, brief and light, the way someone spends a currency they can’t afford to waste. Trust was a luxury. Lucian was one of the few who had never asked for it, and that was precisely why she gave it.

Fin watched the two of them sit on a bench while Tristan set fire to things across the courtyard, and the watching produced a recognition so sharp it hurt.

The boy on the bench was him. The patience was his. The quiet was his. The specific, instinctive understanding of a girl whose trust had been broken before she arrived and whose trust was being rebuilt one careful, undemanding interaction at a time.

That was his.

✦✦✦

AELINDRIS — THE LIBRARY

Lucian found her in the library because Lucian always found her in the library.

The library was where River went when the palace was too loud or too bright or too full of people whose attention she hadn’t requested and whose attention felt like a spotlight aimed at a girl who had spent her formative years learning that visibility was dangerous.

"What are you looking for?"

River glanced up from a scroll and gave him a smile.

"A scroll on Selenath."

The name landed in Lucian’s ears and produced an immediate, involuntary response. Selenath. The Silver Province. A Fae region in the eastern territories that had been absorbed during the same conflict that destroyed Argenvael. A region that bordered his parents’ kingdom.

"Why this one?" His voice was neutral.

"I don’t know," she admitted. "This one just jumped out at me."

"Can you translate that script?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"I didn’t know I could until I started reading it."

"That’s not how translations work, River. You can’t just pick up a scroll and read it without knowing the language."

"With this scroll you can," she said softly.

Lucian smiled and shook his head.

"Show me."

She read. The words that left her mouth weren’t Fae. They were something older, smoother, a language that rolled off her tongue like she’d been born speaking it. She hadn’t. She’d never heard it before in her life. But the scroll was open and her eyes were moving and her mouth was producing fluent translations of script that scholars three times her age couldn’t parse.

Her eyes glowed pink. One second. Bright enough to cast light on the parchment. Then gone, like a flame that touched the wick and changed its mind.

Tristan went still.

River looked up. "What is it?"

"Nothing." His voice was perfectly even. "Continue."