Chapter 478: A Wolf Cries, A Snake Slithers

"Her wolf needs my wolf," Nicholas continued. "And she needs a pack to run with, Drakencrest. You keep her the majority of the time, and that is not in dispute. But my wolf settles hers. That is the single best thing for her. Keeping her from a pack, or trying to sever one of her matebonds, is not a solution. It is a wound you would be giving her on purpose."

Landon inclined his head towards Nicholas.

Maddox saw it for exactly what it was. He also recognized that he was outmaneuvered on the principle and could only win on the terms.

???

SOLVEIL - KING’S PRIVATE COURTYARD

Octavian, who had come on his king’s orders and found a wolf doing backflips off a courtyard wall, was clapping.

"Remarkable," he breathed, watching the wolf clear Kael’s head to snatch a ball at the apex of its arc. "The air sense alone. She’s calculating the descent before the throw lands."

The wolf, pleased by the recognition, trotted a small victory loop.

Then Guinevere’s head cracked.

It hit hard enough to knock her clean out of her shift. White light flashed, the wolf collapsing back into a woman mid-stride, and the ball dropped from a mouth that wasn’t there anymore and bounced away across the stone. She clutched her skull with both hands, buckling.

Kael grabbed his own head at the same instant and dropped to his knees, a sound tearing out of him through clenched teeth.

Sterling’s bracelet vibrated against his wrist, flashing bright white in rhythmic pulses. Kael’s ring answered it, flaring on his finger.

Octavian was already moving. White light gathered at his palms as he ran. "Everyone, hold."

A portal tore open across the courtyard. Landon came through it first at a dead run, a thin line of blood tracking from his nose, Maddox and Nicholas a half-step behind him.

Maddox’s eyes went straight to Sterling’s wrist.

"Solveil." His voice carried over the stone. "The last time that bracelet did that, there was dark magic in the room."

Landon didn’t break stride. He threw one hand out and spoke in an ancient tongue that no one in the courtyard knew.

"Nox revelra sel’vanae."

The courtyard lit ultraviolet.

Every surface drank the color, the gold draining out of the stone and the light, replaced by a deep violet wash.

Guinevere’s wolf was thrashing in her ribs. Nicholas moved in a blur, sliding to his knees on the ground next to her.

"There’s something wrong with my wolf," she panted as she tried to sit up.

"Stay down, Guinevere." His wolf reached across the connection and called hers, a low commanding pull. The thrashing eased. Her eyes faded back toward green.

Maddox slid down next to Nicholas, his back against the stone, and lifted her head into his lap with hands that were steady because his hands were always steady even when nothing else was.

Nicholas looked up at the others. "Did that pain knock her out of her shift?"

"Yes," Ryker called. "It hit Kael at the same moment."

A tear fell down Guinevere’s face. Maddox wiped it with his thumb.

Kael pushed himself up off his knees, teeth gritted, and moved towards Guinevere before his legs had fully agreed to it.

"Shit." He listed sideways. Corrected. Kept moving.

Landon appeared in his path. "Don’t move, Young Light Bearer. Your body cannot—"

"My body can do whatever I tell it to do." Kael’s legs said otherwise. His legs were liars and he was ignoring them. He went around Landon the way a man goes around furniture.

He made it three more steps before his knees quit. Both of them. At the same time. He went down hard on the stone and his palms caught him and his arms shook and his body said: no. His mouth said: "Fuck."

???

Nobody was watching the lady-in-waiting.

In a courtyard gone ultraviolet, with two kings and a mage crouched over a woman on the ground, the room full of weeping women had become scenery. That was the entire point of a diversion. It made everyone look somewhere else.

Aurora slipped out of the huddle like water finding a crack.

"I am going to my chambers," she called over her shoulder.

She did not stop until the white stone went quiet around her. Then she let the face go.

It cost her something to hold a glamour that complete, the scent especially, manufactured and layered and pumped so potent it had fooled a few apex predators for the better part of an hour.

She let all of it slough off at once, a long exhale of borrowed features, Aurora’s cheekbones and Aurora’s eyes and Aurora’s voice draining out of her like color out of the courtyard behind her. Her own face returned underneath. Older than the one she’d worn. Sharper. Finished with crying.

Emma Eldritch rolled her shoulders, loosening the ache of being someone else all night.

The fact that Sterling had marked Electra instead of Phaedra was a surprise. Phaedra was the one whose scent Emma had specifically fabricated to attract his dragon. And the fact that Ryker hadn’t marked her while she wore Aurora’s face was another.

But the plan could still move forward. Just with a few adaptations. The first would come in a little over twelve hours, when the princess woke.

Three floors up and two corridors east, in her own bed, in her own chambers, the actual Aurora had been asleep since before the lounge doors opened.

She had been in her own sheets the entire evening. Her hair was on her own pillow. Her breathing was slow and even and undisturbed. She was going to wake up tomorrow with a headache and a blank evening. Aurora would stand in front of her cousin and say "I don’t know what you’re talking about" and mean every word of it.

By the time anyone questioned Aurora, Emma would be a scent nobody could trace, a face nobody had seen, and a problem the three kings would spend weeks arguing over whose fault it was.

Emma found the ward-seam Brennan had used on the way in, because of course she’d watched where the mage went soft, and she slipped through the crack in the Luminari defenses that a portal had already proven existed.

The hidden kingdom swallowed her exit the way it swallowed everything it didn’t want the world to see.