Epilogue
Corvin was beaming as he walked through the halls of the fortress on his way to the kitchen. His students were abuzz with anticipation for their initiation ritual this evening, and as their final class had concluded, he’d waded through currents of mixed anxiety and relief as he’d congratulated each of them and wished them well. The last two months had gone by so quickly. It had been an emotionally charged day, but now his own excitement to see Audrey was the only thing he could think about.
Everyone was looking forward to the merriment ahead. For the first time in a generation, the initiation ritual had fallen on a full moon that also happened to align with one of the high festivals. Mabon decorations hung in every nook and cranny of the fortress. Boughs of grain and silver and gold ribbon stretched across every rafter and above every door. Gatherings of squashes and gourds filled every empty corner. The entire staff was hard at work preparing for the most bountiful feast of the year, when they would open the prior year’s casks of wine and ale and revel early into the next morning.
In all the bustle, he hadn’t seen Audrey since sunrise. They’d taken to meeting in the tower every day, between morning classes and afternoon chores. For the first time since they returned home two months ago, she hadn’t shown up. Which had spoiled his surprise. Now he had to actively seek her out and drag her back to the tower, and she would probably know he was up to something. It had become nearly impossible for him to hide anything from her.
After she’d stood him up, Corvin had checked the library, hoping she was taking his advice to study up on the ritual rather than just “winging it.” Not finding her there, he’d set out for the place he should have checked first.
He found her sitting with Lilly and Peter at the small table in the nook of the kitchen where the cooks took their meals. The three of them were snacking on a tray of bread and cheese, playing cards, and laughing. They kept their voices low so that Tilly didn’t snap and throw them out. She always had a hair trigger on festival days, and this one carried extra pressure to be memorable.
From the smells filling the kitchen and wafting in from the roasting spits outside, she’d outdone herself. She didn’t even pay Corvin notice as he shuffled in behind one of the Kinde assigned to be Tilly’s personal forklift for the day.
Audrey glanced up, as if feeling his eyes on her. The smile she flashed at him made him almost trip over his own feet. It felt like a dream. All that time tangled in sheets, walking through the forest, talking over the embers of a fire until dawn. All the nights he’d carried her to bed, and the nights he hadn’t dared to move as she slept so peacefully in his arms.
There was also the crying. The fighting. Then, always, the making up…
He wouldn’t trade any of it. Weeks and months would never be enough. He wanted a lifetime to love her.
But you have yet to get up the balls to ask if she’s ready for that.
Her expression turned quizzical as he took an empty seat beside her. He leaned forward and kissed her to distract her from trying to puzzle him out. The teenagers uttered disgusted protests under their breath.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“I’m sure you have,” Audrey said, her tone dripping with innuendo. Her eyes sparked with mischief, and Corvin’s neck heated as he recalled the state she’d left him in this morning.
He cleared his throat, drumming his fingers on the table idly to hide his nerves. “Can I steal you away, Audrey? It’s sort of important.”
She stared at him for a long, heated moment mid-shuffle, then looked at the other two as if to remind him they were sitting there. “That all right with you guys?”
“Yeah. You two need to get a room,” Peter said, turning beet red. No doubt his empathic powers were picking up on the charge between the two of them.
Lilly giggled into her hand, then whispered something in Peter’s ear. He nodded, then asked, “Can we hang out in the rec room until it’s time to prepare for the ritual?”
Audrey feigned deliberation while she snuck an adoring glance at Lilly. The young girl was thriving here. She’d taken an instant liking to Peter and was slowly coming out of her shell and making friends with some of the other children. Though she wasn’t old enough to study for her initiation yet, she had a voracious mind and spent hours observing classes or nested in the library.
Corvin’s heart swelled with satisfaction to see Audrey so pleased with Lilly’s progress. She’d even agreed to let his mother tutor the girl privately when, upon meeting his mother, Lilly had announced that Esther had told her Patricia would be her next teacher.
Audrey bumped shoulders with Lilly. “Okay, but don’t spoil your dinner with too much cider. Tilly will have your heads if you don’t eat at least a helping of everything.”
The teens had a much easier time slipping out of the bustling kitchen than Corvin had had coming in. Audrey tucked the deck of cards back into the drawer of the buffet by the window, then slid into his lap.
He held her tight, burying his face in her long, silky hair and breathing in the light floral scent of her skin. He massaged her hips and thighs as he tilted her back and kissed her, a small growl of desire rumbling in his chest. Her breathing and heartbeat changed, and without tapping into her emotions at all, he felt her unspoken surrender and knew he could have her against the cold bricks of the fortress just outside if he wanted to. It was a tempting idea. With all the fertile Mabon energies swirling around the fortress and forest, he wanted nothing more than to take this bountiful woman back to his hearth and feast upon her. But instead, he led her from the kitchens, out the side exit, and to the tower, where his first surprise of the day was waiting.
When Honey spotted Audrey, she dropped the small rodent she’d been chewing on and called out in glee, launching into the air. Audrey wasn’t wearing her gauntlet, so he lifted his arm and caught Honey as she landed.
Audrey laughed and greeted the eagle with a neck scratch and a slow stroke of her outstretched wing, now fully healed. “She’s off the leash.”
Corvin nodded and walked Honey over to the crate waiting in the back of the Rover. She didn’t want to go in at first, but he corralled her with only a few nips of protest. “She’s been hunting all morning. She’s ready.”
He turned from the business of securing the giant bird to find Audrey staring at him as if he’d just struck her. “So soon?”
The energy around her shifted as the fact that today was very different from all those that had come before finally sank in. They hadn’t spoken of this day. Not in simple terms, anyway. As if they’d both been afraid to face the possibility of parting ways, they’d been vague and for the most part focused on the frivolities of day-to-day living.
He had no desire to tie Audrey down, and she hadn’t made her own intentions clear.
At first, he’d wanted to give her space to recover from her ordeal with the sorcerers. She had been their captive for less than a day, but in those hours, she’d learned more about her past than she had known her whole life. She’d found the last of her living kin, then lost her. She’d rescued Lilly and helped free hundreds more from the sorcerers. But the victory had been bittersweet, stirring up the undercurrents of a lifetime of loss. Those first few weeks, he’d often found her staring off into space, a thick cloud of anger and grief swirling in her aura. He hadn’t pushed, but he’d offered a hand out of it. Sometimes with a joke or tease, sometimes just by holding her or finding other means of distraction.
Slowly and surely, she’d come out of the fog.
Then, she’d become a one-woman rehabilitation task force. She’d made every effort to connect with every refugee they’d brought back from the sorcerers’ lair. She’d learned all of their names, every one of their stories. Her own practice classes had proved unnecessary, so she’d volunteered to serve as a personal liaison, putting each of them in touch with the right person to help them track down their family or otherwise work on integration into the next cycle of initiates. She was popular and well liked among the survivors.
She’d also butted her way into weekly meetings with his mother and made it her personal mission to ensure every victim of the sorcerers was taken care of. As if she’d made their healing a part of her own. When all of that had finished, she’d stayed up late reading every text the archives had on sorcery and taking an entire journal’s worth of notes.
She was incredible. A force all her own.
The depth of her heart and the strength of her focus humbled him. And it was no small matter that his mother had come to respect Audrey’s hard work and to value her opinion. A glaring spotlight had been focused on the inner workings of the guardians, unearthing corruption within the Council itself that had allowed this particular faction of sorcerers to grow so large and established.
His mother was still on the hunt, rooting out key players within the Synod, and Audrey was at the top of a list of new recruits that would be in high demand as the guardians were reformed. Audrey had hinted at other reformations she was slowly pushing on Patricia, too, and she seemed confident she was going to get her way. The two of them had formed an unlikely friendship, and though he was still sorting through his feelings about his mother's—their—secret, it had mended something inside of him to see her and Audrey conspiring and bantering.
He was so damn proud of her, and yet all of her activities had left him feeling obsolete and stagnant in his usual routines. A stick in the mud, as she’d called him on so many occasions.
Another reason he was so excited for today’s revelations.
He had no intention of anchoring Audrey or tying her down. He wanted her to follow her heart, as he planned to follow his.
Once the Jeep was loaded and they were on their way off the grounds, Smoke napping in Audrey’s lap and the peaceful quiet of the open road insulating them, he reached out to test her feelings. She’d gotten very good at shielding the last few weeks, but most of the time, she left herself open around him. The trust her actions showed and the comfort of not having to tether his instincts around her had helped him fall deeper and deeper in love with her. Now she was calm and pensive, but beneath that was a thread of anxiety.
Corvin took her hand and twined their fingers together before bringing it to his lips. “Penny for your thoughts.”
She smiled and sighed, gazing out the window. “How do you do it?”
“What?”
“Say good-bye.”
A cold spot blossomed in his stomach, slowly growing, setting off his nerves, but he asked, “What do you mean?”
“I know it’s best for her. I know the wild is where she belongs. I knew this day would come, and I’m…happy, but…”
His heart squeezed in sympathy, and he watched her out of the corner of his eye. If only she could hear the irony of asking him those questions when he was struggling with the very same feelings about her. “It’s difficult. But when you feel the rightness of it, you realize that attachment is not a part of nature. We are all bound together in the web of life, and so we are never parted. Attachment is a very human idea.”
She smiled at him and unlaced their fingers to ruffle hers through his hair. “I love when you talk about humans as if you’re not one.”
He laughed. “I’m at least part bird.”
“And part demon,” she chimed in with a teasing grin.
“That too.” His cheeks heated. He was still coming to accept the truth of his parentage. His demon blood strengthened his body and his magic, as he’d discovered when Roderic had given him a Khaos potion that had put his Zyne power on steroids. The storm he’d summoned in the battle against the sorcerers would have landed him in a Council trial under other circumstances. He’d only begun to explore the differences between his perceived and actual limitations. He saw the extra magic as a gift, though a dangerous one that must be kept secret.
“Any word from Roderic?”
He shook his head. “The last we spoke, he was on his way to Europe to handle some personal business.”
“Oh.”
His mother had left key information out of her report of the events leading up to the raid on the sorcerers’ lair, shining a light instead on the failings of the guardians. She’d never mentioned him going off on his own or the reasons behind Roderic’s resignation. No one had asked. Corvin was free to return to life as he’d known it, teaching classes and tending his birds, only to find he’d outgrown it.
Now he wanted so much more. Starting with the woman at his side. But Audrey had also opened his eyes to the many needs of the Zyne that were not being addressed or serving the higher good of the Legacy. She’d shaken up his world and turned it on its head, and he’d been forced to see that hiding in his tower was not the answer. There was plenty he could do. For years, he’d used his gifts as an excuse to hold himself apart from people when he should have been using them to help others, to make a difference. He envisioned them continuing the work she’d started here all over the country, or perhaps the world…together.
If she’ll have you.
“Are you sad he won’t be here for the ceremony?” he asked when Audrey’s mood sank into melancholic territory again.
“Hmm? No. I get it. It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s kind of a big deal.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m taking it seriously.”
“I know you are.” Her defenses started to go up, and he couldn’t help bristling in response. As they had all day, his hopes for the future warred with his doubts that she might shoot a gaping hole right through his vision of their life together.
“Right.” An awkward silence filled the car. Audrey shooed Smoke out of her lap and fiddled with the radio, seeming agitated. Smoke hopped to Corvin’s shoulder and pecked him on the ear in silent admonishment for rousing him from his nap.
Corvin sighed. “Have you decided where you want to finish your training?” He kept the question completely neutral, unwilling to influence her choice in any way.
Audrey made a pained face, which she tried to hide from him. “It doesn’t really matter.”
“The weather in Nova Scotia is much harsher. You’d probably go stir-crazy trapped inside eight months out of the year.”
“But London is so far away.”
“So much to see though. So much history there.”
She shrugged again. “Maybe you should go, then.”
He frowned, thrown offbeat by her sullen attitude. “Are you so anxious to be rid of me?”
Her posture relaxed on a sigh as she looked at him. He kept his eyes on the road, reading her energy rather than her face. He felt the echo of his own longing at the center of her being, and it gave him hope.
“Of course not,” she answered in a hoarse voice. “Everything is just changing so fast.”
Realization sang through him like a bowstring let loose.
You are blind.
In all of his pondering of what would happen after today, he’d never stopped to consider how the very act of transition would be upsetting to Audrey. She’d never been able to settle down anywhere. Here, she had found a purpose, a routine, and a rag-tag family of sorts. Now it was all being thrown into question again.
He squeezed her hand. “My feelings for you will not change, no matter what you decide.”
“That doesn’t make it easier,” she muttered under her breath.
He scowled but let the topic go as he pulled onto the dirt road that would lead to the lookout. They unpacked the Rover and geared up for their hike. He had a special perch rigged to his backpack so that Honey could ride hooded. Smoke flew ahead, scouting the path.
The clouds of the morning had burned off by the time they reached the summit, and the sunny sky was crisp and clear above them. Smoke was happily snacking on some wild berries and greeted them with a caw. Honey’s thrill at the scents and sounds of the mountaintop made it hard for Corvin to discern any of Audrey’s feelings from the mix. She was silent as she surveyed the view of the forest carpet below and the snowcapped peaks in the distance.
Honey issued a sharp cry that echoed through the canyon. She shifted her weight impatiently and tugged at her jesses. Audrey put on her gauntlet, and he handed Honey off to her. The three of them stepped toward the rock ledge.
“Say your good-byes,” Corvin said softly as he untied the jesses and removed Honey’s bracelet.
Audrey stroked the eagle’s silken chest as a fat tear rolled down her cheek. “Take care of yourself, girl. No more hunting by the road.”
Honey lowered her head closer to Audrey’s and clicked her beak, asking for a neck scratch. As she complied, Corvin stood behind Audrey and wrapped her in his arms. He reached out to Honey with his magic and found her nervous and excited, as he’d expected. But she surprised him by also feeling concerned—as much as an animal could express that emotion—as if she could sense Audrey’s sadness.
He took Audrey’s hand, passing the message to her silently through feelings.
She gasped, her eyes widening before she smiled at Honey. “Don’t worry. I’ll be okay, girl.”
“Ready?” he whispered against her ear.
She nodded, and he reached up to remove Honey’s hood.
Honey blinked, adjusting to the light, then tilted her head, taking in her surroundings. She stared at Audrey for a long, charged moment, and both of their psyches met through his magic, binding together in silent understanding. Honey turned and stretched her wings, then bounced a few times.
Audrey held her breath.
Corvin helped lift her arm higher. Sunlight rippled in a golden wave across Honey’s bronze wings. With a touch of magic, he whispered to the eagle, Fly home.
She took off, the strength of her wings forcing Audrey to lean back into him. Honey dove below them off the ledge and out across the treetops as a piercing cry echoed through the valley, then slowly spiraled higher and higher into the sky.
Corvin held his connection with her and passed her feeling of complete, unbridled joy to Audrey. Freedom, without regret.
Audrey relaxed into his embrace, laughing, with tears in her eyes. They watched until Honey was a small spec on the horizon and then stood there staring at the vista for several more minutes. He would have been content to hold her like that for hours, but her stomach had other ideas, breaking the calm of the mountaintop with a loud rumble that made them both laugh.
He kissed her neck. “Come on, I have a spot picked out for a picnic.”
They had a quiet snack by a secluded pool Corvin had found many years before. It was fed by a small glacial waterfall. The water was cold, but he built them a fire and had packed plenty of blankets. They ate, and swam, and made love on the beach, keeping each other warm.
For the first time, he kept the empathic connection between them open wide the whole time he loved her, allowing them each to feel the other’s pleasure and the swell of emotions behind it, until they were both practically drunk on it. He told Audrey again and again that he loved her, and she said it back, with a thread of desperation that made it nearly impossible to let her go.
What if this is good-bye?
He wanted to stay on that mountain for days. Forever. To be lost there out of time. But as the sun started to sink and the sky darkened, they packed up their gear and hiked out in silence.
Questions started to compound in Corvin’s mind, putting more and more pressure on his decision. What if he was wrong? What if she wanted to stay? Why couldn’t she just tell him what she wanted? Whatever it was, he would give it to her. If she wanted space, he would give her space. If she wanted a home, they could make one anywhere. The only thing that mattered to him was that it was her choice. He had already made his.
***
When Audrey stepped from the tower that evening, the air was crisp with fall, the light of the full moon gilded the forest floor silver, and change was on the wind. The seasons were turning, and so was her stomach. All day, she’d been searching for some sign of Corvin’s intentions.
He’d been infuriatingly neutral any time talk of her guardian training had come up.
Not that you’ve been any better.
Their days together had started to feel surreal, like slips of time in some other dimension sandwiched in between the layers of reality. She’d been afraid to get real about the logistics of their situation, worried that it would break the spell. She couldn’t shake the feeling that her happiness with Corvin was fleeting, that it would evaporate like mist, just like every other dream she’d dared to have.
She had no idea how to have a long-distance relationship—she’d never even had a short-distance one work out. They were in love, but she wasn’t naïve enough to think that meant everything would just work itself out like in the movies. They were still two very different people, who wanted different things. She was illegally bound to a rogue Hohlwen and magically compelled to keep it secret from him. He’d already tried interrogating her, and they’d gotten into an entrenched argument over it. He kept pressuring her to make a decision on where to complete her guardian training and yet stayed indifferent whenever she asked his opinion.
She’d agonized over how to even breach the subject of what the future held for them, but tonight was the night.
No more stalling.
Corvin was waiting for her at the gate of the main courtyard, dressed in his black Synod robes. His hair was smoothed back and braided at the side, raven feathers woven in. His face was clean-shaven, and the ridged scars she’d come to love feeling beneath her fingers were no longer hidden. The sight of him made her breath catch and her toes start to curl. The hard angles of his jaw and nose contrasted with his full lips.
A mien of power had settled around him since their battle with the sorcerers. His demon blood seemed so obvious now that she was aware of it—from the feral grace of his movements, to the way his dark eyes captured and reflected just a bit more of the torchlight than a normal man’s. Beneath the sleeves of his robes, his leather gauntlets were polished to a shine. He held his staff in one hand, and Smoke was perched atop it, bobbing excitedly.
Corvin nodded to the other white-robed initiates and their mentors as they filtered through the gate ahead of Audrey, but he froze when his eyes settled on her.
Her nerves buzzed and her cheeks heated as she walked toward him, feeling as if she was floating, drawn by some unseen force. She’d dressed in the traditional white robes, with her hair unbound and loose around her shoulders and her feet bare. She wore no adornments except for her mother’s pendant, but the way he looked at her, she felt like the moon come to earth.
He took her arm silently, a small smile curling one side of his mouth as they walked through the gates side by side. The paths through the courtyard had been strewn with a thick carpet of flower petals, and the sweet scents of ripe fruit and crushed greenery perfumed the air. Candelabras filled the space with warm, twinkling light, which reflected off the gold and silver ribbons woven through the branches of the auburn-tinted trees. Long banquet tables lined the far wall, laden with heaps of magazine-cover-worthy food.
It was as if she’d stepped into a fairy tale, complete with her very own tall, dark, and brooding prince. Maybe she could have the storybook ending after all.
Many of the Zyne they’d rescued from the sorcerers were still seeking sanctuary at the fortress, and a sea of friendly faces greeted her as they made their way toward the large cauldron and giant bonfire at the center of the courtyard. As the crowd slowly grew, people visited in small pockets, voices low. She spotted Lilly and Peter. She took one step in their direction and Corvin pulled her back and whirled her into the shadows behind the nearest tree.
Smoke chewed them out from a nearby branch, then took off.
Corvin chuckled, and then his mouth and hands enveloped her with hot urgency. He didn’t stop until they both needed to catch their breath. He held her face in his hands and stared down at her, those flames dancing, beckoning.
She grinned. “Is that for luck?”
“No.” He tucked her hair behind her ear. “Not kissing you just takes too much effort.”
She ruffled her fingers through the glossy black feathers beside his face. “Then don’t ever stop.”
He leaned his staff carefully against the tree, then squeezed her hips and pulled her closer. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”
Though she’d meant to have this conversation, she hadn’t planned to have it so soon. Her heart thundered in her chest, and she swallowed hard. “Me too.”
But she still wasn’t ready to break the spell.
A heavy silence echoed between them for the next few beats as a faint strain of music came from the fortress. The procession of the Council was beginning.
“I don’t want to force you into anything,” Corvin blurted out.
She shook her head in confusion. “Force me?”
“You are free to go anywhere you want, do anything you want. I don’t want you to limit yourself on my account.”
“I never thought you did.” She frowned, holding her breath.
This was the part where he was going to tell her that she should see the world, find her new place in it, find herself, blah, blah. Maybe he would tell her that he would wait for her, that they could visit. That somehow nothing would change, even though everything would.
He tilted her chin up so she met his smoldering gaze, and the still depths there helped calm her. “I didn’t want to hold you back or impede your decision, but…”
“I understand,” she said. “You haven’t, and I’ve been—”
He placed a finger over her lips. “Let me get this out before you take your oath to the Legacy and commit yourself to the Threefold Path, because I want you to know, I love you without it. And I want you—no, I need you to know, whatever you choose, wherever you go, I want to go with you.”
She blinked as his words sank in. “You do?”
He nodded, wetting his lips, looking like it took all his considerable self-control not to kiss her again. He could probably feel her relief and excitement as they drowned out all her nervousness and uncertainty.
“What about your post? The birds?” She bit her lip.
He groaned. “If you do that, I’m going to get so lost kissing you we’ll miss the whole damn ceremony.” His thumb was gentle as it passed over her lip, a contrast to his words. Both lit an entirely different type of fire in her belly. “The birds don’t really need me. It was more the other way around. I can find a teaching post with the Synod wherever you go to train. And after, if you’re not truly called to service, my mother has promised to grant us a coven license with no strings attached. We can go anywhere we want and start anew.”
“Anywhere?” She felt light-headed and wondered if she was imagining this, having all her discarded wishes served to her on a silver platter. She’d been so prepared to scrape together a halfway-decent compromise that may or may not end up straining their relationship to the point of breaking.
Corvin smiled, the bright gilded one he saved only for her. “A very wise woman once told me there’s a whole wide world out there. We can see it all.”
She held back her giddy smile and cleared her throat. “My turn now?”
He chuckled and pulled her close. “Of course.”
“I’ve thought a lot about the future the last couple of months. More than I ever have before. And I don’t know what I plan to do with the rest of my life yet.”
His eyes darkened, and his hands squeezed her hips a bit tighter.
“But I do know that whatever it is, I don’t want to live without you.”
He sighed, and a pulse of intense satisfaction—not her own—moved through her in a luscious wave. His kiss was full of heat and promise. It left her breathless. “You will never have to. Loving you will be the greatest adventure.”
Patricia’s words from months ago tickled the back of her brain, and Audrey laughed.
“What?”
“Just your choice of words.”
“Am I talking like a dinosaur again?”
“It’s not that. Just something an Oracle told me once.”
“Ah, I see.” He lifted his staff from where it leaned against the tree trunk and gazed over the crowd to the ritual that was beginning without them. “So, are you ready to be indoctrinated into the cult?”
She took his arm, beaming. “Yep. Let’s go make me an official witch.”