Chapter 357 You Should Be In Bed (She Should Be Listened To)

River woke gasping.

The light through the window was mid-morning. The bed beside her was empty, and the absence of Tristan’s warmth registered before her eyes finished adjusting.

She sat up. Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t remember the dream but her body remembered the feeling of it. The remnants of something dark clung to the edges of her awareness, a pressure behind her eyes, a taste in the back of her throat like copper and ash.

River was out of the bed in a flash and pushed open her door.

The guard turned.

“You are unwell, Princess. The healer said he would return within the hour.”

She wasn’t sure what he was referring to.

“Thank you, I feel fine though. Where is Tristan?”

“The prince is in council, Your Highness. He left orders to let you rest.”

“Shoot,” she breathed.

She ran.

Through the corridor. Past the eastern gallery. Down the staircase that led to the council wing. Her slippers hit the stone in a rhythm that was too fast for decorum and too slow for the panic building in her chest.

She heard the council before she reached the doors.

Voices. Multiple. The voices were steady, measured, building toward a conclusion that carried the weight of consensus rather than debate, which was unusual for the Fae Council and alarming for exactly that reason.

River stopped outside the doors. She pressed her back against the wall and listened, and what she heard turned her blood to ice.

Elder Velarium was speaking. “—reviewed the precedents overnight. Prince Tristan’s argument regarding the Covenant of Lorathis is, I must concede, legally sound. The covenant permits a severing when the fated tie was established under conditions of duress or coercion, and the evidence of dark magic on the Willow woman qualifies.”

“The evidence is preliminary,” the priestess’s voice cut through. “Sensing dark magic is different from confirming its origin. We are making permanent decisions based on incomplete—”

“Priestess, with respect,” Elder Messrow interrupted. “The prince has presented testimony from three healers confirming parasitic dark magic entered the princess through her dream state. The signature traces back to within palace walls.”

“Correlation and causation are different animals, Elder.”

“They are,” Tristan said, voice low. “And when the correlation involves my wife seizing with dark veins on her face while the woman claiming a fated tie to me sits in a cell radiating dark magic, I am comfortable closing the gap between those two animals.”

A murmur of agreement moved through the chamber.

River’s stomach dropped. Had she been seizing? The last thing she remembered was falling asleep. She felt fine now.

Atlas’s voice sounded next.

“I have requested an independent assessment from the Northern Mage Council. Their preliminary response arrived an hour ago. The parasitic signature matches blood magic, a practice forbidden under every Fae treaty signed in the last three centuries.”

“Your Majesty, the Moon Goddess—”

“The Moon Goddess blessed a tie,” Atlas cut in. “She did not bless the woman attached to it. If the woman has corrupted the tie through forbidden magic, the tie itself is compromised, and a compromised tie can be severed without defying divine law.”

“That interpretation is—”

“Supported by the Lorathis Covenant, the Third Scroll of Sacred Bonds, and the ruling of the Aelindris High Court in the matter of Queen Valendra, year 412 of the Second Age,” Tristan finished. “I checked.”

Silence. The particular silence of a council recognizing that the prince had done more research than they had and was better prepared for this argument than anyone in the room.

“I must register my formal dissent.” The priestess’s voice was steady, carrying the weight of a woman who served the Goddess and would continue serving regardless of what the council decided. “A severing ceremony of any tie carries risk. But a fated tie? The risk is catastrophic. The fated tie is a divine mechanism and severing it is an act of defiance against forces this council does not fully understand.”

“Your dissent is registered, Priestess,” Elder Messrow said. “And respected. But the council has heard the prince’s petition, reviewed the legal framework, and considered the evidence. I move to approve the severing ceremony. All in favor?”

River waited for a full minute.

“The motion carries,” Elder Messrow announced. “The severing ceremony between Prince Tristan Aelindor and Vesper Willow will be scheduled—”

“No.”

The priestess’s voice was sharp enough to stop the sentence. “I will perform no such ceremony. Find another priestess if you must, but my hands will have no part in severing a tie the Goddess wove. I have said my piece. This council will answer for its decision. I pray the answer is kind.”

The sound of robes moving. Footsteps. A door at the far end of the chamber opened and closed.

The meeting continued without her.

River couldn’t believe her ears. How?

The first time she lived this, these exact same elders had suggested a second wife, cited divine law and sacred precedent, calling it the will of the Moon Goddess. Now, when she needed them to do that, they were doing the opposite.

She dragged a hand down her face.

Tristan had won. The council was capitulating, and the severing ceremony was being scheduled, and every elder in that room was signing a document that River knew, with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who had died on a field and been given a second chance, would kill everyone she loved.

The meeting ended.

Tristan emerged. His face was carrying the expression of a man who had just bent a council to his will through sheer force of argument, and the expression was part triumph and part exhaustion and entirely, devastatingly wrong.

“River.” His eyes found her against the wall. “You should be in bed.”

“Tristan, please listen to me. You cannot sever the fated tie. It is the will of the Moon Goddess. Denying it, disrespecting it, that is what is causing the corruption. I am begging you.”

“We discussed this. The council agrees—”

“The council is wrong. Tristan, a fated tie is sacred and severing it is dishonoring the Moon Goddess. If you do—” She couldn’t finish. She couldn’t tell him what it would do, because what it would do was a field and a crown in the grass and a spear and a gate and bodies and darkness, and the knowledge was sacred and the Goddess had said it could never be spoken to mortal ears.

His expression shifted. The triumph drained. What replaced it was the face of a man watching his wife beg him to accept another woman, and the contradiction between her words and her grief was a wound he couldn’t stitch because he couldn’t see the blade.

“River—”

He collapsed.

His knees buckled mid-sentence. His body pitched forward, and River caught him, her arms going around his chest, her legs bracing against the stone floor, the weight of him driving her to her knees but she held, she held because she had held him on a field and she would hold him in a corridor and she would hold him everywhere in between until her arms gave out.

The dark veins crawled up his face.

She saw them. The same veins. The same pattern. Threading from his neck to his jaw, branching toward his temple, pulsing with the slow, deliberate rhythm of a corruption that was patient and precise and had a schedule it was keeping.

“No, no, no,” she breathed.