Page 62 of FoolSilver
I stared at him. “But Nikolai runs intelligence.”
“Nikolai heads the network, yes. He has Caspian’s trackers under his command on certain operations, and we coordinate all channels centrally. But Lady Vaelith’s position is unique. No one else has the access she does, the proximity to the Witch herself. We work in parallel lines.” He paused, and something settled in his voice, the weight of years of this. “It’s by design. If one channel is compromised, the others stay dark. The Witch’s mages have taken down several of our networks over the last few decades. We learned not to put everything through a single line.”
I felt the loss in him, the gravity of what it cost to run intelligence in a decades-long war, to watch networks go dark and know what that meant for the people inside them. I kept my hands clasped behind my back. If I reached for him now, I wouldn’t stop at his arm.
“She dropped her glamour at one point,” I said. “She must wear a different face in the Pallid Court. I could see the residue of it.”
He looked at me, surprised. “You can see that?”
“Yes. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t doubt your loyalty for a moment.” His expression shifted to the recalibration of a man updating something he’d estimated. “Not even the other heirs can detect Lady Vaelith’s glamour. It’s ancient Fae magic. She’s spent centuries perfecting it.” He paused. “She’s one of the eagles.”
That was how she’d come back so fast—no overland route through the Scorched Wastes, no checkpoint at the Crimson Ridge border where the Pallid Court’s watchtowers covered every approach. The Scorched Wastes and the mutant swarms that ran them were an effective barrier between the Covenant and the White Witch’s territory; Crimson Ridge itself was impossible to breach without significant cost. Seven raids over the years, Drakken’s seven, none of them successful. But an eagle shifter flying high enough didn’t need to breach anything. The battles between the kingdoms happened mostly in New Mexico, the triangular zone where the Pallid Court, the Zodiac Covenant, and the Haven all pressed against the same border, but the sky was different.
“Like Captain Holt,” I said. “But Holt’s a pureblood shifter.”
“Lady Vaelith is half-Fae.”
It explained the glamour: Fae magic in her blood, shifter blood giving her the form.
Frost had told me there’d been five eagle shifters originally. Two killed by the White Witch’s mages. Three remaining. Lady Vaelith was one of them.
“She only came back when it was critical,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The Foolsilver intel?”
He regarded me, measuring how much to give. “That was part of it. The larger intelligence was this: every kingdom with afunctioning spy network is now looking for the lost heir, who’s recently surfaced.”
My pulse hit like a war drum. My whole chest went tight.
“It’s connected to the old prophecy,” Aelindor said, still watching me. “We won’t get into that today.”
I didn’t want to get into it today. I didn’t want to get into it any day. The feeling it produced was a particular dread, the kind that comes from standing at the edge of something with no bottom, knowing that whatever lived down there would overturn everything I’d built my understanding of myself on.
“Lady Vaelith might not be your lover,” I said, circling back because the prophecy was a cliff I wasn’t ready to step toward. “But I saw the way she looked at you.”
He was quiet for a moment, which told me more than his answer would have. “We had a history,” he said finally. “A very long time ago, after I lost everything. Evermere. My people. The life I had before the Rupture. She was there during the worst of it, and we comforted each other. I ended it before she was positioned in the Pallid Court. It was kinder, I thought, to end it cleanly.”
“She still loves you.” I held his gaze. “I don’t need Fae senses to read that.”
“I hate hurting her.” A quiet exhale. The weight of it settled between us. “But I can’t return what she feels.”
We’d stopped at the lake’s edge where the path ran out and the water began. The afternoon light moved across the surface, offering a calm that didn’t reach me. Something large and complicated was pressing against my ribs from the inside, looking for a way out.
Aelindor reached up and tucked the white streak of my hair behind my ear.
“You never need to feel jealous,” he said. “There’s no one else, Max. Only you.” A pause, his blue eyes holding mine. “I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”
My heart slammed so hardit beatin my throat. The words moved through me like something physical. Part of me had been braced for them. Afraid of them.
Wanting them.
“Are you—” My voice came out wrong. I cleared it and tried again. “Are you sure, Aelindor?”
It was the first time I’d said his name to his face. It sat differently in the air thansir.
