Chapter Text
On an amber morning in late spring, Cadeyrn moved for the first time in two years and seven months, three weeks, and four days. He had never stopped counting. Keeping track of the time he spent, bound by magic, a living statue, unable to even close his eyes or give himself to the comfortable oblivion of sleep, was all that had kept him from going entirely mad.
It was only his fingers at first. This was an accidental discovery, as he had stopped straining against the arcane shackles every hour of the day, like he had done in the beginning. They twitched, uncontrolled, then rested again. Though the magic had frozen him in time, kept his muscles from shrinking, unlike those of a man who had to lie in bed after a grave injury, he had not used his body in so very long. Cadeyrn shifted his leg, turned his head, shook out his arms. Something must have unravelled by accident, one thread in the complex weave of spells not accounted for.
The wounds and bruises from the torture he had been subjected to when they had first brought him to this place were as fresh as the day when they had been inflicted, but he did not miss the slighter, dull ache they had produced while he had been petrified. Their sharp bite told him he was truly alive again.
He was considering the closed window when he heard the ladder creaking under the trap door.
A complication, but it was better that way. He would have hated to leave without meeting Yngvar again.
Cadeyrn flexed his muscles, made sure that his hands could curl into fists. Then, he stood again the way he had for those two and a half years, his arms tightly pressed at his sides, his chin raised in defiance, his gaze pinned on the opposing wall. An eagle-eyed man would likely have spotted a few small difference after seeing Cadeyrn stand for seasons upon seasons in the hidden attic study as a grim trophy honouring Yngvar’s considerable magic ability. However, having watched Yngvar for so long, Cadeyrn knew that his captor, while talented, was likely too easily distracted to notice. He’d lost papers on his own desk, had gotten distracted from Lady Gudrun while kissing her, left the window open in coldest fall and winter so the rain hit his precious books while Cadeyrn had frozen in the cold, standing naked as he had, stripped down for the purpose of humiliation.
The wooden door in the ground opened, admitting Yngvar into the room. Him and Gudrun were the only people Cadeyrn had seen for all this time that he’d stood, fully aware, sleepless. He knew every small wrinkle in his skin, every strand of dark hair greying at the tips, the nervous way he moved his thin limbs, the folds on his dark blue robes embroidered with golden threat and adorned with diamonds, really too lavish for a court mage, but then, Gudrun loved him, after all.
Yngvar did not spare Cadeyrn a glance. As so often, he sifted between the scrolls that laid spread over the table which stood against the wall that Cadeyrn faced.
Cadeyrn’s feet were naked and thus quiet on the wooden boards. He did best with a sword or lance in hand, but he had always happily wielded the long dagger that assassins slipped beneath bones and through muscle, too, and so it was not the first time he approached an enemy on cat’s paws. He had been a good soldier in those days that seemed centuries ago now, not often truly overpowered, and the last time it had been because the blow came from the back, from the people in his ranks, Gudrun’s soldiers. Time to repay that treachery.
He wrapped his arm around Yngvar’s neck from behind and yanked him against his round stomach with a quick motion, pressing his other hand over Yngvar’s mouth.
“If I had the time, I would make you suffer. Count yourself lucky,” he said, with a voice like a rusty hinge, ruined by disuse, before he tightened his arms and tore Yngvar’s head to the side, breaking his neck.
Cadeyrn wasted no time stripping the clothes off the man. They were about the same height, but the boots didn’t fit well. He squeezed his feet into them, anyway. It would be a long way back home and the air in spring could be cold. With the dagger Yngvar wore at his hip, he tore large holes in the back of the robes so that his translucent wing could fit through. Afterwards, he slit Yngvar’s throat and pierced his heart with the blade, the better to make sure that no mage would be able to put him back together.
As he belted the tunic under his stomach, he felt a stirring inside it, after that a soft kick. He did not let it distract him from his task of getting dressed, but his knees almost buckled with relief. It seemed his child, the heir to the High Kingdom of Lingarth, was still alive. It was eight months old now and had been for all this time. Cadeyrn pushed away his fury when he considered that, if he’d not been captured, his son or daughter could have been the right age now to be sat on a pony and speak babbling sentences and run the castle halls with the children of the servants and courtiers.
No matter. We are both fortunate to be alive at all.
With quick hands, he searched through the table, the cupboards. He knew by now where Yngvar kept his private correspondence and he stuffed his pockets so full of letters and notes that they bulged.
The wind that rushed into the room when he opened the window rustled through his short white hair and smelled of apple blossoms. Gudrun’s castle laid surrounded by those trees, a sea of white and pink moving softly in the breeze. Cadeyrn stared. He knew the scent all too well, but all this time he hadn’t seen the orchard because he’d been positioned to face the wall.
He spread his wings, the wings his husband said looked like they belonged to a dragonfly, and tested that they carried him off the ground. Then he swung himself out of the window, into the air, and fled into the sky.
It was a considerable journey from Gudrun’s lands to Lingarth’s capital city of Ravensdale, a flight of a day if he’d been in his best form, which he was not. At dusk, Cadeyrn stopped in the middle of thick woods whose name he did not know, dug out sweetroots and washed them in a stream before he ate, feeling like he’d forgotten how to use his teeth. The thought of sleeping in the wild darkness made his skin crawl, so he only rested, and flew on as the morning light crept through the foliage.
Though he’d kept such careful track of time, it only occurred to him that it was the day of the Feast of Blossoms when, flying over villages and smaller towns, he saw people gathering in their best garments around large fires, throwing flowers into the flames and dancing to music he could not hear over the wind in his ears. When he arrived at the high walls of Ravensdale, he saw people stand packed in the alleys around the main street that led from the Willowsgate to the king’s castle. They were watching the traditional royal procession. Cadeyrn himself had headed it just once at Agnar’s side. Their marriage had lasted only a little over a year before he had been taken.
His curiosity got the better of him, trumped tiredness and pain. He slowed, lowered himself in the air. There were not many like him anymore, people of the old blood who had wings, and the few who did live in Ravensdale sat on rooftops and chimneys and looked not up, but at the march of knights in shining armour, bards in colourful dress, horses wreathed in flowers, and, at the very front, High King Agnar of the clan of the Dreadfeathers, the people who had built Ravensdale and its castle, the Raven’s Nest, a dark cape billowing behind him, pinned to his back by the round shield on which the black bird of his house was drawn with obsidian on silver. Cadeyrn’s heart seized at the sight and he wished he could have risked flying down far enough to see his face without causing a commotion.
Focused as he was, he needed a moment to notice tall Lord General Sigsteinn next to Agnar, Agnar’s best friend since the days when they had both been boys. The consort’s crown sat nestled in his thick blond curls.
Cadeyrn could not put words on what he felt, but it was not surprise.
Tearing himself from the view, he flew higher again, away over the city and then the battlements of the Raven’s Nest, and landed near where a guardswoman leaned over the merlons, watching the procession. He recognised her sharp beak nose and friendly blue eyes.
“There aren’t many of my kind left, Runa, but it’s foolish to be so blind to attacks from above.”
Runa jumped, gripping at her sword, then froze.
“Lord Captain Cadeyrn?”
She looked at him like she’d seen him rise from his grave herself. Cadeyrn held her eyes. He knew this would not be the last time that he would get this reaction today. He wondered what emotions he would read on Agnar’s face when the shock had waned.