The Ashen Raven's Treason

Chapter 4

Boots click and leather straps rub together. Lyndel squats down next to me, easing his large body onto the rough floor of Cloak's hallway. He grunts, wincing, as the poleyn digs into his knee. The echo of his movements lasts longer than I'd like, armor ringing out down the hall and into my ears.

Lyndel winces and waits for it to pass. "Are you all right?" he questions once the hall restores a calm silence. If Cloak managed to fall asleep, surely that woke him up. There's a reason guards don't move from their posts unless they must. The armor they carry, ordered in uniform by the Raven Queen, does not silence their approach.

I rub at the bridge of my nose. When one headache disappears, another rises. "I don't know," I sigh. "I find it difficult to see him that way, especially when my methods of healing do not immediately work. I, nor him, know what will make him feel better."

Lyndel nods. "The prince has always cast difficulty in understanding. When we served together to protect Wildsurge's ocean borders, he was even worse. No one, down his closest comrades, knew what went through his head."

From where I thread my fingers into my hair, resting my elbows on my bent knees, I glance at the fladline guard. He stares at the opposite wall, to the frosted windows glaring at us, and frowns in remembrance. A shadow of doubt drags down the corners of his mouth, drooping his features to melt. "You served together?"

"That we did. We were in the same battalion. I should know Cloak's tendencies; I was one of his closest comrades." He brings an iron gauntlet to the golden bordered chest plate protecting him from the fault of a sharp blade. To match the door to the prince's chambers, and the rest—a shade of night—to remind all enemies that he serves the one and the only. Millicent Terravale. "I remember the night he was captured by Dubirin. One of the worst nights of my life."

"He was captured?"

"Lured away by a female feliram begging for his attention. It happened late at night, in the camp, and most of us were too exhausted to pay any attention other than to mock the prince as he took great strides into the bushes," Lyndel explains. I scoff at the memory he puts into my head, the faint glow of Cloak fading into the dark to escape from living as a fighter for only a few minutes. Merely seconds on a ticking timepiece. "When he didn't come back...we knew something was wrong. I felt it in my gut."

I drop my hands and fold them around my knees, tucking my entire body tight against my chest. The wall pressing into my back seemed so cold once, but that night must've been worse. The search to find a prince that had disappeared beyond their tedious watch. "What did you discover when you found him?"

Lyndel scratches at his furry ears. Pointed and sharp, seemingly rounded by the soft armor of his kind that fades from light to dark browns. "They tortured him—strapped him to a table and cut into his body. The majority of the scars you see today result from that near-fatal night. We arrived just in time, right before they cut off his horns."

"There is no honor in a feliram that has lost his spikes of truth," I whisper. "They planned to take his honor."

"Indeed," he agrees. "Though he was alive, covered in blood, and still had his horns, Cloak behaved differently since that night. He shrugged it off, claimed everything was all right in his head, but no man returns from torture without battling the dark he voluntarily walked into."

Mistakes are to blame. Cloak fights every day to maintain perfection and when he doesn't reach it, instead falling short of his mother's desires, he faces the possibility of losing a livelihood. Not his horns that mark him a true, strong feliram. A home, a family, a life that he was ultimately forced into to save his father.