CHAPTER 88

JARETT'S POV

The ride north through the pass was brutal and dead quiet.

Helena rode in the saddle directly in front of me. I kept my arms wrapped securely around her waist, holding the leather reins because I needed the physical proof that she was safe.

She didn't fight the proximity; instead, she leaned back, letting the back of her head rest heavily against my shoulder as the horse negotiated the frozen mountain trail.

“You don’t have to push yourself like this,” I murmured, leaning down so my breath warmed her cold ear. “We could have sent Kael and the vanguard.”

“Yes, I do,” she replied softly, her voice barely carrying over the crunch of hooves on hard ice. “Those people in the northern camps are chewing on boiled leather tonight because of me. Because Lucian used my bloodline to justify his war, and now his ghosts are punishing them for my freedom.”

“They’re starving because Lucian’s sycophants are ruthless bastards,” I corrected gently. “It isn't your fault, Helena. None of it is.”

She didn't argue, but she didn't agree either. She just reached down, sliding her gloved fingers over mine where they rested against her stomach, lacing our hands tightly together over the leather straps.

By nightfall, the Frostfang outpost loomed out of the swirling mountain mist like a jagged tooth. It was a miserable ruin of cracked granite, rotting wooden palisades, and half-collapsed watchtowers. Black banners, tattered by years of mountain winds, whipped wildly against the dark stone, bearing the faded silver mark of Lucian’s old regime.

Standing right at the rusted iron gates, watching our approach, was a defensive line of roughly twenty armed wolves. Their weapons were drawn, steel gleaming under the pale moonlight.

And standing dead center of the line was a boy.

He couldn't have been more than sixteen years old. He had the sharp, hawk-like tilt to his eyes that was unmistakable—Lucian’s blood. But beneath the dirt and the military coat that was three sizes too big for him, I caught the familiar, stubbornly set line of Tova’s jaw. Her younger brother.

“Helena!” the boy shouted across the snowy yard, his voice cracking slightly on the high note despite his attempts to sound formidable. “We’ve been waiting for the fake Crown to show up.”

Helena swung her leg over the saddle and dismounted in one fluid motion. I was off my horse a second later, my hand catching hers the moment my boots hit the slush. I didn't draw my sword, but my thumb hovered right over the pommel.

“Give up the food reserves, Julian,” she called out, taking three measured steps forward into the clearing. “You’re holding grain meant for families.”

The boy let out a bitter, barking laugh, clutching his broadsword with white knuckles. “Or what? You’ll incinerate us where we stand? Like you burned the royal ledger? Like you burned my father in his own keep?”

Instantly, the heat rolled off Helena in a violent wave. Golden light flared wildly in her eyes, spilling over her eyelids, illuminating the snow around her boots in an eerie, unnatural radiance.

“Don’t,” I whispered beside her, laying a single, heavy hand on her shoulder. “Don't let him pick this fight.”

Helena froze. She looked side-long at me, her chest heaving as she pulled in a deep, freezing breath of mountain air. She held it for a beat, then let it out in a long plume of white steam.

When she turned back to the boy, the gold was entirely gone.

“No,” she said. Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried across the ruined courtyard with a terrifying clarity that made the guards behind the boy shift uncomfortably. “I’m not going to burn you.”

Julian’s sneer faltered, his arrogant posture sagging just a fraction.

“I am done being the weapon he constructed,” Helena declared, stepping farther out into the open space so every wolf lined up on the wall could see her clearly. “You want to hold these supplies because you’re angry? Fine. We can stand here in the freezing wind and talk about it. But we do it as wolves of the same territory. Not as a Crown and her prisoners.”

A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the ruin. The only sound was the wind howling through the cracks in the stone.

Julian sneered again, trying to reclaim his footing. “You really think this is just about grain and dried meat?”

“No,” Helena said quietly, taking another step closer to the drawn blades. “I think this is about a scared kid who wants someone to validate his rage.”

She let go of my hand.

Every muscle in my body coiled tight. My hand slammed down onto the hilt of my blade, every trained instinct screaming at me to tackle her back into the safety of the treeline, to put my body between her and twenty hostile swords.

But I forced myself to stay put. I held my ground.

Because as she walked forward into the circle of moonlight, she wasn't hiding behind an ancient title or wrapped in defensive magic. She wasn't the Crown walking forward.

She was just Helena.

She stopped barely three feet from the tip of Julian’s lowered broadsword.

“My name is Helena,” she said, looking the boy dead in the eyes. “And I am so damned tired of people dying so someone can sit on an iron chair. If you want to fight me for what my father did, raise your sword and strike. But there are toddlers in the Blackriver settlement who won't survive until Tuesday if those sleds don't move tonight. And I won't let their deaths be on my conscience.”

Julian stared at her, his lips parted, searching her face for any sign of a bluff, any flicker of the monster his father had spent years describing.

He found nothing.

Slowly, agonizingly, the tip of his heavy sword dipped toward the snow. It hit the slush with a dull thud.

“...The storage vaults are down in the lower cellar,” he muttered, looking away toward the broken flagstones. “Take what you can haul.”

Helena bowed her head once. “Thank you.”

We spent the next three hours in back-breaking labor. There was no grand display of power, no lingering threats, and no guards watching over us with drawn bows. It was just wolves, soldiers, and rebels working side by side in the freezing dark, hauling heavy timber crates of grain, dried fruit, and salted pork out of the damp cellars and strapping them securely onto the heavy transport sleds.

By the time we turned the horses back toward the shrine, the sky was beginning to bruise with the pale purple hues of early morning.

Helena was completely spent. She lasted less than ten minutes in the saddle before her body gave out to sheer exhaustion, her head dropping heavily back against my collarbone, her breathing slowing into a deep, rhythmic sleep.

I wrapped my cloak around her shoulders, pulling her flush against my chest, and held her tightly the entire three-hour ride home.

When we finally pulled up to the shrine gates, Kael was leaned up against a timber post, waiting. He took one look at the overflowing supply sleds, then Helena passed out cold against my chest, and let out a long sigh.

“You’re both absolute idiots,” he grunted, taking the reins of my horse.

“Probably,” I grunted back, my muscles aching from the cold.

At the sound of my voice, Helena stirred, rubbing her face against my heavy coat before squinting up into the morning light. “Did... did we get it all? Did it work?”

“The first three sleds are hitting the road to Blackriver before noon,” Tova said, emerging from the guardhouse with a mug of hot broth. She stood by the horse’s head, looking up at Helena with something dangerously close to respect in her eyes. “You did good, Crown-Bearer.”

For the first time since I'd known her, Helena didn't bother to correct the title. She just closed her eyes and let her head sink back onto my shoulder.

That night, we didn't make the long trek back up the mountain to the isolated cabin.

We retreated to Helena’s quarters tucked away in the back of the shrine, a simple, drafty stone room with a single narrow bed, a mountain of wool blankets, and a dying fire in the grate.

She didn't even bother taking off her riding boots before she crawled directly into my lap on the edge of the mattress, burying her face into the crook of my neck, and drifting off to sleep within five minutes.

I didn't sleep. I stayed awake for hours in the dark, resting my chin against her hair, watching the quiet, steady rise and fall of her chest.