Chapter 4: Four Princes, One Bond

Kaelen told no one what he’d felt in that corridor, but he stopped being subtle about watching her for it.

Wren noticed within a day. He appeared at the edges of rooms she walked into, not quite approaching, not quite looking away when she caught him at it either, just present in a way that made the back of her neck prickle every time she felt his attention land on her. She told herself it was suspicion, that a dragon heir with her secret half figured out was simply keeping tabs on a potential threat. She almost believed it, right up until the other three started doing exactly the same thing, each in his own way, none of them explaining why.

Lysander Vale was the first to make it obvious, though obvious for him apparently meant something closer to an ambush disguised as courtesy. He appeared across from her at dinner three days after the corridor incident, sliding into the seat like he’d been invited, which he hadn’t, and spent the entire meal asking her questions that sounded casual and weren’t.

“You’re the human everyone’s talking about.” He said it lightly, the way someone comments on weather, though his eyes never quite stopped studying her the whole time he said it. “I have to say, you’re nothing like what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone easier to read.” He smiled, and it was a genuinely good smile, practiced enough that she suspected it worked on most people most of the time. “Fae court raises you to read a room before you can properly walk. You’re a puzzle, Wren Hale. I don’t love puzzles I can’t solve, and I especially don’t love ones that seem to be solving me right back.”

“Maybe I’m not a puzzle. Maybe I’m just tired and new and not interested in whatever game this is.”

“Everyone at this table plays some kind of game, whether they admit it or not.” He leaned back, studying her over the rim of his glass. “You included. You just haven’t figured out which one you’re playing yet. That’s what makes you interesting.”

She gave him nothing useful the entire meal, deflecting every question with one of her own, and he left looking more intrigued rather than less, which felt like exactly the opposite of what she’d been going for.

Kai Fenwick was stranger, because Kai apparently didn’t do this for anyone. She’d heard enough dining hall gossip by then to know he’d ignored every new student in four straight years of enrollment, sharp featured and secretive and generally uninterested in whatever the rest of the school found interesting. That reputation started cracking the same week Lysander cornered her at dinner.

She found him waiting at the mouth of a corridor two days later, leaning against the wall with the particular stillness of someone who wanted to look like he hadn’t been waiting at all.

“You’re going the long way to the library,” he said, not quite looking at her.

“Is that a crime here too?”

“No.” A small, unreadable smile. “Just an observation. I notice things. Lately I seem to be noticing you a great deal more than I mean to.”

“Is that supposed to be a warning?”

“It’s supposed to be honest. I don’t have much practice at the other thing.” He finally looked at her directly, just for a moment, before his gaze slid away again like it cost him something to hold it. “You should know that before whatever this is gets any further along.”

He walked off before she could ask what that meant, leaving her standing in the corridor with one more question added to a list that was getting uncomfortably long.

It was Rhys who finally said it plainly, because subtlety had never once been his strategy for anything.

He caught her leaving the training yard after a session she’d mostly spent failing to summon so much as a spark, and he didn’t bother with Kaelen’s careful watching or Lysander’s charming interrogation or Kai’s oblique half sentences. He simply stood in front of her, arms crossed, jaw set like a man who’d rehearsed this moment and decided rehearsing further would only make it worse.

“You’re our mate,” he said.

The words landed in the space between them like he’d been holding them in his chest for days and had finally decided to set them down somewhere they couldn’t be picked back up.

Wren laughed. It came out before she could stop it, sharp and disbelieving. “That’s a new one. What is this, some kind of welcome week hazing nobody warned me about? Prank the human until she cries?”

“I’m not joking.”

“You have to be. There’s four of you and one of me, and I’m human, in case anyone’s forgotten that fact for even a second.”

“I haven’t forgotten it.” His voice didn’t waver. “That’s exactly the part none of us can explain.”

He wasn’t lying, and the proof arrived faster than she wanted it to.

Kaelen found her within the hour, expression unreadable but certain. “I felt it the night in the corridor,” he told her. “I told myself it was only the power. It was never only the power.”

Lysander confirmed it next, all his charm momentarily gone, replaced by something far more serious than she’d seen from him yet. “I don’t solve puzzles for fun, Wren. I solve them because I need to understand them. I think I’ve been trying to understand this one since the moment you sat down.”

Kai confirmed it last, quietest of the four, watching her reaction more carefully than he’d watched anything else about her so far. “I don’t do this,” he said simply. “I haven’t, not once, in four years. Draw your own conclusions.”

A bond. Claimed by four heirs from four completely different factions, over a human girl who couldn’t summon a single spark on command even when her life had depended on it.

Before Wren could begin to process what that could possibly mean, a runner arrived from the headmaster’s office with a summons for all five of them, immediately, no explanation given beyond the word urgent underlined twice.

Headmaster Aldric’s expression, when they finally stood in front of his desk minutes later, was graver than anything the bond reveal itself had managed to make her feel.