HER CROWN, HIS FLAME
Part I: Betrayal, Blood Oaths & Forbidden Feelings
CHAPTER TEN: CHASING THE WIND
Finn's idea of a training ground was, predictably, not a clearing at all, but the entire forest between the house and the northern ridge, strung with hidden traps, false trails, and, as Olivia discovered within the first ten minutes, arrows that seemed to loose themselves from empty air with no archer in sight at all.
He met her at the trailhead with a grin that promised nothing good, a feather worked loose from his sandy hair and tucked instead behind one pointed ear, bouncing on the balls of his feet with the restless energy of a man who had never once, in his very long life, learned how to simply stand still.
"They're not aimed to hit you," Finn called out, cheerfully, from somewhere above her in the canopy, his voice bouncing between the trees in a way that made it nearly impossible to locate him. "Mostly. Bastian's still adjusting the last one."
"That is not reassuring."
"It isn't meant to be. Run."
She ran. She fell, more often than she ran, her feet finding every root and rise the forest floor had to offer, her sense of the wind Finn kept insisting was all around her remaining stubbornly, infuriatingly silent no matter how hard she reached for it.
"You're fighting it," Finn said, appearing beside her out of nowhere after her fourth fall, entirely unwinded, an easy, restless energy radiating off him even at rest. "Wind doesn't want to be gripped, Olivia. It wants to be joined. You keep trying to grab it by the throat the way you did with Bastian's metal, and it just slips straight through your fingers and leaves you face down in the dirt."
"Helpful."
"I try." He grinned, unrepentant, and was gone again before she'd finished glaring at him.
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Adam lasted through exactly six of her falls before his patience gave out entirely, appearing at her side mid-sprint with the particular, grim focus of a man who had decided, independently and immediately, to simply run interference between Olivia and every hidden root the forest had to offer.
Finn caught him within seconds.
"Out," Finn said, materialising in front of his brother with none of his usual playfulness. "This lesson doesn't work if she's got a wall of muscle running beside her catching every mistake before it costs her anything."
"She's going to break her neck."
"She's going to learn to trust her own feet, which is considerably more useful in the long run than trusting yours." Finn's teal eyes, usually so bright with mischief, held something steadier now. "You did this with Bastian too. I watched you do it. I understand why. But you cannot spend the rest of her life standing between her and every fall, Adam, or she'll never learn which ones she can survive on her own."
Adam's jaw worked, but he stepped back, and Olivia, watching the exchange from where she'd landed hard against a fallen log, understood, not for the first time, that every one of these seven brothers seemed to be teaching her some version of the same lesson from a slightly different angle.
❖ ❖ ❖
The loss of control, when it came, arrived far worse than any of her previous falls.
Olivia had finally begun to feel something respond beneath her reaching hands, a current of movement threading through the air around her ankles, and in her eagerness to seize it properly she pulled too hard, too fast, and the wind she had only just begun to touch answered with considerably more force than she had asked for.
It swept her sideways, off the narrow trail and toward the ravine that ran along the northern ridge, and Olivia had one brief, vertiginous glimpse of empty air and jagged rock far below before her feet left solid ground entirely.
She heard Finn shout something, heard Bastian's voice join his, both of them too far to reach her in time, and then she heard nothing at all except the rush of wind in her ears and the sick, weightless certainty of falling.
Adam caught her wrist a half second before the ravine's edge would have made the question academic.
The impact of it nearly took his arm from its socket, and for one terrible instant Olivia felt her whole weight swing out over open air, her heart lodged somewhere in her throat, before Adam's other hand found a root thick enough to anchor them both and held, muscles standing out along his forearm with the effort of it.
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He should not have been close enough to catch her. Olivia understood that even as his hand closed around her wrist and his own momentum, carrying them both over the edge together rather than simply stopping her fall, sent them tumbling down the ravine's rocky slope in a chaos of scraped skin and grabbing hands and Adam's arm locking around her at the last possible moment to take the worst of the impact himself.
They came to rest, finally, in the mouth of a shallow cave carved into the ravine wall, half-buried in loose scree, both of them breathing hard, Adam's body curled protectively around hers in a way that had clearly cost him considerably more bruising than it had cost her.
"You could have died," Olivia said, once she'd found her voice, fury flooding in to fill the space fear had occupied a moment before. "Finn told you to stay back. You weren't even supposed to be close enough to reach me."
"You're welcome."
"That's not what I meant and you know it." She pushed herself upright, checking him for injury with hands that shook more than she wanted them to. "You do this constantly. You throw yourself into danger without thinking, without asking anyone, as though your own safety is simply optional whenever mine is in question."
"You want to talk about throwing yourself into danger without thinking?" Something sharp and unguarded cracked through Adam's usual careful control. "You did the exact same thing the day Theo got hurt in the ambush. You do it every single time he's within ten feet of a blade. I don't hear you apologising for that."
"That's different."
"Is it."
The silence that followed had a different quality than the silences they usually carried between them, charged and dangerously honest, and Olivia, staring at him in the dim, dust-filtered light of the cave mouth, understood, with a jolt that had nothing to do with her bruised ribs, exactly what she was hearing underneath his anger.
"You're jealous," she said, before she'd fully decided to say it aloud.
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"I'm not."
"You are. This whole time, every time Theo and I—"
"I said I'm not." Adam's voice came out rougher than he clearly intended, and he pushed himself up, putting distance between them in the small space that did not actually allow for very much of it. "I don't get jealous over things that were never mine to begin with."
"That's not a denial. That's just a very specific way of saying yes."
He did not answer that. He turned instead, examining the narrow crack of daylight at the cave's mouth with far more attention than the task actually required, his shoulders set in the particular, stubborn line Olivia had learned, over the past weeks, meant he had run out of ways to argue and had chosen retreat instead.
She should have let him have the silence. She found, instead, that she did not want to.
Something reckless and unfamiliar had loosened in her chest since the fall, some part of her that had spent two weeks so carefully guarding every feeling she had left that she had forgotten what it felt like to simply reach for a thing without first calculating its cost.
"Adam."
He turned back, and whatever he had meant to say in answer dissolved somewhere in the narrow space between them, because Olivia had moved closer without quite deciding to, close enough now that she could see the fine scar above his left eyebrow she'd never noticed before, close enough that his breath had gone suddenly, carefully still.
"Adam," she said again, softer this time, and did not know, herself, what she had meant to follow it with.
His hand came up, not quite touching her jaw, close enough that she could feel the warmth of it, and for one long, suspended moment neither of them moved at all, the cave holding its breath around them, the whole complicated architecture of guilt and jealousy and two brothers' competing claims narrowing down to nothing but the six inches of space between his mouth and hers.
"OLIVIA. ADAM. If you two are dead in there, I am going to be extremely annoyed about the paperwork."
Finn's voice, cheerful and entirely too loud, cracked through the cave's narrow entrance like a thrown stone.
Adam's hand dropped. Olivia stepped back so fast she nearly lost her footing on the loose scree, and by the time Finn's face appeared, upside down and grinning, in the gap of daylight above them, both of them had arranged their expressions into something considerably less incriminating than the truth.
"We're fine," Adam said, flatly.
"You sound thrilled about it." Finn's eyes moved between them with the particular, knowing amusement of a man who had clearly interrupted something and was choosing, for now, not to say so directly. "Rope's coming down. Try not to fall in love with the cave in the meantime."
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It took the better part of an hour to haul them both back up the ravine wall, and by the time Olivia stood again on solid ground, scraped and bruised and thoroughly humiliated, something in her had shifted, quiet and certain, in a way the fall itself had not managed to shake loose.
She understood the wind now. Not as something to seize, the way she'd tried to seize the metal in Bastian's forge, but as something to move alongside, matching its rhythm rather than fighting it, and when Finn set her back on the training trail one final time that afternoon, arrows already loosing themselves from the hidden mechanisms strung through the canopy, Olivia did not brace herself to fight the air around her.
She simply asked it to carry her, and it did.
She moved faster than she had ever moved in her life, faster than thought, the forest blurring past in streaks of green and gold as she wove between roots and rises she could not consciously track, and when the false archers' mechanisms triggered in sequence ahead of her, Olivia did not merely dodge them. She used the wind's own momentum to close the distance instead, knocking three of the training constructs flat before the fourth had even finished loosing its arrow, and skidded to a stop at the trail's end breathless, laughing despite herself, alive in a way that had nothing to do with fear at all.
Finn whooped from somewhere in the canopy, delighted. Bastian, watching from the trail's edge, allowed himself something that was almost a smile. And Adam, standing a short distance off with his arms crossed and his jaw carefully, deliberately unreadable, watched her land the final blow with an expression that gave nothing away at all, except for the way his eyes had not once left her the entire run.
Rowan met her at the trail's end with a waterskin and a look that suggested he had already heard, in the particular way news travelled through this family, exactly how the ravine incident had ended. He said nothing about it. He simply pressed the water into her hands and told her, with the mild, unbothered air of a healer who had tended considerably worse afternoons, that her pulse was still too fast for someone who'd merely been running.
Olivia did not correct him.
Olivia caught her breath, and felt the wind settle into place beneath her skin alongside everything else the forest had given her, and did not yet let herself examine too closely what had very nearly happened in the dark of a cave that afternoon, or why some small, reckless part of her already wished Finn had called out a few seconds later than he had.