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I looked up from the patch of wishing blossoms I’d been staring at blankly and realized my gaffe. I straightened my back and flopped towards the ground, so I could meet him eye to eye.

“Take all the jabs you want, Shadowson,” I said, fixing my lids to look lax and bored. “Even at my sappiest, I can still throttle you into the ground with one arm behind my back.” I broke out a brilliant yet threatening smile, hoping my recovery had been convincing enough.

I thought he would laugh or throw me into one of those wrestling maneuvers he’d been practicing in training. I would let him detain me for a few seconds while he told me all about his fighting spirit, but Kalen just looked away wistfully into the clouds. Small lines crinkled in the corners of his face as he grimaced.

“Shadowson. Why do you always call me that?” he questioned without looking at me.

I rolled on top of him and jabbed at his side with my knee, putting him in one of the holds he’d been working on last week. Kalen struggled for a minute, grunting and puffing hot breath on my forearm as I held him steady. He slacked his wrists enough to wiggle out of my grip just like I’d taught him. Then we were rolling once more, to my surprise, until I was beneath him, both hands pinned under Kalen’s solid grasp. He looked at me, waiting.

I sighed in partial defeat. “Because the alternative makes me want to puke my guts out all over these beautiful flowers.” I twitched my foot inconspicuously, gauging the space I had to work with to make a quick counterstrike and free myself. “AndI’d rather not subject our meadow to that.”

Kalen flexed quickly, anticipating, sliding his knee up over my right thigh to the hitch of my groin and pressing it firmly into the grass.That, I hadn’t taught him.

“It’s improper,” he said, crouching down until his forehead brushed mine and then hovered. He was teasing, I told myself. It had been quite a while since he’d bested me and Kalen liked to gloat. But even so, the vein running up my leg throbbed harder, and a delectable heat rose alongside it.

“Oh really? Who is going to tell me otherwise?” I challenged, pointedly assessing our current position, then lifting my chin to him in defiance. Kalen dropped his eyes and let them scour the tight space between our bodies. They made their way back up to my throat and I swallowed, hard. Kalen smirked.

“No one,” he conceded, pushing himself off of me and rising to sit on his knees. “but if my father gets word that you are calling me by any name other than his own, he’ll be sure to tell me.”

So, it was back to this, I thought. “He doesn’t own you, Kal.”

“It feels like he does.”

Kalen’s focus was glued to the patch of corn lily we’d tumbled into, his slender fingers threading two stalks and then plucking them with a delicate snap. I hated the frown that tainted the curves of his mouth whenever he thought of his father.

Our hatred for The Cleaver was the thing that had drawn us together. It seemed like decades, not years, that had passed since I’d ventured into Sythe and found an ally amongst traitors.

Kalen was just nineteen at the time, fresh-faced, and eager to betray the man he called Father. He’d been the best asset our espionage had acquired in the seven years since. While I needed The Cleaver alive—for now—it always hurt me to know Kalen often went home to a leather strap in lieu of a warm hug.

“You know I could always fix that.” I threw my plait over one shoulder, and leaned up onto my palms, trying to gauge themixture of feelings that lay behind his frown.

“Hmm, can you now?” He turned only half his face to me, still trying to muffle the smile I’d conjured up underneath that incessant scowl of his.

“I know a couple of emissaries, who know a couple of handmaids, who know the grounds cook at Sythe,” I reclaimed my book in one deft swipe and held it over my face to block the sun. “Wouldn’t be too hard to slip some Silverwood into his morning tea.”

Kalen scoffed. “Yeah, and then you’d have to deal with my brothers. The apples never even fell from that tree.”

“If any of your brothers have a problem with it, they can feel free to fight me themselves and taste fresh dirt.”

“All of them?”

I stilled, and the meadow grew utterly silent. It was a flippant reply, but Kalen’s voice strained to heft the weight of a loaded question. Clearing my throat, I lifted my book off the point of my nose and gave him a quick, knowing glance.

“All of them,” I replied, and let the smell of freshly pressed papyrus fill my lungs again.

I didn’t dare look at him. Whenever I did, it was like he could see the soft, malleable spot in my immortal heart that beat so humanly for him. But I knew he was smiling to himself, happy for my response. I felt a pang of guilt in my third left rib.

“There is the other option,” he mused, too casually.

“I won’t have this argument again.”

Kalen rolled his eyes.“Yes.Yes, I know. Life is a gift and all that. Easy to say when yours never stops giving.”

“I do not refuse to Yield you because I value your mortality, Kalen. A small, human life is not all you would lose if we were to perform the Rite. You know this.”

“Do I?”

“What is it you want from me?” I cried, tossing my book tothe side so I could look at him, though he turned his face to the side, looking at the walls of forest surrounding us. “If I Yield you, you willdie, Kalen. Yes, you will come back immortal, but you will never be the same. Anything that I say, you will agree with. Anything that I ask of you, you will do. Without consequence, without want…without sound mind.”