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Yet here he was now, heart racing, a churning pit in his stomach as he pushed through the crowd of healers and sick, navigating the maze of identical canvas tents.

Eula had included instructions on where to go, but the healing park was vast, growing larger by the day. He had to ask for directions twice.

The first mender he stopped was seated behind a narrow desk just past the main intake line, hunched over a thick ledger with cramped handwriting curling across both pages. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, ink smudged across one wrist, hair fraying loose from its braid.

She barely looked up. “You’ll have to wait. No visitors during triage.”

“I’m not a visitor,” Kato snapped. “I’m family.”

That got him a glance. Then a slow, patronizing once-over, taking in the disheveled suit and windswept hair. “Name?”

“Kato Emrys.”

Usually, that would’ve garnered some attention. Maybe even respect. Today, it barely earned him a second, distracted look as the woman nodded and gestured vaguely toward the eastern block. “Try three through six.”

He didn’t have time to dwell on it. He muttered a sharp thanks and moved on.

The place was chaos. People swarmed in every direction—menders dragging supply carts, runners relaying orders, patients being carried between tents on stretchers. Canvas flaps snapped, unmoored by the wind.

“I swear it’s just allergies,” a Shardless man insisted, standing near triage. “Every spring this happens—itchy eyes, dry throat. Look, I have a pollen journal—”

“My valet said I looked pale this morning,” said a Highborn woman still dressed for the town hall, trailing a mender who didn’t slow. “And he’s never said that before. Do you think it’s the Curse?”

“Cosmetic concern isn’t diagnostic,” the mender replied. “You need two of the following: vomiting, fever, skin veining, or confirmed exposure.”

A woman vomited into a bucket as Kato pushed past a linen cart, barely avoiding a collision with a runner bolting in the opposite direction. He caught sight of another mender standing near a table beneath a listing tent pole, arms full of clipboards, hair sticking up in an unruly black shock.

“I’m looking for Skylen Emrys,” he said, loud enough to cut through the din.

The boy blinked, wide-eyed. “Uh—"

“Skylen Emrys,” Kato said again, slower this time, like maybe his enunciation was the problem. “He was brought in sometime after midnight. Cursed. Seriously, isn’t there a roster you can check?”

The mender juggled his stack, flipping pages. “I’m sorry, sire, we’re dealing with a lot of unexpected new arrivals. Records are still—”

“Well, what about Taly Caro?” Kato cut in. That was a name everyone seemed to recognize these days. Plus, she worked here. “She arrived with him. Short, mean, accident prone. Ringing any bells?”

“Look, sire, I just started.”

“Then find someone who didn’t,” Kato growled, stepping in closer. “I don’t have time to stand here while you fumble through your orientation. Go—”

“He’s in West Two,” said a voice behind him.

Kato turned just in time to see Aiden round a corner between two tents, pulling on healer’s whites over his suit. The mender sagged in relief and took the opportunity to bolt.

“Why the west?” Kato snapped. “Everyone keeps pointing me east—”

“Because the east is overflow, and we’re past overflow. People have been flooding in since Ivain’s announcement—some sick, most just scared. And that’s not even the worst of it.”

Kato’s throat tightened. “What happened?”

Aiden shook his head once, brisk. “I’m not sure yet. All I know is we’ve got two Fey dead from the Curse, and this new variant moves quickly. Taly said she watched it take down a woman within minutes of symptom onset.”

For a second, the noise around them dropped out.

Two Fey dead. Collapsed in minutes. A Curse that moved faster than anyone could track.

And Skye—

Kato didn’t ask anything else. He turned and ran.

He reached the edge of the western block at a near-sprint, dodging past another stretcher team. A cart lay toppled. He vaulted it—and the huddle of menders crouched around it, scooping supplies from the dirt—without slowing.

Tent Two was marked by a number above the entrance flap and a placard that read: Do Not Disturb.

Kato stopped just short of the entrance. His hand hovered near the canvas. He hesitated, only for a moment, then gathered his courage and ducked inside.

The smell was the first thing to hit him.

Antiseptic. Herbs. Blood and vomit.

One bed was empty, the sheets thrown back. And in the other…

Skye was too still. Blankets pulled up to his chest, skin washed out in the dim light. Black lines spiderwebbed across his shoulder, curling toward his throat—delicate, almost pretty, if you didn’t know what they meant.

And what they meant…

Kato’s hands clenched, fingernails pressing into his palms. He stared at Skye’s throat. At the black veins curling like ivy—or a noose.

This wasn’t happening.

Shards, this… this wasn’t fucking real.

For one awful second, he couldn’t see him breathing. He edged closer to the bed, watching Skye’s chest rise—late, too late. The breath came out too sharp, and Kato’s released with it.

Someone had left a chair beside the bed.

Not sure what else to do with himself, Kato eased into it.

He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t imagined this before.

Not the part where he sat at his brother’s bedside, trying to remember how to breathe while counting the seconds between heartbeats.

But the death? Sure. Or at least the aftermath.

The part where his family came crawling back with carefully worded condolences and a freshly polished title.

Skye gone. Kato reinstated. The family finally admitting they were wrong, too late to matter. That was the fantasy, wasn’t it? It had always been easier to imagine vengeance than grief.

But no one had mentioned the part where his hands would shake. Or that looking at Skye like this would feel less like winning and more like punishment. That he would sit here flicking through every memory they had together and find that there were far too few.

He remembered the first time he saw him, his new baby brother: five days old, wrapped tight in a storm-gray blanket, dark hair plastered to a perfect, furious forehead. There had been no instinct toward brotherhood. Just contempt.

Kato exhaled hard, rubbing at the pressure behind his eyes that refused to go anywhere.

It was his fault. The fights, the distance, the lack of any real connection.

That had all been him. And now… now here he was, sitting beside a brother he barely knew, wondering if the last chance to fix any of it had already passed.

“I really fucked this up, didn’t I?”

The words dropped into the space between them like a stone in water—too loud, too honest. Kato cleared his throat, suddenly aware of how stupid this was. Talking to a dying, unconscious brother like it would fix anything. But if he didn’t say it now, he never would.

“And I could give you my reasons why. I, uh… I could tell you that I was angry. I was hurt. That being passed over broke something inside me. And that until you were born, I never realized how much of my own drive hinged on family approval or… or how much it would hurt when those successes were immediately forgotten.”

Kato’s leg bounced. He stared at the ground.

“I spent a decade convincing myself that meant I had a right to be cruel.” His voice caught on that word— cruel .

He forced himself to keep going. “Even though I knew—and I did, I knew—that you had nothing to do with it. You were just… small and helpless and easy to blame.”

He leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, voice going low. “But I won’t tell you any of that. It’s all just excuses. Reasons I made up to make myself feel better. And now…” His throat locked. He forced a laugh past it. “Now I guess I fucking missed my chance.”

He’d had a lot of reasons for coming to Tempris. And one of them, he realized now, was this—to set things right. To earn Skye’s forgiveness. To see if there was even a sliver of that man left that Sarah had once loved.

The man that would’ve looked at that furious, squalling bundle of limbs and royal indignation and felt his heart move instead of harden.

“I missed it,” he said hoarsely. “All of it. Every single chance I had to be your brother when it counted. And I hate that the only thing I know how to do now is sit here and say I’m sorry like that means anything.”

A pause. The air felt too thick. Kato kept waiting for Skye’s eyes to open, but they didn’t.

Voices rose outside the tent—muffled at first, then clearer as footsteps approached. “I swear, Taly, if I find you out of bed again, I’m sedating you.”

“You say that like it’s a threat.”

“It is a threat.”

“Oh, come on. I wasn’t in the way. I just wanted a look at the bodies. I was there when they dropped. I’m pretty sure you need me to identify—”

The flap of the tent jerked open. Aiden all but shoved Taly inside with one hand on her arm, and the deep, practiced patience of a man at the end of his tether.

“ Stay ,” he said firmly. “Or next time, I’m taking away your glamour. I should’ve just held onto it when Aimee brought around a backup.”

Taly glared up at him, listing slightly.

Her hair was damp with sweat, her gait a little off, and her boots left faint white smudges in her wake.

She looked like she’d been dragged backward through a salt mine, covered from head to toe in white powder, which made the already deathly pallor of her skin even more alarming.

She opened her mouth—probably to argue—but then her eyes snagged on Kato.

She took him in: jaw locked, shoulders drawn tight, a perfectly respectable, manly amount of moisture rimming his eyes. Then Skye, pale and barely breathing in the bed beside him.

“Are we interrupting something?” she asked, glancing between them. “Is this why Skye keeps SOS-ing the bond? Seriously, you can stop now. My head is already splitting.”

Aiden frowned, fingers tilting her chin up. “That could be a symptom. Or just the delayed consequence of ignoring literally everything I’ve told you.”

Kato blinked. “I’m sorry… what’s happening?”

Taly growled a sigh. “Skye, stop pretending to be asleep and talk to your brother instead of screaming down the bond at me. I’m not mediating whatever… this is.”

Then from the bed, Skye muttered, “He just sat down and started talking. I didn’t know how to make him stop.”

Kato turned slowly toward the bed. “Wait…” His voice dropped, somewhere between horrified and betrayed. “You were awake? This whole time?”

Skye cracked open an eye. “In my defense, you never checked.”

Kato stared at him, frozen. Heat blazed a trail up the back of his neck. That little shit. That smug, infuriating, impossible little —

Then his gaze dropped back to the black veins curling across Skye’s throat.

Kato turned on Aiden. His voice came out too fast, too loud. “You said the Curse was accelerating. You said Fey were dying . So why isn’t someone in here with him?”

“Kato,” Skye said.

Kato held up a hand without looking at him. “Shut up. I’m handling it.” He took a step forward. “I don’t care if the whole city’s on fire—you don’t leave him alone. Not when no one even knows what this variant does yet.”

Skye let out a quiet sigh. “Kato—”

“I said let me handle this,” Kato snapped.

Then to Aiden, “It took me twenty minutes to find him. And then when I finally get here, there’s no posted mender, no chart, and apparently no standard of fucking care.

If this is your idea of treatment—leaving him to die behind a canvas flap—then we’ll be taking our business elsewhere.

Don’t think that just because you’re the only healing park in town that I won’t find something better.

You’re not the only one that can treat a Curse. ”

“He’s not Cursed,” Aiden said mildly, like he was used to facing down enraged family members.

For the second time, Kato blinked, because apparently that was all he was capable of doing now. “What?”

“I ran some tests. They all came back negative. Skye’s fine. I put him in here to get some sleep until I could get around to treating the wound on his neck. This one, though…” Aiden turned back to Taly. “She sustained a high-grade magical trauma—”

“That’s just a fancy way of saying aether burnout,” Taly interjected with a roll of her eyes.

“—and is supposed to be under observation.”

“I observed myself,” Taly said. “Turns out, I’m fine.”

Aiden didn’t even blink. “That’s not how it works.”

As they continued bickering, Skye sat up, wincing a bit as he shifted. He held the marked shoulder stiff, like the tension in those lines was pulling him sideways. “I liked your speech.”

Kato’s head snapped toward him. “Shut up.”

But his mouth quirked, just enough to be smug. “If I do die, I want you to read my eulogy. You have, and I mean this, such a way with words.”

“I said shut up.”

“Does this mean we can get matching lockets? Because I want mine engraved.”

Kato understood now why Taly was always trying to kill this little shit. Skye was just the kind of person you wanted to strangle.

So, he did.

“I’m going to kill you,” Kato growled, and lunged for his throat.

“I’m healing!” Skye yelped, twisting half-under the blankets. “I’m in a medically fragile state—ow. Get off!”

The cot slammed against the back wall of the tent, knocking a lantern off its hook. Canvas groaned on the poles, one of them bending visibly.

Aiden and Taly paused mid-argument.

Aiden arched a brow. “Should we stop them?”

The tent shuddered as the cot tilted. Skye gasped, “Help—” then choked on the rest.

Taly shrugged, rubbing at a smudge of power on her jaw. “They’re fine.”

Another thump. Something tore.

Aiden sighed and went back to checking her pulse. “Hold still.”