Boots click and leather straps rub together. Lyndel squats down next to me, easing his large body onto the rough floor of Cloak's hallway. He grunts, wincing, as the poleyn digs into his knee. The echo of his movements lasts longer than I'd like, armor ringing out down the hall and into my ears.

Lyndel winces and waits for it to pass. "Are you all right?" he questions once the hall restores a calm silence. If Cloak managed to fall asleep, surely that woke him up. There's a reason guards don't move from their posts unless they must. The armor they carry, ordered in uniform by the Raven Queen, does not silence their approach.

I rub at the bridge of my nose. When one headache disappears, another rises. "I don't know," I sigh. "I find it difficult to see him that way, especially when my methods of healing do not immediately work. I, nor him, know what will make him feel better."

Lyndel nods. "The prince has always cast difficulty in understanding. When we served together to protect Wildsurge's ocean borders, he was even worse. No one, down his closest comrades, knew what went through his head."

From where I thread my fingers into my hair, resting my elbows on my bent knees, I glance at the fladline guard. He stares at the opposite wall, to the frosted windows glaring at us, and frowns in remembrance. A shadow of doubt drags down the corners of his mouth, drooping his features to melt. "You served together?"

"That we did. We were in the same battalion. I should know Cloak's tendencies; I was one of his closest comrades." He brings an iron gauntlet to the golden bordered chest plate protecting him from the fault of a sharp blade. To match the door to the prince's chambers, and the rest—a shade of night—to remind all enemies that he serves the one and the only. Millicent Terravale. "I remember the night he was captured by Dubirin. One of the worst nights of my life."

"He was captured?"

"Lured away by a female feliram begging for his attention. It happened late at night, in the camp, and most of us were too exhausted to pay any attention other than to mock the prince as he took great strides into the bushes," Lyndel explains. I scoff at the memory he puts into my head, the faint glow of Cloak fading into the dark to escape from living as a fighter for only a few minutes. Merely seconds on a ticking timepiece. "When he didn't come back...we knew something was wrong. I felt it in my gut."

I drop my hands and fold them around my knees, tucking my entire body tight against my chest. The wall pressing into my back seemed so cold once, but that night must've been worse. The search to find a prince that had disappeared beyond their tedious watch. "What did you discover when you found him?"

Lyndel scratches at his furry ears. Pointed and sharp, seemingly rounded by the soft armor of his kind that fades from light to dark browns. "They tortured him—strapped him to a table and cut into his body. The majority of the scars you see today result from that near-fatal night. We arrived just in time, right before they cut off his horns."

"There is no honor in a feliram that has lost his spikes of truth," I whisper. "They planned to take his honor."

"Indeed," he agrees. "Though he was alive, covered in blood, and still had his horns, Cloak behaved differently since that night. He shrugged it off, claimed everything was all right in his head, but no man returns from torture without battling the dark he voluntarily walked into."

Mistakes are to blame. Cloak fights every day to maintain perfection and when he doesn't reach it, instead falling short of his mother's desires, he faces the possibility of losing a livelihood. Not his horns that mark him a true, strong feliram. A home, a family, a life that he was ultimately forced into to save his father.

The Raven Queen has many tools up her sleeve that she isn't afraid to use against her children. Each of them came into the world through a different woman, from one stretch of land to the next, but they all originated inside Rivian's ocean borders. That, in itself, is enough for Millicent to believe they belong to her. She holds leverage and will always be one step above.

Cloak has told me of the threats his mother makes when he renders the smallest of mistakes. A crime against the throne, those failures. His father, possibly moved on from the land, is a swinging anvil she hangs over his head. A threat of discovery and demise.

I squeeze my eyes shut to block the false memory of Cloak being strapped to a table, screaming out when they slide a dull knife across his skin. I have memorized many of his scars, the worst and ragged of them all. To think he received those from a night of torture after expecting something else entirely reminds me that the world is not all that it seems. Precisely why I must remain careful.

"Once Cloak returned from the battlements, along with most of his battalion, he remained silent," Lyndel says.

"Did no one wish to ask him of his terrors?" I question.

He shrugs and finally turns his head enough to look at me. Lyndel's yellow cat eyes offset strongly against dark brown skin. They protrude from the hierarchy of his face, slanted in on opposite sides of his broad, smooshed snout. Fladlines possess a certain beauty, an exotic acceptance, that isn't matched by other species. Felirams are the brunt of our land, the elves are the clean and angelic, and the fladlines are the sole essence of beauty and grace. "We assumed his terrors didn't exist. I suppose we were at fault, not the prince."

I scoff. "If I know Cloak at all, he focused on other aspects of his life rather than what he hid from those he trusted the most." Sliding my finger around a brass button on my coat sleeve, I ease myself to calm.

Part of me wishes to snap at the guard and wonder how they could go without providing the prince a proper resource for invisible pain. Then again, it's easy to expect the best from those that put on a smile and act like nothing is wrong.

"He used work as a crutch and put all his focus on trying to complete the jobs his mother thrust upon him. Cloak had to make many tough decisions; after the border wars, it became apparent that he grew tired of killing."

"Even his enemies?" I ask.

His lips thin. "Even his enemies." The time for gratitude for this reveal of Cloak's life will come later, for Lyndel isn't done speaking yet. "His thirst for a normal life, a life without killing, stopped when he returned home. In the war, he had to kill. In the Panjandrum Corps, that's all he ever gets to do. Killing Luminaries got him out of the palace's invisible cell."

I fit the pieces together, the timeline from protecting Rivian's southern borders from attack, to reuniting himself with the Panjandrum Corps. The chain links and I close my eyes to loose a much-needed breath. My heart hammers. I am too late to save him from that night; all I can do is pick up the pieces of what remains and hope they'll fit together after all these years.

"The children," I say without prior notion. "Everything changed when he had to kill the children."

Lyndel steels himself and says, "He begged not to do it. His mother, as usual, held a threat over his head. If only the prince's heart wasn't as big as others fail to realize. The Raven Queen's spies sought a fighter, and they found one by looking on the outside. But they failed to realize the fire in Cloak's chest."

I bark a laugh. "You take great pride in being a guard of his chambers."

"Cloak is more than what the kingdom sees, even you." His face softens, ears turning down. His pale whiskers twitch. "Though he would never admit it, Your Highness spends too many waking hours trying to ensure others are happy rather than himself."

There is nothing he says I'm able to contest. Everything comes clear, from the moment I met Cloak to this second. He sleeps on the other side of the door but seems so far away. I have spent these past frigid months attempting to be someone he can lean on, someone he can trust with his deepest, darkest secret. So why didn't he tell me of being captured?

Perhaps it's the idea that I never should've provided a crutch. Perhaps I should've molded him to stand on his own, shining brighter than he ever has before.