The festival’s roar blurred into nothing. My pulse was a drum in my ears, loud enough to drown every lantern hymn, every hawker’s cry, every breath of roasted fruit smoke. My throat ached like I’d swallowed glass. The soot-firefly sigil still beat in my palm—my pulse, my curse, my brand—and I couldn’t stop shaking.

Not the good trembling, the kind that comes before fire flares. This was the small, awful kind. The kind that makes you want to fold in on yourself and vanish.

Cassie’s hand was at my wrist, grounding, but even that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Prophecies carved me in half, light and ash, savior and ruin, and I didn’t want either. I didn’t want to carry a sun or burn a world. I just wanted—

My mother.

Saints help me, that was what my bones screamed for. Not the High Lady. Not the crown. Not the weapon she’d forged me into with every cruel word. Just… her.

Through the crush of courtiers and cameras and sweet-sour perfumes, I saw a flash of molten-gold braids and a gown that looked like it had been cut from flame. My mother. Selene walked at her side, perfect and poised, but it was my mother I barreled toward.

“Mira—” Cassie’s voice, alarmed, but I didn’t slow. Couldn’t. My heels skidded on the cobblestones as I shoved past a senator’s daughter and nearly bowled over a tray of candied petals. Gasps followed me like sparks. Let them gasp. Let them choke.

The fire in my lungs cracked into a sob I bit back too late. My mask shattered.

And then I was colliding with her.

My mother did not stumble. High Lady, crown, embercut jewels—none of it shifted as I crashed into her body like a child desperate for shelter. My arms wrapped tight around her waist before I could think, fingers clenching at the silk and metal of her gown. My forehead pressed to her chest, my tears hot against the fabric, silent but endless.

Gasps flared sharper this time. The High Lady’s bastard daughter clinging like a child to her mother in the middle of the Eternal Summer Festival. Optics, politics, shame—my mind hissed all of it, but my body didn’t care. I held on tighter.

Mom’s hand hovered at my back like she didn’t know what to do with it. The gold-and-ember scent of her—amber resin, spiced clove, sun-warmed cedar—wrapped around me anyway, a cage and a balm all at once.

“Mira,” Selene breathed, sharp with surprise, but I couldn’t look up.

Cassie caught up, blue eyes wide, chest heaving like she’d run a war sprint to stay at my side. Lucien and Alina stumbled behind, awkward and unsure, his hand hovering at my shoulder like he wanted to pull me back but knew better.

“Princess,” my mother said, her voice still court-perfect, cold as blade glass. “Eyes are on us. You cannot—”

Her words cut off.

Because I tilted my face up, and she saw. My tears. My shaking mouth. The crack I never let anyone see.

Her mask fractured. The golden-amber of her eyes softened, molten into something I hadn’t seen since I was small enough to fit against her hip. Her hand settled, firm, steady, at the back of my head.

“Lightning bug,” she whispered.

And then she pulled me closer.

The world kept staring.

Her gown was cool silk and cold metal under my palms, hard lines of jewelwork pressing crescents into my fingers. I could feel the cage of her ribs, the steady hammer of a heart that had never once stuttered in public. Mine stuttered enough for both of us. The soot-firefly in my palm kept time like it had learned my pulse and decided it belonged there now.

Selene moved first.

Not a flinch. Not a gasp. A shift. A single step that slid her between us and the hungriest eyes, golden braids catching torchlight as if she’d only meant to adjust her angle for a better photograph. Her hand lifted, elegant as a benediction, and the nobles nearest found themselves offering polite smiles to the wrong direction. When Selene wants a crowd to look left, they forget right exists.

Roran’s heat shimmered close behind, invisible glass thickening. The air warped—the way summer roads do at noon—and microphones died one pace from my back. Smoldering iron threaded the sugar-smoke of the night. On Cassie’s far side, Kael shadowed in close—knife-low, eyes higher—matching Roran’s pace stroke for stroke.

Cassie’s fingers found my wrist and hooked my pinky, the gentlest net. I didn’t realize I’d been chewing the seam at my cuff until her thumb pressed down in a slow circle. Cuff glide. My breath tripped and fell back into step. Citrus nicked the air, sharp and clean. Vanilla warmed beneath it like a promise kept.

“High Lady.” A courtier breathed the title like a leash. “May we—”

Selene’s head turned a fraction. “No.”

They smiled anyway and swallowed their question whole.

Mom dipped her face, close enough that the ember-scent of her was all I could taste. “With me,” she said, voice no longer for the crowd. The words were smooth stone. She said them like the cliff says to the tide.

My fingers bunched in the line of her bodice. I nodded, which shook.

“Clear a lane,” Selene murmured, and didn’t have to say it twice.

Roran ghosted ahead. The shield lapped out, a low wave. Bodies parted in reflex, confusion wrapped in courtesy. Nobles love nothing more than believing they’ve chosen to step aside. Naomi and Kess appeared from the noise as if they’d been hiding in the seams, the former a pale blade slicing space open, the latter grinning like she’d been dying for an excuse to bare teeth. Lucien and Alina were suddenly two steps back and then one—Lucien’s jaw set, Alina’s hand at his sleeve as if she were reminding him he was not required to take on a battlefield with sarcasm alone. Kael mirrored Roran on Cassie’s flank, her presence a quiet warning that teeth would meet knuckle if necessary.

I didn’t walk so much as get carried by momentum and mother. My feet remembered stairs and misremembered ground. The world tilted once, twice.

We passed a clutch of lesser fae who went still as leaves before rain. A senator’s wife held up a glass phone at the wrong moment and got a photograph of her own puzzled forehead; Roran’s shield made sure of it. Somewhere to our left, jasmine cloyed into poison—Zyrella. To the right, crushed violets drifted like a bruise—Daevan. Roran didn’t look. “Left quadrant,” he said, a ghost of sound. “Do not engage.” Kael’s answering nod was a blade being sheathed—ready, not needed.

As if I could do anything but hold on.

“Here,” Selene said, and peeled back the mouth of a tent I hadn’t noticed until it was the only thing in front of me. The canvas was pearl-dyed, guy ropes shot through with sunfire thread. Someone had brushed glyphs into the seams in a pigment that refused to be any one color.

Mom didn’t release me to go first; she gathered me and stepped backward, pulling me through with her. Cassie’s hand stayed at my wrist. Selene came last, fingers swift at the flap. The ward stitched shut behind us with a hush so complete my knees almost failed from the sudden absence of noise.

Inside: cool dark. The air smelled of salt on chalk and the ghost of rosemary crushed under thumb. Lamps burned low, their light violet-soft and steady. Rugs layered the floor, old and imperfect. A divan sat against one wall like it belonged to a different century; a shallow brass bowl slept beside it, its water untroubled.

No cameras. No applause. No eyes but ours.

Mom sat before she told me to, dropping with that single, decisive grace she wields like a second sword. She drew me down into her lap as if I were still small enough for it. My body remembered how to fold. My throat remembered how to fail. Silent tears kept going even though there was nothing left to fall.

Her palm covered the back of my head. The other found the notch of my spine and fit there like it had always been shaped for me. “Lightning bug,” she said again, lower. Not a name. A weather. “You’re safe.”

Cassie knelt on my other side, close enough that her shoulder pressed warm to my knee. She didn’t speak. She didn’t reach for more than my wrist. Pinkies hooked. Her breathing slowed on purpose until mine tried to mirror it out of stubbornness.

Selene didn’t ask questions. She crossed to the nearest seam and traced a sigil into the canvas with two fingers, then another at the base of the pole. The wards deepened, a soft settling like sand finding its level. When she turned back, her face was the kind of calm people mistake for cold. I know better. She took up position just inside the flap, the way doors are guarded when the most precious thing in the room is not a crown.

“Roran,” my mother said without looking away from me.

He was already a shadow beyond the canvas. “A perimeter,” he answered. His voice was a hinge. “No disturbances.”

“If someone insists,” Mom said, gold in her tone, “remind them who their High Lady is.”

“Yes, my lady.” The air warmed—the tell of a shield being tuned up one degree past comfortable. From the other side, Kael’s low acknowledgment clicked like a second lock sliding into place.

The inside of my chest kept trying to climb out of me. I tapped three beats against my thigh before I realized I was doing it. Cassie’s thumb pressed each beat, not stopping them—accompanying them. The ember-scent of Mom’s skin wrapped the static in my head until it dulled to something bearable.

“Look at me,” she said.

I did. The amber in her eyes wasn’t hard now; it was molten, a sun poured into a bowl and told to behave. The lines at the corners, the ones she does not allow, were visible. I had never noticed her lashes were the exact color of sap catching light.

“This is not the place for explanations,” Mom said. Not cold. Precise. “This is the place for you to breathe.”

I made a sound that could have been a laugh if it hadn’t been breaking in half. “Working on it,” I said, which came out a whisper and a lie.

Her mouth softened. “I know.”

Selene leaned a shoulder against the pole, arms folded in the kind of easy that eats knives for breakfast. She watched the tent flap without blinking, but the lift of her chin told me she was counting my breaths, too.

Lucien hovered at the edge of the carpet, the picture of every human boy who has ever wanted to help and not known how. Alina touched his sleeve and tugged him back half a step, a gentle gravity that kept the room from tilting.

I let my head tip until my temple rested against the line of Mom’s collarbone. The jewelwork there dug into my skin and I welcomed it; sharp things are anchors if you hold them right. The firefly in my palm pulsed once, twice, steady-steady.

Outside, the festival remembered it had drums. The sound filtered through the canvas as if someone had buried a heart under the floor and told it to be quiet.

“Mother,” I said, and hated how it cracked.

Her hand curved against the back of my skull. “I’m here,” she answered, a sentence with spines and softness both.

She didn’t ask. She didn’t tell me to stand. She didn’t remind me of cameras or crowns or the way rumors salt themselves to survive winter. For once, the High Lady did not exist. There was only the woman who had carried a burning thing to term and dared it to live.

Cassie’s breath touched the inside of my wrist. “I’m here,” she mouthed more than said, because this moment wasn’t hers to narrate. The citrus in her scent gentled. Camellia stayed, clean and composed. Vanilla threaded warm like a hearth someone planned to keep lit.

The flap’s shadow shifted.

Salt and sandalwood cut through the rosemary hush.

I didn’t lift my head; I didn’t need to. Some scents teach you a new meaning of the word home the first time you breathe them, and then they keep teaching you until your bones can recite it in their sleep.

Selene exhaled once, the smallest permission.

Mom’s fingers tightened in my hair.

“Let him in,” she said.

“Dad.” My voice cracked, half-breathed, raw.

Dad stepped through the flap as if the space had been waiting for him. He didn’t carry the fire-and-gold weight of the Summer Court, didn’t need to. Just his presence—tall, steady, sleeves rolled at the wrist—pressed calm into the room like a hand on fevered skin. His hazel eyes found mine first, then moved to where Mom still held me, and for the first time in forever there wasn’t distance between them. Only the same fear written in different tongues.

Cassie shifted at my side, straight-backed even as her fingers twitched toward mine. “We went to see the mystic,” she began quickly, words sharp and clipped, like if she explained fast enough it would fix me. “There were prophecies, they said—”

“Not now, Consort.” Mom’s voice cut like a blade. She didn’t even look at Cassie, though her arm curved tighter around me, as if she couldn’t let go even to glare properly.

“Cass.” Dad’s interruption was gentler but no less firm. His gaze softened when it landed on her, but the steel underneath left no room for argument. “We know.”

I froze. Tears burned hotter, confused. “What?”

Mom’s jaw clenched, then unspooled. Her gold-amber eyes searched my face like she might find me small again, curled on her lap with fire in my fists and too many questions. Her hand smoothed once down my hair, catching on a pin. “I tried to shield you from it,” she whispered, low enough that the tent might not overhear. “From this burden. From the whispers. From the weight.” Her voice faltered, just for a heartbeat. “My little lightning bug—I wanted to keep you in the dark, safe from what the world already decided you would be.”

Safe. Saints, she’d never said the word safe like it belonged to me.

Dad moved closer, one hand finding my shoulder, warm and grounding. “We always knew prophecy shadowed you, Mira. From the day you were born.” His eyes shone, not with court fire but with the stubborn light of a man who’d lived without it. “But we didn’t want you to live as a sentence. We wanted you to live as our daughter.” His voice thickened, sandalwood and tea wrapping every word. “Not a weapon. Not a crown. Not a prophecy. Just our miracle.”

Anger cracked sharp through my ribs, hot enough to flare my magic before it collapsed under itself. “You knew,” I rasped, tears still running. “You both knew, and you didn’t tell me?”

Mom flinched—not much, but enough. Dad didn’t. He only nodded once, firm. “Yes. Because we wanted you to have years where you could just be Mira. Where you could laugh, and fight, and dream, without this hanging over your head.”

My chest hurt with wanting to shove them away and never let go in the same breath. Selene stood at my other side, her presence like a wall of sunlight—silent, steady, letting the moment belong to me. Cassie’s hand brushed mine, grounding, but she didn’t speak again. Lucien and Alina hovered near the flap, wide-eyed, seeing more than they’d ever been meant to.

The soot-firefly mark at my palm pulsed once, twice, syncing with my ragged heartbeat as if it agreed that I couldn’t escape it now, no matter how many years they’d tried to shield me.

I buried my face against Mom’s shoulder anyway, sobbing soundless, hating and needing them both at once.

I wanted to bite the words out of my own throat, to spit fury sharp enough to scorch them both for keeping this from me. But my body betrayed me. My arms locked around Mom’s waist like I was still small, like I hadn’t spent seventeen years training myself not to need her. My forehead pressed into her shoulder, hot pins digging at my scalp where her jewelry caught.

“You should have told me,” I whispered, the sound shredded. “You should have—”

Mom’s fingers threaded into my hair, steadier now, stroking once as if I were a child who’d had a nightmare. “If we had told you, lightning bug, you would have carried it alone for years. We chose to carry it for you. That is the only mercy we had left to give.” Her voice dropped lower, rougher, trembling in a way High Ladies aren’t supposed to. “Every time I looked at you, I prayed the day would never come. That I could keep you mine, unmarked, just a little longer.”

My fists curled tighter in the molten silk of her gown, fury blistering with grief. “You don’t get to choose for me.”

“No,” Dad said, warm and unflinching from where his hand cupped my shoulder. “We don’t. We never did. But we could give you time. We could give you a childhood, even if it wasn’t perfect.” His thumb pressed once, grounding. “You are not just prophecy. You are not just Summer Court. You are not just ours. You are you, and you are a miracle we still don’t deserve.”

The word scraped me open. Miracle. I hated it. I clung to it. I wanted to scream. I wanted to sob.

Selene’s hand settled quiet at the curve of my back, opposite Dad’s, sunlight steadiness against fire and storm. She didn’t speak—she never spoke in moments like this. She simply stood like the wall I could collapse against if I chose, her presence a vow.

“I hate you both,” I rasped, tears spilling fresh even as I pressed closer. “I hate that you knew. I hate that you lied.”

Mom’s arms tightened, unyielding. “And still we love you,” she said into my hair. “Nothing you say will unmake that.”

“I don’t want to be—” My voice broke. “I don’t want to be anyone’s prophecy.”

Dad’s chest shook once, as if he were swallowing his own grief. “Then don’t be. Be our daughter first. Be yourself. Prophecy can wait its turn.”

It should have sounded hollow. It should have been politics. But it wasn’t. It was my father, smelling of sandalwood and tea, and my mother, fire-warm and trembling against me, and Selene, silent anchor at my side.

And me, a storm of fury and relief, letting them hold me even as the soot-firefly mark throbbed on my palm—an echo I could neither silence nor surrender.

The storm burned itself out by degrees. Not with sudden peace, but with shuddering breaths, with the sting fading to salt on my lips, with my heartbeat slowing against Mom’s shoulder. Her hand lingered in my hair like she was afraid that if she let go, I’d disappear. Dad kept one palm steady at my back, the weight of it a compass point. Selene’s arm remained around me until my trembling stopped enough that she could ease away without breaking the circle.

I pulled in one breath. Then another. Then I uncurled, peeling myself back inch by inch until my spine remembered it could hold me. My parents let me go without protest, as if they understood this was balance, not rejection.

Mom’s thumb brushed the last tear from my cheek before she withdrew, the High Lady’s mask sliding carefully back into place. “We will see you both at the Infernal Rites,” she said, voice measured again. “Compose yourself before then. And remember—”

Her gaze softened just for me. “You are mine. Always.”

Dad pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. “And ours,” he added, warm and steady, before turning toward the flap. Selene lingered only long enough to catch my eyes and incline her head—promise, anchor, shield—then followed them out.

The tent fell quiet. Only Cassie and I remained in the wake of fire and sandalwood.

Her hand was still hooked to mine, pinky to pinky, as if she’d refuse to let me drift. “So,” she said finally, tone deceptively light. “That was… dramatic.”

I sniffed, glaring without heat. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Her mouth curved, sharp and wicked. “Don’t point out that the terrifying High Lady of the Summer Court just got glomped in public by her half-fae daughter crying like a baby?”

My cheeks flared hot. “You’re going to die.”

“I already nearly did. Twice. Tonight alone.” She leaned closer, crystalline eyes glinting. “This was still the scariest part.”

I tried not to laugh. Failed. The sound cracked out of me—raw, ridiculous, the only thing keeping me from melting all over again. “You’re insufferable.”

“And you’re cute when you’re blotchy.”

My jaw dropped. “Blotchy?!”

“Adorable.” She leaned back, satisfied, as if she’d won a duel.

I shoved at her shoulder, but the grin spreading across my face betrayed me. The heaviness in my chest loosened, air rushing in where grief had sat like a stone.

“Come on,” I said, already tugging her toward the tent flap. My hand tightened around hers, this time not desperate but electric. “If I’m doomed to fire and ruin, I’m at least going to watch you humiliate yourself at the Infernal Rites first.”

Cassie groaned. “You’re impossible.”

“You love it,” I shot back, chipper now, my voice lifting with the drums outside.

Her snort was answer enough. I yanked her into the noise and color, the soot-firefly mark pulsing against my chest like a secret heartbeat, and didn’t look back.