Chapter 4 THE PACT IN THE DARK
The door shut with a dull thud behind them, sealing out the forest’s cold and the echo of bowstrings that still seemed to hum in the air.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
The tiny cabin felt smaller than ever—four wooden walls, a narrow cot, a table scattered with herbs and half-burned candles. Outside, the forest stretched in all directions like a great living thing. Inside, it was just them, the lingering tremor of danger, and the quiet pulsing of two magics that refused to behave.
Ella let go of Raine’s shirt slowly, as if only just remembering she was holding on.
“I’m… sorry,” she whispered.
Raine arched an eyebrow. “For not letting them kill me?”
A weak, almost disbelieving smile tugged at her lips. “For bringing them here. For your window. For your… life being more complicated now.”
“My life was already complicated,” he said. “You just added better scenery.”
She blinked at him.
“…Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Don’t get used to it,” he muttered, looking away.
But the faint color in her cheeks told him she’d taken it as one anyway.
Her legs trembled beneath her; he guided her back to the cot and eased her down. The black veins along her arms were less aggressive now, their thrumming anger quieted to a smolder.
He could feel it—how the curse settled when she was near him. When she’d held his wrist outside, his magic had responded like a tide shifting toward the moon.
He didn’t like not understanding why. He liked even less that he needed it.
“Lie down,” he said, adjusting the worn blanket around her shoulders.
“We have to leave,” she murmured.
“We will.”
“Soon.”
“I didn’t say we’d nap first.”
Her lips twitched again, but worry chased the momentary warmth from her eyes.
“They’ll go back to the council,” she said. “They’ll send more hunters. Stronger ones. And if the Guild tracks your magic…”
Raine’s jaw tightened. “Then this cabin is no longer safe. For either of us.”
He straightened, the decision already taking shape in his mind like a drawn circle. There was no going back—not for him, not for her. Whatever thin line he’d been walking between survival and surrender snapped the moment he stepped between her and those arrows.
He moved to the shelves built into the far wall, sweeping aside books, jars, and tools with practiced efficiency. A leather satchel appeared from behind a stack of parchment. He threw it onto the table and began filling it without ceremony—vials of powdered herbs, a bundle of dried roots, a stoppered flask the color of stormclouds.
Ella watched him, fingers twisting in the blanket.
“You knew this day would come,” she said softly.
Raine didn’t look back. “I like to pretend I didn’t. But yes.”
“You were always going to have to run again.”
“There’s a limit to how many times a person can run,” he said, shoving a roll of bandages into the satchel. “Eventually you either stop… or you turn around and bare your teeth.”
“And what are we doing?”
He closed the satchel with a sharp tug on the straps.
“Both.”
Her gaze followed his every movement. “You don’t have to bring me with you.”
He turned then, eyes narrowing.
“Oh, I absolutely do.”
She blinked, startled by the certainty in his voice.
“You saw what happened out there,” he went on. “My magic hasn’t obeyed me like that in years. No wild surges, no blackouts. I should have lost control halfway through that fight. Instead…” He flexed his hand, feeling the faint echo of balance still lingering in his veins. “Instead, it listened.”
“Because of me,” she said slowly.
“Because of you,” he confirmed.
“And my curse,” she added, bitterness creeping in.
“Your curse,” he said, “just saved my life. And possibly theirs.”
She looked away, jaw tightening. “If the curse hadn’t existed, none of this would be happening.”
“If my magic hadn’t existed, none of this would be happening either,” he countered. “We’re past ‘if’ now, Ella.”
He said her name like it tasted familiar already.
She swallowed. “I still don’t know what you did.”
He felt the old weight settle on his shoulders, made of ash and regret and old decisions that had seemed right at the time.
“I broke a law,” he said at last. “One the Guild doesn’t forgive.”
“Many people break laws.”
He gave a humorless huff. “Most people don’t break the one that involves opening a sealed source of dark magic and letting it carve its name into their bones.”
Her breath caught. “You… opened a source?”
“It was supposed to be contained. Observed. Studied.” He said it flatly, like reciting a report. “I believed I could control it. The Guild believed it belonged locked away. We were both wrong.”
“And now it’s inside you.” It wasn’t a question.
He tapped his wrist, the runes faintly visible even without light. “It chose me when everything went wrong. I didn’t get a say.”
Ella’s fingers moved unconsciously to the center of her chest, where the curse thrummed slowly.
“The Forbidden Tree chose me,” she whispered. “I didn’t get a say either.”
Their eyes met across the dim cabin.
“Then we’re in similar trouble,” Raine said.
Her mouth tipped in the faintest shadow of a smile. “You’re a wizard. I’m an exiled… whatever I am now. I’d say our trouble is anything but similar.”
His gaze searched her face. “He called you Princess.”
She stiffened.
Raine watched her carefully. “That doesn’t usually come with touching forbidden things, does it?”
Ella’s hand clenched in the blanket. The title felt heavy in the air, like something that didn’t belong in this small, rough cabin.
“I was,” she said at last, voice thin. “Princess. Heir to the Verdant Court.”
“So your ‘tribe’ is actually the ruling council of the largest elven domain on this side of the continent,” Raine summarized. “Good to know my life wasn’t just complicated—it was catastrophically doomed the moment I picked you up.”
Her eyes flashed. “You didn’t have to pick me up.”
“Right,” he said dryly. “I should have left a dying princess in the mud. My mistake.”
Something in her posture softened.
“They’re afraid of me,” she said quietly. “Of what I might become.”
Raine leaned against the table, crossing his arms. “What do they think you’ll become?”
“A conduit,” she whispered. “Or a weapon. Or… an end.”
“The end of what?”
She hesitated.
“Of magic,” she breathed. “Or the forest. Or both.”
Silence settled like snow.
He wanted to say it was ridiculous. That a single girl, even a princess, couldn’t unravel something as vast as magic itself. But he’d stood in the ruins of the chamber where his own foolishness had unsealed a source that nearly killed three Guildmasters.
Magic was not a tame thing. It never had been.
“Why did you touch it?” he asked softly. “The Tree.”
Ella closed her eyes. The memory rose sharp and aching—sunlight through canopies, the whisper of leaves, the distant chanting of elders, and that call…
“It was the Choosing,” she said. “Every heir must stand before the Tree at least once in their life. To be weighed. To be… acknowledged.”
Raine stilled. “Acknowledged?”
“It is said,” she went on, “that the Tree recognizes the true heirs of the Verdant Court. That it ‘sees’ into their hearts. That it blesses those who are worthy.”
His brows knit. “And it cursed you instead.”
Her jaw trembled. “I was nervous. The elders were watching. The court was silent. I approached the Tree, as tradition demands, and placed my hand on the earth at its roots.” She swallowed. “But the ground… moved. Like a heartbeat. I heard a voice. It wasn’t words, not exactly, but it was calling—pulling. My hand rose before I could stop it, reaching for the bark.”
She remembered the moment her fingers met the ancient surface. Cool. Rough. Alive.
“The first contact was—” Her eyes opened, dazed by the memory. “Beautiful. Like standing in a sunbeam and moonlight at once. Like tasting every season in a single breath. And then…”
Her fingers tightened reflexively against her chest.
“And then it hurt,” she whispered. “Like roots digging into my bones. Like something old and deep and powerful was searching through me, tearing me open. And I—”
Her voice broke.
Raine’s hands curled into fists at his sides.
“And I wasn’t enough,” she finished, barely audible. “Not pure enough. Not strong enough. Not right enough. It rejected me. It burned me. And when the elders saw the shadows spreading through my veins, they called for my immediate sentencing.”
“Sentencing,” he repeated, incredulous. “You were cursed in front of them and their first thought was punishment?”
“They said the Tree had judged me,” Ella said. “They said it had revealed my true nature. That I was corrupted already, and the curse was simply the truth made visible.”
“And you?” he asked. “What do you think?”
She stared at him. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”
The confession hung between them, raw and fragile.
Raine pushed away from the table and walked back to her, crouching so they were level.
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “Your people declared you an abomination, but you put yourself between me and three arrows tonight. A cursed conduit wouldn’t have hesitated to let me take the hit.”
She huffed a weak breath. “That’s hardly proof of purity.”
“It’s more than the Verdant Court deserves,” he said.
She looked at him, conflicted. “They’re still my people.”
“People who chose fear over you.”
“Sometimes fear is justified.”
“And sometimes it’s an excuse,” he said quietly, “to hurt someone you don’t understand.”
Her gaze flicked away, throat bobbing.
“I destroyed everything,” she said. “The ritual, the Tree’s blessing, my claim. My mother—” Her voice faltered. “My mother wouldn’t even touch me. She looked at me like…” Tears burned her eyes. “Like I was already gone.”
Raine’s chest tightened.
He should say something practical. Objective. Distant.
Instead, he reached for her hand.
Her fingers were tense at first, then loosened under his touch. The curse shivered, reacting, but the moment his skin met hers, its wild pulse softened into something rhythmic and steady.
His own magic responded too, as if exhaling.
“Your mother was afraid,” he said. “Afraid of losing you, afraid of losing everything she believed in. Fear warps love. It doesn’t erase it.”
Ella blinked rapidly, trying to clear the wetness from her lashes.
“That doesn’t change what they’ve decided about me,” she murmured.
“No,” Raine admitted. “Which is why we’re not going to them for answers.”
She frowned faintly. “Then where are we going?”
He released her hand reluctantly and stood, moving to the leather-bound book still open on the table. The drawing of the Tree stared up at him, its branches twisting across the page like inked veins.
“Here,” he said, tapping another line of cramped handwriting beneath the sketch. “There’s mention of a relic. A convergence point. ‘The heart that remembers what magic was before it was divided.’”
“The Moonlight Crystal,” Ella whispered.
He glanced over his shoulder. “You’ve heard of it.”
“Only in stories,” she said. “Children’s tales. A shard of crystallized moonlight that once rested in the sky beside the first star. They say it holds the echo of magic before it fractured into light and dark, creation and destruction.”
“It’s also believed to purify corrupted magic,” Raine said. “Or amplify it, depending on who touches it.”
Her eyebrows drew together. “Amplify?”
He nodded. “If your curse is tied to an original source—like the Tree—and mine is bound to unsealed dark magic, the Crystal may be able to… reforge what was broken. Restore balance. Or…” He hesitated. “Or utterly ruin us.”
“That’s encouraging,” she said dryly.
“I didn’t say it was a safe plan,” he replied. “Just that it’s the only one that offers more than waiting to die or be hunted.”
She studied him in silence.
“Why are you so certain it will help you too?” she asked finally. “You talk as if my curse and your corruption are connected.”
“Because they are,” he said. “They respond to each other. They calm each other. What happened tonight wasn’t coincidence.”
He turned fully to face her.
“You touched an ancient source and it tried to make you its vessel. I opened another source and it made me its prison. Whatever broke magic in the first place… left scars. I think you and I are caught in the echo of that.”
Her breath hitched. “And the Crystal could heal that echo.”
“Or rewrite it,” he said softly. “Either way, it’s better than letting the Guild dissect me and the Verdant Court execute you.”
She winced. He didn’t apologize for the bluntness.
“Where is it?” she asked. “The Crystal.”
“In the Whitefrost Peaks, if this is to be believed.” He tapped the book again. “Far north. Beyond the swamp line, past the ruins of the Moon Temple, and through mountains that don’t like company.”
“You’ve been there?” she asked.
He snorted. “I’ve been near there. Once. Briefly. It didn’t go well.”
“Define ‘not well.’”
“I left,” he said simply. “Too much Guild presence. Too many records they didn’t want me reading. But I heard enough to know the Crystal might not be entirely legend.”
Ella stared at the ceiling, as if trying to see the distant mountains through the wood.
“The further we go,” she murmured, “the further I am from my home.”
“It stopped being your home when they aimed you at the executioner’s block,” Raine said.
She flinched.
“Maybe,” she whispered. “But it doesn’t stop my heart from knowing the shape of it.”
He looked at her, something like understanding flickering behind his guarded expression.
“We don’t have to decide whether to forgive them today,” he said. “Today we decide if we want to survive long enough to have that choice.”
A faint, weary smile tilted her lips. “You’re very dramatic for a wizard.”
“You’re very alive for someone who was nearly killed twice in the last hour,” he replied.
“That’s because of you,” she said.
“And I’d rather keep it that way,” he answered.
Their eyes met and held.
There it was again—that strange awareness, a subtle hum under the ribs, as if their magics were leaning toward each other long before their bodies dared to.
Ella inhaled slowly.
“All right,” she said. “We go north. We seek the Moonlight Crystal.”
He nodded once. “We make a pact, then.”
“A pact,” she repeated.
His voice softened, somehow formal despite the cramped room and the cracked mug and the broken window.
“I, Raine of the Guildless, sworn enemy of my own poor decisions,” he said, “agree to help you find a way to master or break your curse before it kills you—or anyone else.”
Her mouth quirked. “That last part feels important.”
“It is.”
“Very well.” She straightened, ignoring the way her body protested. “I, Ella of the Verdant Court—formerly Princess, currently walking catastrophe—agree to help you find a way to stabilize your magic, even if it means facing the things that frighten me most.”
“Like forests?” he teased.
She lifted her chin. “Like myself.”
Silence settled again, but it was different this time. Less brittle. More like the quiet between an inhale and the next step forward.
He extended his hand.
“Agreed?” he asked.
She looked at it for a heartbeat.
Then placed her hand in his.
The moment skin touched skin, the air shifted.
His runes flared with a steady glow, neither too bright nor too dim. The curse in her veins pulsed in answer, shadows curling up her arm like ink—then softening, as if recognizing the connection as something not hostile.
Their magics intertwined, not in violence this time, but in something like acknowledgment.
Raine’s breath caught.
Ella’s eyes widened.
“Do you feel that?” she whispered.
“Hard to miss,” he said, voice low. “It’s like the magic is… agreeing with us.”
“That feels dangerous.”
“Most useful things are.”
The glow faded gradually, leaving behind a lingering warmth where their hands were still joined.
Raine released her first, more quickly than he meant to. His palm tingled long after.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
She swung her legs over the side of the cot, testing her weight. The curse tugged at her bones like lead, but the dizzying, suffocating pressure from earlier had receded.
“Not gracefully,” she admitted. “But yes.”
“We’ll aim for ‘alive’ over ‘graceful’ for the next few days,” he said. “Pack light. You’re not going to need silk gowns where we’re going.”
She gave him a look. “We don’t all change outfits twice a day like court peacocks.”
“Good,” he said, turning to rummage for an extra cloak. “Because we’d attract too much attention if you did.”
He tossed the cloak to her; she caught it clumsily, the weight almost toppling her. It was plain, rough-spun, built for function not show. When she wrapped it around herself, its warmth seeped slowly into her, smelling faintly of pine and something that was simply him.
She swallowed.
“You’re certain we can leave tonight?” she asked. “In the dark?”
“It’s our best chance,” he said. “The hunters will have to regroup. The Guild isn’t here yet, but they’ll sense the surge from my magic sooner or later.”
He strapped the satchel across his shoulder, slid a knife into his belt, and took one last lingering look around the cabin — the stacked books, the jars, the makeshift life he’d carved out of exile.
“Will you miss it?” Ella asked softly.
He lingered for a heartbeat.
“A little,” he admitted. “But I think I’ll miss breathing more if we stay.”
She nodded. “Then we go.”
He moved to the door, fingers on the latch, but paused.
“You should know,” he said without looking back, “this won’t be easy. Every step north will put us in the path of people who either want what’s inside us…” He flexed his hand. “Or want it gone.”
Ella stood as straight as she could, cloak falling around her like a shadowed mantle. For the first time since he’d found her in the forest, there was something resolute in her posture.
“I was going to die alone in the dirt,” she said. “Now I’ll die moving toward something that might save us both.” She met his gaze. “I’ll take the second option.”
He studied her.
Princess. Exile. Curse.
Something else, too.
“All right, Princess,” he said softly. “Let’s go steal a piece of the moon.”
He opened the door.
Cold night air rushed in, smelling of damp earth and distance. The moon rode higher now, pale and watchful, casting broken light through the trees.
Ella stepped over the threshold, her heart pounding, the curse slow and steady like a second heartbeat.
Raine followed, closing the door gently behind him.
The cabin—which had been a hiding place, a prison, and a sanctuary all in one—stood quiet as they turned away from it, their silhouettes swallowed by the forest shadows.
The hunters would find it empty by dawn.
By then, the cursed princess and the rebel wizard would already be on the road north, bound by a fragile pact and a dangerous truth neither yet dared to name:
Their fate was no longer separate.
Whatever the Moonlight Crystal would reveal—it would judge them together.
