Chapter 716: Seeing Annie Again
Before Iffy could slip away with the others, Roland put a hand on her arm.
“A moment.”
She waited while the room emptied. When the footsteps had faded down the corridor, he spoke quietly, choosing the words with some care.
“I remember you mentioned a friend named Annie — before you were taken to the Bloodfang Association.”
Iffy’s expression changed immediately. Not alarm, exactly. Something more complicated. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Among the witches who came from the Kingdom of Dawn — besides the Taquila survivor — the rest were all from Wolfheart.” He gave her a moment. “One of them is named Annie. She was also turned away by the Bloodfang Association.”
The silence lasted long enough that he could hear the fire settle in the next room.
“Is it true?” Her voice had gone quiet.
Her face was doing two things at once. Joy rising and pulling back at the same time, the way something warm reaches an old wound and isn’t sure of its welcome.
This was why he’d wanted to tell her privately. He couldn’t know what Annie had carried from that parting — whether absence had softened it or whether the years had only given the resentment more structure. A surprise reunion between two people who hadn’t chosen each other’s company might not go the way anyone intended.
“Room 3009,” he said. “At least for now. She matches what you described, and if you want to know, you’ll have to go yourself.”
Iffy bowed — a deep, earnest bow that had none of the performative quality of formal courtesy. “I understand. Thank you, Your Majesty.”
“Go on. Sometimes the waiting makes it worse.”
She ran.
He stood at the window and watched her cross the snow-covered courtyard, her footprints already filling in behind her.
That’s as much as I can do.
Room 3009. Room 3009.
Iffy repeated it under her breath the whole way up, barely registering Softfeathers and Nightfall when she passed them in the corridor. She crossed the snow-capped olive grove, climbed the stairs two at a time, and arrived on the third floor still breathing hard.
Then she slowed.
She had arrived at the door before she’d decided what to do when it opened. The number was right. The sconce on the wall threw orange light on the grain of the wood. She could hear, very faintly, voices from somewhere below.
Her hand would not move toward the door.
Back then — back when she was seventeen and frightened and had convinced herself that she had no choice — Annie had taken care of her the whole way to Archduke Island. Had watched out for her. Had been the one person who made the journey feel survivable. And when the Bloodfang Association had turned Annie away, Iffy had done nothing. She had stood there with her offer of membership in one hand and her fear in the other, and she had kept both, and she had watched Annie leave.
She had thought, for a long time, that Annie was dead.
She had worn the guilt like armor. The fearlessness, the aggression, the careful construction of a self that didn’t flinch — all of it had been built on top of a girl who had failed someone who had trusted her, and who had eventually convinced herself that she’d simply become a different kind of person.
Now the door was here, and the armor didn’t fit.
“I knew you’d do that,” said a voice beside her.
She startled and looked down. Softfeathers was there, composed and unsurprised. Nightfall had appeared at the end of the corridor, slightly breathless, evidently having run.
Iffy felt something loosen in her chest — not relief exactly, but the particular sensation of not being alone in a moment she hadn’t expected to matter this much.
“You followed me.”
“We were going to stand guard,” Softfeathers said, with perfect seriousness. “In case His Majesty was trying to coerce you somehow.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It made sense enough to follow you.” She shrugged. “Are you ready?”
“Ready for—”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Softfeathers had already stepped back, pulling Nightfall with her, both of them retreating to a safe and observationally convenient distance.
“Just say what you actually feel,” Softfeathers called back. “That part is important.”
Footsteps from inside. Iffy’s whole body went rigid.
The door opened.
She recognized the face before she understood that she recognized it. The sharp gaze, the brows slightly raised, the particular quality of composure that came from someone who had held themselves together through worse than this. Everything she had been afraid was gone — the specific detail of a person who had mattered — came back in one moment. Intact. Precisely as she’d left it.
Annie looked at her.
Fragments surfaced without warning, not as memories but as sensations: the weight of a blanket placed over her shoulders on a cold night at sea. A hand steadying her when the path was bad. A voice saying Annie, you should go — and the shame of having been the one to say it.
She meant to speak. She had planned something, on the stairs, some acknowledgment that would be honest without being an imposition. Something adult and measured.
What happened instead was that her arms found Annie before her voice did, and she heard herself saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Annie, I’m sorry into the shoulder of someone who had every reason to push her away.
The tears came the way they hadn’t in years — not the tight, controlled kind she permitted herself in private, but the full kind, the ugly kind, the kind that happened when the thing you’d been carrying was finally heavier than the mechanism that had been holding it.
Beasts didn’t cry.
She had spent years making that true about herself.
Annie stood in her doorway, too startled to move.
For a moment she hadn’t recognized the woman clinging to her — only felt the familiarity of someone she’d known in a different life. Then the voice reached her, apologizing in that particular broken rhythm, and she knew.
She had imagined this, sometimes. In Wolfheart, in the years after, when the resentment had still been sharp. She had imagined things she might say. How the accounting would go.
But the girl wrapped around her now was not the adversary she’d constructed from the memory. She was smaller than that — smaller than Annie had remembered her, somehow, despite the years — and she was shaking, and the apology in her voice had nothing left in it to protect itself with.
Annie exhaled.
She had carried the grudge a long time. She was tired of its weight.
She put her arms around Iffy and held on. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “Not anymore.”
Iffy shook harder. The crying didn’t stop; it got worse. But something in it had changed — the quality of it. Like pressure releasing.
They stood there in the doorway, and Amy watched them from inside the room with wide eyes, and the candle on the sill made two shadows on the wall, and outside the snow kept falling.
It took a long while for Iffy to stop. When she did, she was still half in Annie’s arms, and her face was a disaster, and she seemed to be aware of this and not particularly concerned.
For the next half hour, Annie pieced together what she hadn’t known. The Bloodfang Association’s end. Earl Morgan. The witches who had gotten out. The king and his sister who had made it possible.
The knot she’d been carrying — old and tight and complicated with things she hadn’t entirely named — slowly unraveled.
It was moving in the right direction.
She looked at Iffy, asleep now, still in her arms, the way she used to sleep on the ship when the sea had been too rough. She looked at Amy watching from across the room, curious and careful.
She had been uncertain, since arriving, what she would do next.
She wasn’t uncertain anymore.
“We should go to Wendy,” she said quietly. “And sign a contract with the king.”