Page 26 of The Reckoning of Starlight

That was worth testing again.

Jassyn turned the corner and found a servant alone, arms full of linens, her steps dragging on the long walk toward the kitchens. She hadn’t seen him yet.

He reached with his mind before indecision could calcify into conscience.

Telepathy slipped from him in a whisper, precise as a suture, sliding into her skull the moment their eyes locked.

“Forget you saw me. Keep walking.”

The servant blinked, her stride faltering for half a step. Then she continued past him, gaze empty, linens clutched to her chest.

Jassyn’s wings shook. His hands trembled at his sides, and he closed them into fists, burying the tremor in his knuckles.

It worked.

Farine’s dreaming mind hadn’t been the exception. Elashor’s command permitted the coercion itself, so long as Jassyn didn’t raise a hand.

That should’ve sickened him, but relief had already risen, cold and practical, to take the shape of usefulness.

Jassyn filed the discovery away and kept walking. These hours before dawn were his.

The only ones that were.

The gardens drew him next. Not only the open sky where he could regenerate with starlight on his skin, but the familiar pulse of the earth. The Vallendes had clipped and paved and manicured every surface, but roots still breathed under marble and stone.

Feet bare on the garden path, Jassyn felt the buried life hum through his soles. Flowers he’d never seen opened to the dark around him, pale blooms unfolding beneath the moons.

He turned inward as he walked, splitting his awareness the way he did in Farine’s bed—one layer left behind to steer the body, another tracing the structure of what imprisoned him.

Never raise a hand. Serve. Stay devoted.

The words assumed a simplicity in obedience. They hadn’t accounted for a mind trained to parse.

He couldn’t fly when his thoughts tilted toward escape, his wings locking before the first downstroke. He couldn’t cross beyond the estate walls without his legs seizing.

Those limits had shape now, borders he could measure. Other restrictions lay deeper, waiting beneath intentions he hadn’t yet dared to follow.

He needed to map the cage so he could break it from within.

An idea took root.

He’d loosened coercion before, bent definitions until obedience pointed elsewhere. But loosening wasn’t destroying the magic, and from inside his own mind, every attempt to dismantle the commands snagged on the desire to be free.

Perhaps another mind could move where his could not.

He could coerce someone else to do it. See through borrowed eyes. Steer another set of hands to untangle the knots.

The thought would’ve repulsed him once.

Jassyn walked on, sunk so deep inside the logic of his captivity that he missed the moment the garden began to change.

The manicured hedges and murmuring fountains had fallen behind. In their place stood an inner courtyard abandoned by the estate’s obsessive order. Ivy choked the marble arches, left to crumble where no noble would wander.

The air pressed differently here, damp with loam and wet stone, thick enough to settle in his lungs.

The ground rumbled.

Jassyn went still.