She picked up the smallest knife because she didn't need drama. The steel hummed in her hand, like a string plucked underwater. When she cut across her palm, it felt less like a slice and more like something taking a sip from her skin. Blood welled up, dark and quick. It beaded and trembled… and then something else happened. The Shadow in the blade seemed to recognize either the act or the courage behind it, and it moved. A faint black ripple passed through the cut like a breath drawn inward. The blood didn't hiss as Rakhal's did when the dark kissed it. It didn't turn black. It brightened—just a shade—before darkening again.Curious. Testing.
The nearest orcs shifted together, almost soundlessly.
Eliza held up her hand so they could see the blood flow. "Now I have bled before the Moot," she said. "Will you hear me?"
The Bonekeeper's eyes had narrowed. Lines deepened at the corners. He leaned forward slightly, not enough to concede but enough to be noticed. "The Shadow is not yours," he said. "But it looked. It permitted."
"It did," Eliza said.
He made a short sound that might have been disdain or grudging interest. He tapped the staff once. "Speak then, Blooded."
The murmurs changed, focus narrowing until the crowd seemed to lean toward her.
Eliza let her hand fall. The cut burned; she breathed through it. She noticed how Rakhal watched her—measuring her reaction to pain, to blood, to Shadow. Since leaving the forest, he seemed more aware of the differences between them, how light embraced her yet rejected him. Something in his gaze suggested not envy, but a quiet wondering about boundaries that might one day be crossed.
"I won't promise what I can't enforce. Not oaths that mean nothing once the drums fade." She thought of the children at the edges of the crowd. "This treaty is not mercy. It is not charity. It's an agreement between predators who've decided to stop tearing each other apart while the world burns around them. Two thrones: one in the shadow-palace you'll rebuild when Kardoc is gone. One in the city where my people will need defenders who understand war as more than spectacle. We set borders, we set consequences. We share what matters: roads, grain, steel, the names of those who go missing so they're not traded like meat again."
Someone snorted. "And you sit on one of those thrones, soft-blood?"
"I sit if your warlord keeps me alive long enough to deserve it," she said, cool as a blade laid against a fevered brow. "I sit because it makes the treaty visible. If he falls, I sit beside whoever can hold the chair without the Shadow eating them from within." She let an edge creep into her tone. "I am not marrying your world. I am making a contract with it."
That hung in the air, clear and sharp. She saw the amusement die in several faces.
"Why should we take this bargain?" someone else called. "We can take your grain. We can take your city."
"You can try," Eliza said. "But you will bleed for it, and then bleed more to keep it. And while you bleed there, Kardoc will gather those you left behind and gut you from behind. I'm offering you time you don't have and victories you can share without starving your children to pay for them."
The laugh that answered wasn't really a laugh. It was one of those broken sounds people make when a calculation they didn't want to face finishes itself in their heads.
She met their faces one by one: a woman with three scars across her mouth, a man with a gold nail hammered through hisear, a teenager with Shadow pooling blue-black in his eyes who couldn't stop staring at the knife in her hand, fascinated and a little in love with the idea of pain.
She lifted her bloodied hand, closed it into a fist. The cut stung brightly. "Two thrones. One treaty. You keep your honor. We keep our lives."
The first sign that the field had shifted was not noise. It was the way stillness became intent. Shoulders squared. Heads tilted slightly toward one another, the way they do when a hunt is about to begin and no one wants to be the first to look eager. The Shadow-touch among them deepened subtly—Eliza felt it like a weight turning on a pivot, the way a storm changes air pressure before rain.
Beside her, Rakhal stood perfectly still. If pride moved through him, he hid it the way he hid most things. But the dark inside him was awake and listening. She could feel that because the air between them seemed thinner, easier to breathe.
Shazi murmured near her shoulder, so quietly only the nearest two could have heard. "They'll remember the cut," she said. "They remember what costs."
The Bonekeeper struck his staff twice. The sound carried. He studied Eliza as if measuring not her words but the part of her that had made her speak them and then pay for the speaking. "The human speaks as one who has placed her foot on a thorny path and will not lift it," he said. "She has bled before the Moot and held her voice steady. The Shadow has seen her and acknowledged."
He turned, and the rings on his staff rattled as bone met bone. "The Shadow will watch her. And him, of course," he added, glancing toward Rakhal with a flick that held no fear.
That was it.
The moot broke like fracturing ice: a web of conversations cracking outward. Groups peeled away. Some spat and returnedto their fires, muttering. Some stared at Eliza, saying nothing at all. A few spoke to Shazi, to lieutenants, to the field captains who knew how to turn intentions into supply lists and sharpened spears. Children stretched for one last look before someone cuffed them and sent them along.
Rakhal moved to her side. He didn't take her hand; he brushed his fingers along the back of it, brief and grounding, and it was more intimate than any clasp would have been. When he spoke, it was for her alone. "You didn't plead," he said.
"I told them what was real," she answered quietly.And I didn't apologize for standing here.The cut in her palm pulsed; the Shadow had left a faint, darker thread under the skin, like a bruise drawn with ink.
He glanced down at her hand, then back at her face. Something like wonder moved across his features and was gone. "It looked at you."
"It did," she said. "And then it looked away. That's enough."
They descended the dais while the last light drained from the world. The wind shifted, carrying the burnt-sweet smell of torch tar and meat crackling over fires. Voices rose and wove together, a low ground-swell of argument and planning and promise. Far off, a horn sounded—three notes—and another answered. The sound wasn't triumph. It was acknowledgment.
As they passed the edge of the basin, an old woman sitting on a bone threshold lifted her chin and watched Eliza without blinking. "Blooded," she said in a voice like rough bark. It wasn't a blessing; it was a sentence passed, a word that would follow her now.
