The side doors opened onto the service corridor. Guards dragged prisoners forward—eight, then twelve—citizens with hands bound and lips split. Two were women with dye-stained fingers: one was a baker with flour still in the cuticles, one was a child no older than twelve with a face set like a scout’s. A scholar stumbled, glasses broken, the same gray wool Eliza had seen on the street earlier; he looked up and met her gaze with a worn acceptance that made something in her chest turn inwards, thin and savage.
“Pick six,” the king said to his captain. “Six will do to begin.”
The captain—a man with a lion’s head tattooed thinly behind one ear—touched three men and three women with the tip of his baton. The prisoners were led toward the balcony overlooking the inner court.
“Stop,” Eliza said, still not raising her voice.
The king’s brows lifted a fraction. “Words don’t move rope,” he said pleasantly. “Only authority does. Which I have now. Only I.”
Eliza took three steps forward and mounted the broken stairs to the dais. She moved slowly enough that archers on the gallery had time to adjust their draw and consider killing her, and then to decide against it because they could not work out whether killing her here would cost them more than letting her speak. She let them think that calculation belonged to them. She made the steps look like her own.
At the top, she stood where the lion’s paw had sheared and put her boot on the smooth, round stump of it, as if testingmarble for ripeness. “You say you can hang six,” she said. “You can hang sixty. Tyranny is not clever; it is persistent. But in the end, it doesn’t change anything.”
It is weakness wrapped in savagery,she thought,but say that and he’ll make them pay for it.
Instead, she turned her head enough that the officers could see the line of her jaw, the scar at her temple, the light on her cheekbone.
She stared at Vael Nareth, hatred burning in her chest.
The king’s hand tightened on the arm of the throne. “Tyranny? You think calling the thing by its pretty name will save you?”
“I think names hold,” she said quietly. “And you think they do not. Which means you don’t belong here.”
He rose. He was not tall, but he had learned to hold his body as if height were a concept and not a measurement. He stepped down from the dais without breaking eye contact, silk whispering, enamel creaking. At arm’s length, he stopped and considered her face—memorizing it, maybe; making himself a legend he could recount later in rooms that smelled of sugar, to women who mistook risk for romance.
“Here are my terms,” he said, voice pitched for the hall’s corners. “Lay down arms. Dismiss your allies. Present yourself at the bridge at sundown. I will proclaim you—” he smiled— “my vassal queen. You will tell your people that this was mercy and that their obedience is worship. You will go on pretending your gods care.” He tilted his head toward the balcony where the first noose swung. “Or Maidan will learn an old lesson again.”
Eliza slid her fingers under her gorget and found the chain there, and for the length of a breath, she pressed the ring to her skin, the way a singer touches the hollow of her throat to remember a note. The counter-sigil pulsed once, faint and cool.
Azfar… now would be a fine moment.
Azfar’s promised signal had not come. The air held its weight. Far below, under the keep, the Shadow had not yet risen. Rakhal was on the bridge. He would hold until he broke or the world moved around him to keep him from breaking. She would buy seconds until Azfar’s thread found its knot.
“Your Majesty,” she said, and put the first lie in the room on her tongue to appease the order of things. “You’re fond of numbers. Hear mine. I have three gates awake. I have a river that belongs to my guilds. I have a thousand men who learned to feed children under siege. I have ten thousand more who learned how to bury them. You have enamel and a map that tells you lies because it does not include steps.” She glanced down at his polished boots. “Do you know your steps?”
His eyes turned cold, any remaining humor boiled off. “You think you can speak your way out of a rope.”
“I think while I’m speaking, your rope is not tightening,” she said. She nodded toward the balcony. The captain, caught by the idea that he might be perceived as a monster in a story rather than an officer in a lawful court, paused for the length of a breath. That was all she needed. The sigil under her armor gave one soft answer, a sympathetic beat.
The king clapped again, three sharp reports. The captain flinched and lifted his hand. The first prisoner stepped forward to the rail, a woman with dye-blue fingernails and the straight back of pride misnamed. The noose waited.
Eliza did not look away. “Do it,” she said to the king, and her voice did not hitch. “Hang them. Hang thirty. Hang the child, too, if you think your gods will be impressed with your arithmetic. It will save me time. The city will be yours by noon and mine by dusk. It will not serve a man who feeds it fear for long, no matter how many mouths you close.”
The king stared at her, surprised into honesty by the extent of her defiance. His mouth opened and then closed.He was calculating, and the calculation was new to him. He had probably expected weeping or bargaining. Perhaps he had expected her to crawl into the shape he had measured and discover, on her knees, how well it fit. He had not expected a woman who would let him prove to a watching hall that his mercy was a story he told to himself when mirrors weren’t around.
“Ah,” he said finally, softly. “There you are. Your father’s daughter, after all.”
“There I am,” Eliza agreed.
Something shifted beyond the walls; the air thinned, as if the city had opened a window. The hair on her arms lifted under the sleeve. She felt it: a tremor not of stone but of intent, like a bowstring being turned an endless inch. Azfar’s work at the tower reached for her and found her heartbeat through the ring. The bond-mark cooled, then warmed again, like iron seeing a forge from across the yard.
She set her palms open on the broken lion’s paw and spoke to the room, not for the king. “Maidan,” she said. “If you can hear me through walls—if you can smell bread and know it is not for you—if you are under a table holding a brother’s mouth closed so he doesn’t wake a man with a stick… listen.” She didn’t raise her voice. She kept it close, for the ones who were afraid, staring into the face of death. For herself. For Rakhal, and the promise of freedom—of them.We are not asking to be spared. We are asking to be remade into ourselves. Together.
Nothing in the hall moved. Wind found the seam in the greased cloth and pressed against it. Light shifted. Liron had tears in his eyes and pretended they were a splinter.
The king turned to gesture, his patience burned away, revealing the cold truth underneath. “Begin,” he told his captain.
The rope lifted. The child on the balcony held very still, as if he had been practicing all morning and did not want to ruin the performance.
