The room is silent except for the drip of blood into a basin beside the table and the distant movement of fighters in the hall.
Then I say the thing no one wants to say and everybody is already thinking. “What does she want in exchange?”
Aelith turns his head slowly and meets my eyes. “She wants Jamie.”
There it is. Not abstract danger. Not future possibility. Not one more thing on the long list of ways the world is broken.
A twelve-year-old boy has become a bargaining chip in royal hands.
“She named him?” Shanae asks.
“She did.”
Jack is going to lose his mind.
Caly, too, quiet as he can pretend to be. And Jamie—Christ, Jamie, with all that bloody determination and none of the caution age is supposed to bring. I dread to think how Solan is going to react.
“Why?” Sonny demands. “Beyond the obvious flavour of evil, I mean.”
Aelith’s good eye closes briefly. “Because she believes he matters to the storms.”
I scrunch my brows, confused.
Varek shifts his attention. “Explain.”
“She has fragments of my father’s records,” Aelith says. “Not all. Not enough. But enough to know that particular human arrivals coincide with particular atmospheric events. Enough to know some are more… responsive than others.”
A memory sparks in the back of my mind—Jamie standing under strange light, all angles and stubborn certainty, saying he thinks he’s meant to be here. The thought turns my gut.
“She thinks she can use him,” I say.
“Yes.”
Sonny pushes off the wall. “That’s not happening.”
“No,” Varek says, and there’s iron in the word. “It is not.”
Aelith drags himself up on one elbow despite Iris’s noise of protest. “But we can exchange him.”
The room stops.
Not metaphorically. Not internally.
Actually stops.
Even the noise in the hall seems to recede under the weight of those five words.
“You can’t be serious,” Shanae says.
Aelith looks at her like she has asked whether blood runs red. “My mate is with her.”
Sonny’s face hardens instantly. “So your plan is to hand over a kid?”
“My plan is to get Dawson back.”
The answer cracks through the room raw and immediate, all princely mask gone. For the first time since he arrived, Aelith doesn’t sound entitled. He sounds terrified.
That should make him easier to stomach. It doesn’t.
