Kara stared at him for a long moment.Then she turned the sentence around in her head, examining it from several angles.Then she set it back down.
That was, she had been generous when she had called it “deeply unhelpful.”
She lifted a hand, the gesture pulling everyone’s attention before she’d made the conscious decision to demand it.“Quick question.”No one in the cavern looked particularly interested in her questions.Several of the assembled trolls had the specific expression of people who’d been hoping the smaller creatures would simply stop generating sound.She continued anyway.“Why on earth would you bring up the fact that you think I’m pregnant, when I don’t look pregnant at all?I mean, surely even in your culture that’s considered taboo.Do troll men walk up to a troll chick and just toss out casually, ‘you’ve got an unborn power,’ e.g.a baby in your belly, even when the troll woman’s stomach isn’t remotely swollen, and not get smacked in the face?”Kara’s eyes bounced around the room, looking at the trolls.
Finally, one spoke up.“Troll females all have bellies.Why would a male want a female that isn’t soft to cuddle?No one wants to snuggle bones.”
To Kara’s shock, Gavril said, “I have to agree with the troll.Nothing better than holding my female and not being able to count her ribs with my fingers.”
“Way to make us boney chicks feel good about ourselves,” Zara mumbled as she side eyed her mate.
Wadim held up his hands.“Babe, I didn’t throw in my hat with the thick lady crowd.I like you any way you are.As long as I get to touch you, I don’t care what my fingers can count.”
“I feel like we’ve gotten way off topic,” Rachel said, her voice calm and poised, like she always seemed to be.Kara was sure she’d never seen the healer rattled in the least.
“The female wolf is right,” the Troll King nodded his large head.“It doesn’t matter what your body shows.Your magic has revealed another source inside of you.New, growing and pure.Only a child has that kind of energy–” He paused, still looking at her.“There is much more going on here than just a group of wolves, a fae, and a witch hybrid entering our realm.”
The king stepped closer, close enough now that Kara had to actively resist the instinct to crane her neck back to maintain the eye contact she was committed to holding.Up close, the age in him was apparent in ways she hadn’t been able to see from a distance, his stone-dark skin was crossed with cracks like old fault lines, deep and deliberate, the kind of marks that weren’t damage butrecord, the accumulated evidence of centuries pressing themselves into flesh that had been around long enough to hold the weight.He wasn’t merely powerful.He wasold, in the way that the mountains were old, existing before the concept of ancient had been coined to describe things like him.
“The Deep Below woke for you.”
The silence that followed was different from the one before, less shocked, more reckoning.
Kara swallowed carefully.“I’m sorry,” she said, keeping her voice level through what she felt was a commendable exercise in self-control, “the what did what, now?”
From his cage, Wadim said, quiet and controlled in the particular way of someone managing their own dread through the careful maintenance of composure, “I was afraid he’d say that.”
Kara didn’t look away from the king.“Why were you afraid he’d say that?Have you heard of such a thing?”
He shook his head.“No, but, civilizations tend to collapse after phrases like ‘the Deep Below woke.’”A pause.“Historically speaking.In my experience.”
She filed that away underthings to panic about once we’re not in immediate dangerand kept her gaze on the king’s face.The column of her spine felt very straight because she’d lost all ability to slump forward like a normal person with bad posture.Kara was completely in scared-straight posture mode.
The king extended one enormous hand toward the darkness at the cavern’s edge.“Come.”
She did not move.The soles of her boots remained in contact with the stone floor as though they’d developed opinions about the proposition.“Hard pass.”
“It was not a request.”
From behind her came the sound of metal taking impact, of Nick’s fists against the bars again, the growl in his chest a constant low frequency, like a second heartbeat running beneath the conversation.Kara turned sharply, and found his eyes immediately.
They were pure gold.Pure protest.Pure panic, barely held behind the cage bars and the thinner, more fragile bars of self-control he was maintaining for her benefit rather than his own.
Their bond vibrated with everything neither of them said out loud, the connection between them taut and humming like a wire under too much tension.She felt his fear not as a separate thing but as an extension of her own, the specific kind that didn’t belong to you but lived inside you anyway because the person it belonged to was part of your architecture now.
“I’ll be okay,”she told him through the bond.“You know what I’m capable of.”
His answer came back without words, traveling the bond in a form purer than verbal language, and it landed with the particular weight of things that were true before they were wanted.“I do know.But I cannot stand the thought of you out of my sight.Not again.Not ever.But, I also know I can’t clip your wings.”
She hated that.Hated his acceptance far more than she would have hated his resistance, because resistance would have given her something to push against.This was worse, this was Nick understanding, which meant he’d already run the numbers and reached the same terrible conclusion she had, and his agreement was its own kind of grief.
She held his gaze for three seconds.Enough to say what the bond was already saying.There was nothing she wouldn’t do to make sure she was by his side, where she belonged.She stared long enough to let him see her clearly before she turned away.
Then she squared her shoulders and stepped toward the king.
Every troll in the cavern watched.She could feel the weight of it pressing against her skin like a change in atmospheric pressure, dozens of enormous, ancient gazes tracking her movement with the collective, unreadable attention of creatures that seemed to have been waiting, across years she couldn't begin to quantify, for something to happen.Even Aphid, who no doubt had survived enough to be unnerved by very little, had gone very still in his cage, his bright fae eyes trained on her with an expression she’d never seen on his face before.
That, more than anything else that had happened in this cavern, reached through the carefully constructed barrier of Kara’s composure and prodded the thing she was trying very hard not to call fear.
