She puts her hand on the root beside mine. The gold brightens where her palm meets the bark, brighter than where mine rests.
The tree knows whose blood runs closer to its source.
We sit with the tree. Some conversations finish themselves.
She leaves before I do, walking back toward the chambers Seraphina shares with her. I stay at the roots a while longer. When I finally rise to head back to our chamber, the corridor I take is not the one I came in.
Veyran is in the corridor when I leave the tree.
His presence doesn’t feel like an accident.
“Lord Maximus.” The title pronounced with the exact degree of formality required by protocol.
“The convening is tomorrow. I trust your preparations are in order.”
“They are.”
“Thessivane’s resources are not unlimited. The alliance, if ratified, draws on reserves that have been preserved for millennia. You should understand the gravity of what you are asking.”
“I understand the weight, but I’m not asking anything. I was offered.”
His eyes narrow. Behind the rigid formality, something hotter.
“With respect,” he says, and the word respect carries no warmth at all, “you have been inside these walls for days. We have held them for ages. Whatever your war requires, it should not require us.”
The anger surfaces before I name it. I feel the same force that cracked the cup at Iron Claw, that split the stone table in Lanthar’s deep chamber.
It rises through my chest and pushes outward, and the floor between us answers.
The stone buckles. Half an inch.
A ridge of displaced rock rising between my boots and Veyran’s, running in a line from my position to his.
The gold along the ridge flares bright and holds.
Directional. Aimed. Force projected at a person rather than discharged into the nearest surface.
I didn’t clench. I didn’t move.
The force came from my sternum and traveled outward through the stone before my mind caught up.
Veyran looks at the ridge between us.
His composure holds, but his weight shifts to his back foot. A small step backward.
Movement at the far end of the corridor. Seraphina.
She is standing at the junction where the passage meets the main hall.
Her face carries the expression she wore when she first examined what lived inside me, the night after the pyre.
Clinical. Assessing.
Her eyes move from the displaced stone to my hands. To my face.
She holds my gaze for two seconds. She says nothing.
She turns and walks toward the east wing.
