Page 34 of Bite Bonded Bride

"I know." Her voice is precisely calibrated. Not cold, careful. The voice of a queen who has already processed this and arrived at her conclusions.

"You knew he would."

"I suspected." She turns then, and I don’t see satisfaction nor cruelty. Just the exhaustion of a woman who no longer takes pleasure in being right. "I warned you, Zareth. I told you what attachment to the human would cost. You believed the cost was political. I told you it was everything."

"She found the solution⁠—"

"She found a theory." Her voice sharpens briefly. "And now Varkai has her and half the Citadel is tearing itself apart in the streets. That is the reality." She crosses to me and places one hand against my jaw, the way she did when I was young and needed me to listen attentively. "If you go after her, you will lose your seat and split the people in half during the worst crisis. Some will follow you. More will not. And whatever is left will not be a kingdom but a wound."

I search her face for a crack. Permission. There is none.

"I am asking you to let Varkai do what must be done," she says, "and to grieve it privately. The way rulers do."

I step back from her hand.

"No."

I hear another riot before I reach the main cavern of the great central chamber where the old capital markets used to run. Torches in iron brackets make everyone look angrier than they already are.

I descend the wide stairs into the middle of it.

Someone shouts my name, another curses at me. The shoving at the crowd's edges gets worse. There’s screaming for the sacrifice, screaming against it, while some simply scream because the tunnel behind them just collapsed and they have nowhere else to go.

I do not call for quiet. I just stand still, waiting and my stillness is louder than any voice, because every Vrakken in this room knows that when the prince goes still, the world has run out of time to be careless.

The noise dims. Begrudgingly.

I look at them. Their faces. The healer woman, Seralya from the fourth district who lost her younger brother to Blood Rot last season. The two brothers who have been sharing one blood ration between them. The old soldier near the eastern pillar with the hand he lost in the lower tunnels. The young girl in the crowd who has never in her short life seen the sky.

My people.

I have spent my entire life trying to save them. I am not certain, standing here, that I have ever once simply seen them.

When I speak, my voice carries. It always has. But I do not pitch it to command. I pitch it to reach.

"I have led you the way my father led before me," I say. "With silence, iron and the belief that the strongest among us should carry the worst of it so the rest of you would not have to know how close the edge always was." I pause. "I was wrong to carry it that way. You deserved to know. You deserved the truth."

The crowd is fully still now.

"The Old Laws were written for a people in crisis," I continue. "And we have been in crisis so long we stopped asking whether the laws still made sense or whether they were just the shape of our fear." My mouth tightens. "Blood sacrifice is not salvation. It is a surrender dressed in ritual. It is what we do when we have given up on anything better and I have not given up. I refuse to give up. And I will not allow Varkai or any elder on that council to bleed a woman who has done nothing but try to save us, in the name of laws that never saved anyone."

A murmur moves through the crowd. Not agreement, yet. But they’re listening.

"I know what you've lost," I say, and my voice drops but I let it. "I have stood beside you in the dark for over a century. I know the names of your children. I know what it smells like when a district goes silent for the last time. I have carried that grief the same as you." My eyes sweep the crowd, the old soldier raising his chin, the brothers looking at each other, the healer pressing her knuckles to her mouth. "But grief is not a reason to die. It is a reason to fight."

Someone near the back wipes their face. Some don't bother.

"The Old Laws are dead," I say. Clearly. Without hesitation. "I am killing them here tonight, in front of every witness this cavern holds. And in their place I am offering you something the elders never offered: a choice."

I let the word sit. Then I raise my voice and let it become the thing it needs to be.

"Any soldier tired of starving in the dark, stand with me. Any civilian told one more time to wait for a miracle that was never coming, stand with me." The torchlight throws my shadow long across the stone, and I do not flinch from it. "We are going to close the Wildspont, end this corruption, and drag this kingdom back from the edge. Not through sacrifice. Through the only thing that has ever actually saved us." I look at every exhausted and quietly furious face. "Each other. So… who stands with their prince?"

The first voice that answers is the healer Seralya before the chamber fills with sound.

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