Page 61 of Blood Ties

“Goodnight, Bryony.”

She crossed the sitting room and shut herself inside the bedroom. The lock turned.

I sat beside the fire with my back against her door. Her breathing slowed on the other side. The court remained quiet, and Adrian’s guards stayed beyond the garden gate.

For the first time since the Claiming began, I slept.

The bedroom lock opened.

I woke at once.

Bryony stepped into the sitting room barefoot. Her eyes were closed, and her arms hung loose at her sides. A thin red line ran from the throne room and curled around her feet.

“Bryony.”

She walked past me without turning.

I caught her wrist. The line flashed, and the chain at my waist locked hard enough to tear her hand from mine. Iron dragged me back against the wall.

Bryony kept walking.

The throne room doors stood open. The Crown had lifted from the carved chair and waited in the air above it.

A woman’s voice moved through the court.

“Come to me.”

Bryony crossed the threshold without waking.

16

BRYONY

I woke three steps from the throne.

My feet were bare on the black stone. The bedroom door stood open behind me, and I couldn’t remember leaving the bed. I still wore the thin shirt I’d slept in. My knife was on the bedside table, several rooms away.

The Crown floated above the carved seat at the level of my eyes.

Up close, it didn’t look like jewellery. Eight dark points rose from a narrow silver band, each one wet with red light. The metal turned slowly in the air. Every point moved with it except the longest, which stayed aimed at me.

“Come closer, Bryony.”

The woman’s voice filled the room. It also pressed against the inside of my head, warm and reasonable.

I tried to step back. My body leaned forwards instead.

The Crown brightened. A picture formed in my mind of the doors upstairs standing open to a sunny morning. Stellan waited on the front steps without iron around his throat, waist, wrists or ankles. His silver hair moved in the wind, and he held out both hands to me.

The picture hurt because I wanted it.

“Touch me, and Harrowmere will open. Touch me, and your king will be free.”

My hand lifted.

“Bryony.”

Stellan’s voice came from the open doors behind me. It was rough with pain, but it reached me more clearly than the woman speaking inside my skull.