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I sat at the workbench.

For a while, I only looked at the paper.

The question required one word. I knew that, once written, the word would become more than an answer.

Aldric Vance already knew what she was. The Council, though, only suspected. They had stamped SUSPECTED across her file in August. They had watched her bring five ferals down onto their bellies in the Pit, and they had seen the altar candles bend toward her.

But suspicion and confirmation were not the same thing to the Council. For all its brutality, it depended on procedure. Orders required documentation, warrants required signatures, and accusations needed someone authorized to make them official. If the Keeper of the Archive and Elder of the Hoard confirmed under oath, in his own hand, that Wren Hale was a Wildheart, the Council would no longer be acting on suspicion.

It would have a fact it could put beneath a seal.

So I tried to lie.

I picked up the pen, set the nib to the paper, and began to write No.

I managed the N.

The brand tightened.

It was not a burn so much as a constriction that began beneath the skin and closed around my throat from the inside. My breath stopped immediately. The pen slipped from my hand, struck the floor, and rolled beneath the stool.

I tried to inhale and produced only a thin, strained sound. The lamplight blurred. The glass hare on the shelf above the workbench doubled and then dissolved at the edges of my vision.

For several seconds, one thought remained perfectly clear.

I could refuse.

I did not have to write the answer. I could remain where I was and let the oath do what it had been designed to do. The Council would lose its Keeper, its Elder, and the instrument it had spent nine years using to certify what it could not certify for itself.

There would be no answer.

I held still.

The room darkened as my vision narrowed, and for a moment the pressure at my throat was accompanied by the faint memory of warm hands resting there and a low, absentminded hum.

Then I remembered the chamber beneath the Iron Seat.

I had never seen it, but I knew what was kept there.

Dragon Eggs.

They would still be warm now.

Dragon eggs did not die easily. They could remain dormant for a century and wake the moment someone of the right blood breathed life into them.

But if the last dragon of the Ashgrave line died in a workshop because he refused to answer a question, there would be no one left to wake them.

I reached for the pen.

I do not remember getting down to the floor or dragging myself back to the bench. I only remember crossing out the N and writing the one word the oath would accept.

Yes.

The pressure vanished.

I folded forward over the workbench and pulled air into my lungs until my vision steadied. When I could focus again, the paper lay inches from my face. The word was shaky and blotted but completely legible.

That was all they had asked, so that was all I gave them.