Does the male havenosense of self-preservation?
Perhaps there’s a way around this Binding. A way to dissolve it. If I can gain their trust… perhaps it might be removed. Or I could say no, and attempt to make my way back in.
Or… I was not supposed to survive this. If I killed Kaelen swiftly enough—a dagger to the heart, or across the throat, or even his leg, would it matter if my own heart stopped beating?
But there would be Eres. And the male saved my life.
I stare down at the floor, attempting to think of a way out of this room without agreeing and without being escorted back to the icy hellscape of the mountain.
Queen Maelira finally speaks. “Eres, if you feel so strongly about the girl that you’re willing to stake your life on her, I will not stand in your way. Lyra, your decision is required. Agree to the Binding, and I will agree to your request for sanctuary in Umbraxis, under Eres’s supervision until further notice.”
I’ll find a way out of it. There has to be one.
Slowly, I raise my head.
“I agree to the Binding.”
Kaelen
My hands grip the back of my chair. I can’t sit down—not when it feels as though my legs won’t support another step. “Wait for me outside.”
Eres—damn him—doesn’t argue. He brushes a hand over my shoulder that I pointedly ignore before he offers yet another reassuring smile to the fucking witch and leaves me—andit—alone with my mother.
The witch doesn’t say a word as the shadows creep around it. There’s a flicker of hesitation when they close over its face, but if it has any issue with it, I wouldn’t hear over the darkness.
And more importantly, it can’t hearmeas I turn back to my mother. “You have to stop this.”
Of all the times to choose to lead a Council meeting, she chosethisone. And now Eres faces a Binding to one of them, andI won’t fucking have it. “Find someone else to bind it. It’s not going to be him.”
“I am still the monarch,” my mother observes mildly. “A little respect, Kaelen.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, hard enough to draw blood, but my next words are still harsher than I intended them to be as they erupt into the air. “You haven’t been a true monarch since he died.”
She stills. At that moment, I hate myself more than I ever have. “You know what I mean. You pick and choose when to pick up the mantle, and now Eres faces this as a result—”
“Faces what?” My mother rarely raises her voice. Even as a child, when I would race through the castle, weaving through crowds of familiar faces and causing trouble in my wake, she never had to go above her usual soft tone for me to listen. But now her voice climbs, sharp and high and ragged with emotion. “The end of our race? That is what we face, Kaelen. We don’t have the luxury of favoritism—”
“Not him,” I rush out. “Anyone else.”
It’s not favoritism. “If anything happens to him…”
My words trail off. Because itisfavoritism. “I cannot do this without him.”
Bad enough that Darian no longer stands at my side. I force my breathing to steady. He’s still here. Still alive, and breathing, and more irritating with every word that drawls from his lips. But to lose Eres now, when we already face our end—it would be the end of me. “I cannot exist in a world where he does not.”
Not for a single fucking day would I keep breathing. Where he goes—where they both go—I will follow.
The silence stretches out between us. When she speaks, her words are heavy. “You can, even if you do not want to.”
Because she did. When my father fell to a Lightbringer unit four years ago, saving his patrol at the cost of his own life, mymother continued on. But she does notlive. She only… exists. She does not leave the castle. Rarely speaks. She is as much a ghost as he is, and I was the one left behind to pick up the pieces of her grief.
There is no me who can pick up the pieces of mine.
“A large assault through the Veilspire will finish us,” she murmurs. “We know it is coming, and soon. Perhaps she will change nothing, Kaelen. But if she could changesomething, isn’t it better to attempt it? Something must change, or we have no hope at all. Perhaps there is some good in her, and she will help.”
I scoff at that. “You cannot believe that. The only good Lightbringer is a dead Lightbringer.”
“There’s good and evil everywhere we look.” My mother looks toward the witch, her eyes thoughtful. “One cannot exist without the other. I have to believe in something, Kaelen. Perhaps Eres is right. Perhaps she is a sign of something, even if we do not understand it. Don’t mistreat her.”
