But my mind was anything but calm.
The Priestess gambit had bought us time. Nothing more. I’d seen the way the elders looked at me after Mabyn’s retreat. It wasn’t with awe, as I’d hoped, but with calculation.
They were weighing the political cost of keeping me against the political cost of casting me out. Running the numbers. Assessing the risk.
And I was a significant risk.
A death-touched creature in their midst. A girl who had cracked their mirrors and befriended their dead.
A human bride who wasn’t human at all, who couldn’t give them the heirs they wanted, who might drain their king dry if he let her close enough.
I understood their fear. I’d lived with it for three months. The terror of being wrong, of being discovered, of being cast out into a world that had no place for things like me.
But understanding didn’t make the waiting easier.
The hours crawled past.
I sat by the fire and let the heat wash over me, testing whether the blood tether had changed my relationship to warmth. It had, slightly. The flames didn’t hurt anymore. They felt... neutral. Neither comfort nor pain.
I missed the cold. Missed the way it had wrapped around me.
The blood tether had taken that from me, had made me something in between. Not dead enough to find peace in the chill, not alive enough to find comfort in the heat.
I was suspended, waiting, neither one thing nor the other.
Lowen found me by the fire. He’d been sleeping in a patch of weak sunlight near the window, his patchy fur catching the light, but now he padded across the floor and leaped into my lap.
I scratched behind his ears. His purr rattled through my chest.
“They’re going to send me away,” I told him. “You know that, don’t you? The elders. They’ll decide I’m too dangerous, too strange, too much of a liability. And then what happens to you?”
The door opened.
I looked up, expecting Cador. Expecting news, good or bad, delivered in that low voice that had become the center of my shrinking world.
Instead, I saw Morveth.
The old priestess stood in the doorway, her silver hair loose around her shoulders, her black robes hanging from a frame that seemed thinner than when I’d arrived.
Her filmed eyes found me across the room, and something in her expression made Lowen’s purr stutter and die.
“Come,” she said. “The King requests your presence.”
Requests, not summons. A small distinction, but I noticed it.
I set Lowen on the floor. Rose from my chair. I brushed invisible dust from the wool.
“The council meeting,” I said. “Is it finished?”
Morveth’s lips thinned. “That depends on you.”
She turned and walked away, her robes whispering against the stone. I followed.
The war room smelled of damp earth and archaic dust. The air was heavy here, still and suffocating, as if the mountain itself were holding its breath. The walls were covered in maps. Old maps, their edges yellowed and curling, their ink faded to brown.
Maps of territories that no longer existed, of kingdoms that had crumbled, of trade routes that had been swallowed by the Shift.
The elders stood in a loose semicircle at the far end of the room. Six of them, as I’d counted from the window. Four men and two women, all of them old, all of them watching me withexpressions that ranged from hostility to fear to something that might have been pity.
