He stopped in front of me. He was a wall of warmth in the drafty cavern, his presence so intense it almost had a physical weight. I could see the tension in his jaw, the tightness around his eyes.
“She belongs here,” he said. “More than any of you. More than any other bride you might have chosen for me. The Realm marked her, and she survived. The ravens call her sister. My mother’s familiar, who rejected every living thing for twenty years, curls in her lap and purrs.”
He turned back to face the elders.
“Challenge me if you wish. But know that if you do, you challenge the Realm itself. And the Realm does not lose.”
Silence.
The elders exchanged glances. The old man with ice-colored eyes opened his mouth, closed it again. The female elder with silver-streaked hair studied Cador’s face, searching for weakness, finding none.
“We’re done here,” he said. “Leave us.”
They left.
One by one, the elders filed out of the war room, their black robes rustling against the stone floor. Morveth went last, pausing at the door to look back at me with those filmed eyes.
Her expression was unreadable. Then she was gone, and the door closed behind her, and we were alone.
Cador stood with his back to me, facing the maps on the wall. The silence stretched between us, heavy and waiting.
“The blood tether,” I said. “What did she mean, it won’t hold forever?”
He didn’t answer immediately. His fingers traced the edge of one of the old maps.
“The tether is temporary,” he said. “A stopgap. It’s keeping you anchored, but the anchor will weaken over time. Months, maybe. A year at most. And when it fails...”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
“I’ll start fading again.”
“Yes.”
I absorbed this. The warmth at my center, his warmth, his fire, the heat he’d given me in the dark hours before dawn, suddenly felt fragile.. A loan rather than a gift.
“What do we do?”
He turned to face me.
“There’s a ritual,” he said. “Ancient. Dangerous. Forbidden for humans.”
“What kind of ritual?”
“The mate bond.” He moved toward me, slow and deliberate, each step closing the distance between us. “It would bind your soul to the Raven Spirit. Make you one of us. Permanently. Irreversibly.”
I held my ground. Didn’t step back, didn’t look away.
“I wouldn’t be human anymore.”
“No. You would be bound to the Raven Spirit. Transformed according to your nature, not wings, perhaps, but something. Power shaped by what you already are.” He stopped in front of me, close enough to touch. “You would belong to the Realm forever. You would age slowly, heal quickly. You would speak to the ravens and walk the line between life and death as easily as breathing.”
“And the cost?”
“You could never go back. Never be human again. Never have a human life, a human death, a human anything.”
His voice dropped. “You would be bound to me. Truly bound. Not a blood tether that fades, but a soul-bond that lasts until one of us stops existing.”
I thought about what he was offering. What he was asking.
