“ENOUGH.”
My voice rides the wards. Windows quiver. Torches bow. Every bloom in the beds turns to face me like congregants remembering how to pray.
I open my left hand. Light gathers—silver first, then the fierce green of new vines shouldering through stone, then a steady gold that has nothing to do with crowns and everything to do with the stubborn beat under my ribs. Runes ladder upmy forearm, old Summer script and older forest mark, binding themselves into a sigil that readsNo More Hiding.
“I am not a scandal to be managed,” I say, and my words braid into the air, into the wards, into the listening stone. “I am not penance for a king’s sin. I am not a balm for a weapon who can’t decide to be a man.”
The guards hesitate at the arch. Kaelen appears behind them, sword at his hip, eyes wide andlistening.
“Princess—”
“Stand down,” I say without looking. The command is soft as velvet, heavy as iron. Steel lowers. Boots retreat a pace.
I reach into my bodice and pull out the thorn-bound scroll. The sealing thread pricks my thumb—blood bright as a promise. I break it. The Order unfurls like a confession dragged to light.
“By the blood that named me and the magic that made me,” I say, voice steady as tide, “I annul this issuance.” The runes on my arm flare and leap, scrawling a counter-script in the air—letters of light overlaying the old cruelty until the page itself smokes. “Any hand that moves against a berserker line in my name burns.”
The parchment combusts—clean, complete. Ash spins and catches the gold air. The wardlines drink the ash and hum, satisfied.
My knees want to go. I make them stay.
I turn my face to the palace. The bond tightens, a knuckle against a door. I press my palm to the mark.Feel this, I tell it—not compulsion, not a breach—just truth pushed along a tether we didn’t ask for and kept anyway. I send him the shape of the Order. Not its heat. Not its smoke. The shape. The choices. The wordfatherlaid next tomurderwithout apology.
I do not beg. I do not excuse. I do not frame myself inside his hurt to make it easier to look at.
Power still roars in my veins, but I welcome it now. I take the storm by the throat and teach it how to move with me. Lightning gentles into thread; I stitch it into the clouds and sign my name across the night. The garden exhales. The vines I cracked out of the ground resettle, gripping stone like guardians rather than jaws.
Kaelen steps into the edge of my magic and stops when it tests him. He raises both hands. “Yuna,” he says—friend-soft, court-steady. “Do you need a wall, or do you need a door?”
“A door,” I answer, and the power parts just enough to let him stand two paces away. His eyes flick to the fading rune on my arm, then the ash-deepened wards. Pride tries his mouth on for size and keeps it.
“Messages?” he asks.
“Yes.” I lift my chin and the girl who used to braid flowers into Minji’s hair stands shoulder to shoulder with the princess who has learned which knives belong in which rooms. “To the Queen of Summer: bring your truth to the parley or keep your silence at home. To the Consort-King: if he speaks my name while plotting another purge, I take his tongue and leave him his crown. To the court: I am not peeling myself into something prettier so their politics can eat it easier.”
Kaelen’s nostrils flare. “And to the prince of wrath?”
The bond answers for me, hot and honest. I meet Kaelen’s gaze anyway. “He knows,” I say, and it isn’t cruelty; it’s faith. “If he wants me, he can stand where the knives can findbothof us.”
The last of the lightning climbs my arm and sinks into skin, a thin, bright line that will fade, then never quite. The guards put their swords away with the care men use aroundsaints and storms. Somewhere, ward-drums shift cadence—moving fromgathertoready.
I pick up a cluster of fire blossoms, twist them until they are a crown, and set it on the bench beside me. I do not wear it. Let anyone who needs a picture learn to imagine it without help.
“Princess.” Seori’s voice comes through the wards—bone-sure, sister-soft.I felt that.
Good,I send back along the weave I reforged.I meant you to.
The wind turns. Petals rise and wheel like small, bright birds. My braid settles against my spine, heavy with moonstones I will keep because they glint like honest work, not because anyone says they prove me.
I look up into the sky I just stitched and feel a steadiness I haven’t tasted since I was very small and the world was less crowded with men’s ideas. I am still shaking. But the shake has changed dialect. It readsreadinessinstead ofcollapse.
“Let them come,” I tell the night, and my power carries it to every listening surface. “Let them ask me to be small. Let them ask me to be silent. Let them bring their old orders and their newer lies.”
I lift my hand; the rune under my skin answers with a warm, low thrum.
“I am done being hidden. I am done being sorry. I am done waiting.”
The garden, greedy for beauty, keeps the echo. The mark answers—one steady pulse that feels less like ache and more like drumline.
