Stormforge shouted over Iron Fang, their usual hostility forgotten in the growing anger.
“You said we were the last line,” someone else growled, “not the only line.”
Questions exploded all at once—louder, sharper, overlapping like crashing waves.
“Will there be an evacuation?”
“What of Thubia?”
“Where is Dorian?”
“Why aren’t we allowed to act?”
Zander had joined our side now, his arms crossed tightly over his chest as he watched his brother, the prince regent, flounder beneath the barrage of voices. Theron’s posture remained composed, but the rigid set of his jaw told another story.
He hadn’t expected this. Even his loyal Iron Fang members were asking questions.
He expected fear.
Obedience.
An Iron Fang rider, broad-shouldered with a jagged scar down one cheek, stepped forward, his voice cutting through the mounting chaos like a blade. “We should be following Dorian. He’s the one the dragons trusted with the trial. He didn’t abandon his own brother.”
Gasps echoed. Even some of Iron Fang’s own shifted uneasily.
Theron’s head snapped toward him, the regal mask slipping just enough to show the fury beneath. “And whereismy elder brother?” he snarled, his voice rising like a whipcrack over the murmurs. “I have asked him—begged him—to take this burden from me. Again and again. But he refuses.He hides behind missions and diplomacy, unwilling to make the hard choices required to keep this realm from burning.”
Silence fell like a dropped stone. Theron let it stretch.
“I am not perfect,” he said, pacing slowly in front of the podium. “But there hasn’t been a full-on Blood Fae war in over six hundred years.”
“Because the wards are dropping!” a woman from Stormforge shouted. Her face was red with rage, fists clenched. “And now they’re gone!”
Theron turned to her, a grim smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Yes,” he said quietly, “Let’s address that problem. Right now.”
He swept his gaze across the sea of riders, the shadows of dragons circling above cast like wings across his golden cloak.
“Someone has orchestrated the deaths of over thirty warders in the last season alone. Thirty. If they were still alive, the wards would hold. The outer kingdoms would be shielded. The commoners wouldn’t be flooding the guilds, and we would not be forced to recall our dragons just to protect our own house.”
A rough and uncertain voice from the back called out, “Who killed the warders?”
Theron didn’t hesitate.
He turned his cold gaze toward me, his words venomous and sure.
“The same people who orchestrate every assassination,” he said. “The Order.”
Gasps rippled again.
But I didn’t flinch.
Not because it wasn’t a possibility.
But because I knew the Order wasn’t behind this.
At least not alone.
ChapterTwenty-Six
