Former queen Rheda had pressed it into my hands the moment she’d stepped back. Small, worn leather, the kind of document that had been unrolled in judgment halls for centuries.
My eyes stopped on one entry near the bottom.
The Barrows.Beyond Veyndral’s northern border. Shifting terrain, beasts that had never been tamed, forests designed to trap and disorient. No shelter or death, because the land wouldn’t grant it. Sentenced lycans wandered until their bodies gave out, which for their species took a very long time.
I rolled the scroll closed.
Altun flanked my left, arms folded, his expression offering nothing. He’d delivered verdicts for centuries. This one wasn’t his to give.
Right. Punishment menu reviewed. Just needed to pick from it without vomiting, passing out, or looking uncertain in front of wolves who were still deciding whether the potential human queen was worth following.
I looked at Annora first.
The aristocratic mask was gone. Stripped by hours of captivity, a failed escape, and the particular humiliation of being dragged back to the camp she’d tried to burn down from the inside. Her wrist still bore the marks from where I’d gripped it days ago. The other cheek carried a bruise from the soldiers who’d caught her at the portal.
She met my gaze and the desperation in her eyes was real. Calculated, but real.
“It was Giselle,” Annora said. The words tumbled out in a rush. “She approached me. She had access to the supply station, she knew the schedules, she planted the...”
“That’s a lie!” Giselle’s head snapped toward her. “You brought the Nighthollow from Veyndral. You planned every detail. I followed your orders because you said the council would...”
“I said nothing of the sort. You were jealous. You wanted Solomon to...”
“You wanted the king! Don’t pretend this was about anything other than your...”
They turned on each other with the viciousness of allies whose alliance had been built on ambition rather than loyalty. Each sentence peeled back another layer of the conspiracy, exposing the architecture beneath.
Annora’s political strategy. Giselle’s personal vendetta. Both of them feeding each other’s worst impulses until the Nighthollow vial became the logical conclusion.
I let them talk. Let the clearing hear every word. Let the ravens record the unraveling for whatever council archive they fed into.
Then I walked towards them.
I could feel the three gazes on my back from Lucian, Solomon, and Percival but I focused on crossing the distance to Annora. Each step cost more than the last because my legs were still unreliable and the clearing was watching. The weight of what I was about to do pressed against my chest.
Annora looked up at me from her knees. The height difference was reversed now. She’d spent weeks towering over me with her aristocratic posture and centuries of breeding. Now she knelt in dirt and I stood above her with a fury that had been building since she arrived.
“You called my children half-breeds,” I said. My voice carried without effort. The clearing had gone silent enough that a whisper would have reached the perimeter. “You called them abominations. You said the bond was a mistake and their lives should never have been conceived.”
Annora’s mouth opened. To explain, to justify, to deploy whatever political framework she’d constructed to make attempted murder sound reasonable.
I slapped her across the face.
The sound cracked through the camp. Her head snapped sideways, a red mark blooming across the cheekbone that wasn’t already bruised, and the silence after was absolute.
My hand stung. The impact radiated up my wrist and into my forearm and I didn’t care because the satisfaction of it burned brighter than the pain.
Rheda’s mouth twitched. A micro-expression, gone before anyone else caught it. Approval wrapped in restraint.
“That,” I said, “was for calling them abominations.”
I turned to Giselle. She flinched before I’d taken a step. The soldier who’d extended her claws at a pregnant woman, who’d stood over me with grief wearing the costume of aggression, couldn’t hold my gaze.
“And you.” My voice dropped. “You said I’d never deserve them. That I was playing house. That when the war ended, I’d leave and ruin them.”
Giselle’s chin trembled. Tears tracked through the dirt on her face.
“You were right about one thing. I might not deserve him. But you don’t get to make that call. And you definitely don’t get topoison the woman carrying his children because your feelings got hurt.”
