He would not feed on Yorali’s handouts.
He would not be a king of death.
His hands were still trembling when he descended to the deep levels.
His father had built the lower dungeons long before Sevrin was born. Cages, really. Empty now, the iron cold, the air carrying the particular stillness of a place that had not been used in a very long time. He had never come here. He made a point of it.
Tonight the point no longer held.
She had nearly died. The wound on her ribs. The smell of her blood, richer than anything he had encountered in years, still present in his memory hours later with a clarity that should have disturbed him and did not. Yvara had been forced to give a transfusion. Yvara carried his child, yet he had agreed without hesitating and he did not regret it. That was the most damning thing of all.
And now Colsar had taken Asharin to the countryside. Away from Veynar. Away from the palace. Away from him. And whatever was happening in whatever room Colsar had brought her to, whatever was being given tonight for the first time…Sevrin would not allow himself to finish that thought. He finished it anyway. He always did.
Another image moved through his mind unbidden. Teorin on the Rathmor throne. It was no longer the loss of Veynar that disturbed him. It was that he knew Teorin, and Teorin's prize would be Asharin. Her beauty, her fertility, and the fact that both he and Colsar wanted her was something Teorin would not be able to resist. That could never happen.
Colsar having her was bad enough. But he could share the blame for that. He had arranged it, after all. And at least with Colsar he could always watch. At least with Colsar she was near.
Teorin was a different matter entirely, and he was unpredictable. The attacks would escalate. The Morraks were Sevrin’s only answer, his own Morraks, trained and ready. It would take time, but he was willing to take it.
He would not open the gate. Not yet. He would build here first, quietly. He had quieted it for years. The pull toward Morrath. The need to create. He had forced it into something smaller, safer, into the human obsession with heirs. But then she had almost died. Then she had been taken from him. And now the thrum was louder than it had ever been before. He would fix this. All of it. This would hold until the gate was opened.
He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him and felt a wave of irritation before he turned.
Lirien.
One of the women he had kept for years, shared occasionally and without acknowledgment with his brother, the arrangement understood by all parties and discussed by none. She curtsied when he turned, eyes lowered.
"I do not like being followed," he said.
"Yes, Majesty." She kept her eyes down. "I saw you making your way and I followed in hopes we could have privacy.” A small pause. "Away from Lady Yvara."
He said nothing.
She looked around at the empty cells, the iron bars, the dark. "Planning renovations, Majesty? I hear you are having your chambers redone as well."
His special room. Yes.
"I am feeling adventurous tonight," she said, her voice dropping into its practiced register. "And full of need." She reached for the fastenings of her gown, unhurried, letting the fabric fall.
In the lantern light her hair appeared gold.
Gold enough.
He looked at it for a moment. Then he crossed the space between them and pushed her against the wall, not with decision but with the particular momentum of a man who has already been moving toward something for a very long time and has simply stopped pretending he will turn back.
He did not see her.
He saw the tavern. Asharin. The particular stillness of her that had made his chest seize before the rest of him caught up. The wound on her ribs. The smell of her blood still sitting in the back of his throat hours later, warm and specific and hers in a way he could not explain and had stopped trying to. He saw her defiance in the gambling house. Her voice in the dark. The way she had looked at him once, only once, as though she was deciding something.
"Majesty," Lirien breathed. "You feel?—"
"Be quiet."
She went quiet.
He thrust harder. He was barely present. The thrum in his blood built past the point of managing, past the point of acknowledging, past the point of pretending it had anything to do with the woman against the wall. It had never had anything to do with any of them. It had always been one thing. One person. Out of reach in a countryside house with his brother's hands on her and Sevrin standing in his father's dungeons pretending he was doing something other than losing his mind.
The want had no edges anymore. It bled into everything. The need to protect and the need to possess and the fury at what they had done to her in that tavern, all of it collapsed into a single pressure he could not name and could not contain.
