Caspian didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed on Kieran.
“I am involved.”
The words landed wrong. Two rows down, a girl I didn’t know whispered ‘this is good’ too loud.
Kieran stood.
He did it too quickly. Pain flashed under his collar — green-gold, a thin shiver of his Mark misfiring — and he covered it by setting one hand on the table. The hand stayed there too long to be doing anything but supporting him.
“Convenient,” he said.
Caspian went still. He was choosing his next sentence carefully. I could see it happen behind his eyes, the slow arrangement of one word against another.
“What is?”
“How involved you get to be.”
“Kieran,” I said.
He heard me, but he didn’t stop.
“The Council writes your name beside hers and calls it official,” Kieran said. “The rest of us have to make sure breathing near her doesn’t damn us all.”
Caspian’s hand closed into a fist.
“You think I don’t know that’s how it is?”
“I think Ashford men have always known exactly what they were taking and never cared if it was given willingly.”
The sentence hit the table like a dropped blade.
Somewhere behind me a chair scraped.
Caspian’s voice, when it came, was very quiet.
“Then say my father’s name, Marsh. While we’re here. While they’re listening. Tell them all I’m just like him.”
Kieran’s jaw worked but he didn’t say it.
Caspian stepped forward. Kieran did too. Half a stride each. Close enough that I could see the muscle work under the line of Kieran’s locs, close enough that the cold off Caspian had a temperature I could feel along my forearm.
My Mark answered both of them at once.
Pain snapped under my sleeve, a clean cut of it, bright, deep enough to steal my breath. I made a sound before I could swallow it.
Both men stopped.
Neither one looked at the other. They looked at my wrist. My Mark. The place where the line of it burned in.
That was when Cosima reached us.
She didn’t hurry. The room moved out of her way anyway, the way rooms had always moved out of her way. Quiet, instinctive, embarrassed by their own deference.
“Sit down,” she said.
Kieran’s mouth opened.
“Both of you.” She didn’t raise her voice. “Now.”
