Page 27 of Given to the Black King

“His people call it the choosing. The old blood picks one mate. Once. Could be anyone. Usually someone inconvenient, if the stories are true.”

My fingers tighten around the wet sheet.

“And the fangs?”

“They wake.” Sera touches her own eyetooth. “Ache until the mating bite is given.”

“Given by whom?”

“You.”

The wash house seems to tilt. Sera catches the basket before I drop it.

“You did ask.”

“He told you?”

“The king tells me nothing. Men don’t tell laundresses anything. They only bleed on cloth and think that keeps their secrets.”

I sit on the edge of the folding table. Sera picks up the shirt again.

“I know the shape of the law, not the private words of the rite,” she says. “The bite must be offered. Spoken and meant. If he takes it by force, the bond goes wrong.”

“How wrong?”

Her hands slow.

“My great-grandmother saw what was left of one,” Sera says. “A woman hollowed out by a forced bond. The old king killed the man, but she never came back to herself.”

A cold wave moves through me despite the steam. Sera shakes out the shirt.

“That is why the pale horns hang over the gate. Oath-breakers. His own blood.”

I think of Torgan in the corridor, claws driven into stone beside my head. He had smelled that I wanted those claws on me.

He had left anyway.

“Does he have a choice?” I ask.

“About the choosing? No.”

“About what he does with it?”

Sera snorts. “Of course he does. He has choices coming out of his ears. That man chooses where to put his feet, his hands, his teeth, same as anyone.”

I get up.

Sera points at the half-hung sheet. “You’re not leaving that crooked.”

I straighten it.

She grunts approval.

In the passage outside, I stop at the first locked door and count the hinges. Then the next. By the time I reach my rooms, I know every turn between the wash house and the outer yard.

I change for the treaty session twice. The first dress shows my throat. The second does too.

At the third treaty session that afternoon, I cannot stop looking at his mouth.