Page 49 of Given to the Black King

“You are unbearable.”

I leave before she can smell how pleased I am.

That night the ache wakes me before the moon clears the wall.

I lie in the dark with the taste of her on my tongue and the memory of her hand around me. My body is hard. My fangs pulse with her sleeping heart.

I take myself in hand.

There is no point pretending it is discipline. I use the memory of her legs around my head. Her fingers on my horns. Her voice saying more.

I finish hard against my fist and bite down on the leather strap I keep beside the bed. The fangs bracket the leather; my back teeth take the pressure. The strap holds.

The relief lasts moments.

By dawn I am in the training yard splitting posts, but the claws stay out of my skin.

A lamp burns on the colonnade rail. Beside it waits hot wine and a small clay pot.

Salve. Southern herbs. Orchard scent.

No note.

I open the pot and rub it into the splits beneath my claws.

Orchard scent rises from my hands.

IONA

Aboy carries a bucket of sand into the audience hall.

That is how I learn law-day will include blood.

He sets the bucket beside a low wooden block near the east pillar, then returns with a second. Nobody else looks at him.

I take a place in the side gallery with Perr and three black-country clerks. Two Serathi guards wait at the rear doors for the delegation’s duty watch.

“What is the block for?” I ask.

Perr sees it and swallows. “I don’t know.”

One of the local clerks glances over. “You will.”

The doors open.

Torgan takes the throne. Ghenn stands at his right hand with a stack of petitions.

For the first hour, the work is ordinary. A boundary stone moved in the night. A miller who watered his weights. Two brothers arguing over a bridge toll.

Torgan hears each case, asks three or four blunt questions, and decides. Fast. No speeches. No appeals to tradition when a sum will do.

The miller loses his false weights. His son keeps the mill.

Then Ghenn calls Vessel.

The widow walks in alone. A crown grain wagon brought her from Vessel under garrison escort; the soldiers remain outside the hall.

I recognize her from the granary square. Road dust stains the hem of her dress. She stops before the dais and does not kneel.