Page 38 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

The generals arrive later in the night. They’ve all gathered inside the command tent and have already decided what they want to say. They've rehearsed it. Practiced the words in pairs along the tree line where they thought I couldn't hear them.

I heard every word.

I take my place at the head of the map table and say nothing. Let the silence do what silence always does — separate the cowards from the ones willing to bleed for what they believe. My generals stand in a half-circle. Twelve Ashwing warriors who have survived centuries of territorial war, scouts, and stone sleep. Men who once followed me without question.

They are looking at me now like they are measuring how much I've shrunk.

"Speak." My voice is entirely stripped of ceremony.

The silence breaks faster than I expected.

"The clans are calling you compromised." Drevkan, one of my eldest ground commanders, steps forward. He is broad and scarred and old enough to remember what I looked like beforethe cathedral fell. "They say the human female has made you emotional. Soft."

"And what do you say?"

He meets my eyes, which I respect even if I hate him for it. "I say the rumors are spreading faster than we can cut them down. That is a problem regardless of their truth."

"The truth," I say carefully, "is that we have held this mountain. We have repelled every scout party Tharros sent through the eastern pass. We broke Flora's flank at the ridge without losing a single aerial unit." I look around the tent slowly. "Which part of that reads as soft to you?"

No one answers. But Drevkan isn't finished.

"She slows your decisions. You hesitate when she's near the front. You split your attention?—"

"My attention has never been split. Not once."

It is Reth who ruins it. Younger than Drevkan, stupider, and twice as bold because of it. He steps away from the half-circle with his chin raised and says it plainly, the way only the truly arrogant manage — without thinking.

"Human blood weakens everything it touches. You included."

The tent disappears.

Not literally. But every sound inside it vanishes beneath the roar that fills my skull. I feel my skin shift. My stone-gray surface bleeds midnight-black from the chest outward, the way it always does when the killing instinct takes over completely. My talons slide free with the sound of drawn blades. The map table between us means nothing. I clear it in one movement, and then my hand is around Reth's throat and he is off the ground and pinned to the table with his feet dangling and his mouth working silently.

The maps crumple beneath him. The oil lamp tips and shatters on the frozen earth.

I can feel his pulse hammering against my palm. Can feel the exact pressure it would take to close that pulse off forever. My grip tightens one degree. Then another.

"Tovian."

Vorgrym's voice. Low. I don't move.

"If you crush his throat in front of twelve generals, you will have demonstrated precisely what Tharros wants them to believe. That you can’t be controlled. Is that the report you want carried back to the mountain passes tonight?"

The pressure in my chest doesn't ease. But my grip does. One finger at a time.

Reth drops. He hits the map table coughing and slides sideways onto the ground. The other generals haven't moved. Twelve warriors who have survived centuries of war, and not one of them breathed while my hand was on his throat.

I turn and exit the tent without another word. The cold hits me like a wall.

The camp is quiet this deep into the night — watch rotations, the distant murmur of human voices from the valley side of the tree line, the occasional shift of a gargoyle sentinel against the dark sky overhead. I move through it without stopping, without direction, until my feet bring me where they always bring me when my mind is the loudest it's ever been.

Sabine's tent.

I don't go in. I stay at the entrance with the canvas half-raised in one hand and listen.

Her breathing.

Slow, and steady, and so profoundly human that the center of my chest closes like a fist. She is lying on her side with one arm curved beneath her head, her dark braid loose across the pillow, and the faint silver markings on her wrist catching the dim light bleeding through the canvas walls. She doesn't stir. Doesn't sense me.