Page 53 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

"You don’t know?—"

"He is alone up there." I reach for my coat. "Alone, in front of every general who is looking for a reason to abandon him or betray him again, and I left because I thought I was protecting him. I wasn't protecting him. I was finishing Tharros's work for him."

"You have claw wounds."

"I've had worse."

"You are one human woman?—"

"I know what I am." I pull the coat on and reach for my blade belt. The drakestone hilt is cold beneath my palm. "I know exactly what I am. That's why I have to stand there."

She doesn't stop me. I think she knows, somewhere behind the practicality and the loyalty and the genuine fear for my life, that this was always how it was going to go. She stares at me for several seconds. Then she exhales through her nose and says nothing at all.

The mountain trailis frost-choked and steep, mist hanging so thick between the pines I can barely see ten feet ahead. My side pulls with every uphill step. I don't slow down.

I think about what Tharros expects. He expects grief from a broken Alpha whose mate fled and whose court has already started the eulogy. He expects the narrative he built—that the bond is a weakness, that Tovian's attachment to a human woman is proof of instability, that a ruler who can be moved by love can’t be trusted with a kingdom.

I think about what they are going to see instead.

The primary entrance to the great cavern yawns open below the cathedral ruins, and I walk straight through it. The guards at the entrance go rigid. One of them takes a step toward me. I look at him once. He steps back.

The murmur starts ahead of me before I even reach the staging area. I can hear it, low and rippling, moving through the assembled generals and commanders like a current through still water.

I keep walking.

The cavern opens up around me—high ceilings, twisted stone pillars, torchlight throwing long shadows across the marked walls. It is crowded. Gargoyle generals, allied commanders, what remains of Tovian's inner vanguard. The smell of stone and cold fire.

And Tovian.

He stands at the center of it, and the sight of him quiets the screaming in my chest that has not stopped since I left. He looks haggard. His stone skin has gone dull and grey-flat, stripped of the low luminescence it carries when he's rested. His wings are slightly lowered — not folded tight, not spread for aggression, just dropped at the edges, like a weight he's been carrying for hours. His eyes are fixed on the middle distance.

The breath he pulls in as he sees me is sharp enough that I hear it across the cavern.

His wings twitch once like a reflex he didn't choose. His hands, hanging at his sides, begin to shake. The stoic mask cracks completely.

I walk to him, stop beside him.

The cavern is absolutely silent.

I don't explain myself or offer apologies or beg the assembled court for patience. I simply stand in the heart of the Ashwing court, beside Tovian's shoulder, where I belong.

28

TOVIAN

The war horns split the mountain silence from every direction at once. The kind of sound that lives in your bones long after the throat that made it is gone.

I launch into the air.

I left her an hour ago. Still feels like a wound. Sabine stands at the entrance of the lower cavern tunnel, her arms crossed over her chest with the infuriating set in her eyes, slowly becoming a dull speck in the vast ground.

She told me to go. Just that. Go. Like she wasn't sending me into the largest aerial engagement the valley has seen in three centuries. Like she wasn't the reason I had anything left worth defending.

I didn't say what I wanted to say. There wasn't time, and even if there had been, the words would have choked me before they reached the surface.

So I did as I was told.

From eight hundred feet, the valley is a living map.