Page 55 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

He looks at me patiently like he already knows how this ends.

"Tovian." His voice is granite scraping granite. "You've built something almost impressive here." His eyes move past me toward the valley below, and the contempt in his expression is so practiced it's almost bored.

I don’t react to his jab.

He reaches to his back and draws the war-blade slowly. He drives it point-first into the bedrock between us with both hands.

"I hereby invoke the Kethara." The Trial of Dominance. The ancient law carved into gargoyle bone before memory. "One on one. Sacred bedrock. No weapons. No earth magic. No interference from any faction under pain of exile." His broken horns tilt.

"Unless you'd like to explain to every Alpha watching why Tovian of the Ashwing is afraid of honest stone."

If I unleash the Ashwing army on him now, I prove every accusation he's spent this war spreading—that I'm unstable, that I've abandoned gargoyle law, that a human woman has turned me into a creature that rules by fear and numbers rather than strength. The allied factions already circling toward neutrality will fracture completely. My own traditionalist warriors will question every order I've given.

And if I refuse the trial?—

I close my eyes for exactly one second.

Sabine's voice drifts up from the valley below. Clear even through the chaos. Still commanding. Still refusing to be anything less than exactly what she is.

To save what we built, I have to step onto the altar alone.

My fingers find the buckle of my drakestone armor. The first clasp releases with a sharp click. Then the second. The breastplate falls away and hits the stone beside his war-blade.

I lift my eyes to Tharros, and I let him see everything I've become—not what he expected, not what he planned for. Something harder, violent.

"Name your ground."

29

SABINE

Imove through the field with a roll of clean linen tucked under one arm and a pot of Velka's herbal poultice balanced in my other hand, stepping carefully over supply crates and around the enormous, half-folded wings that jut into the walkways between cots. There is no graceful way to navigate this. The tents were built for humans. Nothing in this valley was ever built for beings this large.

"Hold still," I hear a village woman say somewhere to my left—Marta, the candlemaker, sixty years old and afraid of her own shadow three weeks ago. Her voice is steady now. I glance over.

She is kneeling beside a Ashwing warrior twice her height, his granite-dark flank split open from shoulder to hip by what looks like a blade that could have cleaved a door in two. Marta's hands don't shake. She presses clean linen against the wound with both palms, leaning her full weight into it, and the warrior makes a sound—low, resonant, like a cave settling after a tremor—and holds himself absolutely still for her.

I keep walking.

The wounds on these warriors are not the kind that inspire heroic poetry. They are brutal and practical and ugly—jaggedtears in stone-dense flesh where enemy claws found purchase on the mountain ridges above, wing membranes shredded to translucent ribbons, horns snapped to ragged stumps.

They came down from the fight above our heads and couldn't fly back up. So they stayed. And the humans—the same humans who bolted their shutters every time a shadow crossed the moon—came out of their homes and into the tents and started tearing strips of linen and heating water over open fires without anyone telling them to.

I don't know what to call that except grace.

Velka appears at my elbow, mud to her knees, a short axe still strapped at her hip. "Eastern perimeter is holding. Rorik's crew finished the second trench line an hour ago." She grabs the poultice pot from me without asking. "You look like you haven't sat down since dawn."

"I haven't sat down since dawn." I say deadpan.

"Astounding self-awareness." She ladles poultice into a smaller bowl. "Vorgrym's patrol rotated back. No new movement on the north pass."

"Yet."

"Yet," she agrees. We both know what yet means tonight.

Father Corren callsthe congregation at midday.

Word moves through the camp the way fire moves and by the time I reach the open center ground, half the settlement is already there. Fighters still carrying weapons. Elders wrapped in winter wool. Children pressed behind their mothers' legs. The faces are exhausted and frightened and tight.