Page 45 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Then I move.

I cross the balcony faster than anything on this realm can follow. My hand closes at his throat. His back meets the rail hard enough to knock the sound out of him. I hold him there. My grip stays exactly where I want it, short of what it would take, and he gets to feel the difference.

He doesn’t fight me, doesn’t reach for anything. Both hands stay open at his sides the entire time.

I bring my face down close to his.

“You’re right about the crime,” I tell him. “You’re wrong about what to do with it. If you come at my people to prove a point, this is what’s waiting for you. I won’t stop where I stopped just now.”

He looks back at me from four inches away with my hand around his throat, his pulse steady under my fingers.

“You’ll understand it before this is finished,” he says. “I’d rather you understood it sooner.”

I let go of him.

He straightens his collar, then turns and walks the length of the balcony toward the garden wall. There’s a gap in that wall that wasn’t there when I came out.

I look away for a breath.

When I look back the gap is stone again. There’s nobody on this balcony but me.

I put both hands on the rail and hold on. Then I make myself breathe.

My hands are shaking. Not much but enough that I can see it against the stone.

Underneath the shaking, all of it is sitting there waiting for me. The Chambers. A floor he walked on before I was born. Every word he said about the tribunal and the Council, all of it true, none of it anything I can hand to another living soul.

The birds are still at it down there. Nothing in this valley knows what just happened on this balcony.

I stay at the rail until my hands quit. It takes longer this morning than it’s taken in years.

Valen comes back up from the grounds a while later. He’s got the look he wears when he’s walked a perimeter, found it clean, and doesn’t believe a word of it. There’s grass seed on his boots and the wind has been through his hair.

“Anything?” I ask him.

“Everything’s exactly the way they said it would be.” He sets his pack down. “That’s my whole report.”

He looks at me for a moment, the same look he’s given me every day since the North Range.

“I’ve got something,” I say. “The court records from yesterday. There was a reference in one of the older ones to the Purification Chambers, offhand, in a list. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“And now you do.”

“Now I do.”

He believes me, has no reason not to.

What I told him is true and it isn’t what happened.

So, now there are two of them in here. Faelan on this balcony, and what the archive said about Valen. I am carrying both into the next realm.

Chapter 27

Valen

The stair runs down inside the castle wall and goes further under Gleann na Sidhe than either of us has had reason to go.

It isn’t cut stone at the top. It’s grown. Root and rock have come up through each other over a long time until there’s no telling which one holds the other in place. Whatever the fae do to make a thing instead of building it, they did it here. All of it carries the same warmth as the halls above us and the same faint charge working at the backs of my hands.