Chapter 5 #2
They march me through a corridor of the same pale stone, down one flight of stairs, and along a passage lit by steady white globes set into the walls.
Entherian tech, maybe, or Glowranth bio-lamps.
The effect is too clean for torches. It makes the place feel institutional rather than medieval, which is somehow less comforting than a dungeon would have been. Dungeons at least admit what they are.
This place looks like bureaucracy with knives.
We pass two more locked doors, a central chamber with a desk and two scribes, then another corridor where the air grows warmer. Not hot. Just less damp. Better appointed. Which tells me we’re moving into a part of the building meant for conversation rather than storage.
I catalogue details automatically—turnings, the number of guards, the smells—and out of habit. It won’t help me escape. Not really. But knowing things has always made me feel less like prey.
The room they take me to is not what I expect.
There’s no chair bolted to the floor, no chains hanging on the wall, and no tray of glinting implements laid out for dramatic effect.
It looks more like an audience chamber that has been pared down to its essentials.
A long table of dark wood sits off to one side, untouched.
The centre of the room is open, with two chairs facing each other near a brazier that gives off no smoke and very little heat.
Pale blue light glows under the stone veins in the walls, tracing subtle patterns that might be decorative or might be some kind of old power system.
A place designed to unsettle without appearing crude.
Very… royal.
The guards leave me alone. For a moment, I stand in the centre of the room and don’t sit. If they’re trying to make me nervous, mission accomplished.
The air feels charged in a way I can’t quite explain, as if the room itself is listening. Then the opposite door opens, and she walks in.
I know who she is before my mind catches up.
Some instinctive part of me identifies danger with perfect clarity, and the rest follows after.
The Queen.
Serresta.
She is taller than most Glowranth I’ve seen, though not as broad as the guards.
Elegant in that unnerving, monstrous way their royal line seems to cultivate—every movement precise, controlled, and effortlessly predatory.
Her skin is a deep, saturated blue that catches the low light and gives it back with a faint internal shimmer, lighter than the armour-dark tones of some of her soldiers but richer than the washed shades I’ve seen on merchant houses.
Bioluminescent markings thread along the ridges of her arms and throat, subtle at first glance and impossible to ignore once you’ve noticed them.
Her eyes are luminous, almost silver-blue, and utterly inhuman in the steadiness of their regard.
A sigil glows at the base of her throat and spreads down across her chest beneath the cut of her gown, etched into her skin like a birthmark made of living light. Royal markings, if the rumours are true.
Her nostrils flare once as she takes me in, and I get the immediate, ridiculous impression of a large cat deciding whether I’m food, threat, or entertainment.
“Pax,” she says.
Perfect English.
No accent I can place. Or perhaps all of them combined, smoothed into something almost too precise.
“Your Majesty,” I say, because I’m not stupid.
Her mouth curves, not kindly. “How pleasant. You do know your manners.”
“Selective miracle.”
One brow rises. “You joke.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Which occupation is that? Mechanic? Smuggler? Informant? Human curiosity?”
Every answer would be a trap, so I offer none of them.
She circles me once, not close enough to touch and not far enough to feel safe. She smells faintly of cold spice and ozone.
“Are you comfortable?” she asks.
The question is so absurd, I almost laugh. “I’ve had better mornings.”
“I’m sure.”
She takes the chair opposite mine and folds herself into it with impossible poise, long fingers resting lightly on one arm. When she gestures, it’s clear she expects to be obeyed. I sit because standing there looming over a seated queen seems like a quick route to an early grave.
For a little while, she doesn’t ask about rebels or tunnels or routes. She talks about humans.
Not casually. Not kindly. Clinically.
It throws me off-balance more effectively than a threat would have.
“Such a varied species,” she says, watching my face as if it might tell her more than my answers will.
“You arrive from different worlds and yet often believe yourselves one people. Your languages overlap and fracture. Your cultures do the same. You divide yourselves by nations, by faiths, by histories, by skin.”
Her gaze drifts over me, deliberate and cool. My brown skin. My locs, tied back badly after a run-in with the ground. The shape of my face, the scar near my eye.
“And yet,” she says, “you remain recognisably human to one another. Interesting.”
I am very aware of how carefully I need to move here. “Most species probably look more different to themselves than they do to outsiders.”
Her eyes narrow slightly with something like approval. “Perhaps.”
She asks where I was born. I tell her the truth because it’s old truth and harmless truth.
Coventry. She asks where I grew up. I say Australia.
She asks if I prefer one over the other, and I say that depends very much on the weather and whether anyone in the room is secretly hoping I’ll incriminate myself.
Again that near-smile, but still, there’s no warmth in it.
“You are cautious.”
“I’ve had practice.”
“So I have heard.”
The conversation tilts then, subtly enough that I almost miss it.
“My youngest son,” she says, as though we are discussing weather after all, “has developed an interest in humans.”
My pulse jumps once, and I force it back down.
“I’ve heard rumours,” she continues.
“Have you.”
Not a question.
She studies me. “Have you met him?”
“No.”
That at least is true.
I’ve seen Aelith at a distance once or twice. Court processions. Moving through the upper city with guards and arrogance and the sort of wealth that makes itself visible even at fifty paces. But I’ve never met him. Never spoken to him. Never had reason to.
She tilts her head. “Curious. There are many stories at present. My son and his alleged bond. His alleged sympathies. So much imagination in this city.”
I keep my mouth shut.
She notices. Of course she notices.
“I do not believe all of them,” she says. “In fact, I believe very few.”
Still I say nothing. The room feels smaller with every breath.
“I do think he has found his mate,” she continues. “That much rings true. But I am quite certain the species is human.”
There it is. A test thrown soft as silk and clean as a blade.
Every part of me goes still. I focus on breathing. On the ache in my ribs. On not letting my face do anything interesting.
She watches for the reaction anyway.
Maybe she gets one. Maybe she doesn’t. If she does, she gives nothing away.
Then her gaze narrows and returns fully to me. “But I am less interested in my son than in you.”
That drops badly enough that I feel it in my stomach.
She rises and crosses the room with unhurried grace. “I have heard another rumour,” she says. “One concerning the commander of the Riftborn rebels.”
I say nothing. This time silence feels dangerous whichever way I hold it.
“That you are his mate.”
Still I say nothing.
Denying it could be useful, if she truly doesn’t know. Denying it could also confirm I understand exactly what matters in the question. Silence might look stubborn. It might look guilty. It might look prudent.
I hate every option.
She must read something in me because she moves before I fully see it happen.
One second she is two steps away. The next her hand is around my throat, and I’m off my feet.
It’s so fast, my body doesn’t register the transition properly. My chair tips backward and cracks against the floor as she lifts me one-handed, not straining, not even breathing hard. My bare feet scrape empty air.
I’m not a small man. She doesn’t care.
Her face is close enough now that I can see the fine pattern of luminous veins beneath her skin, the faint pulse of that royal sigil below her collarbone.
“You need not answer,” she says conversationally, as though we’re still seated. Her grip flexes just enough to make stars gather at the corners of my vision. “I am less concerned with the truth from your mouth than with what your pain may provoke for him.”
I grab at her wrist on instinct. It’s like trying to pry loose forged metal.
“All a mate requires,” she says, eyes glowing cold and bright, “is incentive.”
Then the pain hits.
Not from the hand at my throat but from my left arm.
She seizes my forearm with the other hand and twists. There’s no warning. No chance to brace.
The sound is wet and bright and horribly intimate, a crack followed by the tearing grind of something that should not move that way.
Pain explodes from elbow to wrist so hard, it blanks the room, blanks thought, blanks everything but the animal fact of damage.
I hear myself make a noise I don’t recognise and hate it instantly.
She doesn’t stop there.
Her clawlike hand—because of course she has claws, neat and royal and very sharp—press in just below my wrist where the bones have shifted under skin, and she leans enough pressure into the break that the world goes white.
“Tell him,” she says distantly, from very far away and much too close, “that next time I will take the hand.”
I try to breathe and can’t.
Try to think and can’t.
The floor rises too fast when she lets go. I hit it on my side, cradling the ruined arm before I know I’m doing it. My vision blurs. The brazier light smears. Somewhere above me her gown whispers across stone as she steps back.