Zareth
My mother never knocks. The door to my private chamber falls open. I barely have time to remove my gauntlets, and Maevra Vhalor steps inside like she owns the stone itself. In a different life, she did. Part of me suspects she still believes she does.
"Close it," I say, without turning around.
The door clicks shut. The silence that follows is not comfortable. It never is between us anymore.
"Like a prince protecting his property." I pull the first gauntlet free and set it on the table. The sound rings through the room. "Which is what I am."
"The girl is not your property."
No. She is something far more dangerous than that. I don't say it.
"I placed her under my protection," I say instead. "That is my right."
"Your right?" Maevra moves into my periphery, and I finally turn to face her. The ritual scars along her throat catch the bioluminescent light. "You have jeopardized three hundred years of careful political balance for a human cartographer who stumbled into our kingdom by accident."
"Our kingdom is collapsing."
"And you believe a surface woman will stop that?"
I don't know what I believe. That is the honest answer, and I will not give it to her.
"I believe the council spending breath on her execution is time we don't have.
" I move to the narrow stone window that overlooks the lower cavern district.
From here, the capital should be lit by a hundred channeled light wells, the old Vrakken engineering that drew heat and luminescence from the mountain itself.
Tonight, two of the seven wells are completely dark.
The third is flickering so badly it looks like it's dying mid-breath. "Look at the city, Mother. Look at it."
She looks, says nothing.
"The lower wards have been cold for six days," I continue.
"Three families were evacuated from the western corridor this morning after the ceiling dropped four inches overnight.
We are bleeding out from the inside, and the council wants to hold votes about one human woman.
" I turn back to face her. "So yes. I ended that conversation. "
Maevra's expression does not change. She is marble and old blood, every soft thing carved out of her by decades of loss she will never name. I know she loves me. It lives somewhere beneath all that stone, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of it.
"You forget," she says carefully, "that the council watches for weakness. What you showed them today was not strength, Zareth. It was hunger. And there is nothing more dangerous to a ruler than letting his enemies smell what he wants."
The word lands somewhere uncomfortable.
Hunger.
Even now, standing in a room on the other side of the capital, I can feel the faint pull of it—a tug low in my chest, like a thread drawn taut.
Her scent, warm and alive and absurdly human, ghosts across my senses for just a moment before I shut it down.
She is in the eastern corridor. Resting, I think. Safe.
I think about her too often.
"Noted," I say.
"Zareth—"
"I said noted, Mother."
Her eyes stay on me for several long seconds, searching for something I won't show her.
Then she turns and leaves without another word.
Varkai arrives an hour later, bringing the smell of deep stone with him, very cold and metallic.
He moves slowly, leaning on his obsidian staff, white eyes catching the weak light as they sweep the chamber.
Old instincts make me track him like a threat even though I summoned him myself.
I have never trusted Varkai. I have also never been able to afford not to use him.
"Walk with me," I say.
We descend to the foundation level of the capital, where the ancient channeling stones were laid by the first Vrakken who built beneath this mountain. I want him to see it without preparation. I want to watch his face. He sees it.
The channeling stones which should hum with a low, constant resonance, a vibration you feel in your back teeth more than hear are silent.
Two of them are cracked like they burned out from the inside.
The air is wrong. There is a draft that should not exist, cold and carrying that particular smell of rot and ozone.
"Wildspont," Varkai says softly, almost to himself. "She breathes faster now."
"How long?"
He is quiet. He runs one gnarled hand along a cracked channeling stone, and I watch the disgust move across his face before he controls it.
"Weeks," he says. "Not months. I miscalculated the rate of the spread." His white eyes lift to mine. "The collapse is no longer gradual, my prince. It is falling."
The word drops into the silence like a stone into water.
I put my hand flat against the wall beside me.
The stone should be faintly warm from the ancient magic running through it.
It is ice cold. Somewhere above us, deep in the capital's bones, a low prolonged groan sounds like a living thing turning in its sleep.
The entire mountain is in pain, and I have no remedy left to offer it.
"Tell me what you need," I say. "Tell me what can be done."
"There are older methods." Varkai turns slowly, moving along the wall.
"Blood rituals predating the capital itself.
The mountain requires a vital and untapped source.
A power it has not yet tasted." He pauses.
"The intruder woman. Her surface blood carries resonance we have not encountered in generations. As a possible offering, she would be—"
The wall cracks. My fist is buried in the stone before I finish the thought, and I realize distantly that I've bared my fangs.
The impact travels up my arm and I don't care.
I step toward him and Varkai, who has survived longer than most living things, still goes rigid in a manner his survival instincts remain intact..
"No." My voice comes out low. Controlled. The most dangerous kind. "You will not say that again. Not as a suggestion, not as a theory, not as an implication. If I hear her referenced as an offering a second time, we are done having conversations."
Varkai studies me for a moment with those unreadable white eyes. There’s a shift in them. Not fear. Recognition.
"As you say, my prince."
The scouts arrive before we have returned to the upper chambers.
Two of them, breathless from running, smelling of fear. I know before they speak that the news is external. The look on the elder scout's face is the specific shape of a problem I haven't had in decades.
"Surface entry," he reports. "Upper caverns, eastern approach. Six hunters. Dark elf markings—Thul insignia. They are asking questions about a missing cartographer."
The silence after those words is very, very loud. Varkai says nothing. He doesn’t have to.
I turn sharply and walk. I don't run. I am moving with a purpose untethered from military strategy and wholly bound to the pull in my chest that has been tightening since the scout opened his mouth. I need to know exactly where she is. I need walls between her and that insignia.
Malachar.
His people are already here.
The political part of my mind catalogs it cleanly: they are here to retrieve her, silence her, eliminate any evidence she saw something she should not have seen. The threat is understood. The response is calculable.
But it is not strategy that drives my feet faster through the stone corridors.
It is the thought of a Thul hunter's hands closing around her arm.
The thought makes something animal rise inside me, hot and absolute and entirely beyond reason. No one touches her. Not Varkai's desperate elders, not Malachar's trained executioners, not anyone who breathes in this mountain or the one above it.
She is mine and mine alone.