Chapter 4 #3
Wrath carved hard lines into him as he leaned forward, his presence tightening the air itself. He hissed a single word, dripping with venom: “Kyndralis.”
For a long, strained moment Aedric sat like stone.
It only stoked Sairus’s fury.
“The blood of thirty thousand Solmirans is on your hands, my Lord,” he snarled as he jabbed a finger toward me. “All because you’ve gone cunt-mad for your Eidra whore.”
My pulse hammered, my ears heating.
Aedric didn’t so much as blink. If the insult struck home, nothing in his face betrayed it – only his eyes flashed, lit with a rage his features refused to show.
“I fear, Uncle,” he said at last, a dangerous smile curling his mouth even as every syllable sliced like a blade, “that you forget yourself. You will address me with respect—lest I cut your tongue out and feed it to the drakes in the Vein.”
He gestured toward me, palm up. It took me a heartbeat to realize he meant for me to take his hand. I slid mine into his without hesitation. His grip tightened, as though he were wrestling to hold himself in check.
“And,” he finished, voice thinning to a deadly calm, “you will extend the same courtesy to my bonded mate.”
Sairus’s gaze slid to me, cold and merciless. “She should be bound in iron. Warded.” His fingers tightened against the edge of the table until the wood creaked softly beneath his grip. “There is no such thing as a safe Eidra.”
“She will not harm anyone,” he said stiffly. “She is half-human. She has lived as one.”
Sairus’s mouth twisted. “You cannot unmake blood, my Lord,” he said coldly. “You cannot civilize what was shaped to endure—to preserve itself when everything else burns. An Eidra will always choose its own survival. Whatever stands in its way will be destroyed.”
Aedric crossed one leg casually over the other, but his eyes remained hard as flint. “Then I suggest you avoid standing in her way.”
“I know history,” Sairus snapped. “I remember—as should you. An Eidra inside our walls. Vaelorii in the sky. The Dreamwalker unchained. You don’t need to consult Levinica to see where this will lead.
” He exhaled sharply through his nose. “She released him. She shattered the Veil. Whether by will or by nature, the result is the same.” His gaze burned into Aedric.
“She must be bound in iron for the safety of our people.”
A dark look crossed Aedric’s face.
“If iron so much as brushes her skin while she remains in Dheren,” he said quietly, “mark my words, Uncle—you will not live long enough to regret it.”
Heat stirred through the chamber.
Sairus’s face reddened with rage. He pointed a gnarled finger at me. “Your parents—my own brother—were butchered by her kind.”
My heart squeezed painfully, but Aedric’s face was a mask hewn from stone.
“I will not condemn Elowen for crimes committed long before her birth,” he said, low and steady.
“Not even when my own family suffered from them. The Eidrae paid dearly for that grievance. The last of her kind, bound to our Court, strengthens Elantis. She could be the difference between survival and annihilation when the Dark Prince rises again.”
“You always did confuse selfishness with strategy.” Sairus straightened slowly. “From the moment you took that seat, you have dragged this Court toward ruin.”
“I have only ever done what is necessary for Elantis.”
“Necessary?” Sairus barked a humorless laugh. “And was the flaw in the Veil necessary too?”
Aedric leaned forward in his seat, levelling his stare of blue fire at his uncle.
“What will you do, Sairus? Bring this matter before the Full Circle? Contest my seat simply because I refuse to keep her as a prisoner?”
Sairus’s eyes flashed but he said nothing.
“Before you decide, I suggest you remember what happened the last time you challenged me. You were in your prime then—and still you lost.” His voice dropped. “I spared your life once. I would not count on such mercy again.”
“I have no designs upon your throne.” Sairus smoothed a hand slowly across the table, the ghost of something unpleasant curling at the corner of his mouth. “Not for myself. Not anymore.”
His eyes slid briefly to Calantha. The look lingered just long enough to make his meaning unmistakable.
Heat flared through Aedric’s hand where it clasped mine, sudden enough to make me suck in air through my teeth. He let go at once.
“Father,” Calantha said carefully. The sound of her voice sent fear skittering down my spine.
“No one is disputing the danger of an Eidra. But if Elowen healed herself from dragonfire… from wounds inflicted by a Firstborn… Then perhaps there is more value in allowing her to act willingly than in keeping her bound in iron.” Her gaze passed briefly over Aedric, her face utterly unreadable.
“If she can mend others as she healed herself… That alone could change the outcome of a war, if it comes to that.”
I couldn’t even bring myself to look at her as she glanced across the table at me. She adjusted her circlet and I almost shrank back against my seat.
Aedric’s gaze settled on me with a new kind of focus. Thoughtful. Measuring. The hard line of his mouth eased only slightly as his eyes moved over me, taking in again the impossible fact of my unburned skin.
Sairus pivoted sharply toward his guard.
“Bring one in.”
The guard obeyed without question, slipping through the door immediately.
Silence pressed down on the chamber, heavy and expectant, until the door opened again. The guard returned, a body suspended before him by unseen magic. It glided to the center of the table and hung a foot above its surface. The guard resumed his post.