Chapter 60
JASSYN
Jassyn had stopped reading the Accord’s provisional articles two hours ago.
Neat black rows crowded the vellum spread before him—trade protections, asylum clauses, limits on military command. Grievances trimmed into polite language, demands softened by titles no one had yet earned.
Every line asked the same question in a different way—what shape power should take now that the elven order had fallen.
Two weeks had passed since the sky split open above the Drowned Spires. Two weeks since Galaeryn had left a shattered world behind. Still, those drifting in the wreckage kept arriving at Jassyn’s table in pieces.
He’d planted the Accord in the druid jungle because the surrounding Wastes belonged to no realm. Between the human lands and the druid wilds, Blossom had given their new alliance a place to flourish.
This council chamber hadn’t existed before she grew it.
The dragon had raised the room high within one of the great trees, open to the jungle on every side, with a stairway winding through the trunk to the city below.
She’d coaxed dwellings from the canopy without felling a single tree, bending wood into columns and drawing branches together into vaulted roofs.
Beyond the chamber, twilight gathered in violet seams between the leaves while green light pulsed through the bark.
Along the table, the argument over trade routes had circled long enough for the voices of Kaedryn’s guildmasters to blur.
The room smelled of rain, damp earth, ink, and the cold remnants of the meal one of Lykor’s wraith had delivered hours ago.
A plate sat near Jassyn’s elbow, quartered apricots from Asharyn untouched beside flatbread dried at the edges.
Abandoned dishes crowded the growing stack of dispatches from the human realms—kingdoms that had spent centuries feeding Alari’s appetite now wanting to know what would happen when they stopped.
Someone had thought to pour him tea.
It wasn’t Fenn’s. Too weak with the herbs, too sharp at the back of the tongue, missing the smoky bite.
Jassyn had tried to brew it himself that morning, but three different people had stopped him before he touched the pot. Apparently he could decide the fate of realms, but couldn’t be trusted with boiling water.
He curled his fingers around the cold cup and glanced toward the jungle before he could stop himself. Serenna, Vesryn, and Fenn should’ve arrived days ago now.
A talon struck the table and dragged Jassyn back into the debate. One of Kaedryn’s guildmasters bent over the maps, his claw tracing a border.
“We cannot simply sever these supply lines and pretend the realms will rebalance themselves,” the druid said. “You say that for centuries, grain, ore, timber, livestock, and labor flowed toward the capital. If those channels are to be cut, the goods must be redirected somewhere stable.”
“Stable,” a human envoy from the northern realm repeated flatly.
“You speak of stability because you never had to survive theirs.” Her fingers tightened around the edge of the table.
“For centuries, your people were a story buried in our oldest legends while our harvests disappeared into elven granaries. We learned what elves called order winter by winter, as our stores ran empty and their courts remained full.” Her gaze narrowed on Kaedryn’s delegation.
“If the running of our realms concerns you, you should’ve used the last thousand years to help pry the elves’ hands from our throats. ”
Saundyl leaned back in his chair, fingers tapping against the arm. “She’s right. Each realm provisioned the capital and thanked them for the privilege. I vote to sever every trade route.”
Jassyn studied the maps where roads branched through the realms like veins, every path carrying wealth toward a single heart. The human kingdoms had been stripped in tidy increments for centuries until plunder had become the shape of order.
Kyansari still stood. Centarya still festered. Galaeryn was dead, yet the routes that had bolstered his reign remained open, tribute and obedience still flowing along the same arteries.
The necessity burned sour in Jassyn’s gut. They had to starve the old order before it gathered enough strength to make itself inevitable again.
“Those supply routes should be funneled here, to the Accord,” the guildmaster insisted. “Until distribution can be reallocated.”
“No.”
The word left Jassyn before the druid could make theft sound like governance. The chamber went quiet enough for him to hear water ticking from leaf to leaf through the canopy.
He lifted his eyes from the maps. Every face around the table had turned toward him—druid, shaman, human, elven-blooded, wraith—waiting for the First Keeper to settle by decree what none of them had managed by argument.
They’d tried to call him king.
Only once.
Coercion had stirred under Jassyn’s skin with poisonous readiness. A single exertion of will could’ve buried the title so deeply in every mind around him that no one would ever think of it again.
Instead, he’d refused aloud and no one offered the title a second time. Even First Keeper felt too much like a crown when they looked at him.
The human realms had already surrendered their own thrones. The elven-blooded that once ruled at Kyansari’s pleasure now served as stewards, their authority severed from inheritance and held in trust.
“The realms will keep what they produce,” Jassyn said. His voice came out rough, worn hoarse by too many arguments and too little sleep. “Trade will be negotiated, not extracted. I won’t begin this alliance by replacing elven tyranny with our own.”
Thalaesyn and Mara both dipped their heads, the slight movement steadying Jassyn more than praise would have.
His mentor had once used that same gesture for acknowledging stable healing lattices and steadfast hands, mending cast without wasted magic.
Now it placed something heavier into Jassyn’s keeping—faith in his judgment, his restraint, and the healer he might still become when the wound was the world itself.
The guildmaster’s claws flexed against the table. “Without central oversight, the realms will hoard. Prices will turn predatory.”
“Then the Accord will arbitrate disputes,” Jassyn said.
Low voices stirred among the human envoys.
“Once the Accord is stable,” Jassyn continued before another debate could rise, “we’ll begin negotiations with the elven courts. Kyansari will pay or trade for what it needs.”
A shaman female from the remnants of Daeryn’s forces leaned forward. “And if they refuse?”
“Then they refuse from across a table first.” Jassyn spread his palms over the wood, the tree’s slow pulse beating against his own. “I won’t invade a city full of civilians who never knew a different way of life.”
The guildmaster drew breath to answer.
A spike of ice hissed across the chamber and struck the table beside his claw. The wood split around the impact, frost spreading from the point in a white crawl.
Jassyn closed his eyes. He should’ve known.
At the far end of the chamber, where he’d been refusing to look for the last two hours, Lykor growled.
“Enough. Your First Keeper has spoken.” He pushed away from the trunk and stalked toward the table, snow spinning from his shoulders and leaching warmth from the humid jungle air. “This meeting is adjourned.”
The guildmaster’s brows lifted. “But we—”
“Are finished today,” Lykor snapped. “If you object, I’ll stitch your mouth shut and let the Accord vote tomorrow on whether to reopen it.”
The druid’s jaw closed.
Saundyl studied his hands with suspicious intensity.
Zaeryn stared very hard at the table, though the corner of her mouth twitched.
Along the open edge of the chamber, Koln choked down a chuckle and disguised it as a cough so poorly that the rest of his squad developed a sudden interest in the canopy.
Jassyn pinched the bridge of his nose, collecting himself. It wasn’t the first meeting Lykor had ended by threat.
Or the fifth.
Merely the first in which no furniture had been frozen solid.
Yet.
“Everyone out,” Lykor snarled. “This chamber stays empty until the sun clears the tree line tomorrow morning.”
The druids hesitated, and every head swung back to Jassyn. He nodded once.
Only then did they begin to file out.
Some of the emissaries left through the stairway woven into the trunk, descending toward the lower levels.
Elven-blooded opened portals back to the realms they represented with the humans in tow, each rift spilling a different breath into the jungle—Vaelyn’s salty air, the dry winds from the north, the damp chill of the western forests.
The wraith vanished last, warping off the balconies.
Only Jassyn and Lykor remained.
The spike of ice embedded in the table melted slowly, dripping to the floor.
“I’m impressed,” Jassyn murmured, rising from his seat. “You lasted an hour longer than last night.”
Lykor’s lip curled. “And you let them take three more than you should’ve.” His glare cut over the abandoned plates, the cold tea, the stack of dispatches still waiting for answers. “All this talk of not stripping realms, and yet you sit here letting them carve pieces off you.”
“If you’re going to loom through these meetings,” Jassyn said instead of arguing, “we need to work on your diplomacy.”
“This is my diplomacy.” Lykor folded his arms across his armor, the last of the snow dissolving around him. “No one left bleeding.”
Jassyn released a sigh.
Somewhere below, roots shifted with a groan, deep enough to make the floor hum beneath his boots. He leaned forward, both palms braced against the table, his vision blurring until the rows of ink ran together.
Starved villages and broken courts. Trade routes arranged like healing lattices across a body that kept splitting under the hands trying to mend it. The old world kept laying its systems before him, leaving Jassyn to decide which could be repaired without preserving the damage built into them.
Lykor stepped closer. “You can’t fix every realm tonight.”
“I know.”