Chapter 52 #2
“Go,” he tells her, stepping back, all clipped grace. “Drink. Stretch. Don’t sit still or your muscles will freeze.” He does not look at me as he says it. He does not have to.
She finds me at the ring’s edge like she always does, bare feet sure in the sand until she jams her feet into the boots sitting by the fencing. She does not slow. The little reckless twist lives in her stride even when she is exhausted; it has become the way I know she is still herself.
“Hey,” she says, breath slipping over the word like it wants to run. “You missed a lot.”
“I did.” It comes out rougher than I intend, so I fold the sound into a nod and let my mouth flatten into something almost like a smile. She looks up at me with that unstudied relief that keeps surprising me. I want to press it into my palm and keep it. I do not get to keep things. “I’m sorry.”
The training floor hums around us, metal kissing leather, sand scuff, the tidy thrum of a yard that believes in every correction it makes.
The scent is sweat and oiled and flame sunk into the wood.
George sits on the rail like a carved idol someone made from mischief and stubbornness.
His tail sways once, emperor slow. I count the beats and breathe with it because otherwise I will reach for her without thinking.
Possessiveness I understand. It is a habit drilled into princes and soldiers both: put your body between the thing that matters and the thing that wants it.
Jealousy is different. Jealousy assumes the thing that matters might turn toward someone else and choose them, not because of threat but because of want.
Jealousy is a childish ember. It is not a common flaw among my kind.
Not in me. Not before now. I recognize it, but I do not admire it.
It flares anyway, small and hot and stupid, asking questions I have no right to ask.
I tell myself it is only because the Rite eats what you want most and calls it honor.
Because Varo has always known how to stand just close enough to a fire to look warmed by it without ever risking a burn.
I am not jealous. Unless—I cut the thought clean before it finishes forming. A dangerous path. I taste ash at the back of my throat and choose a different flavor.
If we were bonded, the jealousy would make sense.
It is fairly well-recorded when the flame first marks both.
Probably some mystical, magical, biological need only brought forth by the bond itself.
Bonds are for life. That is the first truth the old songs teach a child.
Ask the flame to tie you, and it will tie you until one of you is ash.
Not fate, not accident—choice. You stand before the fire.
You speak your want and your intention aloud and with the Flame as witness in case you forget.
You lay down pieces of yourself no one else gets to touch shame, fear, stubborn hopes.
Proof you know what you are offering, proof you know what you are taking.
Only then, if the flame deems you honest and equal, does it wrap itself around you both and seal the vow.
It is not just ceremony. The flame marks what it touches; it remembers.
Daemari do not stumble into them. Do not wake to find one has grown around us like ivy.
Without the steps, there is no fire, and without the fire, there is no bond.
I swore—once—that I would never bond. After Isaeth, the vow felt like armor.
We had never taken the final steps. Perhaps we would have been denied.
Vesperan blood before the Ember Throne, tradition bristling like a cornered animal.
Perhaps the flame would have refused us.
It is well known the Vesperan do not spark the way Daemari do.
I do not know. And ignorance is its own wound.
I thought I understood my father’s angle: push me to bind her, force my hand, make me an acceptable sacrifice.
If I were bonded, I could stand in her place.
Blood or bond, those are the rules that govern who may take a contender’s place in the Rite.
He would get his spectacle and his lesson both: the prince throws himself into the fire to save the human, the Realm applauds the usefulness of softness, then forgets the human completely.
But the Asmodeus lies like he breathes. What he wants today is not necessarily what he wanted yesterday.
He delights in changing the board mid-game and insisting it was always like this.
Even if I pulled her out by bond, would he spare her?
Or kill her anyway to prove a point I have not yet guessed?
A bond would give me a lever. It would also paint a target on her skull so bright even the stupidest courtier could find it.
We are not bonded. We cannot be. The thought is a mantra I have repeated too many times in the last day for it to sound like anything but protest. We are not bonded.
The flame has not wrapped us. I have not spoken want and intent with witnesses; she has not offered the truths no one else gets to hold. We are not—
She looks up at me and the word frays.
“I’m glad you’re here,” and then her words do not tumble so much as pour, like she has been carrying a bucket and did not realize how full it was until someone took the handle from her grip.
“I didn’t think—I mean, I didn’t realize the trial had started until I was in it.
It felt like a dream at first. Not like Obsidian.
Not like Viridian. There was no… stillness.
Everyone was being so nice. Which should have been the tell, right?
But my brain kept saying congratulations and sit and eat and—” She drags a hand through her hair and huffs, half laugh, half apology. “Sorry. Words.”
“No apologies.” I like hearing her talk and she needs to release. “Breathe.”
She obeys without thinking. In for four.
Hold. Out for seven. I do not count it for her.
I merely stand where she can see me. The permission she grants herself, to put her needs first, to take care of herself, when I am nearby is both humbling and terrifying.
I do not deserve it. I will not waste it.
“Varo was…” she starts, then grimaces. “Helpful. In a Varo way. He says I drop my guard when I think I’ve won the exchange. He’s not wrong.” Her mouth twists. “He’s annoying about it.”
“He was trained to be,” I say, because it is kinder than saying he has always preferred the clean cruelty of accuracy to the muddy mercy of kindness.
She snorts. It snags the corner of my mouth upward against my will. The small sound a proof of life. I take it like a blessing I do not believe in and keep it.
“I do not like you with him,” I say.
It is out before I can dress it. No court polish, no politics, just the bone of the truth laid bare. She blinks. I feel the moment I should flinch and I do not.
“With Varo?” Her brows tip together like she might be sure she heard wrong.
“Yes.” I do not soften it. “I know there is nothing. I know you are safe with him in the ring and he would step between you and a knife without asking. Knowing does not make the heat go out of my throat when I hear his voice next to your laugh.”
A beat. Then her mouth does this complicated slant, wry and startled and so relieved I want to drop to the floor and press my forehead to the sand in gratitude.
“You’re jealous.”
“Yes.” I taste the word. It tastes like iron. “Not of you. Of proximity. Of how easily the Rite will try to use proximity against you. Of how he has learned to make being studied feel like being seen.”
“That’s not fair to him,” she says, because fairness is the bone she will not stop trying to sharpen into a spear.
“It isn’t about fair.” I pitch it soft, so she hears the care under the correction. “It’s… something else.”
Something in her posture loosens. Soft. Warm. Welcoming.
“Okay then. You’re allowed to be jealous, but he can keep training me.” I nod.
“My father has quickened the pace of the Rite,” I tell her. “He intends to push trials through any gap that looks like rest and then call it tradition. He wants you off balance. He wants me busy. He wants the crowd to forget what slow feels like, so they think this was always the shape.”
Her brow creases. “He can just—do that?”
“The Rite is older than he is, but he has spent decades convincing people that the story he tells about it is the truth. He does not need it to be true for it to work. He needs repetition and fear. And a pretty ending.”
“What’s his pretty ending?”
“You, on a pedestal long enough for people to clap, then ash. A lesson.” I let the ugliness sit in the air between us; it belongs to him, not me, but leaving it unsaid would make it heavier.
“He thinks you want rest. Recognition. A seat that does not bite. That you could be bought with applause. He is wrong.”
Her chin lifts. It is a small motion, but it feels like a banner planting deep in rich soil. A claim.
“He is.”
“Then remember this: if anyone offers you ease, it is bait. If anyone tells you you have earned your rest, they want you still. If anyone puts you above the floor, check for levers.”
“Paranoid,” she murmurs. “You know I could have used some of this before Gilded. It is like straight out of their playbook.”
“Alive,” I correct.
She huffs again, that not-quite laugh. “I suppose alive is good.”
“I need you focused,” I say, and the word lands with a small charge, like a coin warmed by a palm. “Not just on the arch in front of you. On what stands behind it. The arena, Crimson. On me, if there is not a better anchor. Do not let the trial convince you no one is waiting for your return.”
“Is that an order?” she asks, teasing around the edges to cover the way color climbs into her cheeks.
“A request,” I say. “From the man who is not as patient as he looks. Not when it comes to you.”
She nods, quick. “I understand.” And then. “I’m not all that patient when it comes to my demon prince either.”
Her cheeks flame, red streaking across her cheeks, but she does not drop my eyes. I want to pull her close, drag my nose along the curve of her neck. Stroke my tail along the length of her flank. I want to breathe her in. I want to tell her everything.
That my father offered to carve her name on stone before she fell, a magnanimous memorial for a death he has not earned.
That he delights in imagining me listening to the Arena’s roar and deciding which part of it is her voice.
That if I could, I would rip the law across my own throat and drag her out under the mantle of a bond and dare the Flame to stop me.
Her safety is my weakness, but I will not lay that burden at her feet.
Instead, I say, “Eat. Sleep if you can. If you cannot, let me stand next to you while you try.”
“Don’t go?” she says, too casual to be anything but brave.
“I’m not leaving,” I answer, and it is the only truth I have that does not feel like a blade. “Not of my own choice.”
She exhales, something unclenching in her shoulders. “Good.”
George hops down and head-butts her calf as if to declare ownership in front of the gods.
I do not argue with cat or god. My father will quicken the Rite.
He will starve us of breath and call it mercy.
He will try to turn her into the knife he wants to hold.
Let him try. If he wants her broken, he will have to do it through me. And I do not break.
We are not bonded. I repeat it one more time for the part of me that thinks saying a thing makes it truer. We are not bonded. The flame did not wrap us. There were no witnesses. No declarations. No offered truths.
And yet when the lamps pop and settle and her breath evens on the other side of me, the heat under my sternum answers. A heat, a pull, a tug I have never felt before. Not even when the flame first had me branded.