The Alpha King's Tribute

rel

ial, which is its own kind of cruelty: the ki

g. The full council seated. The high packs as witness. A basin of consecrated water, a single drop of the accused's blood let into it. Clean blood

her hands needed somewhere to be. "Nobody living's seen one. T

Kaelen had caught mine. "You're comforting y

she let them, which was braver tha

d the arithmetic Kaelen had done with all the colour draining out of his face, and I arrived where he'd arrived: there was no version of a bowl of water meet

use waiting is the one torture I've never lear

Voss, and he

e'd come without servants, without witnesses, without anything official at all. "No one knows I'm here. I thought you migh

ine, I was never touching anything

first, then mine, then traded the cups so I held the one his mouth had been nowhere near. It was the single most courteo

aid. "You lie beautifully. I wa

ied, folded his hands, and looked at me with something that was almost - almost - kindness. That was when I got frightened. Cruelty I can fence

ll me

ls turned brackish, the does dropped dead litters, and one grey morning the wolves there couldn't find the shapes of their own second skins. Sixty souls. The Withering took them the way rot takes fruit, from the inside, while the rest of us

finish the job the

ng. You snuffed forty lamps in a locked room and didn't mean to." He saw me go still. Of course he knew. Everyone downstairs knew. "The whole council will watch that water turn in three days and they will not see a frigh

rd Severing," I said, "for a

ghtly. "It's a vice." And he moved past it so smoothly I'd have missed

nounce it; a mate may refuse the bond, the law allows it even if the body screams. Go before the council of your ow

than I had any right to. "You've felt one

one moment the reasonable mask slipped and I saw the thing under it. It wasn't hatred. It was certainty. He believed

cup he'd made safe with his own mouth and shook for exactly ten breat

the fire low, that th

th as a stone in a river. I'd done it my whole life when I was afraid and never once heard myself until now. And as the last note left me the fire in the grate leaned. Leaned toward me, against the draw of its own chimney,

hand over m

was going like a hunted thing, because for twenty-two years I'd thought Liora Crowe had lef

me before I could remember, the way you sew a coin into

did. But she'd told me not to let them hear it,

el

f one breath: she is the one. The last of a line his own blood had a debt to. A debt older than him, older than his grandfather, the

he council from open

He bared his teeth at the dark and swore, t

*

p. I'd earned t

o the lips, and I was on my feet bef

ago and said grief shouldn't be drawn out. That mercy was speed." Her voice crack

rk of the hold, a bell I ha