SARA

Chapter 3

“By whom,” Sara said.

“The assembly,” he said. “All three princes are in residence. The Queen Regent has requested a formal assessment of all trespassers detained in the past seventy-two hours.”

All three princes. The Queen Regent. A formal assessment.

For a trespasser.

That was not standard processing. She ran back through the morning’s events and landed on what didn’t fit.

The man who caught her. He had come personally for a grey operative. He had taken her to the Keep himself rather than handing her to the garrison. He had requested a convoy, not a standard prisoner escort.

He had already flagged her as something more than a trespasser before she ever reached the Keep.

She stood up, straightened her jacket, and followed the soldier out.

The throne room was at the heart of the Keep, accessible through a corridor so long and so dark that by the time Sara reached the doors at the end of it she had lost her sense of how deep into the building she was. The corridor had no windows. The torches along the walls were set far enough apart that the light from one barely reached the next.

The doors were black iron, twice a man's height, with the Blackblood crest pressed into the metal. Two soldiers pulled them open from inside as Sara approached.

She stepped through and stopped.

The throne room had no windows. She had been told that but hadn’t fully understood what it meant until she was standing in it. The space was enormous, the ceiling vaulting up into a darkness that the torches along the walls didn’t reach. The floor was the same black stone as everything else, polished to a shine that reflected the torch flames in long orange streaks. At the far end, a throne of black iron sat on a raised dais, currently empty.

In front of the dais, arranged at a long table to the left, sat four people.

She identified them in order.

The Queen Regent first, because of her stillness. A woman in her fifties, dressed in black, with a silver ornament at her neck, dark hair streaked with grey, pulled back severely. Her face was as if she had been composed for decades. Her eyes were on Sara the moment Sara entered, and they didn’t move.

The man who caught her was second, because she already knew what he looked like. He was seated to the Queen Regent’s left, forearms on the table, his expression carrying the same controlled assessment she had seen in the forest. The ledger was not visible. Somewhere with his intelligence team already, probably.

The second prince she placed from the description. Dorian. Golden-brown skin, dark eyes, a quality of relaxed attention. He was watching her with something that looked like casual interest and was, she suspected, nothing of the sort. He smiled at her slightly when she met his eyes, easy and warm, and she looked away. The third prince, the youngest, Riven, was leaning back in his chair at the end of the table with his arms crossed and the silver-streaked hair that she had heard about and hadn’t quite believed until now. He wasn’t looking at her. She stopped in the center of the room, from everything, and waited.

“Name,” asked a servant in the room.

“Mira Cole,” Sara said.

“Pack affiliation.”

“None”

The Queen Regent’s gaze moved to Caius briefly, then back. “You were found in possession of a document retrieved from a border garrison. What was the nature of the document?”

“I found it,” Sara said. “I was going to return it.”

Silence.

Dorian’s smile shifted slightly, more amused. Riven, at the end of the table, looked at the ceiling briefly as if asking it for patience.

“You were found in…” the Queen Regent began.

Then the altar shook.

Every candle in the throne room went out simultaneously, as if they had never been lit. The torches along the walls guttered and died. The room dropped into absolute darkness for one single second.

Then the altar, a block of black stone began to bleed light.

It was the color of a sunrise into a single point, amber and gold and a deep burning red, and it was coming from inside the stone rather than from any surface of it. It grew. It didn’t blaze suddenly, it expanded, slowly.

The sound came with it. Not louder. Deeper. It moved through the floor and up through Sara’s boots and into her bones and she felt it in the scar on her collarbone.

Around her, one by one and then all at once, every wolf in the room went to their knees.

The soldiers by the door. The officials along the wall. The Queen Regent, her composed expression fracturing for the first time, one hand going to the table before her knees hit the floor. Dorian, his performance of casual interest gone completely, down on one knee with his jaw tight. Caius, and this was the one Sara registered most clearly because it seemed the most impossible, Caius on one knee, his head bowed, the muscles in his neck and shoulders carrying the tension of something fighting a command it couldn’t override.

Sara was standing.

She was the only person in the room still standing.

She hadn’t felt it as a command. She had felt it as something else entirely, a recognition so deep it bypassed instinct and went straight to something underneath. The light from the altar reached her and she felt it move across her skin like warm water.

She turned her head slowly and looked at the altar.

In her peripheral vision, she saw the Queen Regent raise her head from the floor. She saw the woman’s face, the composed mask completely gone now, something rawer and older underneath it, and she saw the exact moment Maren’s eyes found her, standing alone in the center of the throne room while every other living thing in it was on the floor.

The Queen Regent’s face went the color of the black stone walls.

Sara looked at the altar.

The altar was lit with fire.