Beneath The Blood Moon

The Court

"How did he get past the gate guard," Sofia said.

"He didn't need the gate," Zayn said. "He needed one servant willing to carry a folded note to a desk. That's all Voss has ever needed. People willing to be paid, or people willing to be frightened into cooperation, and after nine years in this palace he knows exactly which staff fall into which category."

The note itself said little more than what she'd already read. Zayn burned it in the fireplace before breakfast, watching the paper curl and blacken with an expression she was learning to read as controlled fury rather than indifference. Neither of them spoke of it again before the court session, though Sofia noticed he checked the corridor twice on the walk there, a habit she suspected would take longer than a morning to shake.

The court was fourteen people. The remains of a governing body that had once numbered sixty, gutted by Mordain's infiltration and Voss's nine years of careful pruning. They sat around a table built for four times their number, and the empty chairs were their own kind of accusation, a visible reminder of exactly how much this room had already lost before Sofia ever arrived in it.

Zayn stood at the table's head and spoke eleven minutes. The battle at the pass. The dissolution of Mordain's compulsion. The capture and pending trial. The status of the freed wolves, and the note he did not mention, keeping that thread carefully separate from everything else in the room.

Then he introduced Sofia.

"Sofia Vane," he said. "Daughter of Queen Mara. The person who broke Mordain's army without killing a single member of it."

Fourteen faces turned to her. Some curious, some cautious, two openly hostile, one working hard to look neutral and failing at it entirely.

"I didn't grow up in a palace," Sofia said, standing. "I grew up in a pack house kitchen. I know how to scrub a floor and how to stay out of the way of people with rank. I don't know court protocol. I don't know half the names at this table."

She let that land, watching the faces shift, some softening slightly, others hardening further.

"I do know four hundred wolves were taken from their families and used as a weapon, and the man who did it is in custody because of the power I carry and the man standing at the head of this table." She looked at the two hostile faces directly. "I'm not asking for your approval. I'm telling you what happened. What happens next is a conversation I'm willing to have. I'm not willing to pretend to be something I'm not to make you comfortable with it."

Silence, the specific kind that follows someone refusing to apologize for existing.

A grey-haired lord cleared his throat, rigid posture, the bearing of a man who had sat in the same chair for thirty years and expected to sit in it for thirty more. "The Blood Moon Throne has been empty twenty years," he said. "The King holds it by right of—"

"By right of being the last person standing," Zayn said, flat, cutting him off entirely. "Which is not a right. It's a circumstance. Sofia's bloodline predates my claim. This is not something I'm debating in this room or any other."

The lord stared at him, clearly unaccustomed to being interrupted so completely. Zayn stared back, the version the court knew well, cold, certain, allowing no space for negotiation.

But under the table, out of every sightline in the room, his hand found Sofia's. A squeeze. Two seconds. Then gone, and no one at the table saw it happen, and she didn't need them to.

The session lasted another hour. Territory assignments drafted for the freed wolves who had nowhere left to return to. A trial date set for Mordain. A warrant issued for Voss's arrest, though everyone in the room understood how little a piece of paper would accomplish against a man who had already proven he could reach the king's own writing desk.

When the room emptied, they stood alone at the long table.

"You told them you can make porridge that doesn't burn," Zayn said.

"I can."

"The porridge at the pass was terrible."

"That wasn't my porridge."

"I want to try yours."

She looked at him, this king in his own courtroom talking about porridge, and it struck her as the most honest thing that had happened in this building in a long time, the incongruity of it, the throne and the kitchen, sitting so easily side by side now.

"Tomorrow morning," she said.

A messenger appeared at the door before Zayn could answer, breathless, having clearly run through half the palace to reach them, his boots still muddy from whatever road he'd ridden hard to get here.

"Your Majesty. There's word from the eastern pass. Varen sent it urgent." The messenger's face carried the specific grey pallor of someone about to deliver bad news to a room that had just started to feel safe again. "Some of the freed wolves. Fifty of them, maybe more. They've turned. Someone's been in the camp, feeding them, and now they're refusing to answer to Varen's people at all."

Zayn's hand went still on the table, all the ease of the porridge conversation draining out of him in an instant.

"Voss," Sofia said.

"Voss," Zayn agreed, and the porridge, and the quiet morning, and the small domestic future they'd just started building three doors down from each other, all of it receded a half step behind the war that clearly hadn't finished with them yet, not by a long distance.