A throne of a silver teeth

The Silent Crowning "Wait." Cassandra's hand froze a finger's width from the oath stone. Frost crept along the stone's silver veins even here, indoors, warmed by three hundred bodies and a hall full of hearths. "Father, the hall is watching." She kept her voice light. "What's wrong." He didn't answer. His hand went to his collar, and the clasp released, the cloak sliding to the floor. A ripple went through the crowd like wind through wheat. Near the back, an elder began the old invocation, three words into it before realizing nothing about tonight matched the ritual, and stopped. One of her father's oldest captains slowly sank onto a bench, as though his legs had stopped being willing to hold him up. Klaus folded the cloak once and set it at the feet of a stranger waiting at the base of the dais. Southern coloring. A scar, still pink, cut across his jaw. He smelled of ash and pine sap where Silvercrest's cold mineral air should have been. "This is Lucien Duvall." Klaus said it to the hall, not to her. "Silvercrest is his." A goblet hit the floor behind her and shattered. Lucien crouched and picked up the fallen cloak, not gently, more the way a man checks a deed for a forgery before he trusts it's real. He turned it once in his hands, found the Blackwood seal stitched into the collar, and only then folded it over his arm, the way a man secures proof of a claim rather than a keepsake. Nobody laughed. Nobody spoke. "You surrendered." Cassandra's voice cracked. "To him." "Cassandra." She didn't wait for an explanation. She threw herself at the oath stone.Her palm hit silver, and the hall roared to life around her, torches flaring blue white in unison, three hundred years of Blackwood magic surging up through the floor to meet her hand, and Cassandra felt her wolf answer it, felt herself begin, impossibly, to shift right there on the dais. Klaus tore her off the stone before the claim could seal. She hit him. Her fist caught his jaw hard enough to split his lip, the first time in her life she had ever struck her father. Blood ran into his beard. He made no move to wipe it away. Across the dais, Lucien's jaw tightened. Then Cassandra's legs stopped answering her. "Father." She could still speak, and guards were already moving through the crowd, calm, unhurried, positioned before she'd even reached the stone. "Don't." He crossed to her and took her face in both hands. He said nothing, only looked at her the way a man looks at something he is about to set down and never pick up again. The light poured into her, memory and wolf together, one current. Lucien moved. He came up the dais steps fast and caught Klaus's wrist mid working, the two men locked there while magic still poured from Klaus's palm into Cassandra's skull. "Not like this." Klaus turned his head, slow, and looked at Lucien the way a man looks at a dog that has forgotten which of them holds its leash. Four guards closed the distance behind them, hands resting on hilts. Lucien's eyes went to the blades, then to Cassandra. Whatever calculation ran behind his eyes in that half second, it wasn't only her welfare, an unclaimed heir screaming on the floor of a hall he had just taken was a complication he clearly hadn't priced into tonight, and it showed. He let go.The working surged back to full strength. Lucien stepped back to the crowd's edge and said nothing else, though he didn't look away either, watching the rest of it with the flat attention of a man tallying a cost he intended to collect on later. Whole years slid out of her like water through a fist, her tenth birthday gone, a summer at the eastern lake gone, taken before she could hold the shape of them. She turned everything she had left toward the stranger's face instead. The scar. The set of his jaw. The cloak still folded over his arm like something he meant to use. "The mark," Klaus said. "Now." Fire opened across her collarbone and she screamed, twisting hard enough that her teeth found her father's forearm and bit down, drawing blood. Her wolf curled backward and went silent. She lay there after, breath ragged, the hall gone quiet in a way that felt like aftermath rather than shock, nobles staring at their feet, unable to meet what had happened on the dais they'd gathered to celebrate. Klaus turned toward the corridor at the hall's rear, and the guards lifted her to follow. They carried her down through corridors she'd never known existed in her own home, toward frost gates sealed since her grandmother's reign. Klaus opened them himself, and wind screamed through, thick with ice. She looked at him. He looked back. Neither spoke. He nodded to the guards, and they threw her through. She hit the ice hard enough to lose her breath and clawed her way back toward the light, toward her father's shape still standing in the doorway. The last thing she saw before the iron gate slammed shut was Klaus Blackwood's face, bloodied and wet with something he would never have let the hall witness. The gate locked with a sound like a verdict.Cassandra reached back for it and found a wall instead, seamless, no seam, no hinge, as if a door had never been there at all. She pressed her palm flat against the iron anyway, refusing to accept it yet. That was when it shuddered under her hand. Not wind. Something struck it from the other side, once, deliberate, then again, and then a voice reached her through the metal, low enough that the storm nearly swallowed it whole. "Cassandra.”