Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Eleven: The Gate Doesn't Hold

POV: King Kael Ashgrave

I was on my feet before the second shout reached us, every muscle still raw from the change, and it didn't matter. Ten years of instinct doesn't care how tired the body underneath it is.

"Stay here," I told Elara, already moving for the door. "Bar it if you can. I mean it"

"Kael"

"Please." It was the first time I'd ever asked her for anything with that particular word, and something in her face told me she heard the difference. She nodded, once, and I didn't wait to see whether she obeyed, because the shouting below had taken on a shape I recognized with a cold, sick certainty not alarm. Combat.

I made it to the courtyard in time to see the east gate standing open, torn half off its hinges by something that hadn't come through it politely, and Draven already in the thick of it, sword out, blood on his sleeve that wasn't entirely his own. A dozen figures in dark leathers moved through the yard with the particular economy of trained soldiers, not raiders, not opportunists and even at a distance, even through smoke and torchlight, I recognized the gray-blue thread woven into their collars.

Veyloth.

"How," I demanded, reaching Draven's side, already reading the field the way ten years of defending this castle had trained me to.

"The wards," he snarled, parrying a blow that would have taken his arm off, "went down sometime after moonrise. I don't know how. I don't know who. I only know they knew the exact hour to hit us, which means someone inside these walls told them."

The words landed like a blow of their own, but there was no time to sit with them a soldier broke from the group and came at me directly, blade already swinging, and whatever softness the last hour with Elara had cracked open in my chest, the fight that followed had no room for it. I fought the way I've had to fight before, the way this bloodline has always had to fight, with a violence that has nothing to do with the wolf and everything to do with being the last line between everyone I love and a border kingdom that has wanted this castle broken for two centuries.

It ended faster than it began. Veyloth soldiers are trained, but they're not fools, and once it became clear the wards had only failed for a window already closing, once it became clear they'd lost the element that made the attempt worth the risk, they broke and ran for the treeline rather than commit to a fight they could no longer win cleanly. Draven led half our guard after them. I let him. I had somewhere else my whole body was already straining to be.

I found her exactly where I'd left her, chamber door barred just as I'd asked, and when she opened it and saw me, blood on my hands that wasn't mine, exhaustion and fury and relief all fighting for space on my face at once she didn't hesitate before crossing the room and putting her arms around me like she'd done it a hundred times before instead of never.

"You're not hurt," she said, half question, half command, her hands moving over my shoulders like she needed to confirm it herself.

"Not badly." I held onto her longer than the moment strictly required, because I needed, just then, to know that whatever had almost happened in that yard, it hadn't reached this room. "Elara. The wards failed tonight. Precisely when they'd do the most damage, precisely long enough for a Veyloth strike team to get through the east gate. That doesn't happen by accident."

Her whole body went still against mine. "You think someone let them in."

"I think Renata carried more than gossip home from that dinner three weeks ago. I think someone in this castle has been feeding her information since long before you ever crossed our gate, and tonight, they finally used it." I pulled back enough to look at her properly, and the fear in her face wasn't for herself, I realized it was for me, for what this meant, for the fragile, hard-won quiet we'd built in that warded room over one impossible night. "Whoever they are, they know the wards. They know the moon schedule. That's not outside knowledge. That's someone close."

"Draven would never..."

"I know." And I did know, with a certainty that had nothing to do with blind loyalty and everything to do with ten years of watching my brother bleed for this castle without once asking for anything in return. "Which narrows the list considerably, and narrows it toward people I've trusted a great deal longer than I've trusted almost anyone."

Outside, the last of the smoke was clearing from the courtyard, and somewhere beyond the broken east gate, Draven and half my guard were still combing the treeline for soldiers who'd already melted back into the dark they'd come from. I held onto Elara in the gray light of a morning that should have belonged entirely to the quiet miracle of the night before, and felt, for the first time since she'd walked into my chamber with her chin held high and a torn red cloth tied around her wrist, the full weight of exactly how much I now had to lose and exactly how close I'd just come to losing it before I'd even had the chance to tell her, plainly, in words instead of a wolf's stilled violence, what she'd become to me.

"There's a traitor in this castle," I said quietly, into her hair, "and I intend to find them before the next full moon gives them a second chance."