Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Twelve: What the Blood Does

Renna stepped through the open door like she'd been invited.

She was alone. That was the first thing I clocked, and it didn't make sense, no hunters at her back, no guards, just a tall woman with bronze-gold under her skin walking into a room with two of us in it. She wasn't afraid. She was so far from afraid that it scared me more than a whole flood of silver-eyed things would have.

"There," she said, looking around the little hut with mild distaste. "Was that so hard? A stone box in a hillside. This is what the last Lycan king has to offer the heir of the sealed line. A river and a locked door." Her gold eyes settled on me. "You deserve better, cousin. You just don't know it yet."

"Stop calling me that." My own gold was up now, moving under my skin, and I could feel Fenric beside me, coiled, watching Renna the way you watch a snake you can't quite reach.

"But it's true. We're blood." Renna tilted her head. "Which is more than he'll ever be to you, whatever he's let you believe."

"Zaveria, don't listen to her," Fenric said. Low. Fast. "She's here to take you. She can't do it by force, not with me standing here, so she's going to do it with words instead. That's the whole play. Don't let her, "

"Then answer her question," I said.

I didn't look away from Renna, but I said it to him, and I felt him go still.

"You heard her through the door," I said. "What my blood and your blood make together. Why you came for me so fast. What you actually want me for." My heart was slamming, but my voice stayed level, and that surprised me. "You told me all night you'd never lie to me. So don't start now. What does the blood do, Fenric."

The room went quiet. The fire popped. Renna watched him with a small, pleased smile, like she'd set a trap and it had sprung exactly where she wanted.

Fenric let out a slow breath.

"The two lines were hunted for a reason," he said. Quiet. His eyes stayed on Renna, but he was answering me. "Not because either one alone was so dangerous. Because of what happens when they join. Her line and mine. Old blood married to old blood." His jaw worked. "A child of the two lines together wouldn't be sealed-able. Wouldn't be bound, or caged, or marked over. It would be the thing every pack and every hunter and every bargain-maker has been trying to prevent for a hundred years. Something that can't be controlled by any of them."

The words landed slow, and I felt the shape of what he was and wasn't saying.

"So that's it," I said. "That's why you came so fast. You're the last of your line, I'm the last of mine, and together we make something nobody can stop." The gold flared with something I didn't have a name for, and it wasn't warmth. "You didn't come running for the last daughter of the sealed line. You came running for a breeding partner."

"No." He turned then, full on, and looked at me, and there was something raw in his face I hadn't seen even when the hunters came. "That's what she wants you to hear. That's the ugly version, and it's got just enough truth in it to cut. Yes, I know what the blood does. Yes, I knew it when I felt you wake. And yes, some cold part of me that's been alone for a hundred years did the math." His voice dropped. "And then I got there, and you were kneeling on a stone getting branded by fools, and every plan I'd made on the way went out of my head, because you weren't a bloodline. You were a person. And I have not been able to think of you as anything else since, no matter how much simpler it would be."

"He's lying," Renna said pleasantly.

"Am I." Fenric didn't look at her. He looked at me. "Zaveria. Last night you asked me why I cared if you lived, and I told you the truth, that I found the only other survivor in the world and I wasn't losing her in the first hour. That was true. It's still true. What she's trying to do is take the one honest thing you've got and make you doubt it, because a girl who doesn't trust the person beside her is a girl who's easy to walk out a door with." His gold rose. "Don't hand her that. Not after everything you refused to hand everyone else."

I looked between them. The cousin with her easy smile and her bronze blood and her bargain that kept her alive by feeding others to the dark. And the man who'd told me hard truth all night and was telling me a hard one now, that yes, he'd known what my blood was worth, and no, it wasn't why he stayed.

And I realized Renna had made one mistake. She'd walked in here to make me doubt Fenric. But she'd done it by showing me exactly how she worked, take the true thing, poison it, use the doubt as a leash. It was the same thing they'd all done to me my whole life. Make me small by making me distrust myself. Aron with his soft lies. Selene with her collar. And now Renna, with a question dressed up as concern.

I was done being made small.

"Get out," I said to Renna.

Her smile flickered. "Cousin, you don't understand what you're refusing. I'm offering you family. Protection. A place among the blood that survived, instead of dying in a ditch with the last of a line too proud to bend, "

"I said get out." And this time I didn't just say it.

The gold came up out of me on purpose, the first time all night I'd reached for it instead of it reaching for me, and it rolled off my skin and filled the little room, and it caught Renna like a wall of standing light and pushed. She staggered back toward the open door, bronze gold flaring to meet mine and failing, buckling, because whatever her bargain had bought her it hadn't bought her this, the raw thing my line had chosen to burn for rather than trade away.

Her back hit the doorframe. For one second the easy smile was gone, and under it I saw what she really felt, looking at me. Not pity. Not family feeling.

Fear. The same fear the hunters had. The same fear Selene had found at the end.

"You're going to regret this," Renna breathed.

"Maybe," I said. "But it'll be my regret. Mine. Not one you handed me." I pushed harder, and the gold drove her back over the threshold into the grey morning. "Tell your family the sealed line sends its regards. And tell the hunters they're going to need more than a hundred years next time."

The gold threw her clear of the door, and she caught herself in the wet grass outside, and for a moment cousin and I looked at each other across the threshold, two kinds of old blood, the one that bent and the one that wouldn't.

Then Renna straightened her clothes, and the easy mask came back down, and she smiled at me one last time, and it was the worst thing I'd seen all night.

"Keep him close, then," she said, nodding at Fenric. "You'll need him. Because now they don't just want to cage you, cousin." She stepped back into the trees. "They want to make sure you never breed. And there's only one way to be sure of that."

She was gone before the words finished landing.

And beside me, Fenric had gone very still.