Bound by Blood and Fire

The Prince's Orders

Two hundred miles east, in a chamber built of black stone and old fire, Kael Drathorne knelt before his father and said the only thing a second son was allowed to say.

"I understand."

"Do you." His father's voice was mild in the way that had frightened Kael more than shouting ever had, even as a child. "This is not a diplomatic courtesy, Kael. This is survival. Three more shifters born unable to change this season alone. The elders who remember what the old wellspring felt like are dying, and the ones who don't remember are the ones who'll inherit a bloodline that can't finish what it starts."

"I've seen the reports," Kael said.

"Then you understand what's at stake if this alliance secures us nothing but a truce. The wolves hold land that was never truly a gift — it was a mistake made for love, generations ago, and it has cost this family every year since. You will secure the alliance. You will secure the land. And you will not let the wolves suspect why, until it no longer matters whether they do."

Deceive them, is what his father meant, dressed in enough formal language that no one in the room would have to call it that out loud.

"And if the emissary they send asks direct questions," Kael said, "about the land. About the survey teams already working the border under cover of the treaty negotiations."

"Then you will answer them the way a diplomat answers questions he doesn't want asked." His father's pale eyes fixed on him without blinking. "You've done difficult things for this family before. This is no different."

It's entirely different, Kael thought. He'd never before been asked to build the foundation of an alliance on a lie this specific, this personal, aimed at a person he hadn't even met yet.

He told himself that was all it was. A stranger. A wolf he'd never met, whose trust wouldn't cost him anything to spend, because he had none invested in her yet.

He believed it, mostly, right up until three days later.