Bound by Blood and Fire

Orders from Father, Again

"You've had a full week," Aldric said, without looking up from the reports spread across his desk. "The land assessments should have progressed further by now."

"The emissary isn't a fool," Kael said. "If I move too quickly on access to the border territory, she'll ask exactly the questions we can't afford her asking."

"Then don't move quickly. Move effectively." His father finally looked up, pale eyes unreadable. "You have an advantage no other diplomat in this court's history has ever had — a bond she can't ignore, and won't want to. Use it."

The suggestion sat in Kael's chest like something cold and wrong. "You're asking me to use the bond itself. To get closer to her for the purpose of the land."

"I'm asking you to do your duty," Aldric said. "The two aren't mutually exclusive unless you decide to make them so."

Kael didn't answer right away. He thought of the ring still sitting in his palm most nights when he couldn't sleep, of the particular, unguarded way Ravenna had looked at him in the corridor before either of them remembered to be careful. The idea of weaponizing that — of using six years of grief and a bond neither of them had asked for as a tool to steal her people's land out from under her — made something in him go quietly, coldly furious in a way he didn't often let himself feel toward his own father.

"I'll handle the negotiations as I see fit," he said, which wasn't agreement, and wasn't refusal either, and they both knew it.

His father's expression didn't change. "See that you do. Quickly, Kael. The bloodline doesn't have the luxury of your hesitation."

Kael left the chamber with the ring pressed into his palm again, wondering — not for the first time, and with far more dread than he'd expected to feel — how much longer he could keep choosing his duty over her without it costing him both.