Page 18 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Weeks," he says. "Not months. I miscalculated the rate of the spread." His white eyes lift to mine. "The collapse is no longer gradual, my prince. It is falling."

The word drops into the silence like a stone into water. I put my hand flat against the wall beside me. The stone should be faintly warm from the ancient magic running through it. It is ice cold. Somewhere above us, deep in the capital's bones, a low prolonged groan sounds like a living thing turning in its sleep. The entire mountain is in pain, and I have no remedy left to offer it.

"Tell me what you need," I say. "Tell me what can be done."

"There are older methods." Varkai turns slowly, moving along the wall. "Blood rituals predating the capital itself. The mountain requires a vital and untapped source. A power it has not yet tasted." He pauses. "The intruder woman. Her surface blood carries resonance we have not encountered in generations. As a possible offering, she would be⁠—"

The wall cracks. My fist is buried in the stone before I finish the thought, and I realize distantly that I've bared my fangs. The impact travels up my arm and I don't care. I step toward him and Varkai, who has survived longer than most living things, still goes rigid in a manner his survival instincts remain intact..

"No." My voice comes out low. Controlled. The most dangerous kind. "You will not say that again. Not as a suggestion, not as a theory, not as an implication. If I hear her referenced as an offering a second time, we are done having conversations."

Varkai studies me for a moment with those unreadable white eyes. There’s a shift in them. Not fear. Recognition.

"As you say, my prince."

The scouts arrive before we have returned to the upper chambers.

Two of them, breathless from running, smelling of fear. I know before they speak that the news is external. The look on the elder scout's face is the specific shape of a problem I haven't had in decades.

"Surface entry," he reports. "Upper caverns, eastern approach. Six hunters. Dark elf markings—Thul insignia. They are asking questions about a missing cartographer."

The silence after those words is very, very loud. Varkai says nothing. He doesn’t have to.

I turn sharply and walk. I don't run. I am moving with a purpose untethered from military strategy and wholly bound to the pull in my chest that has been tightening since the scout opened his mouth. I need to know exactly where she is. I need walls between her and that insignia.

Malachar.

His people are already here.

The political part of my mind catalogs it cleanly: they are here to retrieve her, silence her, eliminate any evidence she saw something she should not have seen. The threat is understood. The response is calculable.

But it is not strategy that drives my feet faster through the stone corridors.

It is the thought of a Thul hunter's hands closing around her arm.

The thought makes something animal rise inside me, hot and absolute and entirely beyond reason. No one touches her. Not Varkai's desperate elders, not Malachar's trained executioners, not anyone who breathes in this mountain or the one above it.

She is mine and mine alone.

11

CYBELE

After the council chambers filled with all that cold stone and colder eyes, Seralya's cramped workroom feels warm. Safe. Bundles of cave moss hang from the ceiling. Alchemical jars line every shelf in neat, stubborn rows.

"You're going to get yourself killed coming to find me," Seralya says. She doesn't look up from the mortar she's grinding.

"People keep telling me that." I set my satchel down and pull up a stool. "It hasn't worked yet."

She finally looks up at me, a smile flickering across her silver-marked face. She sets down the mortar, wipes her hands on her stained healer's robe, and crosses to the far wall where a locked cabinet sits behind a hanging tapestry.

"I've been thinking about what you said," she announces. "About the maps. The gradient inconsistencies in the lower strata."

"So have I."

She hesitates, hand resting on the cabinet latch. "What I'm about to show you… Cybele, some of the elders believe this knowledge itself is dangerous. That it draws attention."

"From who?"