Page 196 of Feralheart

I’d lived with this my entire life.

“Terrant,” I said.

He emerged from the shadows, stopping at my side. “Your Highness?”

“You’ve attended me well. Tell her that, word for word, the way you tell her everything else.”

Even in this, nothing showed on his face.

He was very good. She’d have accepted nothing less.

“And tell her she can try to strike tonight from the kingdom’s records.” I shouldered my pack. “It will still have happened.”

The weight of thirty years pressed down on my shoulders as I turned away from it all.

Lord Blair’s cousin stood beside his tent. Our eyes met as I passed. His mouth opened, but he closed it, his face shifting between pity and contempt.

He turned his back on me.

The gesture hit harder than words could. I was not worth acknowledging. I was already gone.

As I walked, the conversations didn’t stop. That would’ve required showing I still mattered. Instead they continued speaking, voices pitched to carry just enough.

“He’s throwing everything away.”

“I always knew there was something wrong with him.”

“Contaminated, all of it.”

My boots compressed the dew-soaked grass. Each step shed weight I’d carried so long I’d forgotten it wasn’t a part of me. Or maybe it was adding weight. I couldn’t tell anymore.

I could still turn around. That option existed. It would continue to exist until Eradin saw me cross the boundary, and maybe even after that. I could claim I’d come to have her check on my shoulder or to discuss tomorrow’s trial. I could manufacture plausibility for anything.

I kept walking because I wanted to. That distinction mattered more than I had words for.

The boundary between elite and commons was just grass and firelight, nothing physical marking where one world ended and another began. But everyone knew where it was. That invisible line drawn by class and custom and centuries of people who’d learned not to mix themselves with what they saw as taint.

My foot touched down on the commons side.

The grass felt no different, the same cold, damp give beneath my boots. I’d half-expected the world to register what I’d done with a shift in air pressure or a sign that I’d crossed something real.

Nothing changed.

Everything changed.

I kept walking.

Vella’s voice carried across the distance, pitched loud enough for everyone to hear. “This is how you throw everything away? For her?”

Yes. For her. For Aristus. For the parts of myself I’d buried so deep I’d forgotten they existed.

For the chance to be something other than what I’d been made to be.

Elite eyes watched, waiting to see if I’d turn back.

I didn’t.

The commons fire burned lower than elite flames, its light weaker but somehow warmer. Smoky, but not magically confined.