Chapter 171 The Blood Throne: Part One

Chapter 171 The Blood Throne: Part One
POV: Lucian
The catacombs had taught him the specific quality of waiting that had a purpose.
Not the waiting of the confinement quarters in the den, which was waiting as a form of management applied to him by others. The waiting of the catacombs had been active, the specific vigilance of two people in an unfamiliar space with limited information and a narrowing window, and the shape of that waiting had been productive in ways the confinement waiting had not been, because the narrowing window had forced the production of a plan.
The plan was Lior's.
Lucian had contributed to it through the specific kind of contribution that consisted of identifying which elements of the plan were catastrophically bad and having those elements removed or modified. What remained after the removal and modification was still a plan that involved walking into Thornhaven's throne room voluntarily, which was either the correct decision or the most expensive mistake available.
"Severan's approach to the hybrid problem changed the moment the fortress started coming down," Lior said, making the same case he had made across three days of catacomb conversation from every available angle. "Before the collapse, the hybrid is a resource to be extracted. After the collapse, the hybrid is a force that needs to be either controlled or killed, and I have been explaining to you for three days why the king has decided that killing you costs more than controlling you would."
"He has not decided he cannot control me," Lucian said. "He has decided that controlling me requires a different mechanism than chains."
"Yes," Lior said. "The mechanism being hospitality and apparent freedom and the offer of things your own people cannot or will not provide."
"Training," Lucian said.
"Training. Acceptance. Research into the hybrid nature that the wolf traditions have been calling corruption rather than convergence." Lior looked at him with the gold eyes that the catacombs' minimal light made more luminous than usual. "Severan is three hundred years old. He understands that a willing asset produces better results than a forced one."
"As long as what he wants from me is research," Lucian said. "The moment his interest becomes military, the willing asset becomes a problem."
"And at that moment," Lior said, "we leave."
"Through two hundred vampire warriors," Lucian said.
"Through whatever is between us and the exit," Lior said, and the specific quality of how he said it communicated that he had done this calculation and had arrived at a position that was not comfortable with the result but was not willing to let the result determine what they did. "But Severan is not a military man in the way that Kaelen is. He is a researcher. A collector of rare things. He will push for more than we want to give and we will push back and the boundary will be found through that process rather than through force."
Lucian had agreed because Lior was right about the catacombs running out of time regardless of what they decided to do about the king.
The ascent had been forty minutes of Lior's established authority doing the work that forty minutes of fighting would have done less efficiently. Guards who saw a commander they recognized moving with purpose deferred in the way of people who had been trained to defer to authority signals and were not looking closely enough at the figure behind the commander to notice what the figure was.
The first guard who looked closely enough noticed immediately.
"Is that," the guard started.
"Royal summons," Lior said, with the specific flat authority of someone who had said this once and was not going to say it again. "Stand aside."
The guard stood aside.