Chapter 107 The Fae
ARYA
I looked at Luca. His lips were pressed into a thin line, jaw set with that particular tension he carried when something had shifted from theoretical to real. I turned back to Caspian who was waiting with an expectant expression, his dark eyes steady and giving nothing away. “That’s also possible.” I said with a sigh. “What’s your read?”
“Fourteen days is not chosen arbitrarily.” His voice was controlled and cold in the way that meant he was working through something. “It puts us exactly in the middle of the election campaign period. Maximum public visibility. Maximum political pressure. Maximum opportunity for a dramatic demonstration.”
The word demonstration landed in the room with weight.
“They’re going to attack something,” I said. My heart dropped to my stomach.
“Something visible. Something symbolic.” He looked at Caspian. “Pull every public event scheduled in the next fourteen days. Unity Council events, territorial gatherings, anything with significant attendance and symbolic value.”
“And increase security at Mordecai’s cell,” I added. “I don’t think they can break him out. The wards are too strong. If they try and fail, we’ll want to catch them in the attempt.”
Caspian was already typing, his fingers moving across the interface with practiced efficiency. “The council session reconvenes in an hour. Do we bring this to them?”
Luca and I looked at each other.
“Yes,” I said, before he could speak. He glanced at me with raised brows, something flickering behind his eyes. “I know what you’re thinking. Keep it internal, manage it ourselves, don’t panic the council.”
“You know me well.”
“I do. And I understand the instinct. But we just offered them elections. We can’t simultaneously offer them democracy and keep major threats secret from them.” I held his gaze. “We bring it to the council. We brief them fully. We let them be part of the response.”
“Even if some of them leak it to candidates that will use it politically?”
“Even then. Because the alternative is deciding we know better than the process we created, and that’s how every well-intentioned leader becomes the thing they were trying to prevent.”
The silence in the room was brief.
“Bring it to the council,” Luca said to Caspian.
CASPIAN
He’d spent eight hundred years in service to Luca Varyn, and in that time he thought he’d seen every version of his king.
The strategist. The warrior who moved through a battlefield like violence was his native language. The diplomat who smiled with perfect precision at people he wanted to destroy. The ruler who made devastating decisions without visible hesitation and lived with the consequences alone, in whatever silence kings inhabited when no one was watching.
He’d never seen the version currently sitting across from the Unity Council.
The version that was genuinely, actively listening.
It wasn’t a performance. Caspian knew Luca’s performances well enough to read them from across a room — the slight loosening around the eyes that never quite reached warmth, the careful angle of attention that looked like openness and wasn’t. This was something different. Real attention, real consideration, the particular quality of someone who was revising their understanding of a situation in real time as new voices added information.
Arya had done that to him.
Or not done it exactly. More like made it safe for Luca to do it himself, when he’d spent centuries deciding it wasn’t safe.
The council had responded to the threat communication with predictable ranges. Outrage from the wolves whose territories were nearest the last attack, their representatives leaning forward with barely contained aggression. Careful calculation from the older Lycan houses, faces arranged into the kind of stillness that meant they were already three moves ahead. Genuine fear from the smaller delegations who felt least equipped to weather another conflict, their worry unguarded in a way the older powers would have considered weakness.
And from Ferris Calder, who sat in the back corner with his arms folded and his broad shoulders deliberately relaxed, his expression thoughtful in a way that didn’t match the room’s current pitch, something that Caspian couldn’t quite read.
He filed that away.
“This interval gives us time to act,” Arya was saying, her voice carrying through the chamber without the speaking stone. She’d stopped needing it a week ago. Her voice had taken on a quality since the void that didn’t require amplification. It wasn’t louder exactly, just somehow more present, like it occupied the room differently than sound usually did. “We’re not going to spend that time waiting for them to demonstrate what they’re capable of. We’re going to find them.”
“And if we can’t?” This from Lord Drayven, a heavyset man whose authority sat on him like something inherited rather than earned.
“Then we make sure they can’t reach anything worth targeting.” She moved to the tactical display Caspian had set up, indicating the map of the territories with a hand that was steady. “Every high-visibility event in the next two weeks gets enhanced security. Every council member gets a dedicated protection detail. We increase monitoring on all known coalition networks and on anyone with connections to the void research community because if the Reclaimed has magical expertise capable of getting a message through our verified channels, they have magical expertise worth watching.”
“You’re making significant demands of the security apparatus,” another voice said. Councillor Niamh from the Fae delegation, her silver hair catching the light as she spoke, her voice carrying its usual quality of being slightly outside normal sound frequencies. “The resources required—”
“Will be allocated from the emergency council fund,” Arya said. “Which exists for exactly this situation.” She met Niamh’s eyes. “I know the Fae delegation has concerns about resource distribution. I’d like to schedule a separate meeting to address those specifically. Preferably this week, before the emergency period begins. Is that acceptable?”
Niamh blinked, and even after all this time Caspian found Fae expressions genuinely difficult to read, their faces arranged according to some internal logic that didn’t map onto the other species in the room. But the tilt of her head suggested something like approval. “That would be acceptable.”
One piece at a time, Caspian thought. She handles them one piece at a time.
He glanced at Luca, who was watching Arya with the expression he wore when he’d stopped trying to hide what he felt, his careful composure set aside like something he no longer needed to carry in every room.
Eight hundred years. And he’d been waiting for this the whole time without knowing it.