Chapter 72 Chapter 72

Chapter 72 Chapter 72
Twilight's POV

I have imagined going back to places that tried to break me before. I used to do it when I was in the camp and the camp was being particularly awful, I would sit with whatever weapon I had managed to get my hands on that week and I would think about what it would look like to walk back through a door that had been closed on me. 

I always imagined it the same way. Through the front. Head up. Making it clear with every step that I had not been broken and that whatever they were looking at now was the consequence of their attempt.

So when we came to the main gate of Aretia at early morning with the city still half asleep and the guards on the wall looking down at us, I walked the way I had always imagined walking back.
Nixon had given us the rotation schedules.

We came during the shift change, the window when the outgoing guards were tired and thinking about food and sleep and the incoming guards weren't fully oriented yet. 

Prati's people had already moved into positions around the gate district, twelve of them, dressed like ordinary people moving through the city at dawn and not drawing attention to themselves in the way that very trained people were able to not draw attention.

Devonye was on my left. Isla was on my right.
She had simply been there when we started moving. I hadn't asked and she hadn't said anything, she had just been standing on my right side when we left the waystation and she had stayed there through the whole walk to the city and she was there now and I was not going to think about what that meant right now because we were about to do something that required all of my attention.

I looked up at the guards on the wall.
One of them recognized Isla before he recognized me and I watched the recognition move through him like a current. 

The way his spine straightened. The reflex of someone in the presence of a commanding officer trying to remember whether to salute or not salute and what the current political situation meant for that choice.

His fellow guard on the wall looked at the people in the street behind us. Prati's people, who were not trying especially hard to look like they weren't a coordinated group. The math was fairly straightforward and the guard was doing it.
The gate opened.

The sound of Aretia came in around us as we walked through. City sounds. Stone and movement and someone somewhere starting a cooking fire and the particular quality of noise that belonged to a place with real walls and history inside them. I had grown up without a place like this. Without walls that had belonged to anyone connected to me, without a history I knew the shape of. 

Knowing now that I had more claim to these walls than James ever had didn't make them feel like mine exactly. But it made them feel like something.

Underneath all of it I felt something shift. Something in the city itself, or in me, I couldn't separate the two clearly. An awareness. A recognition moving in both directions.
And then, just past the gate, Ryaknorg.

Not physically. Not a presence in the sky. Just the bond, the wall between us cracking the way ice cracks when the temperature changes, not all at once but in pieces, fractures moving outward from a center point and the warmth coming through the gaps and it was so sudden and so strong that I stumbled half a step and Isla's hand caught my elbow before anyone else noticed.

"Okay." She said quietly, a question.

"He's back." I said, just as quietly. "He's coming through."

Her grip on my elbow tightened for a moment. Then she let go and we both kept walking and I kept breathing through the connection opening up in my chest like something unclenching, power and warmth and that enormous patient presence that had chosen me and never stopped choosing me even through a wall I hadn't built.

The markings on my arms were flickering. Not fully gold yet. But moving in that direction.
The throne hall was across the main courtyard. The doors were closed and there were twelve guards on the outside of them and through the stone I could hear raised voices. James knew we were coming. Of course he did. There were still people in this city who were his and they moved fast and not all of Prati's people had been able to get ahead of all of them.

I stopped in front of the twelve guards.
They looked at me. At Isla. At the people filing in behind us from the gate, more of them now, Prati's network plus the three who had already been inside and were now standing clearly on a side. 

I saw one of the twelve guards clock the numbers and the math and I watched his face do what faces did when they realized the calculation had already been done for them.

Eight stepped aside. Four held.

The four that held looked at each other and I felt for them in the way I occasionally felt for people put in positions they hadn't chosen by people who weren't standing here to deal with the consequences. One of them looked at his blade and then at the crowd and put the blade away. The others followed.

Devonye pushed the doors open.

The throne hall was a large room and it felt small right now because of everyone in it. James at the center with what remained of his actual loyal guard, maybe sixteen people, and the rest of the room pressed against the walls, courtiers and attendants and people who had not chosen a side yet and were holding very still while they figured out whether they needed to.

The king on his throne above all of it.

I had not looked at the king's face in a long time. Not directly. Not in a situation where he couldn't avoid having me look at him. He looked older than I had expected and smaller, which I understood because that was what happened when the thing that made you feel large was threatened. He sat with his hands pressed down on the arms of the throne hard enough that I could see the tension from across the room, knuckles pale, body language doing the specific thing that bodies did when they needed something solid and were hoping no one noticed.

He was afraid.

Good.

James was not afraid. James was past fear, or had converted it into something else, the particular high-energy vibration of a person who has decided they are going to burn something down rather than watch it be taken from them. I recognized it because I had felt something adjacent to it once or twice in my life and I knew what it looked like from outside.

I walked to the center of the hall and stopped.

"You know why I'm here." I said. To the room. Not to James or the king specifically, to the room, to everyone pressed against the walls who was deciding right now whether this was over.

James said nothing. The king said nothing.

I let the silence sit for a moment because silence in a room like this did work. Then I looked at Devonye and nodded and she moved to the center of the room and began to read.

The papers. The king's seal on the outside and the contents on the inside, everything I had found before they ran us out of the kingdom, the full account of who the king was and what he had done and what James was and what he had never been entitled to. Devonye read clearly and evenly and the room got quieter with every sentence, the kind of quiet that meant people were hearing things they suspected and were now having those suspicions confirmed in front of witnesses.

James moved when she reached the part about his mother.

He came fast. He came with a blade and a face that had stopped calculating and was just moving. The blade was going for Devonye, not for me, which told me something about what he was thinking, which was that he wasn't thinking anymore, just trying to stop the reading, and that was his mistake because I was already between them before he committed to the direction.

The blade caught me along the left side.
It was a real cut. Deep enough that I felt it in the way you felt things that were going to matter later, and the breath went out of me all at once, and for about one second everything narrowed to that sensation and nothing else. Then I found the breath again and I hit James with the flat of my palm and everything I had and the vines on my arms lit up gold, fully gold, the way they were supposed to be, and the power moved through me like Ryaknorg had been waiting for exactly this moment and maybe he had.

James went down.

He didn't get up.

The hall was completely silent. I stood there with my hand still extended and the light from my arms throwing long gold shadows across the stone floor and blood on my side that I was going to deal with in a minute and I looked at the king on his throne.
More afraid now than before. Significantly more.

"Get up." I said.

He didn't move.

Behind me, I felt Ryaknorg break through whatever remained of the wall between us all at once, not carefully, not gradually, the full weight of him coming through in a rush that flooded every part of me he could reach. The cut on my side went from screaming to distant. The room went from feeling large to feeling like something I could hold in both hands. And the markings on my arms blazed bright enough that people in the hall raised their hands to shade their eyes.
Someone in the crowd knelt. Then someone else. Then several more.

The king looked at me and I looked at the king and the thing wearing Isma's face was somewhere out there with a creature it couldn't control and I was standing in the throne hall of a kingdom I had been told I had no claim to with the first dragon's power moving through my arms and the mate bond humming like something that had always been allowed to exist, regardless of what anyone said about it.

I said it again. Quieter this time. Which made it worse.

"Get up. We have a great deal to discuss."