Chapter 17 — Learning to Burn

"Stop fighting it," Kael said, for the ninth time. "You can't command a wolf the way you command a room. It isn't staff."

"Then what is it?"

"It's you." He circled me in the bare stone training hall beneath the house — barefoot, shirtless, the brutal scar across his ribs catching the light. "It's the part of you that walked back into my tower expecting to lose and refusing to. Stop holding it at arm's length and let it up."

I'd been letting it up for three days, and three days had taught me what the chained part of me felt like. It felt like grief and like fury and like a child screaming behind a locked door for twenty-four years. Every time I reached for it the silver came up my arms too fast, and the hall went cold, and I had to slam the door again before I burned a hole through the wall — or through him.

"You flinched," Kael said. "Just now. You had it and you flinched."

"Because last time I 'had it' I cracked the floor. Forgive me for not wanting to crack my son."

"You won't crack the boy. The boy is the only thing your wolf will never hurt — it woke for him." He stopped in front of me, close, his gold eyes steady. "It's already holding him, Aurora. Right now, two floors up, just by being awake near him. It's the most natural thing you'll ever do. The only thing standing in its way is the one habit you've never been able to break."

"Which is?"

"Doing everything alone. Lean on it. Let it carry you for once instead of carrying it."

So I stopped carrying it. I stopped bracing. I stopped holding the door shut. I stopped doing the one thing I'd done my whole life — and I let the screaming child behind my ribs come up into the light.

The silver came slower this time, because I wasn't dragging it through a crack. I was opening the door wide. It poured up my arms and across my shoulders, and I felt my spine try to rearrange itself, felt the world tip sideways into scent and sound, felt teeth that weren't mine and were entirely mine. The cold hall lit silver-white. Kael didn't flinch. He stood in the center of it, the one creature in the building who would never bend to me, and he held my eyes the way you hold a rope thrown to someone in deep water.

"There," he said softly. "There she is. Hello."

For one breathless moment I was balanced on the knife's edge of becoming — half woman, half something vast and silver — and it did not hurt. For the first time in twenty-four years, the thing inside me wasn't a wound. It was a self.

Then I lost my nerve and slammed the door, and the silver snapped back under my skin, and I dropped to my knees, gasping.

"Don't apologize," Kael said, before I could. "You held it nine seconds. Yesterday it was none. Tomorrow it's a minute." He crouched to my level. "We don't have to make you a wolf, Aurora. We only have to keep reminding you that you always were one."

"How touching," said Seraphina from the gallery rail. "The king, teaching the clerk to be a person. I'd buy a ticket."

She'd taken to watching the training the way some people watch surgery — fascinated, faintly appalled, certain she could do it better. She'd never left the estate after the wedding. A set-aside betrothed who lingers is either a fool or a spy, and Seraphina Voss had never been a fool.

"You should try it," she went on, drifting down the steps. "Burning. It looks cathartic. Though I suppose when it's done you'll just be a bigger target with a prettier coat." She tilted her head at me. "You do know what they'll ask of you. To save the boy. You know the price."

"I know it."

"Do you?" Something flickered across her lovely face — there and gone, too fast to name. "Because I've watched my father's people whisper about the White rite my whole life, and the way they tell it, the full rite doesn't just take the mother. It takes every year she had left. So the child gets a mother for a day and a grave forever." She studied me. "I keep wondering which of you he'd rather keep. The boy who's the prophecy, or the woman who's the inconvenience."

"He doesn't get to choose," I said. "I do."

"Mm." She turned to go, all grace. Then she paused at the foot of the stairs — just a beat, her hand resting on the rail. "For what it's worth, clerk," she said, not turning around, "I had a mother who chose a price for me once, without asking. And a father who's been choosing every one since. I've spent my entire life being the thing other people decided." The grace cracked, very slightly. "I wasn't even the only thing he kept, you know. There's a girl in that house — down a wing no one's allowed down, quiet as a held breath, watched and dosed and never once explained. I told myself for years she was some sad cousin's child. I learned young not to ask." She caught herself, as if she'd said more than she'd meant to. "So when you do your choosing — make absolutely sure it's yours."

Then she was gone, heels sharp on the stone, and I stood alone in the cooling hall and wondered, not for the first time, whether the villainess of my story knew she was rehearsing for a different part.

That night I couldn't sleep, so I went looking for water, and instead I found Kael's voice behind the half-open door of Crane's lab, low and hard.

"—then it takes me. Not her. You've said it yourself — the bond shares the burden both ways. So I bear her half. She pours into the boy, I pour into her, and when the well runs dry it runs dry on my side of it."

"My lord, I cannot promise—"

"I'm not asking you to promise. I'm telling you how it goes." A pause, and his voice dropped to something I'd never heard from him — not cold, not controlled. Pleading. "She will not survive losing the boy, Elias. So she doesn't lose the boy. And she doesn't pay for it. I pay for it. And you will not tell her, because if you tell her, she will refuse the bond to spare me, and then they both die, and I will have to live."

"My lord." Crane's voice, heavy as a closing door. "Understand what you are choosing. The full rite has no half-measure. A true bond doesn't let you give some — it gives until there's nothing. You would not be wounded. You would be gone."

"I understand it perfectly."

"She would wake bonded to a dead man. Do you know what a severed true-bond does to the one left alive?"

A long silence. "I know exactly what it does," Kael said, and his voice had gone to iron. "I watched my mother feel my father die through theirs, in the half-second before they killed her too. She didn't scream from the blade, Elias. She screamed from the bond." A breath. "So I'll make sure Aurora's far enough into the rite that the boy is already holding her up when I let go. The child anchors the mother — that's the whole point of it. She'll have Luca. She won't have me. But she'll have him, and she'll live, and that is the only version of this where I win."

I stood in the dark hall with my hand against the wall and my heart going wrong.

He'd already chosen to die for me. And he'd built it so I'd never get a vote.