Penalty is death

The first thing my scholars taught me, the moment I learned to speak, was that showing mercy could get a Lycan killed just as quickly.

It was only after I was attacked that I understood how deep those lessons ran. The werewolves despised us just as much as we hated their kind.

The attack on me came suddenly while I was on patrol, marking territory as I always did with the soldiers.

There were eight of them, all armed with silver blades because silver was the only thing their kind had ever been able to use against us.

I killed three before I felt the first cut. The fourth tore my shoulder open to the bone, and after that, everything else blurred.

When it was over, I was on my knees losing a lot of blood. The silver was already crawling through me, cold and slow, shutting my shift down muscle by muscle until I couldn't shift to my Lycan form to defend myself.

I remember counting my own heartbeats to keep them honest. And then suddenly, the arrow came, moving through me underneath my collarbone, close enough to my heart.

Squeezing my eyes shut for a moment, I saw the woman's face again—the archer whose arrow had nearly killed me.

Long silver hair curled loosely over her shoulders, catching what little light made it through the birches. Skin like gold held to a candle. And her eyes—green, but not any green I had a word for. Green the way a forest is green in the hour after rainfall, when everything is soaked and dark.

I remembered wanting to close my hands around her throat. I wanted it so badly that my ruined arm twitched with the thought. I wanted to feel the small bones of her neck give underneath my hand as I watched the life drain from her eyes.

Instead, I fell unconscious, and by the time the guards reached me, she was gone.

……

When I stepped out, the square was already full.

It had been dug into the flat bed of the old quarry generations ago, a long, shallow bowl of packed white dust with the causeway running up its center. The causeway was where the crowd was permitted to stand. They pressed in on both sides until the road was no wider than two men abreast.

It was a living sea of bodies stacked up the slopes, faces upon faces. Above them, the cages hung.

Twelve of them, iron-ribbed and man-tall, swinging from chains that ran up into the scaffolds flanking the road. Some held prisoners waiting their turn. Most held what was left of the last ones. The chains groaned when the wind moved, and nobody in that crowd had ever heard the sound without knowing exactly what it meant.

At the far end, at the head of the causeway, stood the platform.

It was plain wood, raw and unpainted, wide enough to hold forty men and built high enough that even the poorest wolf at the back of the bowl could see every inch of it.

That was the point.

My father, King Malric, had ordered it built after his rise, and he had ordered it built ugly.

The cart came up the causeway ahead of me, hauled by two guards, with the prisoners chained in the bed of it.

The crowd did not cheer. Silence consumed the place.

I walked the causeway alone, the guards dropping their eyes to the ground as I passed.

I climbed the steps.

The two rebels were already kneeling at the center of the platform, and they were young.

Neither of them could have been more than twenty years old. A female and a male, bound at the wrists with silver wires. They knelt an arm's length apart.

The boy was thin, his ribs showing through his shirt, one eye swollen shut. The girl had a shaved head and a cut across her mouth that had stopped bleeding.

Behind them, the guards stood in two ranks with their batons at the angle the ceremony demanded. Beside them, the captain of the watch held the sentence scroll he would not need me to read from.

I let the silence sit for a moment.

Terror is a thing you cook. It does not arrive already finished.

I stepped forward, and the boards took my weight with a sound like a door closing.

"For crimes against the Crown," I said, and the bowl of the quarry threw my voice back at me from every side, "and for violation of the sacred laws laid down by the blood of the first Lycan King, these two stand judged."

"By the order of His Majesty, King Malric, sentences will be carried out in the manner the law allows. They have been charged with the conspiracy toward the murder of the king."

The crowd made a noise then.

It was a sound of approval, but deep down, I knew it wasn't coming from their hearts. Many of them—werewolves and humans alike—looked starved and weary. They had soon come to learn the law: those who went against the King would be executed.

So what choice did they have?

I raised one hand, and it stopped.

"In accordance with tradition," I said, "the condemned may choose the manner of their death."

I turned to face them.

Up close, the girl was shaking so hard, her teeth were clattering. The boy was not shaking at all. His one open eye came up and found mine, and stayed there.

A small shiver crawled through my spine at the death glare he was sending me.

This wasn't the first time I'd received stares like this, but it never became familiar. Each time, I felt the guilt sinking deep inside me at the reality of what I was about to do.

"Do you understand what is being offered?" I asked.

The girl nodded. Her tongue slid over the cut on her lip.

"Rope," she murmured. "I choose the rope please."

The captain marked it on the slate.

I looked at the boy.

"And you?"

He turned his head and spat on the boards, just short of my boot.

"You're going to do it however you want," he said. "Don't pretend I get to pick the hand that does it."

I admired him.

In a different life, he would have made a soldier worth keeping, and standing there, I imagined myself in his place, kneeling and all bloodied.

I quickly shook the thoughts away.

"Rope for both," I said, walking towards the beam.

It ran on a pulley system built into the scaffolds, a crossbeam of black oak with the cords already hanging from it.

Reaching for the beam, I paused.

One beat became two, and two became long enough that somewhere out in that bowl of packed white dust, ten thousand people noticed.

The beating of the drum slowly began to falter as everyone looked at me.

I felt a shallow sickness grow in my throat and the tremor in my left hand as I watched the girl quiver with fear.

She didn't want to die. None of the werewolves I executed wanted death when they were brought to this platform.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, and when I looked behind me, the captain's face came into view.

"What are you waiting for?" he murmured.

My eyes widened slightly.

I hesitated.

I looked behind me, and my eyes found my father, who was sitting on a wooden throne with a deep, serious expression of concern on his face.

Quickly reaching for the beam, I drew it up.

When it descended, the chains that held the cages shuddered all along the causeway, so that for a moment, the entire road rang.

The guards hauled the boy up first.

He walked the two steps to the mark on his own feet, and he was still looking at me when they dropped the loop over his head and drew it closed.

He fought, struggling as his feet kicked at nothing. The silver-threaded cord bit into his skin, drawing blood.

The crowd came apart into a roar.

The girl began to scream. She clawed at the cord as she begged and screamed for mercy. But mercy did not exist here.

It took several minutes for her body to stop thrashing and she hung motionless.

When they hauled her up, she was already gone.

I stood through all of it with my hands behind my back and my chin level.

The bodies turned slowly on their cords in the dust-light, and the crowd screamed itself hoarse.

When the noise finally began to tire, I walked to the edge of the platform.

“A warning to everyone!” I bellowed to the crowd. “If ever anyone comes for the crown, the penalty is death!”

I scanned the crowd of endless bodies. They made a small sound, murmuring as they all looked at me.

With that, I turned around and started to walk away.

Breezing down the steps, I left the guards to close behind me. The laborers came forward with their poles and buckets of lime, and throughout the whole long walk back down the causeway, the crowd dropped their eyes exactly as they had on the way up.

The chains kept groaning in the wind.

…..

My room was located in the west wing, above the old armory. When I stepped inside, I locked the door, standing with the back of my head against it and let out a breath I had been carrying since the beam came down.

Walking toward the mirror, I looked into my reflection, and I saw the face of my father.

I slowly pushed back strands of charcoal hair from my face. Slowly running my fingers through my hair, I took off my shirt.

Standing fully naked in front of the mirror, my hand found the scar on my right breast. When my fingers grazed it, the memory of that day flashed through my mind.

That was the one thing I could not get past since the past week.

It was not the pain of getting shot by a werewolf. Nor the humiliation of being carried home after what happened.

It was her. For the past week, my mind had been haunted by her.

Standing in the white trees with her hair coming loose and her second arrow already knocked, looking at me with those wet green eyes.

Moon Goddess, help me.

I wanted her death.

Maybe that would lessen the torture of having to wake up every night drenched in sweat from a horrible nightmare of her shooting me with her arrow.

A knock came, and I quickly wrap my body in a black robe. When I reached the door, I opened it and found a guard standing outside. He dropped his head in bow.

"Your Highness. The King requests you in his study immediately."

I nodded, ignoring the rush of adrenaline in my veins.

"Ten minutes, and I'll be there."

Closing the door, I took a deep breath.

I pushed strands of hair from my face as I walked toward the bathing pool in the center of my room. Shedding the robe from my skin, I dived in and buried myself underneath the cold water for some time before coming out.

Once I was dressed in clean, fresh clothes, I made my way to the King's study. King Malric sat at a mahogany desk.

"Father," I greeted, bowing my head slightly.

Malric gestured at the chair before his desk, and I moved toward it carefully before sitting down. There was silence for a moment as Malric reached for the glass of wine on the table and slowly took a sip.

"Are you going to explain to me why you hesitated in front of everyone?" He questioned.

I swallowed hard, feeling the air thicken as tension rose.

"There was a hitch in my hand," I kept my voice firm. "Nothing more. The cord caught wrong on the beam, and I lost half a second correcting it."

It was a lie, and judging by my father's face, not a convincing one.

"Hmm." He set the glass down, his gaze not leaving mine as he continued. "Ten thousand people noticed your half second, Lucian. My spies noticed it. Even the captain noticed it enough to remind you."

He slowly leaned forward, resting his arms on the mahogany desk.

"You are my heir. My only heir. A week ago, a rebel attempted murder on you, and today you stood in front of everyone and hesitated to kill the same people who nearly murdered you.”

"Weakness does not exist here. Not for the Lycan Prince, my heir. The moment they find out you're weak, they won't hesitate to strike you. How sure am I that you would survive the next one? And when you don't, who will take over the throne?”

There was nothing to say that wouldn't sound like an excuse because it was one.

"If it's the succession you're worried about," I said, "I'm courting Sylvia."

"Sylvia will still be your wife," Malric said, waving the name away like smoke. "That was never in question. But you know as well as I do what our blood has become. Our blood have become infertile. I will not gamble the line on one union, however well-bred the bride."

He turned his glass slowly by the stem.

"You need a werewolf female. Their blood breeds true where ours has gone thin."

This is the reason why my father kept breeders. My jaw tightened.

There were around seven female werewolves in the south wing, bred and re-bred in the hope that Malric would be able to father a child. But only one had conceived. It was Hannah, his youngest heir, who was currently pregnant.

But when Malric heard from the midwives that Hannah would give birth to a female, he was irritated and had abandoned her since then.

"I understood the necessity for you," I said carefully. "I didn't think it would extend to me."

"Everything extends to you. That is what being my heir means." Malric's mouth curved. "I've already chosen her."

"Who?"

"A prisoner," Malric said. "The one who shot you with an arrow. Her name is Rosewyn."

My chest tightened.

Rosewyn.