THE BRIDE OF ASH

The guard didn't knock, not that he ever did for me.

"War room. Now. The king wants you."

I froze with the ledger still open on my lap, ink not even dry on the line I'd been staring at without reading, because nobody wanted me anywhere. My sisters got summoned. I got informed, days later, of things that had already been decided without me.

"Me?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Not Rosalind, not Bree?"

"You, Princess Elara."

Something was wrong, and every part of me screamed it before I understood why, my pulse kicking hard and fast and animal in my throat.

I ran, not sprinting, because a princess doesn't sprint through marble corridors, but close enough that my skirts fisted in one hand as I passed portraits of ancestors who'd never spared me a glance either. The war room doors stood open, and my father's voice cut through them before I even reached the threshold.

"She won't fight it. She's not built for fighting."

I stopped dead in the doorway.

Six men sat around the long table — my father, General Rurik Thane in all his silver buttons and silence, three council lords who wouldn't meet my eyes, and Cassian standing apart from all of them with his arms crossed so tight his knuckles had gone white.

"Father, what's happening?" My voice cracked the quiet like a whip.

He looked up, unbothered, like he'd known I was standing there the whole time and hadn't cared enough to acknowledge it.

"Elara. Sit."

I didn't move, because some animal part of me understood that chair was a trap wearing the shape of courtesy.

"Peace," Rurik Thane said before my father could. "That's what's happening, Princess. Twenty years of it, if this goes correctly."

"If what goes correctly?"

Cassian's eyes found mine across the table and something in them made my stomach fold in on itself, guilt raw and unpracticed, like he'd never worn it before and didn't know how to hide it fast enough.

"El..."

"Don't." My father's voice was sharp as a drawn blade, and Cassian's jaw locked shut.

The air in that room went thick and suffocating, six sets of eyes suddenly finding anywhere to land that wasn't my face, and I understood then, not the shape of it yet, just that a storm was already on top of me and the sky had gone the wrong color while I wasn't looking.

"Someone talk, or I walk out right now."

My father folded his hands on the table, slow and deliberate, a man who had never once in his life been in a hurry to hurt someone.

"The Ash Dominion has agreed to peace," he said. "Their price is a royal marriage, a bride from our bloodline to theirs."

Relief hit me first, stupid and fast. "That's good, which of my sisters is..."

"Neither of your sisters."

Silence dropped over the room like a blade through rope.

"I don't..." The words caught in my throat, and I felt the exact second my body understood before my mind did, ice sliding down my spine while my hands went numb at my sides.

"Your sisters serve this crown through other alliances," my father said. "You do not."

"So I'm available, that's what I am to you, available." The word tasted spoiled in my mouth.

"You're valuable," Thane said, as if the word could soften what was coming. "The Ash King demanded blood close enough to Virell's throne to matter."

"Close enough to matter, but not close enough to be missed." My voice shook and I couldn't stop it.

Nobody argued, nobody so much as blinked, and that silence told me everything my father never would, that I mattered exactly as much as I was useful, and I was useful precisely because no one had ever needed me before.

"Father, there has to be another way." Cassian's voice was raw now. "Gold, land, anything that isn't her..."

"There isn't." My father didn't even look at him. "The Ash King was specific, a bride of the blood, or the war burns through spring."

Ash King.

I'd heard the stories my whole life the way children hear stories about the edge of the world, a black castle carved into a mountain of glass and cinder, dragons still nesting in its bones, a man they called a monster because he'd supposedly burned an entire village to nothing without blinking once. Stories, not real, never meant for me.

"You're handing me to a monster," I said.

"I'm ending a war that's already killed twelve thousand of our people, and you should be grateful you finally have a purpose." His voice hardened with an edge I rarely heard from him, though even then I understood it wasn't guilt sharpening it.

The words hit exactly where he aimed them. Nineteen years of being furniture in this palace, and now, suddenly, I was wanted, not for anything I was, only for what I could be handed over as.

"When?" There was nothing left worth asking that would change the answer.

"Three days." He straightened his coat like the conversation was already filed away and forgotten. "You travel to the border with an escort, and after that you belong to the Ash Dominion."

I looked at Cassian, and he looked away first.

"And if I refuse?" I already knew.

My father's eyes met mine, flat and final, a man closing a ledger. "You won't."

He was right, I wouldn't, not because I agreed with a single word of it, not because I believed for one heartbeat this was about peace instead of convenience, but because nineteen years in this palace had taught me exactly how much room I had to say no. None. I had none.

"Three days," I said again, quieter now, mostly to myself, because saying it out loud twice didn't make it any less true.

I turned before they could watch my face come apart, and I didn't stop walking until I hit the corridor outside, alone, palm slamming flat against cold stone because my legs had started shaking too hard to trust.

Three days to become someone else's peace treaty, three days to become a monster's wife.