Brandon Ashveil's Arc

Chapter 16 of 18

The queen walked ahead of Brandon through wet ferns, and he had nothing in his hands and nothing in his head. He had traded his feet for Dayna's life. He had not thought past that. The thread in his chest pulled north, steady as a rope, and every step tightened it. He needed a plan before the mouth of the tunnels. If he arrived empty-handed, Thornweave and the queen would decide what he was for. He watched her back. The black bark gown moved without sound. She had not bound his wrists. She did not need to. The bond did that work. He made himself list what he had. One thread of bond. Thornweave's blood inside him. A dying fae lord who wanted the thread cut as much as Brandon did, but not at the cost of his own life. A queen who wanted her kin alive. Those wants did not point the same direction. That was the lever, if he could find where to set it. They came to the black arch in the hillside before he was ready. Cold air breathed out of the stone. The tunnel throat opened blue and low, the same passages he had crawled out of days ago. He stopped at the threshold. "Walk," the queen said. "One word first." Brandon kept his voice level. "He won't cut the thread. You know that. He'd rather die on the slab than lose the leash on me. If you take me in there with nothing to offer him, he keeps the thread, you keep a dying cousin, and I bleed out on the floor when he does. You get nothing." She turned. Her dark eyes held on his face. "Speak your offer, then." He had none. He said the first true thing he had. "I stay. Not as a body on a slab. As his hands. He can't stand. He needs someone the bond won't kill to fetch and carry. I do that. Six months. You get your cousin alive through the fever. At the end, he cuts the thread and I walk." Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. "A hunter as a servant to the man he hunted." "A live cousin," Brandon said. "Or a corpse before nightfall. Pick." She was quiet a long moment. Water dripped somewhere in the tunnel behind her. "You will swear it to him," she said. "Not to me. If he accepts, you live under his roof until he releases you. If he refuses, I decide what you are." "Agreed." She stepped aside. Brandon walked into the dark passage under his own feet, ahead of her now, the thread pulling him down toward Thornweave's slab. He had a plan. It was thin and it was ugly and it put him in his enemy's house for half a year. But he had walked in with terms of his own, and the queen had not set them.