Xara Zynthar's Arc

Chapter 11 of 16

The council chamber was smaller than Xara expected. A long table. Seven chairs. Grey robes and older faces. Verity took a seat at the far end without being invited. No one told her to move. Xara stood where the steward pointed. The prince stood beside her, not in front. That mattered. She felt the pact seal warm against her sleeve where she had tucked it. Not hot yet. Warm. She knew what warmth meant. The magic had noticed she was here to tell the truth, and the truth would break every term her council had written. The questions began. A woman with iron-pinned hair asked why Xara had come. Xara told her. All of it. The mission. The seduction terms. The blood pact. She laid the parchment on the table so they could see the sigil for themselves. As she spoke, the warmth in her sleeve climbed. A dull ache started at her wrist and moved up the bone. She kept her face still. She would not fall down in front of these people. An older lord asked the prince if he had been deceived. The prince said yes, at first. Then he said what happened after. He said he had been a poor brother and a poor prince since his sister died. He said Xara had made him listen again. He said his sister, in her last words to him through the orb, had told him to be useful while he still could. He apologized to the table for the months he had wasted. He asked what kind of realm they wanted to be, if a dying world reached for them and they closed the door. Xara's arm was shaking now. She pressed it against her side. Verity watched her, not the council. Verity gave one small nod, as if to say hold. The lords asked to deliberate. Xara and the prince were walked to an antechamber. The moment the door shut, she sank onto the bench. She pulled back her sleeve. The skin above her wrist was black in a shape like the sigil, spreading slow. "The pact," she said. "I broke the terms out loud. It is collecting." The prince reached for her arm. Verity was already there. She placed two fingers on the mark. "It cannot take you here," she said. "Not while I stand for you. It will wait at your border." "For how long?" "Until you go home." The chamber door opened. The steward called them back. The iron-haired woman spoke for the table. Ships would sail. Grain and healers would go with them. The vote had not been clean, but it had been enough. Xara bowed her head. The ships were won. Her people would live. And the mark under her sleeve kept spreading, patient, waiting for the moment she stepped off Scytheveil soil and the pact could finish what she had started.