Page 44 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Down in the valley the birds are still at it, the same as they were before he turned around.

“You’ve read what’s in that room downstairs,” he says. “I know what’s in it, because I read it first. Then I spent three hundred years finding the same account in nine other archives, every one of them sealed the same way this one was. So, we can skip the part where you tell me I’m mistaken about the facts.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you that.”

“No.” He almost smiles. “You weren’t.”

He turns and puts his back against the rail so he’s facing me properly.

“Every court in every realm sits on it,” he says. “Every throne, every tribunal, the Inter-Realm Accord you serve. All of them take their authority from the judgment of men who sealed a living world and cut the memory out of everyone they carried off it. That’s not a wrong somebody did once. That’s the foundation. You don’t repair a foundation like that. You take the building down off it.”

“You take the building down and it lands on people who had nothing to do with any of it.”

“Which people?”

“All of them. Every single one who was born into it and never had a say.”

“Name me one of these systems that has ever protected the innocent when protecting them was expensive.” He doesn’t raise his voice, hasn’t raised it once. “Your healer. When her sister was murdered, the tribunal’s answer was to put Lyanna in a marriage she didn’t want, so the court could go on looking legitimate through the scandal. Nobody on that bench was protecting a soul but themselves.”

“That was your doing.”

“It was my opening. They built the door. I walked through it.” He lets that sit. “Or take the angels. A wolf comes to the Council with his mate already dead and they let him bargain for her. They take the bargain, let him walk out of there without telling him what he’d just agreed to pay. He’s still walking around not knowing. That’s your Council. That’s the institution I’m supposed to leave standing on the grounds that innocent people live under it.”

My hand has closed down on the rail.

“We’re done,” I say.

“You didn’t sleep in your own room last night,” he says.

There’s nothing in the way he says it. He isn’t accusing me of it and he isn’t enjoying it. He’s telling me how long he’s been close enough to know.

“Get off this balcony.”

The words come out wrong. Not the meaning, the sound. My voice catches partway across them and I have to take the sentence again from the start to finish it.

He hears it happen. I watch him hear it.

My left wrist goes warm.

The star does this. It always has, since I was a child, and nobody has ever been able to tell me why.

His eyes go to my wrist.

They don’t stay there. He brings them back up to my face the way a man is polite about something he wasn’t meant to see. Staring would have been easier to take.

“I’m not asking you to join me,” he says. “I know better than that. You’ve spent your whole life inside these institutions and they’ve been good to you personally. Nobody puts that down over one conversation on a balcony.”

“Then what.”

“Stand aside.” He says it the way another man would ask for the salt. “When it comes. Don’t put yourself in front of it. That’s all I want from you, and I’d rather have it now than have to work around you later.”

Two things occur to me at the same time.

I could end this here. He’s on a balcony that isn’t his, on a realm he doesn’t hold, both hands open and empty, with nothing between him and me but four strides of stone. Everything this pack has lost since the night he first came for it ends in the next four seconds if I want it to. Nobody has ever had him like this. Nobody is going to have him like this again.

Or I let him finish, let him walk, and carry every word of it around inside me with no one to hand any of it to.

I don’t work it out in my head. My body does it without me. Four strides. Less than that at speed. The angle from here to his throat, what it takes to put a man that old into stone, whether the rail holds or goes over with him.