Chapter 4 Rhyan

My father summons me quietly, without an audience, which only ever means one thing.

A guard leans down at my shoulder mid-feast and murmurs that the Emperor wants a word, and every drop of good humour I built up walking through those doors with Gina drains straight out of me. I glance at her once. She’s talking to my brother’s new bride, laughing at something, utterly unaware that a summons like this only ever means trouble.

I follow the guard out through a side door into the corridor behind the throne room, where the music fades to nothing and the torches burn lower.

My father is already waiting, and he does not look like a man in the mood for celebration.

“Close the door,” he says.

I close it.

“Do you remember what I told the seven of you this morning, before the Choosing?” he asks.

“You gave us a list.”

“I gave you the only acceptable list. Every girl in that courtyard had been tested for months beforehand, blood, lineage, fertility, all of it done quietly, without a single one of them or their families ever knowing. I handed each of you the names that cleared. Six of your brothers chose exactly who I told them to choose.”

“I remember the list,” I say

.

“Then you’ll remember her name wasn’t on it.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“So you understand my confusion,” he says, “when my seventh son, who received the same list as his brothers, who knew precisely which girls carried clean blood and which did not, walked past every cleared name in that courtyard and chose the one girl I never gave you permission to touch.”

I say nothing, because there’s nothing to say. He’s right. I had six names. I looked at every one of them and chose a girl who wasn’t on the list at all.

“She was never tested,” he continues. “Her family lives past the last checkpoint the physicians bothered reaching. We have blood results for sure, but lineage, no way of knowing what she carries. For all we know she’s riddled with some coastal rot nobody’s ever documented. Lice, even.”

“She’s not diseased.”

“You don’t know that. Neither do I. That is precisely the problem, and it’s a problem you walked into with your eyes open.”

I keep my voice level, though something under my ribs is already burning. “So what would you have me do?”

“Annul it. Tonight, before the weddings begin tomorrow. Choose again from the girls who weren’t selected. There are two suitable candidates still unclaimed, both cleared, both of appropriate blood.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

“Then you humiliate this family in front of every noble house in the kingdom, and you do it for a girl who smells of fish guts and doesn’t own a single garment that wasn’t sewn by her own hand.”

I think of Gina standing at the threshold an hour ago, actually weighing whether to walk away from all of this, actually considering home over a crown, and something in me refuses to hand her over to a scalpel disguised as a screening test.

“No,” I say.

My father’s eyes narrow. “No? You dare deny your king?”

“I’m not annulling it.”

“Give me one reason. One good reason, and it had better not be that you find her beautiful.”

I don’t have a reason. Not a true one. The truth is that she looked at me like I was a person and not a rumour, and that she made a joke about her own bad luck instead of flattering me, and that something in my chest hasn’t settled since she said her name. None of that will move him. He wants bloodlines and breeding charts, not a girl who laughs at herself in a wedding tent.

So I lie.

“The dragon spoke,” I say.

He goes very still.

“When I looked at her in the courtyard,” I continue, “before I even opened my mouth. One word. Clear as if he’d said it aloud.”

“What word.”

I hold his gaze and choose the one word I know he cannot argue with, the one word that overrides bloodlines and breeding charts and every physician’s report in the palace.

“Soulbound.”

For a long moment my father says nothing at all. His face, which has spent the last ten minutes carved from stone, cracks straight down the middle.

“Soulbound,” he repeats, like he’s tasting the word to check it’s real.

“Yes father.”

“You’re certain. You felt it, not merely heard rumour of it, not merely wished it into being because you liked her face.”

“I felt it,” I say, and the lie comes out steadier than it has any right to.

My father lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been trapped in him for twenty years, and something shifts behind his eyes, relief so raw it looks almost like grief.

“A soulbound match,” he says, mostly to himself. “In this family. In my lifetime.” He presses a hand flat against his own chest, right over his heart, and for one horrible second I think the old man is about to keel over on the corridor floor and die from sheer joy, which would be a spectacular way to end an already complicated evening.

“Father—”

“Do you understand what this means?” He grabs my shoulders, both hands, harder than I expect from him. “Bloodlines can be bought. Breeding can be arranged. A soulbound match cannot be manufactured by any physician alive. The gods themselves chose her. Do you understand what that does to every noble house who whispered about my water-breathing son for twenty years?”

“I imagine it shuts them up.”

“It buries them.” He laughs, such delight, a huge, delighted, disbelieving sound I’ve heard maybe twice in my life. “My boy. My boy.” He pulls back, eyes wet, and for a moment he looks less like the Emperor and more like the father I barely remember from before the crown swallowed him whole.

He turns toward the corridor and bellows for the nearest guard.

“Ring the bell,” he orders. “Wake the court. Tell them the seventh son has bonded true.”

“Father, it’s late, they’re still at the feast, there’s no need to—”

“There is every need.” He’s already moving, robes snapping behind him, years falling off his shoulders with every stride. “We celebrate tonight. And tomorrow, before the wedding, the priests will want to see proof.”

I go cold. “Proof.”

He looks back at me, delighted, oblivious, already halfway gone down the corridor toward the bell tower.

“The soul-bond mark,” he says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “It appears within a day of the bond forming, always, on both mates. The priests will need to see it on both of you before they’ll bless the marriage.”

He disappears around the corner, already shouting for the household to wake.

And I stand alone in the corridor with a lie I invented forty seconds ago, and a wedding in less than a day, and absolutely no idea what a soul-bond mark is even supposed to look like.