“I won’t surrender this dance, or any dance with Lady Morning, to you, Caspian. Not to Drakken either. Not to anyone.” He pitched his response loud, and his voice carried to every corner of the room, rolling over the music and the murmur until both fell away. “I’m not dancing with some girl. I’m dancing with my betrothed. And I won’t allow a single soul to lay hands on my future queen.”
“What the fuck are you saying?” Caspian snarled, his green eyes going molten.
The shock hit me like cold water. I shoved Xander back.
“Forgive me, Max.” He spread his hands, the picture of sincerity. “I should have told you sooner. I wanted to get to know you first. You belong with me. I’ve come to this hostile land to take you home.”
The heirs closed in, death in all four faces.
“Step away from her.” Nikolai’s voice had nothing diplomatic left in it. “Now.”
Xander turned to the room and lifted his voice for all of them.
“Lady Max Morning”—he let the name break, the pause deliberate—“star. The lost heir of House Scorpio and House Capricorn. Promised to me before she was born. Stolen and hidden away at only a few weeks old, lost for twenty years, until the cloaking spell laid over her wore thin and we felt her again.” He turned to the room. “I have come to the Zodiac Covenant to claim my queen.”
The whole room reeled.
The heirs stood rigid, the violence in them strung tight enough to snap. Only Aelindor seemed less than blindsided, though his eyes burned with cold fire all the same.
Coldiron had tried to warn me. The false heir, the true heir—was this what my sentient metal had been chirping about all along? But Xander couldn’t be the false heir if I were the true one. He already ruled the Haven. He had no need to claim a title that wasn’t his.
And I didn’t want to be a fucking heir at all.
“Lies,” I hissed, fear and rage scorching through every thought I had.
Because if the Collector spoke true, the truth was a horror. I could not belong to a monster like him.
I would not.
They came at him all at once, their demanding voices overlapping, cold and lethal.
“Walk out of this hall while you still have a throat,” Drakken said.
“Put one more finger on her,” Caspian growled, “and I take the arm off at the shoulder.”
“There is no contract, no betrothal we will honor.” Nikolai’s voice was curt. “Leave her behind or be left in pieces.”
“I don’t lie, Princess.” He said it to me alone, as though the rest weren’t there. “I have hunted for you a very long time. These heirs are using you, nothing more. You stand above every one of them, and they’ve dressed you up and worked you like a common soldier, like a whore to be passed around. With me, you would be my equal. My queen. The mother of my line.”
He raised a fist. A rolled parchment unfurled into the air above his open hand and hung there. With a flick of his power, a shimmering ward closed around it.
“By all means, review it. The marriage contract, signed in blood.” His smile didn’t waver. “I can see how badly you’d all like to burn it. But it’s warded against water and fire—dragon fire included—against blade and fist and spell. A blood contract cannot be unmade.”
He’d chosen this stage on purpose. The ball, the open floor, the New Columbian envoys standing witness.
As one, the heirs and I moved to the shimmering forcefield and looked through it at the thing suspended inside.
BLOOD DEEDOF BINDING
Sworn in Living Blood and Sealed Beyond the Grave
Be it known to the powers of this world and the next:
That the bearer of this seal, Xander, Sovereign of the Haven, takes to wife and queen the girl-child born of House Scorpio and House Capricorn, Princess Trivia Morningstar.
That she was pledged to him before her birth, and that no law, no crown, and no death shall sever what this blood has joined.
That from their first meeting and first touch, their lives are bound into a single thread, so that what befalls the one shall befall the other.