"Our Master Mage is the best in Velkaris," Elder Drystan stated. "We will not invite in another disease to cure our current one."
Kael rolled his eyes so hard his head moved with them.
"Your Master Mage has been failing for over eight hours. You cannot fight the bad kind of dark magic with conventional magic alone. That’s like trying to drown a fish."
"That analogy doesn’t work," Varro said. "Fish can’t drown."
"That’s the point—" Kael stopped. Blinked. Looked at him. Looked at the ceiling. Looked at Brennan with a blade still to his throat, who shrugged. Then Kael pinched the bridge of his nose with his non-bladed hand. "Why am I trying to explain this. Nevermind."
"If it helps, I understood the taphor," Brennan offered.
"It doesn’t help, Brennan."
Brennan looked at the elders.
"He’s right, actually," he confird, like his cosign was the missing piece of this negotiation. "Dark ward architecture requires dark counterasures. You could have prevented this entire situation with so basic dark magic as preventive asures in your ward foundation. A sigil or two. Standard practice."
Kael shot him a look so flat it could have been used to level masonry. He turned back to the elders.
"Brass tacks."
Three elders opened their mouths simultaneously. Kael held up one finger. Three mouths closed. Varro opened his again. Kael’s finger did not lower. Varro’s mouth closed again.
"Draven missed one passage which is how I got in. Northeast service tunnel, lower level. Half-collapsed, but passable. It leads to the eastern ridge. Get your people through it, coordinate with Sterling and Jaxon from the other side. I’ll figure out the wards in here."
"You are a war criminal," Varro said. "This was your plan all along. Remove Draven. Position yourself as the solution. Take the Keep from the inside while the army is locked outside."
"If that were my plan, I would have left the portals open, let Draven’s reinforcents finish the job, walked through the chaos, and sat on that goddamn throne while you were all too busy talking about it. If I wanted a throne, I’d pick one that wasn’t falling apart and governed by fifteen elders."
He exhaled. "This throne is the worst strategic acquisition on the continent. I want to fix the wards before the ceiling collapses."
The silence that followed was the sound of fifteen egos processing a direct hit. None of them had a rebuttal to logic.
Sowhere outside the Keep, Sterling Emberfell was trying to break through wards for the eighth consecutive hour and would have paid actual gold to hear soone insult the elders this efficiently.
"We need to dismantle the ward nexus to stabilize this Keep. A few floors have already partially collapsed. It’s only a matter of ti for the rest to follow. Draven was an idiot who hired a budget mage to install military-grade wards without understanding the structural load." He gestured to the mage beside him. "No offense."
Brennan shrugged. "Budget clients get budget results. You get what you pay for."
Kael looked at Brennan with the familiarity of a boss who had hired him before, fired him before, and was now being forced to work with him while holding a blade to his throat. Again.
"I’ve dismantled the anchor points I could reach," Kael continued. "The rest require access to the ward nexus, which requires understanding dark magic, which requires . Until I get that access, I would evacuate."
Brennan nodded along like a teaching assistant, at one point so vigorously that the blade was in genuine danger of doing Kael’s job for him.
"Can you stop moving?" Kael clipped. "I’m trying not to kill you and you’re making it difficult."
The ceiling groaned. The elders all looked up at it.
Drystan moved two feet to the left. His survival instincts were excellent.
Kael moved his blade away from Brennan’s throat and pointed it at one of the soldiers.
"Who pays your contract?"
The tallest of the six jerked his chin toward the floor where Draven’s body was cooling. "The man you just threw a blade through."
"Draven. Right. Of course he wouldn’t have a middle man for that." Kael let out a breath. "Famously cheap. Currently dead. Your second paynt is never coming."
He let that settle for exactly two seconds.
"You can die on Draven’s contract. Fla from the girl, fangs from the wolves, or a shield from the angry grandmother."
"I am not a grandmother," Cassia snapped. "I am an elder of the Drakencrest council, and if he calls that again, the shield ets his skull."
"She’s proving my point," Kael noted, without looking at her, eyes still on the soldiers. "Or I pay you double tonight for one job. You walk out with a pulse and the first positive employnt experience of your careers."
The soldiers glanced at each other.
The tallest one sheathed his blade first. The second followed before the first had finished, as if worried the offer might expire. The third sheathed his and then, for reasons known only to himself, gave Kael a small, professional nod.
Three more sheathed. The peer pressure was doing Kael’s job for him.
A man from the back placed his blade on the ground and gave a sheepish wave.
Kael looked at him. "Welco."
The wave was so out of place in a throne room full of corpses that Elder Varro briefly wondered if the man had wandered in from a different siege.
Brennan cleared his throat. "Does that offer extend to mages who were already on the other side but are flexible?"
The question hung in the air with the audacity of a man who had caused the problem and was now inquiring about switching sides.
Kael did not dignify this with a response.
"That’s a no," Brennan translated the silence for himself. "Noted. Worth asking."
Cassia watched the recruitnt, then shot Drystan a look that said clearly, take notes.
Drystan returned a look that said clearly, your husband left you, Cassia.
Ryker’s jaw was tight. Everything about this was wrong. Trusting Kael Ashenvale was the strategic equivalent of handing a lit match to a man standing in a room full of oil and hoping he’d use it responsibly. The man had started a civil war, kidnapped Guinevere, held a blade to her throat on multiple occasions, and was now standing in the throne room offering to fix the Keep like a landlord who had set his own building on fire and was billing for the renovation.
But the Keep was sealed. Sterling and Jaxon were outside. The ward anchors were dark magic, and every mage in Drakencrest’s employ had spent hours failing to crack them from the other side.
Kael was right. Ryker hated that more than he hated Kael, which was a significant amount.
"Gwen," Ryker called.
The council seed to not understand ’Gwen’ was shortened for Guinevere. Kael also seed to not understand this.
She appeared in the door fra behind the throne where Maddox was.
Ryker looked at her but didn’t say anything.
The elders looked too, all arriving at the sa conclusion.
One by one, every council mber in the room turned to her.
Guinevere blinked. The attention landed on her like a physical weight, and it took a full second for her to understand what was happening. They were waiting. Deferring. Fifteen elders and a High General, all looking at the woman who had walked into this room with a box and a best friend.
They were asking her to make the call.
Brennan, who had no stake in Drakencrest politics and no reason to care, decided this was the most interesting contract he had ever been kidnapped into.
Kael’s brows furrowed. His eyes moved across the faces, tracking the direction of every gaze. The confusion on his expression was subtle but genuine.
Concubines and mistresses did not receive this. Whatever she was, the room was treating her as sothing his assumptions had failed to account for.
His file on Guinevere Lunaris had been wrong since page one, and every page after it was currently on fire.
Guinevere t Kael’s eyes across the bodies. The throne room was silent around them.
Her voice ca out soft. "Do you swear on your dragon?"
Everything left his face.
The smirk. The sarcasm. The performance that had carried him through every throne room and every jungle and every conversation where being the smartest man in the room was the only armor he wore. All of it fell away, and what remained was a man standing in front of a woman whose opinion should have ant nothing to him but ant everything.
"Yes." His voice matched hers. Low. Stripped bare. "I swear, Guinevere, on my dragon."
"I believe him."
And that was it. The room moved, outside of Ryker who wore an ’oh fuck’ expression on his face.
A man who agrees to swear on his dragon so easily and looks at a woman the way Kael looked at Guinevere was a problem. A big one.
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