"If we live," she said, "you will not be a secret I keep from him. He touched you first. He deserves the truth of what he chose."
"If we live," Kael said, "I will earn the right to be spoken of kindly. That is all I ask."
The Hollow King came with the last dark before dawn.
He did not look like a king. He looked like a man who had been hollowed carefully, over years, until the skin fit a vacancy. His crown was iron wire. His eyes were the open-eye mark from the standing stone. When he spoke, every word seemed to arrive from a long way off.
"Kaelor Venn," he said. "You brought me the hinge. How considerate."
Kael stood. Blood had dried in his fur in dark maps. "You do not touch them."
"I touch what I own. The Binding owns you. Fear owns her. And the child—" The Hollow King's gaze slid to Elias. "—the child owns a power he cannot possibly understand. I will understand it for him."
Mara stepped onto the plinth, Elias in her arms. "He already understood enough to choose. You don't get to revise it."
The Hollow King smiled with borrowed mouth-muscles. "Mothers. Always confusing love with law."
He lifted a hand. The air thickened. Kael staggered as if invisible chains had yanked his limbs. The old Binding flared in him—horns burning with a cold light, spine bowing. Mara felt the Bond between them shiver, a rope under strain.
"Revoke," the Hollow King suggested pleasantly to Mara. "Say you were forced. Say the beast deceived you. The light will die. I will leave your village unburned. I will even leave you the child—quieter, of course. Emptied of inconvenient destiny. You may raise a soft, safe boy who never makes the sky change color. Is that not what you want?"