Page 7 of The Bloodstone Oath

She gazed up at him, a wan smile playing on her mouth. “You’re not always annoying,” she conceded.

“Are you concerned because she’s the Bloodstone Priestess?”

“No.” She shook her head, voice low, untypical of his boisterous younger sister. “It’s just-”

Before she could continue, a messenger arrived to summon Kaelor to meet General Orik. Avelina squeezed his arm. “I’ll travel with you, brother,” she murmured.

Orik’s news was not new to Kaelor, but it was the official notification he was required to receive. “As you know, the treaty is signed; the betrothal will be held at Tidehaven. Escorts have been chosen and the routes mapped. I want you to feel secure,my lord, if this is a trick, we will know before anything untoward occurs.”

Kaelor listened.The Night of the Twin Fires, when their goddess, Lyra, glows with our god, Ignis.“Thank you, Orik.” He placed a firm hand on the general’s battle worn shoulder. Perhaps this alliance would prove good for his people and provide them with respite from the battles they had constantly waged with the Rootborn.

The corridors buzzed: smiths adjusting his gold-etched cuirass as he walked, scribes waving cargo lists, courtiers whispering about the wedding to a “forest goblin” was either genius or heresy. Kaelor endured it all until he slipped into the training yard for air, only to find two sentries drilling with practice blades. The itch to move, to bleed off thought, dragged him forward.

He stripped to a linen undershirt, lifted a blade of quench-hardened drakescale steel, and beckoned the larger sentry. They circled once, twice, sweat gathering at Kaelor’s nape. On the third pass blades cracked. He let the burn in his shoulders drown politics, until a mis-timed parry slammed a hilt into his ribs. Pain lanced, bright and hot. He doubled, breath gone, then forced himself upright.

“Your Highness!” The sentry bowed low in apology.

“I’m fine,” he ground out, masking the flare in his side. He finished five more passes, each breath a white-hot needle, then dismissed the sentries and wrapped his torso with a strip of cloth before anyone else could see. The bruise would blossom tomorrow, but he would ignore it: a prince had no right to complain about hidden wounds when his people had bled and the woman he was poised to marry might be carving herself open to feed a stone.

Night found him alone in the palace archives, torchlight quivering over dust-choked scroll racks. He should have been sleeping; instead, he hunted for memories. He knew Varek Flamewright, the first of the Fireforged kings, had given the ancient bloodstone as part of a bride price for a Rootborn princess. Like now, the first king had needed to forge peace with the Rootborn and procure food for his people from the fertile lands below the volcanic mountains. It was expected that the bloodstone would stay within the Emberhold domain and be passed on to the offspring of the royal couple, but they never had children. It was said that the Rootborn princess escaped with the bloodstone. War had waged ever since.

The Rootborn had discovered the Bloodstone’s hidden abilities to create wards, which protected most of their lands from the flames. Yet nothing Kaelor found could explain exactly how.

He copied the most troubling lines onto a scrap and tucked it beneath his breastplate. If the Bloodstone once answered to Emberhold, the palace might hold older, darker secrets, and he would find them. But he couldn’t stop the nagging thought in the back of his mind:Were the Rootborn attempting something similar now? Only seeking more power from the Fireforged?

Departure morning came in a clang of armor and trumpets. Kaelor, in obsidian mail traced with lightly flaming gold, mounted his stallion while citizens cheered or muttered. Hidden among his supplies he packed the copied archive notes and a battered Rootborn talisman he’d bartered years ago, a bit of vine-twined jasper that had fascinated him long before he knew its maker’s name. Now it felt like a compass toward the woman who wore the most dangerous stone in the land.

Renna and Zaria rode on one side of him, Avelina on the other; Orik led the vanguard; Malek Emberfist remained in Emberhold, but Kaelor felt the man’s ambition following likesmoke. As they rode, plains of blackened stubble unfurled, testament to raids he himself had commanded. The sight needled guilt beneath his breastplate:How many children went hungry because I called this scorched earth a victory?

That night the column camped beneath a basalt ridge. Kaelor lay awake, turning the talisman over, letting the flickering campfire paint vines on his palm. He pictured Selara again, this time not in rumor but as a real woman standing across a treaty table, candlelight gleaming on that Bloodstone.Would it glow brighter if his pulse quickened?A flutter moved in his chest, half apprehension, half anticipation, and for the first time he admitted he wanted to see her, to learn if the stories of ferocity masked a fatigue like his own.

The next day they arrive at the marsh-road that would take them to Tidehaven. Ember-mist trailed behind the column as Kaelor and Avelina rode ahead of the escort, loose reins letting their embersteeds pick their pace along the cattail-lined causeway. Avelina reached across the saddle gap and flicked a playful finger at the prince’s gleaming pauldron.

“Still polishing your armor for every tree we pass?” she teased. “You do know the Bloodstone Priestess is marrying you, not the metal.”

Kaelor snorted. “It is diplomatic courtesy to arrive unmarred.”

“Diplomatic courtesy? You once raced me through a lava tunnel wearing nothing but boots and your knickers.”

“That was before Father made me heir,” he said, but the corner of his mouth curved. “Besides, you cheated with that shortcut.”

Avelina spread her hands in mock innocence. “Shortcut? I called it creative route-finding.” Her laughter rolled across the open marsh, bright as sun on water, and for a moment Kaelor’s shoulders unknotted. She nudged her embermare closer,lowering her voice. “You always carry the whole realm on your back, brother. Let it ride behind you for one mile.”

Kaelor tipped his head, watching her auburn hair flare in the wind. “If I loosen my grip, the realm might slip.”

“Or it might learn to balance itself.” She leaned over, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek, an old childhood habit, and cantered ahead, daring him to follow. Kaelor clicked his tongue, the emberstallion surged, and for several reckless heartbeats Prince and Princess splashed through reed-spray like the carefree siblings they had been before crowns and treaties.

On the third dawn they crested a low rise, and Tidehaven spread below: pale marsh pools steaming, basalt pillars jutting beside gigantic ash trees. The town itself was at a distance, down by the lulling waves of the sea. Tidehaven was on the border between Fireforged and Rootborn territories. Each clan claimed their own part of the only reasonable port on the island; thus, it had never been touched by the constant waging war. It was from here the King Maeron Mossweaver and Queen Sylvaine had departed for the capital, and where the Rootborn believed Queen Valeska had embarked also. Instead, she had remained in Emberhold with her ailing husband and left the betrothal in the hands of her son.

Kaelor reined in across the shallow stream that separated their territories. His vanguard emerged behind him from the mist, their embersteeds, broad-chested war-horses whose iron-dark hides glimmered with threads of flame, snorting gusts of cinder into the salt-laced air. Flame-red manes billowed like banked coals and every footfall kicked up a scatter of orange sparks that hissed out on the damp leaf-litter.

Across the shallow marsh the Rootborn escort arrived in near silence riding sleek moss-stags with branching, jade-tippedantlers. The beasts padded along vine-woven paths, their hooves soft as rain on loam while riders guided them with whispered seed-songs. Where the ground grew too tangled, living bark platforms unfolded from unseen roots and glided forward on curling tendrils, ferrying elders as serenely as drifting leaves.

The two columns halted opposite one another, steam rising from ember-hoof prints even as cool green shoots unfurled behind the moss-stags’ passage, and for a breath the quiet held, root and flame meeting eye to wary eye.

Rootborn banners rippled on one bank, Fireforged pennants on the other. Between them rose a shared pavilion of living vines and dark iron, hastily built architecture to mask the uneasy truce.

Kaelor’s emberstallion picked its way along the slick path as moss-stags disappeared into the mist behind the pavilion. Rootborn sentries watched, vines coiled around their spears; above them, archers already lounged on branches in attitudes of ease that fooled no one. One nod from their commanders and arrows would flower in every Fireforged throat long before a spark could leap from Kaelor’s gauntlet.

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