Page 94 of The Shattered Rite
Below, the steward pretended to have competence.
Malric knew he could go to the king with a clean report, telling him about her new ally in the trials. Thalen would praisehis observations and leave him where he’d put him: above, outside, hidden.
No.
Malric wanted more.
He would become close to her. He would be the constant she learned to account for, the correction that kept her upright, the edge that taught her where to cut.
Possessiveness isn’t a sin if you’re honest about it. It’s a plan.
He thought about the mask he wore for her. How clean his hands looked when he offered a cloth. How stains always return, no matter how well you wash. He’d told her nothing that was a lie; he’d only withheld details.
I’ve hidden the monster—for now.But he would show her soon.
He wanted that moment. He wanted to stand close enough to measure the change in her eyes when understanding arrived. Some people flinch. Some harden. Some lean in. He wanted to know how she would respond.
He tracked small, useful truths. The way she never sat with her back to a door. The way pain had taught her economy instead of drama. The way her left wrist—the one he’d corrected—held true now, even tired. The way she ignored Whitvale because he was cheaper than her attention.
He imagined the scene rewritten: her breath taking its measure from him; her forearm finding his like the natural place it belonged; her mouth forming his name—Malric—not as a test, but as something you set on a table and intend to keep. He remembered the first time she’d said it and remembered the cadence. He wanted it steady, next time. He wanted it warmed.
He stayed where the rafters held him and let the want sharpen instead of spread.
He marked the timing of the guards’ turn by the stutter in their lantern shadows. He counted the beats between the steward’s bell and the footfalls. He noted the soot-blackened finger on the third torch to the left—someone had been checking the bracket for a loose pin. Malric noticedeverything, no detail too small.
He would speak to the dragonrider again where light chose no favorites and stone remembered order. He would plant himself at the distance a weapon lives in—closer than a breath. He would give her the choice to step back and measure what that meant or give her judgement as quickly as she thought it.
She shifted, only slightly, and the pendant at her chest warmed in answer. He felt the echo of it the way you feel thunder approach before sound.
The room traced her silhouette.
Malric would soon cast the shadow over it.
Chapter 15: The Tempering
“The sword does not choose the fire, nor the hammer, nor the pain. But if it endures, it becomes something more than steel."—Arden Valemir, Master of Arms, Citadel
The bell rang once.
Low and resonant. Not triumphant. Not mournful. Just final.
The steward stepped forward in the center of the room, a magical wind tugging gently at the edges of his robes. His face held the same careful neutrality as before, but something behind his eyes had shifted and tightened, like a man bracing for a truth he didn’t enjoy speaking aloud.
“You stand now at the end of the second trial,” he said, voice crisp but not loud. “You have endured what others could not.”
He glanced to his left, then right, his gaze drifting over each of the six who remained.
Eliryn.
Garic.
Whitvale.
The other warrior from Tarn’s Hill who still wouldn’t meet her eyes after she infered he was a bug.
The tall, slim woman in her thirties hailing from Stormthresh.
And finally, the boy with the copper hair, from Westbrae perhaps.
