Immune

Not all powers are meant to rule.

—Tsolien, First Chronicle of Seronia

The man holding the knife is an idiot.

This is not bitterness speaking. It is observation. The blade is too hot, the grip is wrong, and if he keeps angling his wrist like that, he is going to botch the line and have to go back over it. Which will hurt more. For both of us, really. No one enjoys redoing their work.

“Hold still,” he says.

I consider pointing this out and decide against it. I have already used up my allotment of good advice for the day.

The guards restraining me are young. One smells faintly of soap and nerves. The other will not meet my eyes. That one at least understands what this is. Behind them stand two Fae in dark leather and iron, their expressions remote, their attention distant. They do not leer. They do not gloat. They simply wait, as though this is another task to be completed before supper.

The knife presses into my cheek.

I inhale slowly, because I am not going to scream for a room full of men who drown children in rivers and call it order.

Pain blooms sharp and immediate, a bright, white-hot thing that steals my breath and makes my knees wobble. Someone swears as my weight sags against the guards. The cut does not run clean. It splinters upward near my temple, dividing into two jagged forks before stopping short, as though lightning struck and faltered before finishing its thought. The shape is deliberate, not ornamental. I taste blood and smoke and something metallic that does not belong to either.

I think of my classroom.

Of the benches by the window that stayed empty last winter. Of how we stopped rearranging seats because it only made the gaps more obvious. Of how the smallest children always sat too close together, as if warmth might convince the world to let them stay.

The knife drags to complete the lower stroke. I grit my teeth and focus on not biting my tongue clean through.

Names disappear quietly now. No announcements. No trials. Just a knock at the door and a body in the water and a village told to be grateful it was not worse.

Once, the rivers took offerings in spring like lambs, grain, and coins pressed into mud by trembling hands. Now they take children in winter, and no one calls it blasphemy.

Tomas’s face flashes behind my eyes. Six years old. Half-Fae ears he tried to hide with his hair. He had asked me once if you floated after you drowned. Rumors had reached us of villages to the south where others like him were being taken. Exterminated.

I had lied and said no. I wanted to save him right then from the fear, but where do you run to on an island from which there is no escape? The gods had closed the island to the world five hundred years ago, and the Lean locked us in with deadly proficiency.

“Don’t fight it,” the idiot with the knife mutters. “You’ll only make it worse.”

As if worse were a meaningful category anymore.

The pain spikes as he finishes the mark. Blood runs warm into my mouth, metallic and thick. I swallow reflexively, then spit at his boots.

That earns me a blow across the jaw. My head snaps sideways, vision flashing. The crowd murmurs with either approval or disgust. It is hard to tell which these days.

“Waren,” the magistrate intones. “By decree of the crown. By covenant of the Lean.”

Covenant.

The word settles into the room with more weight than decree. One of the Fae steps forward at the magistrate’s gesture. He does not look at me directly; his gaze rests somewhere just beyond my shoulder as he murmurs something low and old, a thread of sound that does not belong in a human throat.

Heat ignites behind my sternum.

It is not pain in the way the blade was pain. It is cleaner than that—brighter. A jagged flicker runs along the inside of my ribs, branching outward in deliberate lines. The sensation travels downward through muscle and bone, as though testing the shape of me, and the message is unmistakable.

Kneel.

Around me, I hear the soft scrape of boots as others lower themselves to the stone without hesitation. The heat presses again, firm and insistent, urging my body toward obedience. It feels like standing too close to a forge, close enough that the air itself seems to burn.

And then it passes.

Not resisted. Not broken. Simply gone, like lightning striking wet ground and finding nothing willing to carry it.

So this is how they make obedience look like consent.

I lower myself to my knees.

Chains bite into my wrists as they haul me upright again. The iron is cold, grounding. I welcome it. Pain I understand. Pain has rules.

I straighten, ignoring the way my cheek throbs and burns.

Someone in the crowd sobs. Someone else laughs.

I lift my chin.

If this is the price of saying no, then they will have to collect it again and again.

Intimidation is easier when you let the environment do the work for you. The boards of the cart are slick with something that might once have been grain and might once have been blood. The wheels complain the entire way, a wet grinding sound as they drag me along the rutted road toward the inner keep.

No one speaks to me. They never do on the ride. It ruins the effect if the condemned gets conversational.

We pass fields I recognize at first: stone walls sagging with age, sheep huddled low against the wind. Beyond them, the land falls away toward the coast, though the sea itself remains hidden behind hills and mist.

The guards cross themselves when a gull screams overhead.

Cowards.

The cart jerks to a stop. Hands seize my arms. Not rough, not gentle. Efficient. I am hauled down and marched through corridors that grow colder the deeper we go, the stone sweating faintly underfoot. Torches hiss in their brackets, their flames guttering as though reluctant to burn in this place.

The magistrate waits in a narrow chamber paneled with dark wood and carved knotwork worn smooth by centuries of anxious fingers. He does not stand. That is deliberate.

He is thin, precise, and dressed in black wool so fine it drinks the light. A seal ring glints on his finger.

He looks at my face.

The fresh mark.

Good. Let him see it.

“Adalina of Lake Serath,” he says mildly. “Former village schoolmistress. Now waren bound to the king’s mercy.”

I say nothing.

“You are accused,” he continues, “of interfering with lawful conscription.”

I lift my eyes to his. “They were my students.”

The magistrate’s lips thin. “They were vermin. Half-bloods who will amount to nothing.”

Ah. There it is.

“They were children,” I correct calmly. “And very poor readers, if I’m being honest.” I will make sure he knows he killed real beings with real futures. “Tomas still reversed his letters. Elen cried when she got sums wrong. Bran was brilliant but lazy. I had hopes for him.”

“Half-Fae births destabilize the realm.”

“The realm seems remarkably unstable already if it has to kill children,” I reply.

One of the Fae shifts at the edge of the room, just slightly. Not disagreement. Not approval. Only the smallest tightening of jaw.

The magistrate raises a finger, and stillness returns.

“Why,” he asks softly, “were you educating them?”

I laugh before I can stop myself. It is not a pleasant sound.

“Because they were alive. Because ignorance does not make anyone safer. It only makes them quieter.”

“Quiet is preferable,” he says. “Quiet villages endure.”

“Endure what?” I ask. “Extinction?”

He steps forward, closing the gap. That earns me a slap from him. My head snaps sideways. My cheek screams where the mark still burns. Blood fills my mouth again, and I swallow it rather than give them the satisfaction of spitting twice.

“Your king murders children. There’s no dancing around that truth.”

His mouth curves into something cold and set.

“King Edward has ruled Seronia with justice and grace for longer than you have been alive, child. He did not invent the Lean. He merely maintains it, and conscription is a right afforded by the gods.”

He circles me slowly.

“You taught them to read. You taught them numbers. You taught them to imagine futures they were never meant to have. My reports say that when soldiers came, those children believed, because of you, that someone would save them. They fought. They cried. They suffered longer than necessary because you filled their heads with dangerous ideas.”

I feel something twist low in my gut, but I keep my voice steady.

He leans closer. “Say you were wrong,” he murmurs. “Say you caused this. Say you will never speak against our king again, and you may serve a set sentence instead of a lifetime.”

I think of chalk dust in sunlight. Of ink-stained fingers. Of Bran’s grin when he finally solved a sum on his own.

“I would do it again,” I say. “And if your king has a soul left to rot, I hope this keeps him awake at night.”

The second slap comes fast, and stars burst behind my eyes.

“Very well,” the magistrate says. “Send her somewhere useful and put her to work.”

I don’t even have time to be afraid of this punishment because they don’t send me to some provincial keep with two bored sentries and a lord who thinks a lock is security.

They send me to King Edward’s castle at Stormhaven, where they can keep an eye on me, I suppose.

The closer we get to the coast, the more the land seems to give up trying to be hospitable. The air becomes salt and kelp and something ironed flat by wind. Even inland, the sea presses itself into everything.

The castle rises from the cliffs like a challenge. Dark stone crouches against the Sundered Reefs, its walls battered by wind and salt until they have taken on the same stubborn character as the land itself. It is not beautiful or graceful.

This is what authority looks like when it has nothing left to prove.

They drag me through gates, past banners snapping in the wind, past Fae standing watch with eyes that do not quite focus on the horizon.

I’m taken to the laundry hall, a room that sits low in the keep, half-swallowed by stone, its narrow windows forever fogged with steam. The air burns with lye and wet cloth and old smoke. Four vats boil at all hours, their contents stirred by women whose hands have long since stopped healing properly.

The work never ends, and nothing about it stops me from thinking.

On the tenth day, I move.

I don’t run for the gate. That would be as idiotic as that man with the knife who left this gouge on my face. I take the service stairs instead, counting steps, measuring distance, memorizing the way the wind moves through narrow corridors. I make it farther than I expect.

But of course, I don’t make it. Keepers take me, but I would have rather died than endured the next part.

The punishment is public. The lashes are precise.

By the tenth, my body trembles with a violence I refuse to name. Clarity settles over me somewhere between the sixth and seventh strike.

I am not being punished for trying to escape.

I am being punished for refusing to accept that this world is allowed to drown children.

When it is done, a different magistrate rises and smooths his robes.

“Send her back to the vats,” he says pleasantly. “If she tries to run again, break her legs.”

My back is fire, and my cheek throbs with its broken line.

As they drag me away, salt wind cuts across the courtyard and carries the sound of leather and breath and stone into the open air beyond the cliffs. It used to be that the gods gathered the songs of the persecuted.

I do not know who listens for such things anymore, but the wind takes it north all the same.