The Proving

"They're calling for the Proving," Maren said, before I'd even sat down to breakfast.

I put my fork down. Something in her voice had already told me this wasn't a phrase I'd like the meaning of.

Maren didn't sit. She stood at the edge of the table with her arms crossed, the same stance she took in the practice yard right before she told me something I wasn't going to enjoy hearing.

"How bad," I asked, "on a scale from 'annoying' to 'the thing you wouldn't explain three days ago'?"

"Closer to the second one," she said.

"What's the Proving?"

Cassian answered instead, from the doorway, and the fact that he'd come to tell me himself instead of sending Maren alone told me plenty about how much this mattered. He looked like he hadn't slept — the first time I'd seen him look anything less than composed since the ceremony ground.

"I'd have come sooner," he said, "but I spent the early hours trying to find a way to talk the council out of it. There isn't one. Not without conceding the point they're using it to make."

"An old rite," he said. "Older than the Ninth Accord. When a claimed bond is politically contested enough — enough packs doubting, enough standing at stake — the court can demand it be tested, not just recorded. Not a registrar's word. A trial the whole chamber witnesses."

He came and sat across from me, which he'd never done at breakfast before either — always standing, always half out the door toward some council matter or another. Today he sat like a man who intended to stay until every question was actually answered.

"Tested how?"

He was quiet a beat too long for my comfort.

"The claimant bond is placed under duress — controlled, supervised, but real — and the court watches whether it holds. A true mate-bond responds to danger to the other half of it before the mind catches up. Instinct, not performance. That's what can't be faked."

"And a bond that isn't true?"

"Doesn't respond in time," Cassian said. "The claimant is left standing alone in front of a threat they believed someone else would answer, and the court sees exactly that — nothing, where a true bond would have moved."

I sat with that. "Who's calling for it?"

"A faction," he said. "Led, in practice if not in name, by Lady Aveline." His jaw was tight in a way I hadn't seen since the council chamber. "She's framing it as due diligence. A wolfless claimant, no verified lineage, a King who's never once shown this kind of certainty before — she's not wrong that the court has reason to ask for more than my word. That's what makes her dangerous. She's arguing from a real concern, not a false one."

"Then let them ask," I said. "I'm not afraid of a test."

"You should be," Cassian said, quiet, and something in his voice made the room go very still. "The Proving hasn't been invoked in three generations, Sera. Not because no one's doubted a claim since — because the last time it was, the claimant didn't survive being tested."

I felt that land somewhere under my ribs, cold and specific.

"What happened to her?"

"The bond she claimed wasn't real," Cassian said. "The court set the danger, and nothing came to answer it, and by the time anyone moved to stop the rite, it was already too late to matter." He crossed the room and knelt in front of my chair, so we were eye to eye, which he'd never done before — always standing, always the King, even in private. "I know what's between us. I've known it since a ceremony ground three weeks ago. But I need you to understand what you'd be walking into if the court forces this, because I will not let you walk into it blind."

"And if you refuse the rite?"

"Then the court reads it as an admission," he said. "That I don't trust the bond enough to test it. Aveline wins either way unless we win the Proving itself."

I looked at him — at the King who'd kneeled to say this plainly instead of standing to make it sound smaller — and felt the shape of the choice settle over both of us at once.

"Then we win it," I said. "You don't get to be the only one in this room who's allowed to gamble everything on something neither of us fully understands. I've been doing that since a ceremony ground three weeks ago."

"That's not the same thing."

"It's exactly the same thing," I said. "You just get to call yours strategy because you're a king."

He almost smiled at that — the closest I'd seen him come to it since the map room. "Maren's going to work you harder than you've ever been worked."

"Good," I said. "I'd rather arrive at that hall exhausted and ready than rested and unprepared."

Something moved behind his silver eyes, gratitude and terror in the same breath, and he didn't try to talk me out of it a second time.

Maren, still at the edge of the table, exhaled through her teeth — not quite approval, not quite dread, some third thing that lived between the two.

"Three days," she said. "I've had you a fortnight and you can put me on the ground once in every four tries. That's not enough time to build what you'll need in that hall."

"Then we don't sleep," I said.

"No," Maren agreed, already turning for the door, already thinking three drills ahead the way she did everything. "We don't."

To be continued — Chapter 11: Maren's training turns up something bigger than last time — and for the first time, she doesn't have an easy explanation ready.