The arguments behind her were hushed but frantic, the sort of urgent, low-vibration friction that happens when duty collides with sheer terror. Ryse, the commander and captain of her guard, was leaning in so close his breath stirred the loose hair at her neck.
His logic was as simple as a blunt blade. "Your Majesty, if the guards did not intervene, the stones would graduate to knives."
If she stayed here, she would die. It was a mathematical certainty to a man trained in the physics of violence.
But Eris was playing a game of narrative warfare, and she knew the mathematics of the soul.
"Hold," she repeated, her voice not just for Ryse, but for every pair of eyes in the courtyard. She turned slightly, the blood from her temple now a dark, drying streak that cut through the dust on her cheek.
"If you strike them," she said, her voice projecting into the sudden, brittle silence, "you confirm every lie they have been fed. You prove that the Empire views their grief as a crime."
