The hall smelled like old judgment.
They dragged her in. No curtain. No mercy. Kaelthrax walked before them, long and severe, like a storm that had learned manners. Nysa had the scroll under her shawl and the seal at her wrist. She had Ilias at her side, pale, hand clamped tight on the strap of his bag. The court pressed in.
Kaelthrax stopped at the dais and turned as if he had been waiting. He did not march to theatrics; he spoke a line and the room folded.
"You were given a month," he said. The words were small and lethal. "You failed."
A murmur. Someone laughed thin. Nysa's jaw went hard. She did not flinch. She did not bow.
"You will be displayed," Kaelthrax said. "Tomorrow. The plaza will watch you stand as an example."
The air narrowed. The word "displayed" had edges. Nysa tasted salt on the back of her tongue—not fear, not yet. Anger.
She heard Ilias move. He stepped forward like he could catch the fall before it happened. Kaelthrax's hand moved like a blade and stopped him. The King's eyes found Nysa; they held her like a promise.
"You," he said. He pointed as if choosing a prize. "Come with me."
They led her through corridors that had no right to hold breath. Servants peered. Scribes froze with quills in the air. No one reached.
They reached his private chambers. The doors closed like a trap. The silk of the room smelled of smoke and something sweet the scrolls never named. Kaelthrax did not sit. He stood at the foot of a wide bed and watched her like a man inspecting a weapon.
"You cost me a month," he said. "You will learn why lessons should be kept."
He moved then—quick, no announcement. He took her wrist and her mouth because she did not let him. He pushed her against the wall with one hand and the other found the seam of her shawl like a small search. His fingers were hard at the nape of her neck, catching the sway in her. She smelled ash on his skin.
Nysa had been punished before in small ways—snubs, weeks of cold bread, tasks that left muscles hollower. But this was different. He pushed her down onto the bed and leaned over her as if she were a map and he intended to rewrite it. There was no softness in his touch. There was a claim.
"You will not be broken for display," he whispered, voice low as threat. "You will be broken because I say so."
She tried to spit a word but air left before sound. The seal at her wrist clinked against his steel when his hand moved. His other hand slid to the knot of the scroll at her chest; he pushed it away, away from her like he wanted the truth naked, not hidden.
He undid her shawl. He unpinned the hair at her neck. His fingers skimmed bare skin with a bluntness that made her flinch—but the flinch had more to it than fear. It had resistance. It had the small, human trait of being alive in spite of the edges.
He said nothing about softness. He made no promises. He kissed her, hard—an act of ownership and need all at once. The kiss was hunger shaped into command. She did not meet him with equal hunger. She met him with braced teeth and angry breath, because anger could be a kind of armor when everything else was thin.
He pushed further. Not violent in the way of breaking bones, but close enough to the line that she felt the steel of his will. His hands traveled with arrogance—on the curve of her back, on the edge of her shoulder, refusing to be gentle. He pressed himself to her in a way that demanded an answer. Her body answered before her mind did—because bodies have older languages.
She fought. She moved away, and he tightened his hold. He said a single order, low, unforgiving: "Say my name."
It was a test. A trap. A key. She could have spat the word like a blade, refused and left and taken the scaffold in the morning. But refusal would be a different kind of blindness. She was not sure if she wanted to survive the display or to survive the city without her name.
She swallowed. The word came out like a wound healed too quickly. "Kaelthrax."
He pressed harder. The room narrowed to the hard sensation of his hands and the dull drum of her pulse. He bent and kissed the line of her jaw; the motion was not tender. It was precise. The heat between them changed in a small, chemical way. She felt herself answer—not surrender, not fully, but choosing to place a brick in the scaffolding rather than smash the whole wall.
He moved with that answer. Their bodies collided and fit and scraped in a language that wasn't new to either of them. It was rough. It was needy. It was blunt. Clothes came loose like an accusation. Hands explored as if trying to find the line that would make the other bend. He drove into the moment with the same exactness he used in council—efficient, unromantic, hungry.
The act was not clean. It was messy and edged and loud in her bones. It stung with humiliation and with a weird, unwanted sort of rightness. She felt small, but not erased. She felt claimed in a way that made the scaffold tomorrow seem both unreal and inevitable. She felt seen in the deepest, wrongest place.
And then—when the heat peaked and the world thinned to the weight of two breathing things—he paused. He held her there, breasts and skin and the slow slickness left only to the two of them, and he began to hum.
It was not an idle sound. It was a tune, low and woolen, a lullaby. The notes were simple but old, and they were wrong because they were in a tongue Nysa did not know she knew. Her throat tightened. The sound tasted like cracked glass and honey. He hummed a line and then another. Each line slid into a memory as if finding a key.
Her head tipped back. For a second, truth or dream—she couldn't tell—she saw a small room with a thin bed and a child's hand holding a carved medallion. The lullaby's rhyme fit like an old stitch. She heard syllables she'd never been taught, syllables Kaelthrax used as if they were his private grammar. The tune hit her like a memory that did not belong to her but described where she had been.
When the humming stopped, both of them lay for a long minute, breaths heavy and ragged. The room felt smaller now, less sharp. The domination had been what it was and the aftermath was quieter in a way no court had been.
He rolled off, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked at her not as a prize or a lesson, but oddly, as if he were trying to read her face for a truth he had lost.
"You sang that back," he said, voice raw. He did not ask how, only stated a fact that felt dangerous. "You hummed the second line without thinking."
She did not remember doing it. She only knew the tune was inside her now, like a splinter. She felt the tiny pull of it and the way it conformed around the ugly thing they were both carrying.
"What is it?" she asked.
He watched her for a long beat. "The sentinel likes names," he said flatly. "Lullabies anchor children. We used to—some of us—use lullabies like keys. You heard it because it belongs to the stitch that cut you out."
Her breath snagged. That sentence folded into the space between them and made a new kind of floor. She had been cut out, and now she carried the echo of the thing that cut.
"Why did you—" she started.
He cut her off with a look. "Because I could," he said, blunt. "Because no one else would. Because I am tired of choosing and losing later. Because I saw a thing and decided I would keep what it cost to keep the city."
It was not an apology. It was an explanation in the most dangerous form: the honest one that commands you to answer.
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
"Find Idran," he said. "Bring him. We'll see what the scroll says then." He looked at her as if measuring a future. "And stop being a foolish thing. Don't put yourself where you would be picked."
Nysa let out a short laugh that had no humor. The room hummed with a lullaby that should have been private between a child and its keeper. She felt the scar of the harshness he'd used and the odd pity in his eyes. She felt something complicated and raw: anger and a sliver of understanding that doing terrible things sometimes looks like protection.
He stood. The claim was still there, like a shadow. He did not say he was sorry. He did not offer kindness. He only said, "Cover yourself. Court waits." Then he left her with the room spun slow and the lullaby stuck in a place she could not name.
She dressed in a daze. The seal at her wrist felt tighter. The display would still happen. The humiliation would stand in the plaza. What had changed was small and vast: he had taken claim, and he had hummed a song only she and the stitched things seemed to know. That song sat like an ember.
Outside the chambers, the palace noise seemed louder than before. Nysa slid the scroll back beneath her shawl like a wound. She had been touched in a way that altered her path. She had been claimed, and in the claiming she'd heard a line of a lullaby she could not yet place.
She stepped into the corridor and did not say his name again.