By the fourth morning after the council ratified the triumvirate, every pack from the salt marshes to the ice fields knew the shape of Silvermoor's fracture.
Three kings.
One human mate.
A bond that should have been impossible.
And a kingdom that suddenly looked like prey.
Seren felt the shift before she understood it.
She stood in the rose gallery that afternoon, the small etiquette salon still unfolding around her like a carefully rehearsed dance. Lady Isolde had chosen the setting with surgical precision: intimate enough that six highborn ladies could not avoid one another's eyes, fragrant enough with late-blooming roses to mask any tension, open enough that every word carried. Two loyal to the crown. Two leaning toward Elowen. Two undecided. All of them watched Seren the way wolves watch a wounded deer that has inexplicably learned to walk upright and bare its own teeth.
