The King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe

Chapter 11 The Heart on the Table

Daren’s stolen heart beat twice inside the glass before his own remembered how to move.

He pressed a hand beneath his ribs. Across the hall, people rose from their blankets, staring through the windows at the monastery lifting above the peaks. Seven chains hung beneath its foundations. They did not swing.

They stretched into the darkness below.

“Sit down,” Maera Thorne told her daughter.

Selka remained standing.

“You brought that here.”

“The monastery was already preparing to move.”

“I meant his core.”

Maera looked at the casket as though it were a bowl someone had set between them at supper. She had Selka’s narrow face, but time had softened nothing in it. A white streak ran through the hair at her temple.

Daren shifted Orin from his knee into Pella’s arms.

“Take him beside the hearth. Tell him where I am if he wakes.”

Pella nodded and moved away.

The casket pulsed again. Daren’s burned palm twitched toward it.

He put that hand beneath his other arm.

For one shameful moment, he imagined taking it before anyone could stop him. He remembered lifting Orin with one hand, running without measuring every step, carrying his wife across a flooded lane while she laughed against his shoulder. The core had belonged to that man. The desperate part of him believed putting it back would bring everything else with it.

Then his ribs caught on a breath. His wife would still be dead. The villagers would still be hungry. Whatever waited in the glass could return only what it actually held, and he did not yet know what that was.

Brida noticed. She moved the casket to the far end of the table with the handle of her mallet.

“Does it bite?”

“Only if opened carelessly,” Maera said.

“Then start being useful.”

For the first time, the messenger looked surprised.

Daren studied the red stone. Before Corren, he had felt it as warmth behind his breastbone, a reservoir filled by years of practice. He had never seen it outside his body. It looked smaller than the ruin its loss had made.

“How do I know it’s mine?”

“You felt it.”

“I felt a broken rib once. That didn’t make the boot mine.”

Selka’s mouth tightened. Maera ignored her.

“Three channels entered your core from the left. One was scarred before the extraction.”

Daren remembered a siege ladder, a snapped rung, and a wound he had hidden from the company healer to avoid losing his pay.

“Who told you that?”

“The stone.”

He leaned closer without touching the glass. A dark seam crossed one side of the core. Beneath it, something silver curved around the base.

A collar.

“Brida. A cloth.”

She covered the casket.

The ache in his chest weakened.

Maera watched him with new attention.

“I was told you were an impulsive man.”

“You were told by someone who put my son on a scale.”

“Collector Veskar exceeded his discretion.”

Selka struck the table with her palm.

“He used the rite I was ordered to witness.”

A few people stopped gathering their blankets. Daren saw Iven standing in the doorway, her infant asleep against her shoulder.

Maera glanced at them, then back to Selka.

“This conversation concerns matters you do not understand.”

“Then explain them where everyone can hear.”

The room grew quiet enough for Daren to hear the mill turning below.

Outside, the monastery stopped rising. Its lowest towers hung just clear of the mountain shoulder. One chain tightened, brightening from the valley floor upward.

“It can’t simply fly here,” Daren said.

Maera’s gaze flicked toward the window.

He had watched siege engines hauled across mud. Anything that large needed somewhere to put its weight, even if the weight was spiritual.

“What are the chains attached to?”

“Anchor shrines. Moving the Summit requires prepared currents and a resting place at each stage.”

“How many stages?”

“To this valley? Three.”

“And how long?”

“Nine days, if the currents remain sound.”

Selka looked sharply at her mother. Daren could not tell whether the answer surprised her or whether she doubted it.

“Nine days to do what?” he asked.

“Accept an arrangement that keeps these people alive.”

He looked around the hall. Some faces were angry. Others had turned toward the covered casket with painful hope. He could not blame them. He had wanted the same thing before he saw the collar.

“What arrangement?”

“At daylight. You are injured, the woman who saved you is exhausted, and your people need sleep.”

“Your daughter,” Daren said.

Maera looked at Selka.

“Yes. Mine.”

Selka turned away first.

Brida pointed toward a bench beside the door. “You can wait there. Your horse goes in the stable. Nothing else enters the hall without asking.”

“You would set a guard on an envoy?”

“I’d set a guard on a bear carrying honey.”

Daren almost smiled. Then the casket shifted beneath the cloth.

A faint scrape crossed the tabletop.

Maera’s hand shot toward it. Daren caught her wrist with his uninjured hand before she reached the cover.

“What moved?”

“The cradle inside the glass.”

“Why?”

She stopped resisting.

Selka pulled the cloth aside.

The silver collar had turned beneath the core. A needle, finer than a fishbone, now pointed toward Daren’s chest.

He stepped sideways.

The needle followed.

Maera looked at the ruined wall behind him, then at his copper scar.

“It recognizes its former vessel,” she said.

From the hearth, Enn bared its ember teeth.

“No,” the guardian whispered. “It recognizes a way inside.”