Chapter 5

Cassius's POV

The torches along the garden wall were losing their argument with the wind, guttering and recovering in intervals that had no pattern. Rune walked half a step behind me.

We passed the outer wall of Thornwick.

I spoke without slowing. "Renard. Has he been causing problems again?"

"The gatehouse has turned away several women over the past two weeks," Rune said. "No verified introductions. The steward has handled it privately each time."

The wind cut through the gap between the wall and the hedge. I kept walking.

"Watch every entrance to the estate," I said. "Anyone without confirmed standing does not remain on the grounds."

"Yes, my lord."

That was the end of it. Renard was a predictable problem. Predictable problems required containment, not commentary.

The tower fire had been built up in anticipation of my return. I moved to the window chair and sat. Rune poured without being asked, set the glass on the arm of the chair, and remained standing.

I turned the glass once. "Go ahead."

"The Alchemical Conclave has sent a formal request for joint inquiry. One of their senior fellows is suspected of selling restricted compounds through private channels. They are requesting Tribunal oversight."

Standard. I would review the documentation in the morning. I nodded once.

"The second matter." A fractional pause. "A courier from the palace arrived during the evening hour, sealed under the royal physician's mark. The Dragon King's core degradation is significantly more advanced than the public reports indicate. The physicians have requisitioned emergency quantities of breath-stabilizing compounds from the Conclave. Several times the standard reserve volume."

The glass stopped moving in my hand.

Several times the standard reserve volume. The public reports had been calibrated to suggest managed decline. A king growing old. Nothing requiring anyone to begin repositioning ahead of schedule.

But that number did not suggest management. It suggested collapse, happening faster than anyone outside the palace walls had been permitted to know. Every alliance being assembled under the assumption of two stable years was being assembled on false ground.

I set the glass down. "Understood."

Rune did not move immediately. He was watching my face with the careful attention. Whatever he found there made him press his lips together once.

Then he gave a short, quiet bow and withdrew without a word. The door closed behind him without sound.

The fire crackled. Snow moved against the glass. I let my mind work through the implications in the order they needed to be worked through, following each thread with the cold patience I had spent years developing, because the alternative was to react instead of decide.

I was still on the third thread when my mind produced an image I had not requested.

The gate. The figure standing outside it.

I had registered her in passing. A shape at the edge of the entrance. Coat too thin for the temperature. Back straight. Both hands locked around a document she was holding against her chest like it was the only solid thing left in her world.

I had issued the appropriate response and moved on. That was correct. There was nothing else it needed to be.

But the image remained. Specifically her hands. Every finger gripped around that document in a way that looked less like holding and more like refusing.

Like she had decided somewhere in the hours before I arrived that this one thing was not going to leave her possession regardless of what her body did around it.

I pressed two fingers against the bridge of my nose and frowned.

It was irrelevant. Whatever her situation was, it was not mine to resolve tonight. Lady Elaina would return tomorrow. I picked up the glass, finished what remained in it, and went to bed.

I woke before the light changed and dressed in the dark. The Tribunal had two hearings before midmorning. Rune was already at the base of the tower stairs when I came down.

We took the side path. Four minutes shorter than the main route.

Rune slowed.

I caught the change in his pace before I identified the reason. My eyes moved to the base of the stone dragon column on the left side of the path.

In the deep shadow at its base was a shape that was not stone. Dark cloth pressed into the angle between the column and the wall, covered in snow thick enough that the shape had nearly ceased to read as a shape at all.

"Check it," I said.

Rune moved forward, crouched, and brushed snow away with one hand. His shoulders went still. He turned his head. "My lord. It is the young woman from the gate last night. She is breathing. Barely."

I walked the remaining distance and crouched beside him.

I held two fingers near her nose and mouth. The warmth was almost nothing. A faint, uneven thread of air, too slow and too shallow.

Her fingers were bare, the knuckles split in thin lines that had bled and frozen over, dark threads sealed into the cracks at every joint.

The document was still in her hands. Both of them. Every finger locked around it in a grip that had not loosened through the entire night. Through however many hours of cold it had taken to bring her to this. She had not let go.

I gripped her shoulder and shook once, hard.

Her eyelashes moved. Her eyes opened slowly, unfocused and glazed, the irises clouded with the opacity that comes when a body has spent everything it had.

She was trying to see me. I could watch her working at it, pulling at the image in front of her, trying to make it resolve into something legible.

Her mouth opened. No sound came out. Only a thin curl of white breath, faint enough that the wind nearly took it.

I held her gaze for a moment. Then I pulled my hand back and stood.

One of the household staff had appeared at the corner of the walkway, drawn by the sound of our footsteps.

"Carry her inside," I said.

The man looked at the figure on the ground, then back at me. "My lord. Where should we take her?"

I looked toward Thornwick. The windows were dark at this hour. That meant nothing about who was awake.

I looked away. "The guest room in the obsidian tower." A beat. "Say nothing to anyone in Thornwick."

I did not wait for his response. I turned and walked directly to where my horse was being held, swung into the saddle in one motion, and set my heels to the animal's sides without pausing.

The hooves broke through the snow's surface in clean, hard strikes as we moved out toward the palace road.