Yuna stands in the archway, crowned and pale, speaking to a family who lost a son and gained a queen who refuses to pretend those facts balance. Taeyang is a step behind her, not looming—guarding the air she needs to draw. The new crescent beneath her collar warms when he touches her shoulder; the matching mark over his heart answers. Two pulses learning to be one drum. It steadies the whole court.
I write more names.
When my hand cramps, I set the charcoal down and climb. Roofs are honest. They admit how badly you patched them the last time the sky tried to tear them away.
Rheon is already on the highest ridge, shadow tethered to the eaves like a quiet scaffold. He doesn’t look at me when I land. He doesn’t need to. Kings know when the fallen are carrying things we can’t set down.
“How many?” he asks.
“Enough to fill a small book,” I say. “Not enough to justify the stories we tell about glory.”
He grunts what might be agreement. Far below, Seori is making the colonnade yield the truth about which wards failed and which loyalties did. She does it with a blade in her hand and gentleness under her voice, which is why people answer without bristling. Mercy is terrifying when it refuses to break.
“I almost called the river,” I admit. “When Taeyang went under the wrath.”
Rheon’s mouth tightens.
“And you didn’t.”
“I remembered Minji saying the law isn’t a lever. It’s a spine.” I huff a laugh. “I am inconveniently in love with stubborn people.”
“She would be flattered by your accuracy,” he says, and the corner of his mouth tips.
We stand in the quiet the way soldiers do when they’re not allowed to call it prayer.
By the eighth bell, the courtyard is a ledger of small salvations: a child carried out from under a collapsed balcony; a rooky named Seo-joon asleep with a cat nested in his sleeve; the peace-cup shattered at the Veil, its old slope unlearned, its whisper finally without teeth. Minji did that with Seori and Rheon—leveled the incline in Taeyang’s bones and anyone else the King taught to kneel when old magic whistled. When she came back, there was ink on her knuckles and a feather tucked into her book spine: mine, singed, given without flourish.
I keep wanting to earn it. I keep remembering that’s not how gifts work.
Kaelen meets me at the far gate with a slate of damage to the outer wards and a quiet I used to mistake for severity. Today I hear the grief in it.
“We’re patching where we can,” he says. “Replacing where we can’t. It’s… a lot.”
“Chaos is lazy,” I tell him. “It breaks what’s closest. Order can be lazy too. Don’t let it rebuild the same mistakes.”
He holds my gaze.
“I won’t.”
We walk the wall together. He doesn’t apologize for binding the King with star-silver and ivy-iron. He doesn’t have to. He madea choice and set it down where Yuna could stand on it. That thin line between treason and loyalty has been my home for centuries. I recognize its cost.
Afternoon finds me in the training court with the new children who think they’re soldiers because they didn’t die last night. Taeyang is already there, shirt off, scars out, teaching the stance that saves shoulders tomorrow. He does it with gentleness that would have gotten him killed in the house that built him, and all I can think isgood. Let the world learn what to do with a man like that.
“You’re slouching,” I tell a girl who tries to hide inside brave. “No one wins a war pretending to be smaller.”
“We won, didn’t we?” she says, chin lifting, eyes wet.
“No,” I answer softly. “We lived. That’s different. Now we learn how to be worth the breath we kept.”
When the light goes long, I find Minji where the colonnade breaks into garden—ink-stains, tired mouth, hair pinned up with a soldier’s efficiency that fools no one who loves her. She’s reading petitions that arrived at dawn as if people didn’t hear steel and think it was their cue to ask for favors.
“An hour?” I ask, because we made a bargain: time without demand, proof without grand gestures.
She doesn’t look up.
“What for?”
“For whatever hurts less afterward.”
