And none of them noticed me, standing in the space between their words.
“Why are we gathered, truly?” Serenya’s voice lifted again, this time too bright for comfort. “If you call this council because a storm is a storm, I am insulted. If you call it because it rebels in the borderlands use weather as an alibi for theft, then say so. And if you gather because an old ghost coils around your throats and you wake choking—” her eyes slide, sharp, toward Embers and Sea in the same breath “—say his name.”
Tharos’s fist cracked the table. “We broke him!”
“We bound him,” Maerith corrected, colder than Winterborne.
“We erased him,” Serenya said, as though we were reciting a mantra.
“Did you?” Naerys’s smile deepened without softening. “How very thorough of you. Such a pity thoroughness has such a short memory.”
A tremor skated across the stormglass ribs that made up the ceiling. The trapped lightning flickered like a creature dreaming in sleep. The torches bowed so far, they licked the stone. Rain began to find its way through the old mortar, beading on the window bars like sweat on iron.
I felt it before anyone looked up. Not the cold of rain, but the weight of being noticed, like the moment a stag knows the arrow has already left the string.
Outside the storm pressed against the Hall making the windows rattle.
“There is a voice,” Queen Nyvara said into the growing hush, as if naming it allowed for control. “Witnesses hear it in thebreaks between thunder. Some say the words are a warning, some say a vow.”
“Some say it speaks to a girl,” Naerys offered lightly.
“Let us proceed with sense,” Serenya said, smoothing the moment away with priestly ease. “Our scouts report unrest along the Thornway. Verdant, you will quiet your root-witches. Embercourt, call back your raiding bands from the salt marshes. Sea?—”
“You will stop speaking as if order were a rite,” Maerith said, low and venomous. “We are not your flock.”
“And you are not Gods,” Serenya snapped, the light went hard in her eyes, “no matter how often you set yourselves on fire to prove it.”
“Enough,” King Sylas said, and the roots in the floor tightened. “The borderlands starve while you trade insults. The river is sick. The storm season?—”
“—is a symptom,” Nyxara said from her star shadowed corner. “Not the disease.”
A wind uncoiled along the length of the hall. The torches shivered, flames bending backward. The rain on the window bars gathered itself, drop by drop by drop, until each bar wore a trembling string of beads.
If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn the beads had turned to face me.
Serenya’s gaze lifted towards the windows, then settled on me.
“Child,” Serenya said to me, annoyed more than unkind, as though a draft found its way into her hem. “You are too close to the window. Move back. The storm only sounds louder from there.”
I didn’t move because the storms chatter wasn’t noise. It was a cadence that I felt beneath my ribs, like the slow count of a heart beating too close to my own.
“Leave the mouse where she sits,” Naerys said with a small smile. “You’ll frighten her for no reason.”
Tharos’s gaze shifted from the rest of the room to me, without any pretense of courtesy. There was no cruelty in it only a soldier’s habit of identifying the strangest thing in a room and measuring whether it needed to be exterminated. “Name,” he said simply.
“Caelira,” I said, and my name sounded like a pebble dropped into a well that had no bottom.
“House?” asked Maerith.
“None that would impress you,” I said, before caution could seal my mouth. “I am here on Verdants charter. I keep ledgers for shipments along the Thornway. Numbers.”
“And yet you keep your seat while queens stand,” Serenya said, a frown knitting the perfect line between her brows. “Who told you that you might?”
I lifted my chin. “I didn’t think to ask.”
Gods, I thought.Why did I say that?
“Get her out,” Tharos snarled, already rising, contempt flashing across his face at the sight of someone who refused to fall in line.
