“Too late. It’s entirely in my head. I’ve been mentally redecorating the estate for the past four hours. There’s going to be a pancake kitchen.”
“You burn every pancake you make.”
“I burn them with wealth now. Noble pancakes. Aristocratic char.”
Mira reached up and straightened his collar. “You’re not a rogue anymore.”
Percy went still. The humor faded just enough to show what lived underneath it: the orphan who’d spent two centuries not knowing his own surname, following his brothers’ lead, believing he had nothing to offer except loyalty and a good right hook.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not.”
“Percival Kaelwyn. Wealthiest noble in the kingdom. Owner of a pancake kitchen.”
“When you say it, it sounds real.”
“It is real.” She smoothed his collar flat. “And you deserve every bit of it.”
The corridor outside the dressing chamber led to the grand balcony that overlooked Veyndral’s central courtyard. Torches lined the pathway, their flames reflected in the polished obsidian floors.
Mira walked between us. Gown restored, hair pinned properly this time with Solomon supervising, the obsidian pendantcentered at her throat. Her shoulders were back. Her chin was up.
She didn’t look nervous. She looked ready.
The balcony doors stood twenty feet tall, carved obsidian inlaid with silver, depicting the founding of Veyndral during the Burning Years. Two guards pulled them open and the sound hit us first.
Thousands of voices. Rising from the courtyard below, from the streets beyond, from the Glowwood’s edge where wolves had gathered in both forms to witness the moment their king introduced the woman who’d cured their people, freed their prisoners, and ended a war that had lasted centuries.
Mira stepped onto the balcony.
The roar that greeted her shook the obsidian beneath our feet. Lycans bowing, wolves howling, the sound rolling across the kingdom.
She stood at the railing and looked down at them. At the kingdom that was now hers. At the people she’d bled for before she’d ever set foot on their soil.
Tears slid down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them.
I stood behind her. Solomon on her left. Percival on her right.
It was the first moment in five hundred years that I understood what the crown was actually for.
It was this.
Watching the woman I loved realize she belonged somewhere.
That the place she’d been searching for her entire life, the home she’d been too scared to name, existed on the other side of a portal in a kingdom who’d understood, better than anyone, what it meant to need somewhere safe.
Mira turned to me. The tears hadn’t stopped but her smile was the brightest thing in Veyndral.
“I’m home,” she said.
The crowd roared. The wolves howled.
And the queen of Veyndral stood on her balcony as her kingdom welcomed her.
77
— • —
Solomon
