"Badly. They correct me often."
That earns the smallest turn of her mouth.
"You really won't go back," she says.
"No."
"Because of the council?"
"Because I know what happens to men who sit too long in rooms built to make others kneel." I keep my eye on the graves. "If I go back there, people will come to be commanded. Some will beg for it. Some will demand it. Some will try to put the crown they offered me at Blackwater into softer language and call it duty."
"And here?"
"Here, no one needs me polished. No one needs the Ash King at the end of a hall. They need stone carried, routes marked, witnesses protected, grain kept dry. That is smaller. Better."
She studies me for a long moment.
"You'll hate being corrected by masons."
"Yes."
"Good," she says. "It'll keep you survivable."
We go before full dark. At the broken gate I look back once—not toward the throne a frightened officer offered me in this same ruin, not toward the army that would still answer the name. Toward the graves and the cairn between them, the pin and the cloth vanishing under white, the small wrong bird keeping watch over a child no one was allowed to count.
A man could rule from a place like this. Varek nearly did. The bones are right for it. I leave it a grave. I take Corrine's hand where there is no one left to read the gesture as strategy, weakness, or claim.
We walk out through the broken gate together. Not toward my estate. Not toward the capital. Not toward any room that remembers how to make me useful. Behind us, Blackwater holds its dead the way it always should have: quietly, asking them to mean nothing more than what they were.
33
CORRINE
The bonfire in the square is the first I've stood near in years without some animal part of me planning the way out. Someone's daughter keeps feeding it cedar, and the sparks climb toward a sky gone plum-dark. I hold a cup of spiced wine going cold in my hands and let the heat reach my face.
They built the festival around the survivors. Not a victory—no one here is fool enough to call it that—but a counting of who's left, which is all I've ever fully trusted. Human fiddlers and a dark elf with a hand-drum have found a rhythm neither of their people taught them. Children who don't remember the war chase each other under the trestle tables. An old woman from a crossing presses a second honey cake on me and won't hear refusal, so I eat it, because turning down kindness is a habit I'm trying to set down.
Leoric is across the square, cornered. The mason and the well-digger who fought over the cistern in autumn have pinned him between them again, arguing about a grain store, and they've decided he should settle it. He keeps issuing something that sounds like a command and they keep talking over him, and when the well-digger laughs and claps his good shoulder, Leoricholds stillness like he hasn't worked out what to do with being liked.
I watch him longer than I mean to. Peace has been harder on him than any pass we crossed bleeding. Battle had rules he could read asleep. A festival has none. He learned the language of rooms built to make people kneel, and now he's learning the one where a child hands him a carved horse and wants nothing back except for him to hold it carefully. He's getting better at it. Slower than he'd like. He still rises before light to walk a perimeter that doesn't need walking, and I let him.
Isolde appears with a refill I didn't request. "You're looking at your dark elf like he hung the stars."
"I'm making sure he doesn't court-martial the well-digger."
"Mm." She follows my gaze, unconvinced and not bothering to hide it. Near the ale, Theren stands upright, lung healed enough that he's resumed insulting people at full volume. He catches me looking and lifts his cup half an inch—the most fondness he allows himself, which from him reads almost like a poem.
Leoric works himself loose near the second round of songs and crosses toward me, and the crowd opens for him without flinching now. He stops close. The flames lay gold along his face, and I take it in the way I'd take in our own hearth at home.
"You watched me suffer," he points out.
"You volunteered. Nobody conscripted you to arbitrate barley."
"Drogan did. He claims it's good for morale." The corner of his mouth moves. "Mine or theirs, he wouldn't specify."
"Come home." I leave my cup on the table. "Before someone asks you to bless a goat."
The climb is uphill and quiet, the music thinning behind us until there's only our boots and the wind off the ridge that no longer carries anything worth bracing for. The little house we'veborrowed waits at the top. He stands aside for me from habit, then comes in close at my back, and I'm warm from the wine, the walk and the plain fact of him. He reaches for the lamp. I catch his wrist before the flint.
