Castiel
The palace does not forget.
Men do. Courts do, with careful ceremony and convenient fire. But stone—stone is a miser. It hoards what has passed through it, stacking dust on dust, breath on breath, until memory becomes weight. The older I have grown, the more I recognise that weight in the way these halls settle at night, in the way a door will sigh when opened as though it has been asked to speak a name it buried centuries ago.
Tonight, the name it wanted was hers.
Temperance moved somewhere in the deep of the palace, and the bond struck like a knuckle against a bell. Not loud. Not frantic. Certainty, not panic. I was in the council room, the maps unrolled like flayed animals across the table, and still I felt it through my palm on the carved arm of the chair—the quickened thread of her pulse, the sharpened edge of her thoughts. She had left her rooms. She should not have.
Varus was speaking of the northern line, of floodwaters and cattle tithes and a petty lordling who fancied himself cleverer than the law. I lifted a hand. He stopped at once. Old habit.
"Continue," I said, and took my hand away before the stone learned more than I intended.
He continued. I listened enough to make them believe I was listening. The rest of me stood at thresholds Temperance crossed, felt her brush the air of corridors rarely used, felt the small stiffening of servants as she passed. She found the Sable Library—yes, I tasted its old ink like iron on my tongue—and then, later, another place. Older. The weight shifted. The palace drew breath.
The Hall of Ash.
I rose. Varus did not comment. He knows better than to question the routes I walk.
"Adjourn," I said. "At first light we speak of the border again."
The elders bowed, relieved to be dismissed, eager to return to their small theatres and their smaller cruelties. Varus remained. He always does.
"Your Majesty?" he asked.
"Later," I said, and left him with the maps.
The Hall of Ash is not a room. It is a ledger.
Stone, yes, and smoke and ritual. But ledger first, built to add columns you cannot see, to balance sums no court wants written in a Scribe's pretty hand. The doors closed behind me with a hush that tasted of cedar and old rain. The braziers were banked; the air was near-cold. Even the false lantern-dawn felt hushed here, as if light had been cautioned not to speak too loudly.
She had been and gone.
Her tread was light. No mortal scent of fear hung in the air—only that bright, metallic thrill that comes from stepping too close to the drop and remembering, too late, that you were born without wings. I stood a long moment and let the room reacquaint itself with me. It was not fond of me—no room that holds memorials is fond of kings. But it tolerates me, the way a ledger tolerates the hand that keeps it in order.
The obsidian queens watched, as they always do. I do not pretend indifference to them. Indifference is for those with shorter memories. The first of those faces is older than the crown. She was not called queen in her day; they called her an answer and then burnt the question. After her—others. Mortal, living, fierce, terrified, foolish. The Court would not keep their names, so the palace kept their faces.
On the lowest step of the central dais a faint smear of skin-warmth lingered where Temperance had set her hands. As if the stone itself remembered her touch with something like surprise. A ridiculous thought. Stone does not feel. And yet I laid my palm on the same place.
Heat. Not feverish. Not warning. Recognition.
The bond climbed my arm like a vein full of light. Images—impressions—rose up from the dark: a quill scratched across black parchment; the river turning silver beneath a casement; the slight pull of lace at a collarbone as breath snagged; Isolde's voice saying do not bleed where they can smell it; the faint laughter she swears she heard when she touched an obsidian mouth carved a century and more ago. Not mine. Hers, caught on the corner of my senses and dragged into me by the thread we have made.
Not prey. Not pawn. Something else.
"Fool," I said, and I did not know whether the word was addressed to her or to the part of me that had let her walk into this room without ordering the doors sealed and the guards doubled.
The palace did not answer. It never does. It only remembers.
I stood until the braziers gave up their last thin smoke. Then I turned away and took the quiet stairs at the back—the ones that open on the roped gallery above the Night Guard's yard.
Steel speaks a language I speak better than most. It minds its temper if you do. It holds an edge if you pay attention to how you cool it after heat. It betrays fools without malice. Tonight the yard hummed with that language. The Guard trained in pairs: shadow on stone, whisper of leather, the punctuating knock of haft on haft. No boasts. They keep their voices for the places where it matters. They keep their silence for here.
Captain Arlen glanced up when he felt me overhead. He did not call the yard to attention. He knows I do not want their theatre. I want their attention. He gave me that with a tilt of his chin and returned to watching the pairs move.
"Captain," I said when I reached the stair's foot.
"Majesty." A nod. He did not bow deeper than needed. That is why he has his rank. There is nothing in him that bends unless bending is the surest path to breaking something that requires it.
"Two shadows on the queen," I said. "Older blades. Eyes, not hands. Always close. Never seen."
"Names?"
"Yours," I said, because I am not interested in mistakes. "And Grey."
A flick. Acceptance. Grey stepped from the dark like consequence. He is not old as the palace counts age, but old enough to have learnt how to stand inside a silence until it stops feeling like a shroud and starts feeling like a tool.
"You will not interfere," I told them. "You will not frighten her. Half a pace behind danger, never ahead of it. If a hand rises to strike, take the wrist. If a mouth rises to speak a command she cannot refuse, cut the tongue that moves it."
Arlen's mouth creased. "And if the mouth belongs to silk?"
"Then cut the silk," I said, and let them take whatever comfort they could from the order.
They did not ask why the queen needed shadows now when I had left her unshadowed for a week. They did not ask why I had not given such instructions on the night of the vows. They understand something the Court forgets on purpose: that timing is a weapon.
"Captain," I added as I turned away, "double the watch on the Mirror Walk. I am not amused by parlour games played in my corridors."
"Nor I," he said, grim, and I left him to his yard.
Varus waited where I knew he would: the door outside the council room, hands folded at the small of his back, eyes cool and tired and incapable of pretending to be otherwise.
"You were not with us," he said mildly.
"I was," I replied. "Just not with my body."
He grunted, which passes for laughter when he has already given his quota of mirth to the day. "The queen?"
"The palace," I said, which amounts to the same thing.
He hesitated, then: "Does she know what she does in walking where she walks?"
"No," I said. "And yes."
"Helpful."
"I do not intend to be helpful," I said. "I intend to be honest."
He inclined his head, accepting the correction without resentment. "The elders will press for pageant rites at the next new moon. They want to see her bleed ceremonially—nothing deadly, they will say. Symbol. Binding. Spectacle." A beat. "The last time we allowed such a thing…"
"Was the last time," I finished for him. The Hall of Ash was built the week after. When a court cannot bear to keep a name, it commissions a statue. Penitence dressed as art.
Varus looked at me long enough for the question to form. I answered it before he could spend words on it.
"No pageant," I said. "No rite. If they hunger for theatre, let them hire singers."
"They will not be pleased."
"They never are."
He nodded. "Then the pressure will come elsewhere. The feasts. The hunts."
"Let them hunt," I said softly. "But not her." The bond pulled, a steady thread tugging toward the Grey Tower, then easing again as if modesty had remembered itself and stepped back into shadow. "She is making maps."
"Of the palace?"
"Of herself," I said. "It amounts to the same thing."
Varus's mouth did that almost-smile again, the one that would be a comfort if he were capable of softening for more than a heartbeat. "Isolde has spoken with her."
I let that sit. Isolde speaks with whom she chooses, when she chooses. I do not tell her where to pour her mercy. It is one of the reasons I suffer her counsel: she spends it where I would not, and that is sometimes the only way to keep a house from burning down around the stubborn.
"And the other mouths?" I asked. "Selvara. Veynar."
Varus's gaze sharpened. "Veynar grows careless in his contempt. He believes a pattern, repeated long enough, becomes law. Selvara believes she is the pattern."
"Cut one and the other thinks herself immortal," I said. "Leave both and the palace eats at its foundations."
"Then you intend—?"
"I intend to watch," I said, "until watching is no longer a tool."
He accepted that, though not with pleasure. "What of the Oathkeepers?"
"Summon Malachar to the Grey Chapel at dusk," I said. "Quietly. If the bond frays, I want his hands on the knot before the Court notices the loose thread."
Varus blinked. "Frays?"
A pause. I do not enjoy naming uncertainty in front of men who have always looked to me for certainties. But I enjoy being blind less.
"It is not a mortal cord," I said. "It sings too strongly. It carries more than law. I hear her when she is three halls away. I felt her in the Hall of Ash as if she stood at my side."
Varus's composure shifted by the smallest margin. I watched it. He swallowed that knowledge and made room for it next to the others I have handed him over the years.
"Then if the Court discovers it—"
"They will call it weakness," I said. "And because they are unimaginative, they will be wrong."
He bowed. "Dusk, then."
"Go," I said, and he was gone, grey as his name.