Castiel
The Grey Chapel is older than the Court. It was a river-cult once, a place where men brought the first cup of floodwater each spring and asked the water not to drown their children when it fattened. The Court tolerates it because I told it to. The Oathkeepers burn their cold incense there because they like the way the smoke climbs the old stone ribs and disappears without leaving a stain.
Malachar came as if he had been waiting in the next alcove and stepped out when I turned my head. He does that. He says it saves time.
"Majesty," he said, and bowed as little as necessary to keep my temper in its sheath.
"Spare me the prayers," I said, and held out my wrist.
He set his fingers against the skin, two points of cool flame, and closed his eyes. He is older than our words for old. He listens with more than his ears.
"The cord sings," he murmured. "Too clean for a mortal tie. Too loud."
"I am aware."
He cocked his head, as if hearing a note he had not expected. "It answers quickly when I call," he said. "It does not drop like a stone into quiet. It swims."
"English, priest."
He smiled, thin. "She is not drowning."
No fear I knew I was carrying left me; I am not given that release. But a tightness shifted by a degree.
"And if the Court discovers how loud it is?" I asked.
"They will think hunger when they should think harmony," he said. "They will try to make it quiet by breaking it. They will fail. But the attempt will be ugly."
"Can it be dimmed?" I asked. "Not cut. Not severed. Softened."
He considered. "There is a rite that narrows a bond to its legal channels. It is used when one party is too loud in the other's marrow. It does not break the cord; it wraps it."
"Cost."
"A price both must pay," he said. "A fast. A silence. A night unlooked at."
I did not ask him to explain poetry. I know better than to let priests use more of it than is unavoidable. "Prepare it," I said. "But do not speak of it. If I choose to bind the song, I will do it on the Grey Tower roof and not in your books."
He bowed. "As you will."
"And Malachar—" I added as he turned.
"Majesty?"
"If Selvara or Veynar troubles the queen with the old games in the Mirror Walk, trouble them with an older one."
His mouth curved. "I do enjoy a service call."
He folded back into the chapel's dim like a thought I had decided not to have.
Fog took the roof by the time I reached it, rolling off the river in thick, wool-wet drifts. The lanterns along the balustrade were only suggestions of light, smudged halos that made the stone look as if it had learnt to glow and then regretted the ostentation. From here the palace feels less like a crown and more like a ship: masts of towers, sails of banners lagging in a wind that barely remembers itself.
I put my hands on the parapet and let the stone cool them. Below and behind, I felt her moving—no longer in the library, not now in the Hall of Ash; drifting through a corridor where queens watch in marble and refuse to tell you what they saw that made them agree to be stone. She paused near a gallery where two nobles whispered about her fall as if the fall were tomorrow's entertainment and not the day a court learns who is holding the rope.
The bond tugged. I tugged back. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to remind.
She did not call me. She did not slow. Whatever she whispered to herself, she kept it. I felt the shape of the words, not their sound: Not prey. Not pawn. Not broken.
A smile came then. Not the one the court knows. Not the one that keeps their hands from reaching too far. The other one. The first my mother taught me before she taught me how to place a hand on a hilt.
The court thinks a king is a wall. Sometimes a king is the wind that teaches a flame to lean.
"Hold fast," I said, which is what you say to a ship and to a soul, and let the fog take the words where it pleased. The bond answered—once, bright as struck flint—and steadied in my chest like a promise I was not sure I should have made.
Behind me, boots on stone.
Varus.
"Hunters on the western road," he said without flourish. "Not many. Enough."
"Human?"
"Human," he said. "Poorly funded. Well taught."
The court would enjoy the theatre of a hunt on our doorstep. They would crowd the balconies and watch and measure the shape of my reply, as if a king is a chess piece that moves according to their rules and not his own.
"Keep them outside the gates," I said. "If they cross the boundary, make sure the Court sees them escorted back in daylight. I have little patience for martyrdom this month."
"Shall I inform the queen?"
"Inform Isolde," I said. "If the queen asks, tell her the truth: that the court is a mouth and has found a new course to chew. She will hear what is underneath."
"And if she asks whether you intend to use her to quiet that mouth?"
"She already knows the answer to that," I said, and the fog took the edge from my voice.
Varus did not ask what the answer was. He does not like to be made to repeat my ruthlessness back to me. He bowed, and the roof ate him.
I stood alone until the river found its rhythm again. The wind pulled at my coat, lifted it the way hands lift veils. Somewhere below, the palace turned over in its sleep and muttered the name of the girl who had not asked to be made queen and was learning how to be a weapon without losing her shape.
I remembered the first statue we carved when we realised names could be erased. I remembered the last time I allowed a pageant rite and the year of ash that followed. I remembered the sound a mortal breath makes when it chooses to become a vow.
Not yet, I had told myself the night I left her door unopened. Not yet when I heard her heartbeat through the bond like a second song. Not yet when she walked into the Hall of Ash and put her palms on memory.
Not yet.
But soon has a way of moving.
The fog thinned. Across the roofline, the Grey Tower's top was a silhouette against a sky that does not know how to dawn here. I closed my eyes and let the bond settle into a quiet I could bear. When I opened them again, the palace was only stone. The river, only water. The king, only a man who had decided he would not be outlived by his own silence.
The court believes itself invulnerable. Let it. I have learnt to count in other currencies.
If they touch her, I will teach them an arithmetic they have not seen for a century. If they do not, I will teach her how to set a sum the court cannot balance.
Either way, the ledger will close with my signature, not theirs.
I left the roof to the fog and the chapel to its old river hymns and went to my chambers by the quiet stair. On the way, I passed the landing where a tapestry shows a stag and a black stream. The thread has frayed at the place where a hand touches it each time it passes, as if some small human insistence had learnt to outlast silk. I set my palm against that place, just once, and the palace—miser that it is—took the touch and tucked it away with the others.
Remember this, it said without saying. Remember this as well.
I will.