Ironhold — The Citadel, Year of the Compact
It had not occurred to anyone in the Citadel to ask whether the Emperor wanted flowers. They simply appeared, which was how things worked under the reign of a man who had consolidated the North in two years and who had a reputation for decisiveness that, on certain mornings, translated into a decorating committee assuming that if they waited for permission they would be waiting until spring.
Lorenzo had arrived at the great hall's threshold and stopped. The smell had reached him before the sight did, something green and living in a space that was usually stone and iron and the cold mineral breath of altitude. He had stood very still for a moment. Then he had walked inside without comment, which the committee had correctly interpreted as approval, and which Lorenzo had meant as something more complicated.
The flowers were Northern. Whoever had sourced them understood the geography and the season well enough not to import softness from the South, which would have been wrong in a way that people would have felt without being able to name. These were the hardy things that grew in the passes, low and pale and stubborn, white-petalled against dark foliage. They lined the long aisle in stone bowls rather than vases. They did not shout. They simply were there, which was the Northern way of doing things that mattered.
He had stood at the end of that aisle for what felt like a very long time.
There were three hundred people in the hall. Lords from every tier of Ironhold. Captains whose names he knew individually and who had fought beside him through the consolidation. The Abbott of the Northern Order, whose presence conferred a legitimacy that was not strictly necessary but was the kind of thing that cost nothing and meant something to the generation above his own. Representatives from three of the Western canyon clans who had come not out of obligation but out of the specific calculation that a stable North was better for everyone, even those who had reservations about the man running it. He knew they were there. He knew who had come and who had sent a proxy and what the proxies signified.
He had registered none of it. He was looking at Seraphine.
She had entered from the eastern passage, which meant she had walked the full length of the hall toward him, which meant he had the particular experience of watching her approach across a room that had gone quiet enough that he could hear the rhythm of the ceremony drums from two floors below. She was wearing grey-white, the Northern ceremonial color, and her dark hair was dressed simply, which was a choice he suspected she had made deliberately and which he found, in the moment, unmistakably correct. She looked like herself. She looked like the woman who had, fourteen months ago, sat across a strategy table from him for six hours and argued him to a standstill over the grain taxation question and been right, which was a thing that still produced in him a quality of feeling that was not entirely about grain taxation.
She reached him.
She looked at him steadily. Her eyes were dark and direct and gave nothing away, which was one of the first things he had understood about her and one of the things that had not changed. Then something shifted, just slightly, in the set of her expression, the particular movement of a face suppressing something it has decided is for later and not for now, and she said in a voice low enough that only he could hear: "You're nervous."
"I am the Emperor of the North," he said, also quietly.
"That's not an answer," she said.
"No," he said. "I'm not."
"You're a very poor liar for someone in your profession."
The Abbott cleared his throat with the specific resonance of a man who had learned to clear his throat at exactly the volume required to remind two people that there were three hundred witnesses present without being impolite about it.
Lorenzo looked at Seraphine. She looked at him. The careful political architecture of the moment held, and then something underneath it shifted, the way ice shifts in late winter, and they were simply two people standing close together in a room full of flowers and iron, and the distance between the thing they were doing and the thing they meant by it collapsed to nothing.
He took her hand.
The ceremony itself was brief by Northern standards, which meant it was still longer than most Southern ceremonies but shorter than the Western ones, which were famous for lasting until someone collapsed. The Abbott spoke the compact words in the old liturgical dialect, which approximately a third of the room understood and the rest responded to through instinct and repetition. Lorenzo repeated what was asked of him. His voice was steady. He was aware of Seraphine's hand in his throughout, her grip neither performative nor tentative, the grip of someone who had decided something and was following through.
When it was done, the hall produced a sound that was not quite cheering and not quite silence, the specific northern response to ceremony, which was acknowledgment rather than celebration, the sound of three hundred people recognizing that something had been decided and that they were the witnesses. The drums below accelerated. The flowers, which had already been there, continued to be there.
Lorenzo was aware that he was smiling. He was aware that it was not the performing smile, not the calculated expression he wore in council or at the edge of military decisions. It was something older and less managed than that.
Seraphine was not smiling, quite. She was looking at him with the specific expression of someone who has just concluded a negotiation that ended better than they had allowed themselves to expect, which from Seraphine, he had learned, was the equivalent of warmth.
"Well," she said.
"Well," he agreed.
The feast began. Lorenzo ate little and drank moderately and spent most of the next four hours talking to people he needed to talk to, which was indistinguishable from what he did on any other evening except that tonight the room smelled of living flowers and he had a ring on his hand that he was aware of the weight of in the way you were always aware of a new weight at the start, before familiarity absorbed it.
Sometime in the third hour, when the mead had done its work on the room and the conversations had loosened into the kind of talk that meant nothing but required presence, he found himself at the edge of the hall, looking out through the high iron-framed window at the vertical city below. The tiers dropped away into the valley dark. The lights of the lower city burned amber and orange in the cold air. Somewhere far below, the civilian population was celebrating in its own fashion, the north-quarter markets loud with the specific festivity of a people who had had a year of relative peace and decided to spend it.
He thought about the dream.
The boy in the silk. The quiet fire.
He pressed the thought back. Tonight was not for that. Tonight was for this: the warmth of the room behind him, the sound of three hundred people doing what people did when things were, for a moment, going correctly. He had worked for two years to build something that could produce a night like this. He was entitled to stand in it for an hour without turning it into a problem.
He turned back to the room.
Seraphine was across the hall, in conversation with two Western representatives. Even from here he could read the quality of it: she was listening more than speaking, which was her method, and the Westerners were leaning slightly forward, which meant she had already done something that made them want to be heard by her. He had not arranged this conversation. She had found it herself.
He watched her for a moment.
He thought: this will work. Not effortlessly. Nothing here was effortless. But this will work. The North will hold. The ring on his hand was real and the woman wearing its twin was competent and decent and someone he found, in ways he had not entirely worked out the vocabulary for yet, genuinely glad to be in the same room as.
He allowed himself the thought. He did not follow it further than that.
He went back to the feast.