The torches are still burning when I push through the council chamber doors at midnight and the sound of them hitting the wall echoes down the corridor behind me because I did not bother being quiet about it. The council members are all there. Every single one of them, which tells me someone sent word ahead, which tells me at least one of them knew I was coming, which tells me everything I need to know about who is actually surprised and who is just pretending.
I walk to the head of the table and I do not sit down.
"Who sent him," I say.
The room is silent. Lord Theron is the first to look up and I watched the color leave his face in a slow drain, starting at his forehead and working its way down.
He opens his mouth and then closes it again and then opens it a second time like a man deciding how much of the truth to use.
"Your Majesty," he starts, "I do not know what you are referring to."
"The guard," I say. "The one who went into the prisoner's cell tonight with a knife and a message about the council growing tired of waiting. That guard. Who sent him."
Theron's jaw tightens. "I swear on my bloodline that no order came from me." He says it the way men say things when they want you to believe the words instead of looking at the space around them. "I would never move against you directly, you know that."
"I know what you are telling me," I say. "That is different from knowing it."
Lady Mirabel leans forward from her seat across the table, her fingers folded together neatly in front of her. "Your Majesty, perhaps we should consider a different possibility.
We have had rogue spies inside the palace before. It is not impossible that someone slipped in, used a guard's uniform, and acted without any council involvement at all. A planted agent looking to stir trouble between you and your own advisors."
She says it smoothly, like it is a perfectly reasonable idea that just occurred to her, like she has not been sitting here since someone sent her word and thinking up the cleanest answer she could build.
"A planted agent," I repeat.
"It is possible," she says.
"It is convenient," I say.
She does not flinch. She just holds my gaze with that patient, careful face she always wears and I feel my wolf moving under my skin, restless, because something in this room smells wrong and it is not just one person.
It is the air itself, the way everyone is holding just slightly too still, the way no one is asking what happened to the prisoner first, only what I plan to do next.
I look around the table and I let them wait because the silence is the only honest thing in the room right now.
"Eryx lives under royal protection," I say finally. "As of tonight. He is no longer a prisoner of the crown.
He is a guest under my authority and anyone who touches him, through a guard or a knife or a message written in invisible ink on palace stationery, answers to me. With their life."
The room breaks apart. Voices climb over each other and Lord Danvers stands up from his chair and one of the younger council members slaps his palm on the table and someone in the back says something about the old laws that I do not fully catch over the noise.
Marcus is near the wall and I see him watching me with a careful, steady face, not arguing, not agreeing, just watching the way he always does when he is trying to figure out how far I am going to take something.
"He is a criminal," Lord Theron says, loud enough to cut through the others. "He has broken crown law. He stole from our villages.
He led rogues against the realm. You cannot grant royal protection to a man like that, it makes a mockery of every law we have upheld."
"I can do whatever I decide is right," I say. "That is what it means to be king."
"With respect," Mirabel says, and her voice is back to its smooth, careful register, "there are limits even kings must observe. The council exists to advise you when…"
"The council exists because I allow it to," I say, and I say it quietly, which is worse than shouting and everyone in the room knows it.
"You advise me. You do not decide for me and you certainly do not send men into cells with knives to handle things you do not have the courage to bring to my face."
No one speaks.
Marcus steps forward then, placing himself slightly between me and the table without making it obvious, the way he has done since we were boys when he could feel something about to break.
"Perhaps we should revisit this in the morning when everyone has had time to think clearly," he says, keeping his voice even. "It has been a long night."
I hold the silence for another moment, long enough to let every person in the room understand that the meeting is over because I am done with it and not because they have run out of things to say. Then I turn toward the door.
The council filters out behind me in clusters, quiet now, talking in low voices that stop the moment they notice I am still in the corridor.
I wait until Marcus passes and catches my eye and I tilt my head toward the far end of the hall to tell him to stay close, and then I start walking back toward my chambers.
I almost miss it.
Lord Theron stops at the bottom of the staircase and leans close to a young servant who is waiting there with a candle, and the boy nods twice, fast, before Theron presses something small into his hand. The servant turns to go and looks up and sees me standing twenty feet away in the shadow of the corridor arch.
He runs.
Not fast enough to be anything other than what it is. Not slow enough to pretend he was doing anything ordinary. He just turns and goes, his footsteps quick on the stone, and the candle flame bends sideways with the speed of him.
Theron turns back slowly and finds me watching him. He says nothing. I say nothing. We stand there for a moment in the dark and then he bows his head and climbs the staircase without a word.
I watch him go.