There is one place in the Widow's Keep the door cannot reach, and it is his.
The warden's quarters sit at the top of the oldest tower, and the walls in there are not like the walls anywhere else. Nine generations of Voss blood, given willingly, worked into the stone at every succession, a lattice of old oaths so dense that when Alaric led me across the threshold the counting behind my ribs went muffled, like a shout heard through deep water. For the first time since the Frostwater, the loan and the door and the whole listening dark of the Hollow all fell quiet at once.
I stood in the middle of that quiet and nearly wept.
The rooms themselves were nothing like I'd have guessed for a king. No gold, no trophies, no great bed hung with furs. Bare stone, old books stacked against the walls i
