The BloodBound Crown

The Distance Between Two Thrones

By morning, the whole of Ashvale Keep had decided, collectively and without discussion, to pretend nothing unusual had happened at all. Larke found this almost impressive. She’d grown up around courts that could smile through a coup, but even by those standards, the effort being spent on not looking at the two thin silver bands now fused to her and Roan’s wrists was remarkable. Servants curtsied and kept their eyes on the floor. Ambassadors found sudden urgent business elsewhere in the hall. They think if they don’t mention it, it isn’t real, Roan said, dropping into the chair across from her at the small table someone had apparently decided they would now share for every meal. It’s a very Ashvale strategy, Larke said, ignore the fire and hope the smoke goes away on its own. And Veyra’s strategy is what, burn the house down first and ask questions never. At least we’re honest about it, she said, and he didn’t answer that, which she was coming to understand was his version of conceding a point without the indignity of actually conceding it.

She watched him pour his tea one handed, the other wrist resting on the table between them like something they’d both silently agreed not to look at directly, and thought, not for the first time since the terrace, that she had spent eleven years building an entire personality around hating this man, and it was deeply unfair of the universe to now require her to have breakfast with him. The ache in her chest had settled overnight into something almost bearable, a low hum, present but ignorable, so long as neither of them tried to leave the room the other was in. She’d tested it twice already that morning, once walking to the window, once walking back, both times nothing worse than a dull tug, like a held leash. I sent for the royal archivist, Roan said, once the servants had cleared the plates and left them alone, quietly, if anyone in this castle remembers what the Rite actually is, not the ceremony, the magic underneath it, it’s her. You didn’t think to mention this before I finished my tea. I’m mentioning it now. You could have led with it. I could have, he agreed, standing, but you looked like you needed the tea more than the information, and I’ve learned not to argue with you before you’ve had either.

She hadn’t told him about the man in gray robes. Not yet. It sat in her like a stone she kept turning over, deciding what shape it was before she handed it to someone else to hold. The royal archivist of Ashvale turned out to be a small, sharp eyed woman named Ysolde Fenn, somewhere north of seventy, who greeted the news that the Rite of Binding had misfired with the mild irritation of someone being told a delivery was running late rather than someone being told two kingdoms’ fragile peace now hung on a magical accident. Well, she said, adjusting her spectacles and looking between them both like she was cataloguing a matched set, that explains why the Second Archive’s been humming since last night. Humming, Roan repeated. The old wing, sealed since your great grandfather’s time, nothing in there but Rite records and border treaty drafts nobody’s had reason to read in a century, Ysolde said, already moving, robes snapping, clearly expecting them to follow, which they did, down a servants’ corridor Larke hadn’t known existed, toward a door at the base of a tower that looked like it hadn’t been opened since the treaty it supposedly stored. Magic doesn’t hum for no reason, Your Highnesses, she added over her shoulder. It hums when something old wakes up.

The Second Archive smelled like dust and cold stone and, faintly, ozone, the particular smell Larke associated with wardings under strain, the same smell that had clung to the Hall of Two Rivers the night before. Shelves rose three stories into shadow, and at the center of the room, on a plinth that clearly hadn’t seen visitors in decades, sat a single iron bound book, glowing very faintly at the edges of its pages. That, Ysolde said, with the satisfaction of a woman whose instincts had just been vindicated, was not doing that yesterday. Roan crossed to it first, and Larke felt the tug of the bond ease as she followed, the two of them drawn toward the plinth in a way that had nothing to do with curiosity and everything to do with the leash between them simply preferring they stand in the same place. He opened the book with the careful, reluctant hands of someone who suspected he wasn’t going to like what he found.

The first page was written in a hand neither of them recognized, older than the Rite itself. The Rite of Binding is not, and has never been, symbolic, it read. It was made real once, in the beginning, by two who were not enemies but something else entirely, and the crown of each house has quietly re-cast it as ceremony ever since, because a bond that can be renewed and released every year keeps two kingdoms tethered without ever risking what happens when it is allowed to finish what it started. It has never been allowed to finish. Until it is. Roan read it twice. Larke read it a third time, because the first two times she’d been too busy not looking at him to properly take it in. Someone knew, Roan said quietly. Someone in one of our houses knew this could happen, and built three hundred years of ceremony specifically to make sure it never did. Which means someone let it happen, Larke said. Last night. On purpose.

Ysolde, behind them, had gone very still, the stillness of someone who had just realized she knew something dangerous and was rapidly deciding how much of it to say out loud. Ysolde, Roan said, without turning around, in a voice that had stopped being the terrace voice and become, very precisely, the voice of a crown prince asking a direct question, what do you know. The archivist was quiet for a long moment, glancing once at the glowing book, once at the two of them standing close enough together that the ancient magic in the room had gone hush and contented around them like something recognizing its own work. I know, she said finally, that you should both sit down. This is going to take a while to explain, and I don’t think either of you is going to like it.