The BloodBound Crown

The Court Watches

The Ashvale war council met at midday, which meant Larke spent the morning being fitted into a formal Veyra gown by two attendants who kept glancing at her wrist with poorly concealed curiosity, and being reminded, twice, by her own steward, sent ahead from Veyra the moment word of the unusually strong Rite had reached her mother, that she was not, under any circumstances, to let Ashvale’s council see her flinch. She did not flinch. She’d had a great deal of practice not flinching in rooms full of people who wanted her to. The council chamber was long and cold, lined with the portraits of Ashgrave kings going back further than Larke cared to count, and by the time she and Roan took their seats, necessarily close, necessarily visible, the two heirs bound at the wrist in full view of both courts’ senior advisors, she could feel the whole room doing arithmetic behind their eyes. Your Highnesses, Lord Castellan Bren Ashgrave said, not bothering to disguise his displeasure, a broad, gray bearded man who had, Larke gathered from years of diplomatic gossip, never once approved of the Rite as anything but a necessary indignity, and liked it considerably less now that it had stopped behaving. Perhaps you’d care to explain to this council why the Rite has, for the first time in three centuries, failed to dissolve as scheduled.

It hasn’t failed, Roan said, before Larke could speak, his voice settling into the smooth, unbothered cadence of a prince who had clearly rehearsed this in the mirror that morning. It’s simply taken with unusual strength this cycle. The archivist assures us it will fade in time, as it always has. It was, Larke thought, a genuinely excellent lie, delivered with exactly the right amount of bored confidence to make most of the room want to move on to the next item rather than press further. Most of the room did. Bren did not. And yet, he said, I’m told the royal archivist has spent several days in the Second Archive, a wing that has been sealed since my father’s reign. That doesn’t strike me as the behavior of someone confident in a temporary inconvenience. Larke felt the bond hum, low and warning, as Roan’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly beside her, and she found herself watching Bren more closely than she had all morning, wondering, not for the first time since the stables, whether the man sitting across from them asking pointed questions about a forged authorization was doing so because he suspected something, or because he was the very thing being suspected and had simply gotten good at asking questions first.

Careful research seems the responsible course when magic behaves unexpectedly, Lord Castellan, Larke said, cutting in before the silence could stretch. I’d have thought Ashvale valued caution. Ashvale values honesty with its own council, Bren said, and turned his attention, deliberately, to her. Princess. Your mother’s ambassador has already sent two separate inquiries to this keep in as many days. Veyra is asking questions. I would very much like an answer to bring them before they start asking louder ones. The room had gone quiet in the particular way rooms did when everyone in them was pretending not to be listening as hard as they possibly could. Larke held Bren’s gaze, and did not look at Roan, because looking at Roan right now would tell this entire council exactly how much they’d already come to rely on each other in the space of a few days, and that was not a weapon she intended to hand a man who might, for all she currently knew, be the very person orchestrating the crisis he was so loudly demanding answers about. The Rite is Ashvale and Veyra’s oldest working, she said. Older than either of our thrones. I would think, Lord Castellan, that a little humility in the face of magic neither of us fully understands is the wiser position, for this council, and for whoever sent it two urgent letters in as many days.

It wasn’t an answer. Everyone in the room knew it wasn’t an answer. But it was delivered with enough steel that Bren, after a long moment, inclined his head, not agreement, but a temporary retreat, and the council moved, with visible relief, to the next matter on the agenda. You’re good at that, Roan murmured, once the council had broken and they’d escaped onto the colonnade outside, out of earshot of everyone but each other. Answering a question without answering it. I was raised at my mother’s table, she said. It was that or starve. He’ll keep pushing, Roan said. He should, Larke said. He’s not wrong to be suspicious, someone in one of our houses did this on purpose, and until we know who, everyone with a reason to distrust the other side has a reason to distrust us. She stopped at the colonnade’s edge, looking out over the practice yards below, where a handful of Ashvale guards were running drills in the cold afternoon light. I don’t like lying to a room full of people who might be trying to help us, she said. But I like the alternative less. And I keep watching your uncle, she added, quieter, and I can’t tell if I’m watching a man who’s afraid of what he doesn’t understand, or a man who understands it better than anyone in that room and is making very sure no one looks at him twice.

Roan didn’t answer that right away, and when he did, his voice had none of the council chamber’s polish left in it. Ysolde sent word this morning, he said. She’s found something in the Rite’s older records, a seal, pressed into the back cover of the binding ledger. She didn’t recognize it. She wants us to look, in case either of us does. Something cold moved through Larke that had nothing to do with the bond. What kind of seal, she asked. A river, split by a crown, Roan said, and glanced at her, and whatever he saw in her face made his own expression sharpen. You know it. It’s not an Ashvale mark, Larke said slowly, and it’s not the current Veyra seal either. But I’ve seen it before. Once. In my grandmother’s private study, on a box she never let anyone open while she was alive. She felt the bond pull taut between them, sharp with her own rising unease, and did not try to hide it from him, because there didn’t seem to be much point anymore. It’s the old seal of the Voice of the River, Roan, she said. The title Ysolde said belonged to whoever was bound like this the first time, three hundred years ago.

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Below, in the yard, the drill bell rang, sharp and ordinary, entirely indifferent to the fact that somewhere above the practice ground, two royal heirs had just realized that whoever had reached back through three centuries to break the Rite had left their signature exactly where they knew, eventually, someone bound closely enough to Larke’s own family would be forced to find it. Someone in your house wanted us exactly here, Roan said quietly. Or someone wanted my house blamed for it, Larke said, which, given how this morning went, might be working just as well. And meanwhile someone in yours borrowed your uncle’s own seal to walk into a sealed archive three times without him ever knowing, she added, and didn’t finish the thought out loud, because she didn’t need to. Whoever had done this hadn’t left one thread to pull. They’d left two, one dressed in Veyra’s oldest bloodline and one wearing Ashvale’s own authority, laid out far enough apart that anyone chasing either alone would end up certain they’d found the whole answer, when all they’d actually found was exactly half of it.