The BloodBound Crown

The Rite That Would Not End

The bells of the Hall of Two Rivers rang at dusk, same as they had for three hundred years, and Larke had stopped hearing it as music a long time ago. It just sounded like a debt collector’s knock now, patient and punctual, the kind of sound that showed up whether you were ready for it or not. She stood at the base of the black stone dais and watched the last of the light drain out of the tall windows, and thought, not for the first time, that the whole ceremony had the shape of a wound getting reopened on schedule so it never really had the chance to close. Above her, coiled in the rafters, the binding chain waited, dormant, harmless, everyone said, the way people say things they’ve repeated so many times they’ve stopped actually checking if they’re true. She’d counted four Rites in her life so far, and she knew this one in her feet and her shoulders more than her head, stand here, kneel there, wait for the seneschal’s voice to climb into the old tongue and let it wash over her without really listening, because the words never changed and neither did the outcome. What she didn’t expect was the man standing near the back of the Ashvale delegation, gray robes, a face she was fairly sure she’d never seen at a single state function in eleven years of attending them, not watching the crowd the way most delegates did but watching the dais itself, the way you watch something you’ve been waiting a long time to see happen. She filed it away and turned her attention back to the ceremony, because there was a prince to hate first and a stranger to wonder about later.

You’re scowling, Roan said, right on cue, low enough that only she could hear it under the seneschal’s opening lines. It’s ceremonial goodwill, Larke, not a funeral. Give it a year, she murmured back without moving her lips, an old trick they’d both perfected out of necessity, one of these might end in yours. That got her the almost smile, the real one, the kind he only ever let slip when he was sure no one but her was close enough to catch it. In public Roan Ashgrave was all warmth and polish, a man who’d apparently decided somewhere in his teenage years that charm was armor and had never once taken it off since, but up close, waiting on a three hundred year old spell to do its work, he was sharper, drier, the version of him she’d been trading insults with since she was eleven, ever since he’d stood in front of the entire Ashvale court and called Veyra’s river claim sentimental like it was a joke everyone was supposed to laugh at. She’d broken his nose with a goblet that night. Her mother still brought it up like it was the single best piece of diplomacy Veyra had produced in a decade, which, depending on how you measured these things, was possibly true.

The chanting climbed, and the chain overhead began to glow, the same soft gold it glowed every year, the light that meant this is working, this is symbolic, this will fade by spring like it always has. Larke held out her wrist. Try not to enjoy this too much, Roan said, offering his. No promises, she said. The chain lifted itself from the rafters, wound once around each of their wrists, and the seneschal spoke the final word, and the light, which should have flared gold and settled and dimmed into two thin bracelets bound for a slow and unremarkable death by winter, flared white instead. It hit her like lightning that had somewhere specific to be, one hard pull down through her spine, sharp enough that her vision blurred white at the edges. Across the dais Roan made a sound she’d never once heard from him in eleven years, low and strangled, and the chain did not loosen. It should have loosened. It was not loosening now.

The seneschal’s voice had turned into something closer to panic. Ashvale’s court physician was already moving toward the dais, and through the white noise crowding her vision Larke saw Roan drop to one knee, gripping his wrist like he meant to tear the chain off with his bare hands, and for one disoriented half second the only clear thought in her head was that if this killed him, her mother would be unbearable about it for the rest of her natural life. And she saw the man in gray robes too, still standing exactly where he’d been, not moving, not startled, not reaching for anyone at all, just watching the two of them with an expression that, if she had to name it, looked almost like relief. Then the pain settled, didn’t vanish, only settled, sinking down through her chest like something that intended to stay for good, and the light dimmed at last, slow and reluctant, and the hall went silent the way a room goes silent when several hundred people have simultaneously forgotten how to breathe. Roan looked up at her from one knee, and whatever version of him usually lived behind his eyes in public was gone. That’s not supposed to happen, he said. No, she agreed, staring at silver now fused seamlessly into her own skin, no clasp, no seam, nothing that looked like it was ever meant to come off. It’s not. Behind them the seneschal had begun, very quietly, to pray, and when Larke made herself look again, the man in gray robes was already gone.

They didn’t get to speak properly for nearly two hours, not until the court had been fed a version of events thin enough to see through but polite enough that no one dared question it out loud, something about the Rite taking with unusual strength this cycle. Larke found Roan on the east terrace, staring down at the black ribbon of the Greywater like it owed him an explanation it was refusing to give. How far did you get, she asked, before it started to hurt. About forty paces from the hall, he said, not turning around. You? About the same, she said, coming to stand beside him, close enough that the low ache in her own chest eased slightly, which she resented more than she was willing to say. So we’re bound, he said flatly, like a man reading out his own execution order, not for a year, not symbolically. So it seems.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Below them the river moved on in the dark, indifferent, the way it had moved on through three generations of people trying to claim ownership of it. Larke thought about the man in gray robes, about the way he hadn’t flinched, hadn’t reached for help, had simply watched. She thought about telling Roan right then. She almost did. But she didn’t yet know who the man was, or which side he answered to, and handing Roan a mystery she couldn’t finish explaining felt, in that moment, like handing him a weapon with the safety off

I don’t suppose, Roan said finally, you’d consider not hating me quite so intensely, given that we appear to be stuck together for the foreseeable future. I don’t suppose you’d consider being less insufferable, given the same. That earned her the almost smile again, tired this time, more real than the version he wore for court. No promises, he said, echoing her from the dais, and Larke found, with some alarm, that she did not entirely hate the sound of it. The thread between them pulled taut, then eased, like something settling in for the long haul. Neither of them moved away.