The east gallery looked different after the convergence.
Not structurally. The dark stone was the same. The candles burned the same silver. Yseult’s portrait hung in the same position with the same amber eyes and the same expression caught between two things.
But the light in the room was different. Warmer. The way a room changes when it has been used as a site of significant events and has absorbed them into its atmosphere.
I stood in front of Yseult’s portrait on a morning six weeks after the last fault line, the castle quiet around me, the fault line pulse gone from the stones and replaced by something else, the slower deeper rhythm of a realm in the early stages of healing from the inside out.
Caelan came in without knocking, which was simply what he did now.
He stood beside me an
