Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The new office still smells like someone else’s decisions—old polish, candle smoke trapped in wainscoting, a darker bite of oil that lives in the hinge of every drawer. Cain has been Commander for six days and the room has mostly stopped resisting him; the maps lie flat now, the shelves hold the ledgers he wants held, and the chair creaks at the right point in his spine when he takes the weight off his heels. Order is an animal he knows how to break. Routine lives on the desk in tidy stacks, sharpened pencils aligned like a picket line.

Discipline carries him through first light: signatures, rosters, the morning briefing where rookies pretend not to stare at the Tin Man with a Commander’s sash. He rides the outer wall before breakfast and walks the inner yard after, takes a turn on the line with a training pistol because nobody under his command gets to forget that he knows the work in his bones. The day slots into him like the teeth of a gear.

Then the air shifts.

It’s not smoke, not soap, not anything he can tie to a bottle or a flower pressed in a book. It’s sweetness sharpened into ache, clean as first snow under sunlight, bright as the nick of a blade along the thumb. It hooks behind the ribs and drags. He stands very still in the corridor between barracks and office, breath stopped, and for a second the entire city narrows to the little feral thing that scent makes of his chest.

“Commander?” Jeb’s voice from the yard—too far to be inside the moment, mercifully. The ache loosens a fraction. Cain blinks hard, exhales slow. The air is just air again, the corridor just a corridor tiled in patient stone.

He doesn’t answer right away. He pins his jaw into place with the same pressure he uses on a trigger, turns his shoulder, walks. In the yard he corrects a recruit’s stance at the shoulder not the hip, which is how you teach an entire arm to remember. He says good. Again. Good. Reset. His son watches him with a little wrinkle between the brows that means concern and raised by a soldier both. Cain tips his chin once: I’m fine. The wrinkle eases, but doesn’t go away.

By midday the scent has threaded the city’s breath. It’s not constant. It’s worse. It comes like a tide he can’t chart yet: a wash across the street outside the north gate that takes his hands from steady to already curled; a brush of it on the stairwell that makes his back teeth throb; a ghost through the Commandery corridor that turns every intake of air into a decision. He keeps choosing. He knows how to. The Tin Suit didn’t leave him much, but it left him that.

He eats the lunch Jeb pushes onto his desk and tastes nothing. He flips a ledger to the next page and his pulse hops in his throat like a fish on a dock. By dusk, he has rubbed the ache at the base of his thumb raw and the bruise across his knuckles says he misjudged a doorframe.

He locks the office when the last runner leaves. He doesn’t trust the latch; he tests it anyway, twice. The room holds its breath with him. The map of the city glows in late sun, streets fading to thread. On the sill, the tiny glass jar he uses for spare buttons throws a fleck of light that twitches like a nervous eye. The sweetness walks through the door after him without opening it.

Cain crosses to the basin. The water is the temperature of metal. He runs both hands under it until numbness climbs his wrists; the ache only curls deeper, patient, knowing a different watch than his. He presses his palms to the porcelain and leans. His reflection puckers in the rippled glass above the washstand—lines etched deeper this year, hair cut too short to grab, eyes too bright. He inhales and that makes everything worse. He exhales and the room still smells like a promise buried under stone.

The first sound he makes is a growl, low, a grater dragged through wool. He swallows it. He doesn’t have use for a voice like that inside a room with a door that locks. Outside, maybe. On a field, maybe. Here, it’s just an animal talking to itself.

He goes to the window. The city below him is a book lying open under streetlamps. The towers of the palace are evening’s teeth against the indigo. Somewhere in there is the source, or the reason, or the person—for a sliver of thought he lets the word mate flash along the inside of his skull like lightning in cloud, then he slams all the shutters in his head because naming a thing is one step toward breaking it and he is not about to break this with his own mouth.

He breathes through the slice of his nose until the urge to tear something apart meets the wall he’s built for that purpose. He counts backward from sixty, because when control gets loud you make it countable, you put edges on it. On forty-three the scent peaks again, honey over steel, bright ozone. The bottoms of his teeth ache. He shuts his eyes.

He thinks of cold water in winter creeks. He thinks of the Tin Suit—iron and sweat-soaked straw, a world narrowed to breath and sound, the stink of rust and despair. He holds that until it bites. He lets it go before it poisons.

Movement steadies him. He rolls his sleeves and clears the desk from left to right, one crisp gesture per stack. He audits the requisitions with a precision bordering on cruel, rejects the bad ink and the sloppy numbers, writes what needs writing in a hand that never shakes. He does push-ups until his shoulders protest, then command-sits in the chair until the animal inside settles into a long, irritable crouch.

It’s a long day. He outlasts it. The city clock grinds into midnight. The smell thins like a tide going out, leaving him scraped raw and strangely clean. He leaves the office with his collar unbuttoned and his sleeves still rolled. He tells himself he’s going to bed. He tells himself that control is the same thing as patience. He doesn’t lie to himself about much; he won’t start now. He’s something like proud and something like murderous by the time the corridor empties him into the moonlit yard and the night air hits his teeth like ice.

Across the city, in a room that used to be a polite gauze-cloud of a princess’s and now belongs to someone who keeps a pair of boots by the bed and a knife behind the clock, DG can’t sleep.

Sleep refused her first at suncare, when the ward-lamps hummed too loud and the sheets felt like the wrong kind of skin. It was a distraction at dusk, a nuisance at nightfall. By midnight it’s an occupation. She lies on her back and watches the plaster ceiling breathe. The patterns shift, crawl, rearrange themselves into maps that she doesn’t know how to read. The skin at the base of her throat glows on and off, a pulse that doesn’t belong to her heartbeat. Magic skitters under her skin like fireflies that got lost and are now furious about it.

“Stop,” she says to no one, and flops onto her stomach, and the mattress laughs in springs.

Heat licks behind her sternum. Not fever. Fever is stupid and dull and the same all over. This is smart. It finds edges she didn’t know she had and traces them with a hot, amused finger. She rolls to her side and pulls her knees up and that doesn’t do anything except press the ache into a different arrangement of her bones. She sighs and that trembles into something more like a whine, and she tells herself absolutely not, we are not doing that.

She tries a cooling charm. Tutor taught it to her when she was twelve and refused to sleep in summer without every window open, which made the curtains into sails and the lamps into tiny lighthouses. She lets the syllables tumble off her tongue and lifts a hand the way the diagrams insist and the air over the bed goes frost-bright—then a rose-colored shimmer sparks at her wrist and that brightness softens, curls, warms like breath in a cupped palm. The ache purrs.

“Okay,” she says, and laughs because there’s nothing else to do. “Okay, so it’s like that.”

She throws the blanket off and then drags it back up because her skin misses the pressure even as the heat complains. She gets up and pads across the rug to the mirror and sees… not a stranger, exactly, but a DG drawn by someone who knew other flavors of her. Her pupils are blown wide, too wide for this light. There’s a sheen on her cheekbones that has nothing to do with a room’s temperature and everything to do with the way the air tastes. Her hair is a rumor around her head. She looks young and ancient at once and that scares her for half an inhale, and then she catches the way her mouth keeps trying to part and she has to look down at her own hands to stop from staring at herself like a painting she doesn’t quite trust.

She presses her fingers to the place that keeps flashing at the base of her throat. Warm. Not hot, not fever, not wrong. Just… awake. The red she thought she imagined this morning in the bath—something ribbon-thin waving under the skin—flickers again, definite now, as if it’s turning over in its sleep to face the sound she makes.

“What are you?” she whispers, but it comes out as, Who are you looking for.

She should call for Raw. He would hum at her and tell her in that soft, careful way of his that the city’s heart has a new rhythm and hers is joining it. He’d be right. She should call for her mother. Lavender Eyes would drink tea and tell her a story that isn’t a story about a girl who was too much and a world that learned how to hold her without breaking. DG should call for anyone. The idea of opening the door more than an inch makes the muscles at the base of her skull lock.

She opens the casement instead. Night pours in, dark and barley-sweet, the city smelling like rain that hasn’t fallen yet and iron that remembers what it was forged for. She grips the sill and leans into the air as if it might meet her halfway. The ache is a tide now, same as the one pulling whatever it is across town through corridors and over stone and under other people’s conversations. She doesn’t need words to know it’s coming in waves. She feels it when it crests. She feels it when it breaks.

Fae, she thinks, and the word is wrong and right. Auntie’s stories were always the safe kind, with thorns that had names and doors you could choose not to open. The histories in the sealed library were not safe at all. Names like knives; laws like mazes. Wings that appeared when you needed to fly or when you needed to fight. Oaths that bound like silk and cut like wire if you strained in the wrong direction. DG touches the glass with her fingertips and hears, at the edge of hearing, a thread being drawn out of an old spool: a red one, bright as mouth-bitten fruit.

“Not now,” she says to the thread. “Please. Be kind.” The word heat leaves itself unsaid, but it waits on her tongue like a taste she knows she knows.

The palace isn’t asleep. No palace sleeps. Servants pass like stitches in the halls. Guards yawn and shift their weight and pretend they aren’t counting toward dawn. Somewhere, a door shuts like the punctuation at the end of a sentence that doesn’t want to end. DG closes her eyes and lets the noise crawl up from the street, through the courtyard, over the sill, into her. The ache answers. Magic rolls onto its back and shows her its belly: here I am, scratch, fix, help, need.

She bites her lip and startles because it’s too easy to let her head tip back and breathe the way her body wants to breathe, throat open, spine softening, palms going still with a weight she can’t see. She sets her teeth in the inside edge of her cheek just hard enough to anchor. She counts backward from a number she doesn’t tell anyone she knows: sixty and then fifty-nine. The ache relishes the challenge. It meets her, playful, relentless.

Time does a slow fold. When she looks up again, the moon has moved to a different tile of sky. The light in her room has the empty blue of late-night kitchens and old heartbreak. Her heartbeat has become a pendulum, pendulum, pendulum. Every few swings the red at the base of her throat answers the bell of it with a pulse of its own, and each time it does her magic flutters its wings like it’s trying to learn how to fly inside her bones.

There’s a knock she can’t hear that lands soft on the back of her mind: Raw, probably, or a servant checking lamps. She ignores it and it leaves obediently. She’s not alone. The not-alone is terrible and wonderful. It makes the sweat between her shoulder blades feel like a promise. It makes her mouth dry. It makes the inside of her wrists itch like a storm coming in from the west.

By the time she crawls back into bed, the sheets are cool again. She turns her pillow to the other side and curls on it like a cat wraps itself around a decision. She puts one hand at her throat and the other under the edge of the mattress where the wood is earnest and real. She breathes. The room breathes with her. The city breathes with the room. The ache follows, a half-step behind, amused that she’s pretending she can lead.

She almost sleeps. The doze comes on her like a cloak—first at the shoulders, weighty and kind, then over the arms, then the ribs. Her knees uncurl a degree. Her mouth remembers how to close.

When it recedes, it does it without apology, and the heat is there in its place, not shy anymore. Not fever. This is a pull toward, not away; a call, not a warning. It drops through her like a stone into a well and the ripples hit all the edges she has filed smooth with practice. Her breath changes. She can’t help that part. She can’t pretend it’s normal. She can only make it quiet. She presses her lips together and hums, very gently, a lullaby she hasn’t sung since a tin man needed something to hold on to besides iron.

Out in the yard, Cain stops under the shadow of a barrack’s eave because that hum—he shouldn’t be able to hear it; he knows he shouldn’t; his skull shouldn’t be built to catch that frequency—but his bones recognize it the way a hound recognizes a note only it can love. His hand goes to his neck without orders from him. He looks at his palm like it’s a thing that might have words. It doesn’t. Not yet. He makes his hand come back down. He stands in the unlit strip of yard where moonlight doesn’t quite reach and, for the first time that day, lets himself admit that the scent is not going to stop because he wants it to. The admission is cool water and hot metal at once.

He wants to move. Every muscle he owns is a horse straining at harness. His control sits heavy in the driver’s seat and keeps the reins even. He thinks of Jeb sleeping two buildings over, head on a pillow stuffed with clean straw. He thinks of the rookies snoring in their rack. He thinks of the city that decided to give him back to himself and what he owes it for that choice. He thinks of an office still unlocked because he had to leave it to breathe and how he’ll double-check the latch in the morning.

He looks up at the palace, square shouldered against the sky, and feels something in it look back.

DG’s eyes are open in the dark. She hasn’t decided to open them. They simply are. She is aware of everything: the squeak of a cart on some far street, the tiny pop of cooling candlewax in its cup, the way the woven rug holds the day’s warmth while the flagstones under it give nothing at all. She is aware of her heartbeat and the other beat that is not her heartbeat and how they are learning a duet. She brings her hand away from her throat to see if that makes the red go dark. It doesn’t. It brightens, quick, like a delighted bird.

“Okay,” she says again, and the word is more honest this time. “Yes. I hear you.”

The heat purrs and kneads. There’s no fear in it. That surprises her even as she acknowledges that of course she would be this kind of fool, the kind who can stand in the doorway of a forest people warned her out of and step forward instead of back. She climbs to her knees to feel what her body feels like when it holds itself up instead of collapsing into the mattress. Her hair falls in her face and she blows it out and laughs because the laugh sounds like someone else for a second and she likes her.

She looks at the window. The city looks back. Somewhere out there, a man who wears his jaw like armor is standing very still and pretending the stillness is enough. She doesn’t know how she knows that; she knows it anyway. The red pulse in her throat agrees.

“Tomorrow,” she tells the room, and the room doesn’t believe her. The room has seen too much of her to fall for that voice.

She slides down under the blanket and drags it over her shoulder and takes one deliberate, deep breath and then another. She lets the ache lap at the edges and refuses to let it climb onto the furniture. Control isn’t about denying; Tutor said that once. It’s about choosing. She chooses to let the magic hum, to let the heat mark the corners in chalk, to let the sweetness in the air write itself in the margins of the book she’s reading called Herself. She closes her eyes and holds the image of a ribbon, redder than any ribbon she’s actually owned, curling on a tablecloth next to a cup of tea. It seems like a kind of kindness to give the ache a shape.

Somewhere beyond the wall, the scent lifts again, bare and bright. Cain lets the breath he’s been holding go. He looks like a man carved out of the notion of control and then sanded until the corners are handsome. Inside that statue, something old is pacing, smiling with too many teeth. He turns toward his quarters and makes his bootsteps even, because evenness is a gift, and he is merciful where he can be.

In her bed, DG dreams of a door. It is not the door she knows. It is carved with patterns she has seen only in the oldest books, vines that are not vines, thorns that are not thorns, a ribbon that is a river and a road and a promise. She reaches for the latch, not because the story says she must or because a lesson says she must not, but because the heat under her skin becomes a little quieter when her hand is there. The room breathes with her as she does. The city breathes with the room. The scent breathes with the city.

She does not open the door. Not yet. The tremor that started and didn’t have a name has one now and refuses to tell it. The word hangs just out of reach, laughing under its breath like someone who knows you’ll chase them when the time is right.

The night holds them both: a man who outlasts his own hunger and the girl who has stopped pretending it isn’t hers, the city caught between like a drumhead stretched to the right pitch, waiting for the first deliberate strike.

Chapter Text

Morning peels itself off the city like old wallpaper. DG wakes with her mouth dry and her sheets thrown in a strangled knot at the foot of the bed, heart drumming a rhythm that didn’t stop working even in dreams. The ache didn’t leave; it learned her. It sits inside her ribs like a cat in a sunpatch, content and ready to rake anything that tries to move it.

She is not a girl. She keeps that like a talisman between her teeth as she swings her legs over the side of the bed and plants her feet. The flagstones say good morning in their honest way, cool and unbothered. The window is still open; the air that comes through it tastes like last night’s promise diluted with dawn. She inhales. The sweetness is there, further away, but she swears the red at the base of her throat answers with a tiny, impolite pulse, mine.

“Bold,” she tells her own skin, because talking to her body has always worked better than pretending it’s a separate thing. “Let’s not set anything on fire before tea.”

The mirror doesn’t argue, it just gives her back everything. She pads across the rug, hair a wild crown, nightgown hitched crooked at one hip, and catches herself halfway to laughter because the expression on her face is not maidenly and never will be. Her pupils are wrong for morning—wide, hungry, slick black swallowing almost all the blue. When she leans closer, the shape shifts. Not round. A flicker sharper than a cat’s, the pupils thinning to slits and back, as if some reflex keeps trying to draw a different world into focus.

“Hello,” she says to the stranger who is also entirely her. “I’ve missed you.”

The place that keeps flashing—sternum, where gladness and panic both live—answers in crimson. It’s not a glow so much as a movement under the skin, a shimmer that unfurls like a ribbon testing slack. It curls, finds no knot to tie, curls again. The sensation is intimate and not shy; it feels like a hand straightening a collar, like a string tugged through a buttonhole, oh there you are.

Heat answers, yes, yes, yes, annoying and delicious. DG sets her palm over the shimmer and her hand comes away tingling, as if she touched static and it decided to follow her in threads. She doesn’t pull away. She chases the prickle with the edge of her thumb and snorts when it follows like a stubborn dog.

Knuckles on the door. “Highness?” Tutor has a way of saying her title that’s less bow than warning not to jump the fence. “May I?”

She drags the nightgown down, because the palace has rules about what bits of a princess are supposed to be visible before noon. “Come in.”

Tutor enters with a tray and two ward-lamps that buzz like disciplined bees. He sets the tray down, eyes flicking over her face, his mouth doing that line it does when he has a lecture and also the sense to delay it. He’s dressed for morning like always, cords and soft waistcoat, pockets that have swallowed more chalk and small bones than a museum. Raw would have hummed; Tutor just looks, the way a man looks at a board before placing the first piece.

“You didn’t sleep,” he says, not asking.

“Define sleep,” she says, and lifts the lid from the teapot to breathe in steam. It helps. Cinnamon and orange peel. Her magic hums. The shimmer twitches again, happy about the heat like it expects to be fed.

Tutor sets the lamps on either side of the casement, thumbs the brass toggles. Their circles of ward-light knit together so smoothly the seam is invisible. He palms a stick of charcoal from a pocket and draws a sigil on the sill in quick, practiced strokes—triangles nested in curves, a symbol she once spent a whole afternoon failing to reproduce because her hand kept wanting to round what should have been sharp. He adds a spiral over the lintel and a net of simple knots over the rug under her feet. The magic in the room notices his and lifts its head, curious, like foxes in snow.

“Wards,” he says, unnecessarily. “For cooling and for quieting and for keeping from any uninvited knocking.” His eyes rest on her throat for a heartbeat. “If that is agreeable.”

“If you can quiet this?” She taps the red. “I will embroider a sampler that says Tutor Is The Bravest and hang it over the hearth.”

He huffs. “Don’t start with slander.”

He lights the lamps. They shiver, then settle, filaments burning blue-white. The sigil on the sill takes the light like dried moss takes rain. The net on the rug pulls snug around her feet. She feels the ward take shape, not like pressure but like a gentle hand on the back of her head, encouraging her to lower her shoulders.

For a breath, it works. The ache recedes half a step. Her pupils remember morning. Her ribs get easier. She sips tea and catches her breath sighing in relief on the way out. It’s almost enough to make her laugh.

The crimson shimmer rolls, amused, and opens like a flower.

The ward-lamps pop at the same time, both little detonations polite enough not to shatter glass but firm enough to tell the room who’s boss. The sigil on the sill licks itself clean off the stone. The knotwork on the rug undoes its shoelace and flops. The air warms, sweet as fruit left too long in a bowl.

Tutor doesn’t startle the way a man might who isn’t used to teaching a girl that grew like a tree through brick. He takes two steps back, puts his hands where she can see them, and says in a tone the palace rarely hears, “Good morning, my lady.”

The magic laughs in her spine, delighted with itself. DG stares at the bits of charcoal dust floating in the beam of sun and then at Tutor’s careful face. “Okay,” she says. “So that’s a no on cooling and quieting.”

“Not a no,” he says, “a not yet.” His eyes drop to the crimson at her sternum; they do not flinch. “May I?”

She nods. He steps close, close enough she could count the grays in his beard, and holds his palm an inch from her chest like a healer lets heat tell him where to lay hands. His breath changes, subtly, the way a man’s breath changes when he stumbles on a truth he didn’t expect to see so close. He is steady; he is also a little startled. Tutor doesn’t do alarm. That’s how she knows it’s big.

“Princess,” he says, softly. “What do you feel?”

She tries to name it without lying. “Like… a thread got caught in me,” she says, closing her eyes to see it. “Red. Clever. Mouthy. It wants to tie something to something.” She swallows. “It wants to tie me to—” The word mate is suddenly so bright behind her teeth she feels heat burn the roof of her mouth. She lets it burn and doesn’t let it out. Not yet. “Someone,” she finishes, hoarse. “It’s not abstract.”

Tutor’s cheek twitches, which in other men would be a gasp. “Ah.” He lowers his hand. “Not abstract, no.”

He turns, moves with deliberate economy to the writing desk she never uses to write anything as boring as letters, and unrolls a scrap of thin leather from a lower drawer that shouldn’t have been his to open. He always has a key for the drawer you didn’t know you had. Inside the leather are six pieces of chalk in six colors and a chunk of something that looks like old amber with a leaf trapped in it. He chooses the amber and presses it to his palm like a worry-stone and then walks a slow circle around her.

The ward he lays this time isn’t a net. It’s a story. Curves without corners, lines that double back and then slide under themselves, a language of loops. It smells like wild mint and hail. As he closes it, something inside the circle remembers a dance it wanted to learn.

“Fae,” Tutor says, as if he is both admitting it and performing a diagnosis. “Or if we are pedantic—which I reserve the right to be—fae-touched. The royal house has always loved an oath more than is strictly good for it. It appears some of those oaths loved us back.” He raises a brow at her. “You’re not frightened.”

“Should I be?”

“Yes. And no.” He lifts his chin toward her throat. “The color is a kindness. Red has always meant tie here.”

“This is where I keep my heart,” she says dry, because if she doesn’t make a joke she might start to vibrate.

“Convenient,” he says, same dry. “The… other part of what you feel—” He searches for a word and, like always, refuses to reach for one he doesn’t trust. “There is a… structure. A world with rules you’ve read about in the wrong kind of novels. Hierarchies that smell like wolf and honey. Heat, knots, command. We have not named it in this house because naming is invitation.”

“I’m not afraid of invitations.”

“I’m aware,” he says, fond, and then sterner: “Omega.”

The word drops into the room and lands right in the red shimmer. The ribbon purrs. Her spine does a quick, involuntary shiver that starts at the base and climbs, a cat stretching. Her pupils flick to slits and back before she can blink.

“Say it again,” she says, because she is unwise, and Tutor obliges because he’s never flinched from teaching her the names of her own bones.

“Omega,” he says, and the ache in her belly tightens into something that feels like the first note of a song she wanted to hear as a child and told herself she didn’t. “And not only. There are alphas and there are betas in that schema. You, my dear, are an omega whose blood sings to old trees.” He taps the circle. “Magic with manners until it decides not to. Which is to say: fae.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. The taste is copper and wake-up. “Is that why the cool-down wards blew like birthday candles?”

“They were not calibrated for you,” Tutor says, mildly. “They were calibrated for… court daughters. You will have noticed you are not that.” He angles his head. “What did you say to yourself in the glass?”

“That I missed me.” The admission surprises her more than it surprises him. “That I… recognized something.” She shakes her head. “And that it’s not going away because I pretend it’s not there.”

“It won’t,” he says. “You can sit on it. It will only get heavier.”

“Is it going to… get worse?” She wants science. He won’t give her that. He gives her truth.

“It will get sharper,” he says. “Then sweeter. Then—” He draws a shape in the air that isn’t a shape but conveys totality. “And then you will not be alone in it.”

Her body answers that last part with an obscene little burst of pleased heat. She clamps her teeth together to keep in the sound that wants to come out of her throat. It’s not a laugh. It’s not a moan. It’s a please sharpened into a command by the world’s most arrogant brainstem.

Tutor hears the breath anyway. He chuckles, not unkind. “Yes,” he says. “That.”

“Do we have a book for this?” she asks, because if you can put a problem on a shelf you can lift it down again on purpose later.

“Not one I can hand you before breakfast without causing a diplomatic incident.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded square of paper worn soft at the corners. He hesitates, then gives it to her like a trust. “But you can start with this.”

She opens it. A sketch, ink and careful hand: a ribbon tied through a heart, a rune that wants to be a handprint and refuses to be anything but itself, wings sketched lightly behind a woman’s shoulders like the artist didn’t want to impose too much. The caption in Tutor’s tidy script: Red Ribbon Covenant, Prime Rune, Dawn-Blooded.

“It’s you,” he says, and even in his mouth it’s not prophecy, it’s observation. “Or it might be. We’ll decide. In the meantime, we will keep you from chewing through your own leash.”

The word leash should make her bristle; it doesn’t. It makes something warm low in her belly splay out and show its throat. She rolls her shoulders once, restless. The circle under her feet hums back.

“What if—” she starts, and the question flares up from the place where fear and want braid together. “What if I… know who.”

Tutor’s eyes flick to her face and away. “Do you?”

Leather, pine, gun oil, the sound of a voice that turns the air into orders and safety at once. A mouth that doesn’t know it’s soft. A man who startled a hummed lullaby last night like a dog on point catching a far bell. The memory makes the ribbon kick against her skin the way a baby kicks against a wall in a story.

“I—” She swallows. Lying to him is like trying to sing over a bell; the note only makes him smile. “I don’t know,” she says, honest as she can be. “I suspect.”

“Then we say suspect,” he says, satisfied. “And we do not chase a suspect through a palace with your scent on your sleeves.” He tilts his head, listening to some internal weather. “We will layer wards he can’t smell through unless you invite. We will give you exercises so you can breathe without drowning. We will remind you that hunger is a message, not a mandate.” He looks at her like a man looks at a door he knows she will open. “And we will prepare for an introduction done on your terms.”

“What if he doesn’t—” She hates the tremor in her own voice; she loves the way the ribbon tightens in answer. “What if he doesn’t hold.”

Tutor’s smile is swift, almost wicked. “My dear,” he says, “I have only seen two men hold you when you decided you would be held, and one of them was a Tin Suit. The other commands half the city and the respect of the half that pretends it doesn’t. If it is who we are not naming, he has been holding more than himself together for longer than most men can count. He will not drop you.”

The sentence lands in her bones with a thump that feels like a foundation stone laid in wet mortar. The ache purrs and stretches. The crimson at her sternum slips a tendril outward and then, as if embarrassed, curls back, shy for the first time all morning.

She sets the sketch carefully on the desk and smooths its corner with her fingertip. “Tell me the rules,” she says. “Not the court’s. The other ones.”

Tutor’s mouth becomes a white line of pleasure—the kind he gets when she asks the question he hoped she would ask. “Breath before magic. Three breaths when you feel the surge. In through the nose as if you were smelling something you love, out through the mouth as if you were cooling tea.” He demonstrates; she copies; the ribbon rolls under her palm, amused and then content. “Second rule: ask the ache what it wants, not what it’s afraid of. It knows the difference; it will sulk if you don’t. Third: you command, but you do not compel without consent. That’s a fae rule, and the only one that bites the hand that breaks it.”

She nods. The room nods with her. The circle purrs. She wants to kiss his cheek, which will make him sputter and then give in. She restrains herself. Barely.

“And this—” Tutor reaches up, his finger hovering over the place that glows red. “When it pulls, you do not follow to the exclusion of sense. You invite. You say here rather than there. You make a nest where you want to be found. You leave a door unlatched and you sit inside and you do not pace the hall.”

“That last one felt personal,” she says, grinning a little.

“I have known you since you tried to cast a warming charm on snow because you thought it would be kinder if it melted from the inside,” he says, wry. “I’m aware of your relationship with doors.”

She takes three more breaths. The ache learns the drill like a very important general reluctantly admitting the value of push-ups. Her shoulders settle. Her pupils flirt with roundness and hold there. The ribbon under her skin makes a small, satisfied knot over bone. It does not tie. Not yet. But now she can feel the loop it wants to make, and the way it will cinch when it finds the other end.

A word rises through her teeth, ancient and bright. It does not ask permission. It never would.

“Saethyr,” she says, and the air changes.

Tutor freezes, not with fear but with recognition. The ward-circle brightens where her toes press it as if a sun came up under the floor. Saethyr doesn’t translate cleanly in her head; it wriggles when she tries to pin it. The closest thing in the palace tongue is Belonging That Also Leads. The sound of it tastes like honey cracked with thunder.

“High speech,” Tutor murmurs, reverent despite himself. “We will not say that again until you are ready.” His eyes meet hers, humor back like a life raft. “And we will not say it in front of anyone we are trying not to knock flat.”

“Because it’s a command,” she says, feeling the truth of it vibrate in her molars.

“Because it’s you,” he says.

He gathers the blown ward-lamps and their dignity, wraps the amber back in leather, wipes the soot from the sill with his sleeve like a man who doesn’t intend to mention it to anyone. At the door he pauses. “Breakfast. Then we will visit the archive. There are pages you will want to put your hands on. And afterward… perhaps a walk along the outer halls.”

“Fresh air?” she asks, knowing what he means.

“Lines of sight,” he says, bland, and she loves him for refusing to play coy. “And because if you’re going to scent each other like hounds at a fair, I’d prefer witnesses and stone between you and any ungentlemen who mistake hunger for license.”

Her jaw tightens at that. Roan’s face flickers in the back of her skull like a bad lamp. The ribbon goes hard and mean under her hand in agreement. “Gods, yes,” she says. “Stone. And witnesses. And a long memory.”

Tutor inclines his head, the courtly version of a fist bump. He slips out; the door clicks.

DG stands very still. She can hear the city breathe. She can hear herself. She can hear, if she lies down inside the sound and closes her eyes and stops pretending she isn’t listening, another breath syncing to hers one building, two buildings, a precinct away—steady, held in a fist, released in measured counts. The sweetness rides it like a rider on a warhorse, sitting steady, ready to charge and refusing to without the right word.

“Saethyr,” she whispers once more, just to herself, just to know how it feels behind her teeth. The room goes soft at the edges and the ribbon rolls, delighted, flattered, a wicked little thing. She laughs, shakes her head, and pads toward the wardrobe because if she’s going to be an omega and a fae and a princess in one body she might as well put on something that doesn’t apologize for any of it.

Leather. A skirt that lets her run. Boots with bite in their soles. A jacket that smells like the gardens at night. She braids her hair back until it stops falling into her eyes. The mirror gives her back a woman who is not trying to look safe. Her pupils sit round now, but when she tips her head just so she catches the cat-snap glint and bares her teeth to herself because she can.

In the hall, she meets the morning head-on. The ache follows, a little better behaved with a leash of breath on its neck. The crimson at her sternum hums like a low-lit lamp under skin. She doesn’t hide it; she doesn’t flaunt it; she exists with it. Servants remembering their own young don’t stare; they just smile into their sleeves. Guards who would have tried to be invisible last year shift so she can walk the center of the hall. Somewhere below, across stone and air and rules, a man turns toward the scent he can’t stop smelling and smiles without letting his mouth give him away.

The wards didn’t hold because they were never meant to hold her. She understands this the way a swimmer understands tide. The ache is a name she can say now: omega. The magic is a forest with her footprints all over it: fae. The crown is a weight she wears because no one else will. She puts them all on and walks, spine straight, a ribbon under her skin trying its knot over and over until the day answers with the other end.

Chapter Text

The barracks smell like metal scrubbed with soap until both scents give up and agree to share the same air. Cain’s boots drum a steady law down the central aisle, his shadow slicing over bunks that have been made tight enough to bounce a coin and footlockers that have forgotten what clutter looks like. Recruits line up at attention in two rows, shoulders squared, chins tucked, ears straining for the flick of displeasure in his voice like a switch they’d rather not feel.

Outwardly, he’s iron. Collar sharp. Sash straight. A man-shaped rule, walking. Inwardly, the sweetness laces the air in invisible coils and burns every breath hot. He builds a wall for it to crash against, builds another behind that, stacks them until he’s a fortress strapped into a uniform, and still the tide finds hairline seams, sluices through, lives in his mouth like a taste he can’t spit.

He stops at the first recruit, a broad-shouldered kid with sun on his neck and the bottled look of a beta trying to be smaller than he’s built. Cain checks the lay of the strap on the service pistol, flips the buckle, nods once. The boy doesn’t breathe wrong. “Name,” Cain says.

“Stev, sir.”

“Knots, Stev?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Show me.”

The commandery’s drill-master, a block of a woman named Brogan with shoulders like doors, flips a coil of rope onto the ground between them. It lands with a hiss of hemp on stone. Stev swallows and drops to a crouch, hands moving. Bowline: neat, quick, true. Clove hitch: serviceable, too careful. Square knot that thinks it’s a granny. Cain raises a brow. The boy blanches, fixes it, and by the time he looks up again the flush on his throat says he knows which line almost got him chewed.

“Better,” Cain says, mild enough that half the row startles. “Knots save lives. Sloppy ties kill you slow.”

“Yes, sir,” comes the chorus.

A handful of the men aren’t recruits at all. They stand just a little back, not because anyone told them to but because habit puts them in the shadow and tells them to like it there. Former Tin Men—more precisely, men who used to breathe rust and panic and now breathe air and have to make peace with that trivial miracle. You can pick them out by how they listen; they don’t look at him so much as take him in, angle by angle, as if they’re mapping his weight against the door in case the door closes.

Cain takes them in right back. He made the Restablishment Program exist by staring at a page covered in budgets until it remembered compassion, by yelling at three councils until two of them bent, by promising the third he’d put his badge on the table if they wanted to make him choose between their old way and his. The men watch him like he’s either going to save their lives or set their hearts on fire. He intends to keep proving they can have both without the burn.

He moves down the line. An omega recruit—rare, and more than a little brave to stand under a Commander’s eye while the palace fizzles with rumor—sweats a telltale shine at the hairline and doesn’t flinch when Cain’s shadow passes over him. Good. Courage has a smell and it’s not bravado; it’s copper under rain. A beta woman meets Cain’s gaze straight-on and tips her chin minutely toward her left boot: the lace is a hazard. He taps it with the toe of his boot, and she fixes it without breaking posture. Good. The line breathes as one organism, muscles and nerves knotted up into something that will learn to move like a living machine.

Jeb watches from the edge with his arms folded, mouth straight as a road and eyes that can’t help being his mother’s in how they show you every thought if you’re the sort of person who’s earned the right to read them. He’s got his father’s stance, though—the way gravity seems to shake hands with him and promise not to push him over. He is competent enough to be cruel if he chose to be, and kind enough that he keeps doing competent instead. The knot-pull of worry shows in his jaw when Cain’s shoulders go a hair tighter on an inhale no one else notices.

On the far end of the line, Raw sits cross-legged on a low bench with his hands folded in his lap like a prayer he hasn’t been taught to say out loud. He’s wearing a coat too big for any court and too comfortable for anyone who cares about court to disrespect. His hair looks like it fought a pillow. He hums under his breath at a frequency that makes the air around him feel like he’s telling it a secret. His eyes don’t move much. They don’t need to.

“Breathe,” Jeb mutters at his father, too quiet for the room, too loud for Cain’s spine. “The way you taught me before a pull.”

“I am,” Cain says without moving his mouth. He is. He has been. The sweetness still manages to thread the breath he pulls in and stitch itself inside his ribs with neat little nips at the seam. His palms itch in the meat; he keeps his hands where everyone can see them, open and easy. He has no interest in teaching a roomful of kids what his control looks like when it’s straining; he wants them to learn the version of it that doesn’t budge.

“Demonstration,” he says, and the room snaps to attention so sharply it’s almost comic. He gestures to the training square—chalk lines, scuffed from a hundred falls. “Brogan. Rope. Volunteers.”

They pair off clumsy and quick, getting into each other’s space like foals learning where their knees are. The exercise is stupid-simple and therefore perfect: you and your partner, one line between you, four hitches to memorize, four reasons to trust your hands. Tie a quick-release that doesn’t slip when you don’t want it to. Bind an arm without cutting off blood. Assume your partner will panic, then assume you won’t. Hard rules for men who have only known hard things.

Cain steps into the square with the last leftover recruit—a former Tin Man with night left in his eyes and a jaw that wants to be iron but doesn’t quite hold. “Name,” Cain says.

“Mil,” the man says, and it’s good he can get that much out without tasting rust. His hands shake very slightly. When the rope touches his knuckles, they go quiet. Some men’s bodies only remember sense when there’s work to do.

“Clove hitch,” Cain says, and Mil makes it without looking at his own fingers. “Good. We’re going to get you where you don’t sweat that. Quick-release on my wrist.”

Cain offers his hand. Up close, the itch in his palm is a small animal scratching. He lets it scratch. Mil ties the loop clean. Cain tests it, leans, gives Mil that half-inch of slack that tells a body I trust you and also if you fuck this up I will throw you across the room loving you as I do. Mil laughs, the creak of it so rusty it startles him. He doesn’t look at Cain’s face. He doesn’t need to. The rope remembers for him.

“Again,” Cain says, and then lets Mil tie him to the training post. The square hums with other people’s work: rope on rope, breath, the grunt of a body meeting a floor and deciding to stay for a second so it can reacquaint itself with gravity.

He glances up. Raw is watching his hands. The empath’s eyes have a far-away cast, not absent but elsewhere, as if he’s tuned some dial to catch the song of something distant and now that it’s playing he can’t quite believe the lyrics. His shoulders hitch once, a minute flinch that would look like a shiver on anyone else.

“Problem?” Cain asks, mild and to the room, but he aims his voice at Jeb so it doesn’t hit Raw like a thrown stone.

“Depends if you like good problems,” Jeb says, trying for light, not making it. He scrapes one hand over the sanded edge of a bench and ends up with a new small scar because he never backs away from friction if it’s useful. “Raw’s been… humming.”

“Raw always hums,” Brogan says from the other side of the square, not unkind. “He’s the only reason I haven’t murdered half of you in your sleep.”

Raw tips his head. “Raw hums for keeping teeth in mouths,” he agrees, solemn. Then: “Raw hums because threads hum to Raw.” His gaze cuts to Cain’s hands. “Thread loud this morning.”

Cain’s mouth does not change. Inside it, a smile full of knives bares briefly and then tucks itself back behind his teeth. “Is that right.”

“Mm.” Raw folds his fingers together, then unfurls them again like he’s showing the air how to behave. “New thread, red thread. Tied inside princess. Not tied-tied. Looking. Clever thread. Mouthy.”

A couple of the recruits chuckle without meaning to; it’s either laugh or make a sign against old magic. Cain’s eyes stay on Mil’s knot. The man has tied it in a way no manual would approve of and it will still hold hard and release soft. “Useful mouth,” Cain says. “Or the other kind.”

Raw’s head tilts, wolfish in curiosity. “Depends who bites.”

Jeb’s mouth tightens. “Raw,” he says, warning in his tone like a friend who loves a dog enough to tell it not to chase a wagon.

“Raw careful,” Raw says aloud, to ease him. His eyes find Cain again and settle, steady and old all at once. “Line runs from here”—he taps his own chest, then points lazily through two walls and a stack of stone toward the palace—“to there. Line sings both ways. Teeth on it. Not bad teeth. Holding teeth. Like… like ribbon become rope. Like rope become… kn—” He stops and his grin is sudden and wide. “Knots.”

“Fascinating,” Brogan mutters, saving three children from strangling themselves with their own good intentions. “Use the rope, not your throat, Farl.”

Cain looks down at Mil’s hands because he must, because he cannot stand there in front of men who don’t know him yet and show them a single ragged edge of the thing that keeps trying to rip out of the inside of his collar. “Release,” he says, and Mil pulls. The loop drops. Cain is free. No part of him is. He claps Mil’s shoulder: not hard, not light. “Good work.” He moves out of the square with a shoulder roll and the knowledge that every gaze in the room tracks him like a good dog tracks a thrown stick, already calculating the path to it.

He stations himself at the far end by the equipment lockers so he can breathe against wood that smells like oil and old sweat. The sweetness threads the gaps between the planks as if it had practiced in a place just like this. He inhales. The molten core of him goes to one knee and tries to rise. He lets it. He leashes it. He counts it like he taught Jeb to count a pull: in on steady, out on quiet. When it crests, he doesn’t lose his tongue to it.

Jeb is beside him by the third breath, close enough that Cain can feel the heat of his son through two layers of cloth. “You’re at ten,” Jeb says, voice pitched for a man who’s about to drag his father out of a fight if the fight is with himself.

“Seven,” Cain corrects, and the lie isn’t for Jeb; it’s for the part of himself that starts to obey at the first hint of command. Jeb snorts anyway, affectionate and pissed off that he is never going to be able to bluff this man comfortably as long as he lives.

“You told me not to white-knuckle my control,” Jeb says. “You said if I hold too hard, my hands will be busy when I need them.”

Cain slides him a look sharp enough to shave with. “When did you turn into me, and why didn’t you warn me first.”

“Been watching you since I could walk,” Jeb says. “You think I didn’t learn. Raw’s right. Whatever line that is, it’s… it’s loud, Pa.”

“I am aware,” Cain says, almost gentle because talking to a son who worries is not a place for teeth. He doesn’t say, You don’t need to be afraid of me. He knows what else Jeb is afraid of. He doesn’t say, He won’t touch her. He doesn’t have to. The promise lives in how he stands.

At the far bench, Raw’s hum deepens. Men who can’t hear what he hears feel it anyway; they shake out their shoulders as if a draft ran along the floor. Raw lifts his palms, studies them like topographical maps. “Thread has teeth for others,” he says in his careful, rounded grammar, as if they’re choosing lessons and he picked the one with the simplest bruise. “Not for you. For… bad hands. For—” His brow folds, trying to find the right word in a language that likes the wrong ones. “For taking without asking. Thread bites.”

Brogan’s eyes flick up at that, quick and raw under their guard’s squint. You can see who in the room has daughters or sisters in that instant. You can see who remembers a corridor with the wrong smell in it. Cain hears the scrape of that memory inside himself and then drowns it in the cold water of duty because he can’t kill anyone until they present themselves for killing.

“Then we teach the right hands how to hold,” Cain says, level, carrying enough weight that even the jokes hush. “On your feet.”

The square becomes a flock of moving bodies, rope knotting, unknotting, laughter where fear used to live because hands are better at that kind of work than mouths are. Cain walks through the motions with them, not above them, checking tension with two fingers and a grunt, catching a loop before it slithers into a useless mess. The itch in his palm scratches for attention. He doesn’t give it any. He does what he does best: turns the thing burning him into better training for someone else.

The sweetness spikes on a draft—as if the palace exhaled in the direction of the barracks just to see what he’d do. His stomach tightens. His throat ropes. He does not change speed. He does not trip on that tide. He leans into a boy’s stance instead, taps the inside of a foot, “Weight more over the ball, not the heel,” and the boy’s mouth opens in honest surprise at feeling his body do what a Commander’s fingers asked it to.

“Commander,” Mil says, after a minute, too bright-eyed to keep it down, too respectful to make a mess of speaking. “The Program—” He swallows. “You mean it.”

“I don’t make games out of men’s lives,” Cain says, mild.

Mil’s mouth shakes like he wants to laugh and cry, neither allowed in formation. “Used to. People used to, I mean.” He swallows the rest like a bad taste and makes his hands move. “S’rry, sir.”

“Saying sorry for breathing isn’t on your list anymore,” Cain says. “Your list is this: sleep, eat, tie your knots, learn your laws, do not die, help the man next to you not die either.” He doesn’t add: I will kill for you if I have to. He doesn’t have to. The room knows.

Raw is on his feet now, idly testing the give of a rope tied between two posts with the kind of scrutiny he gives fruit at a market—elevated, precise, open to being delighted. He murmurs something that sounds like a wind through reeds. It’s not any word a city teaches. The rope stops pretending it wants to come loose where it shouldn’t.

“Mm,” Raw says, pleased. He looks at Cain without turning his head. “Prime.”

It’s quiet enough in the two beats after that word lands that you can hear a fly think about whether to be alive near Brogan’s neck. Half the room doesn’t know the term; the other half has read a book they shouldn’t have or heard a rumor that put it in bed with the wrong kind of story. Cain doesn’t blink. Jeb’s shoulders roll back like he’s about to square up to someone invisible. Brogan’s eyebrow makes a small, rude motion and then drops, as if to say: later.

“Gossips are going to have us for breakfast,” Jeb says out the corner of his mouth, tone set to cheerfully murderous.

“They can choke,” Cain says, plain. Then louder, to the room, not for the rumor but because he will not pretend he’s not built of hierarchies: “No one in this room says a private word about what he doesn’t understand. Anyone asks, you say the Commander smells like oil and sweat and coffee and that’s all he’s ever smelled like.”

A ripple of laughter bubbles up because brooking fear with humor is also training. The sweetness laughs in his throat, bright and mean and fond at once. He takes hold of the bottom of his own vest with one hand and arranges the drape of it over his ribs as if a man can tame the way air works by looking tidy.

“Break,” Brogan barks, and the line collapses into organized not-rest. Water skins pass. A boy hitches his pants. Somebody bets a button on whether Raw can tie a knot with his eyes closed. Raw doesn’t look up from listening to the invisible thread that has his attention like a bell. “Raw can tie with hands behind back,” he says, smug. He doesn’t do it. He keeps watching the place in space where the line hums through him like a wire.

Jeb drags his sleeve across his mouth and becomes for a second, under the sweat and the worry, a child who used to stand in a doorway and watch his father clean a gun and learn about love by watching a man care for something designed to kill. “I’ll take the west patrol,” he says. “Scouts’ve been saying the trade road looks jumpy.”

“You’ll take four, you’ll take Raw if he wants to stretch his legs, and you’ll take a lunch that has more in it than salt and stubborn,” Cain says.

“Don’t want Raw’s legs,” Raw says, distracted. It takes two heartbeats for the joke to land and then he grins, wicked and eight years old. “Want walk. Want wind. Want—” He closes his eyes. When he opens them again his pupils are a little wider than they were. “Want to be between teeth if teeth show up. Good place for Raw.”

Jeb tilts his head to the side the way he does when he makes room in his plans for the way the world will refuse to be polite. “Come on then,” he says. “We’ll make the wind bring us something to do.”

Brogan claps her hands once. “Tie-off. Stow. Ten minutes. Then we see if you can still think with sweat in your eyes.” She catches Cain’s glance and returns it with a “you good?” roll of shoulder that passes for tenderness in a woman who’s carried three men with their blood on her shirt across two streets under fire. Cain nods once. She nods back. No one else in the room notices they just promised each other to stand between a rumor and a boy if the rumor runs at him with a knife.

The recruits peel away in threes and fives, the room’s energy settling into a low, useful hum. Cain leans back against the locker and closes his eyes for a count of four. When he opens them, the itch in his palm is brighter. It’s not pain. It’s anticipation. The skin there looks the same as it always has. He flexes his fingers. There’s a ghost of pressure against the meat of his hand, almost as if he’s gripping a hilt he hasn’t been given yet. He allows himself the smallest smile that is also a threat and then tucks it away like a blade back in a sheath. No one gets to see that edge unless they earn it.

Raw sidles near on bare feet that make no sound. Up close, the smell of him is leaves and laundry and the sort of clean you don’t get from soap. He looks at Cain’s hands, then at Cain’s face. “Thread will pull,” he says. “You will not let it drag you. Good. But—” He makes a small gesture, like a fisherman giving slack at the right moment so the line doesn’t snap. “Sometimes hand open is stronger than fist.”

Cain’s voice is dry as a knife wiped clean and put away. “You been talking to Tutor.”

“Always,” Raw says, pleased. “Tutor says words. Raw says hums. DG says—” He shuts his mouth, because he is not a fool, and because he does not say a princess’s name in a room full of kids when the very air has eyes. He looks at Jeb instead. “Your father does not drown.”

“No,” Jeb says. “He doesn’t.”

Cain pushes off the locker, steps back into the room’s motion like he invented it, and because he refuses to follow a scent across stone the way a boy would chase a ribbon blown by wind, he makes himself do the next right thing: check a list. He signs three requisitions, tears up one. He listens while Mil asks if the nightmares stop if you drink before sleep and says no, they just turn different, drink water instead, I’ll get you a better pillow. He watches two recruits figure out a hand-signal that will save them three seconds in a fight and memorizes it so he can teach it to their whole unit. He tells Brogan to switch the afternoon schedule to put the ones who think they’re good with a blade on ladders and the ones who think they’re bad on blades.

The line under the floor hums like a living thing. It routes itself around obstacles he throws at it. It tests his walls, finds them real, curls up against them like a red thing that knows when it’s chosen correctly.

Raw heads for the door at Jeb’s shoulder and turns at the threshold as if a bird knocked against the inside of his skull. “Oh,” he says, very pleased with himself. “Wings.”

Brogan stops with a hand halfway to the peg where she hangs her hat. “Whose.”

Raw beams. “Hers.”

Jeb blinks at him. “Birds don’t get to live in the barracks, Raw.”

“Raw knows,” Raw says, rolling his eyes as if they’re the only sane people here. He lifts both hands and waggles his fingers by his shoulders. “Wings. Big. Not for leaving. For… riding.”

Cain does not close his eyes. In his head, a picture paints itself anyway: a girl with her knees braced on his hips, a flash of pearly light, a sound like a bell hit soft and deep. He files the picture away in the part of him where oaths live and comes back with all his angles straight. “Out,” he says to Jeb, because if he doesn’t put his boy beyond a wall soon he’s going to double the patrol by sheer paternal momentum.

“Lunch,” Jeb says, dutiful and sly, because if he can make his father say yes to orders he can make anyone do anything. Cain grunts, a yes in the only language it will accept, and Jeb grins at Raw. “Come on, then. Let’s go be between the teeth.”

They go. The room recalibrates around the space they leave. Cain stands in the middle of a day he built and holds his ground while the sweetness writes itself along the inside of his ribs in loops designed to hold.

He does not chase the thread. He tightens a knot on a post until it sings with a clean note when he plucks it, and the sound goes out into the room and through the stone and into air that knows the way to a window that is, even now, open.

Chapter Text

The palace has bright halls for spectacle and shadowed ones for truth. DG takes the truth-way without thinking because she wants stone at her shoulder and a line of sight to three exits, because Tutor taught her to change her route every other morning, because the ache has better manners when the walls are cool. The smell of wax and old books clings to this corridor; dusk hasn’t bothered to make it this far. Lamps hang unlit like closed eyes.

Her pulse and the ribbon’s pulse have learned a rhythm that doesn’t trip her feet. She breathes the way Tutor drilled her—three in, three out, warm the tea, cool the tea—and the red at her sternum settles from a flutter to a steady, impudent glow. Magic pads at her heels like a fox that’s decided to be domesticated today and might remember the forest again tomorrow.

The scent slips its leash.

It’s not something she does. It’s something her body does with the confidence of a cat walking across a table it was told not to touch. One soft, sticky-sweet exhale—heat, honest and unashamed—and the air in the corridor rewrites its hierarchy. DG’s mouth opens on instinct to pull it back in; you can’t uncrown a scent once it’s chosen to be seen.

Footsteps. Too quick to be elegant, too sure to be a servant’s. She knows who he is before she sees him; the whole palace knows Roan when he comes—decorations marching down his chest like a story he thinks excuses him from another one, a stride that mistakes rank for right.

“Highness,” Captain Roan says, and the rank tastes wrong on his tongue. He slides into the corridor from a side door without asking the corridor if it minds. His jaw is fresh-shaved, his uniform crisp, the old medals polished until they blink. He smells like a stable scrubbed too hard and wine hiding in a water skin. Under that, his alpha scent bristles, trying to look taller in a room that isn’t impressed.

“Captain,” DG says. She gives him nothing to grip that isn’t proper. “You’re off post.”

“I just came from it,” he says, cheerful the way men get cheerful when they’ve decided their cheerfulness is a weapon. His eyes are wrong for cheer. Wide. Bright. Black edging out the color. “Funny thing. The wind turned and I thought, now that’s a change in the weather.”

He steps into her space. Not touching. Not yet. He angles himself so the light behind him makes a silhouette out of a man who has always wanted to be a shadow.

“Step back,” she says, even, with Tutor’s iron under it. “You’re too close.”

He laughs. Not loud. Not polite. A dry spark noise. “Too close to what, Princess?”

The ribbon at her sternum tightens into a warning knot. Her magic rises, ears pricked, not at him but at the echo he brings with him: the way some alphas carry a crowd around in their scent like the floor of a tavern clinging to their boots. He’s not alone inside his own head. He’s never been.

“Captain,” she says again, because rank is a door you can shut if you use it right. “Back.”

He moves closer.

His hand hits the stone by her shoulder with a slap, fingers splaying in a way that is meant to look like bracketing and is actually staking. His other hand hovers, hesitates, and lands on her upper arm—too tight, too high, a grip that will leave a commentary on her skin in colors the court will pretend not to see. He leans down, not much, enough that the wrongness of breath not invited shows its teeth.

“Smelled it all the way from the gate,” he says, voice roughening as if it’s being pulled over gravel. “Never knew a princess could smell like that. Like the orchard after rain. Like—”

The ribbon snaps. Her patience does, too. She puts the flat of her palm on his chest and shoves, not with muscle (he outweighs her), not with practiced leverage (the angle’s bad), but with magic that leaps like a struck match.

It sputters.

Power flares up her arm and breaks apart in red moths. He staggers the half step her body can win on its own and then stops like she’s given him a suggestion he thinks he can decline. He grins, small and mean, right at the place where the glow beats under her skin. He crushes down on her bicep without looking at his own hand. “There now,” he says. “Don’t start a fire you can’t put out.”

Her pupils snap to slits and she lets them. She bares her teeth, not a smile, not a threat she’s ready to cash. “You will take your hand off me,” she says, every syllable precise enough to cut.

He hears the words. He doesn’t listen. Control snaps in him like a tacked-on plank giving way in a storm. He leans in and inhales against her hairline like a man about to compliment a perfume he thinks he paid for. “Gods. It’s real. Thought it was rumor. Princess coming into a proper heat—”

“Stop.” Her voice cuts off the air between them. Omega command is a blade she’s only just learned she owns. She throws it raw. It flashes; it lands; it skids on the slick patch where fear and fury and the red thread are trying to take turns holding the wheel. His body jerks, one muscle forgetting itself and obeying before the rest of him drags it back to heel.

He laughs again, that strike of sulphur-head on brick. “You don’t even know how to use it yet.”

The corridor’s chill eddies against the back of her neck. The thought arrives, cool and correct: he has chosen a place where witnesses are unlikely. He has counted the guards who would hesitate to contradict a captain. He has never counted her.

“DG,” she tells herself under her breath, because naming sometimes makes a spine behave. “Breath before magic. Ask the ache what it wants.” She breathes. The ache answers with a clear, furious: safety. Hands that hold right or no hands at all.

She lifts her unpinned hand and traces a sigil into the air between them. The circle almost takes, bright and red as a seal stamped in hot wax—and then his fingers close around her wrist, two inches below the shimmer at her sternum, heat and pressure and arrogance.

“None of that,” he says, low. “Not in the halls. Not without a note from your tutors.” He bares his teeth in a grin that shows intent not to bite but to bruise. “We could save you some trouble, Princess. Spare you having to hunt. Plenty of us know what to do with a scent like that.”

She throws her head forward a fraction, not to strike but to make him flinch. He doesn’t. He’s past the part of himself that fears getting hurt; his fear lives in the consequences he cannot imagine anyone will be allowed to bring down on him. He drags her the smallest step toward the wall. Stone catches her shoulder. Cold. Anchor. She breathes it and feels her magic reach for the mortar lines like grip holds on a climb.

It doesn’t matter, it won’t matter, one slow part of her thinks, because Cain is in the building and the thread knows how to scream. She doesn’t call him. She wants to. She doesn’t.

“Captain Roan,” she says, steady, louder, because the hall is long and sound travels, because a title is a leash tied to the law. “Release me.”

He tightens his fingers, delight curling at the corners of his mouth like mildew. “Say please.”

The ribbon at her sternum whips out like a snake.

It’s not visible in the way human things are; it is visible in the way magic is when it has decided it doesn’t care who sees. A slash of red across a layer of the air most people don’t learn to look at. It catches his wrist where he’s holding her and bites.

Roan yelps, genuine, a boy’s noise trapped in a man’s throat. His grip loosens a fraction. The skin under his fingers heats, not with arousal but with the burn of a ward that has chosen sides. He recoils and then stubbornness—the kind that has made him good at the wrong things—makes his hand come back as if offended that the air dared to cut him.

“You’re dangerous,” he says, half admiring, half insult. “All that pretty and claws. You need someone who knows how to—”

She doesn’t let him finish telling her what she needs. She throws Saethyr at him like a coin at a debt.

It lands. The word shudders down the corridor, not loud, not quiet, huge. It doesn’t make him kneel. He’s not hers to command; he’s too off his leash for that. It does make his shoulders hitch. His neck muscles cord. It drops a weight into the space between them that isn’t gravity and isn’t law and is both. His nostrils flare. Fear arrives, late, bringing with it a whiff of sobriety he hadn’t invited.

“What was that,” he whispers, almost reverent, because even the thickest men recognize an older name when it lays a hand on the back of their neck.

“A word you don’t get to use,” she says.

He snarls. It’s not a sound alphas make when they’re in charge. It’s one they make when they think they’re about to be put down and want to bite first. He presses into her again, not with weight—he hasn’t fully lost the part of him that doesn’t touch a princess’s torso with his— but with proximity, with breath, with the promise of teeth if she steps wrong.

“Cain won’t protect you from everything,” he says, and there it is: the name he shouldn’t know he’s jealous of, ripped out of him like a thread snagged on a nail. “You don’t want a leash; you want a lesson.”

“You’re not qualified,” she says.

His temper flashes. The heat in him isn’t sweet now; it’s tannic, souring. He shifts his grip lower, then thinks better, then doesn’t, fingers sliding toward the inside of her arm as if the geography of soft skin might sign him a permission slip.

The ribbon bites again. Harder. The red glare at her sternum spikes bright enough that for an instant she sees his face lit the way men’s faces are lit when a house they thought was theirs is on fire. He swears, jerks his hand back. A welt rises where nothing visible touched him. It looks like a ring left by a slender chain.

“Tricks,” he spits.

“Warnings,” she corrects.

His control goes like a rope cut by a bad knife: sudden, ragged. He bares his teeth for real, lips peeling back too far from gums, eyes gone hungry in a way that isn’t about bodies so much as taking. He leans in so close she can count the tiny pale scars along his jaw where a blade once taught him to respect smaller men. He inhales like he means to steal the breath from her mouth.

Footsteps, far end of the hall. Not hurried. Measured. Metal tasting the air.

Roan doesn’t hear them yet. He has built himself a small, stupid world in which there is only him and what he wants. He is years of training and a lifetime of wrong reinforcement wrapped around a heart that learned the easiest way to keep beating was to step on someone else’s ribs. He is, right now, exactly the kind of man the Program was built to unteach and the court was built to promote.

DG holds his gaze. “Last chance,” she says. Her voice is ice at the top of fast water. “Step back.”

He smiles. He mistakes a warning for a flirtation. He mistakes a command for a plea. He mistakes a princess for a girl. “Make me.”

Her magic tries again, fox all bristle and teeth, and the spell snaps halfway to speech because the air between them is thick with wrong breath. The red thread lashes once more, leaving a second mark, twin to the first. Roan flinches and huffs a laugh anyway, defiance of pain like a boy at his first fistfight.

“You think that scares me?” he says, and then he hears the footsteps the way a deer hears a bow get strung.

The corridor changes temperature. The shadow from the far archway deepens with a will of its own. A presence walks in front of the body that carries it, and the body is a man with his coat undone and his jaw set and his eyes the color of a storm over iron.

Roan goes still. Only his fingers betray him—tightening once, reflex, as if to take a keepsake from a place he knows he won’t reach again. DG doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a flinch. She holds herself against the stone, chin up, breathing controlled, ribbon bright, and lets the shape of the boots on stone fill in all the blanks Roan was hoping to write over.

He looks at her. He looks over his shoulder. He fails to decide who to face first, and that is the first honest thing he has done all day.

Chapter Text

Cain arrives like the corridor belongs to his bones. The growl comes out of him before the rest of him crosses the threshold, a low, metal-warmed thing that puts a tremor through the lamps and makes the dust think again about where it wants to land.

Roan turns, too slow. Cain’s left hand is already in the man’s collar, knuckles blanching, fabric biting up into Roan’s throat; his right hand has a memory where it likes to be in a fight and finds the same place every time: thumb under the angle of jaw, fingers along the throat, control and warning together. He wrenches Roan off DG with a jerk that has no flourish in it, only function, and spins him into the stone. The impact thuds like a drum. The corridor learns a new pitch.

DG’s shoulder lifts off the wall as the pressure leaves it. Her breath snaps in and holds, then drops out of her in a sound she didn’t pick. The ribbon under her sternum flares, then calms, then flares again when Cain steps between her and the world as if he doesn’t remember the world was there first.

Roan scrabbles for anger and finds fear first. He’s heavy and trained and he still moves like a boy who didn’t expect to be picked up by the front of his shirt and introduced to mortar. His hands go for Cain’s wrist and meet iron disguised as tendon. He tries to square his shoulders and gets the heel of Cain’s hand under his jawbone, a pressure that says: you are vertical because I am merciful, not because you are allowed to be.

“Commander—” he manages, half choke, half appeal, and Cain’s face doesn’t flicker. He uses Roan’s body to make space and uses the space to put DG behind his shoulder. It’s not coy. It’s geometry. He is taller than the danger; she is not. He takes the angle that eats the line of sight. He doesn’t look back to see if she follows. She does, a step back and to the side, where he taught every rookie to stand when a door blows inward.

“Hands,” Cain says, flat as a table, and it’s not a question and not a shout. Roan’s go up. Cain releases his throat enough that the man can breathe without making a fool of himself and then clamps down on his collar again, dragging him a half-step away from the princess as if distance can be measured like penance.

Steel rings against stone: two guards from the far archway, late because Roan chose the kind of corridor that doesn’t carry sound generously. Brogan is one of them; the other is a kid with a jaw too tight to be pretty. Both slow when they hit the air Cain has made. Not fear. Etiquette. There is a way you move when a commander has a hand on a man’s neck and the crown’s heir behind his shoulder.

DG breathes. The scent that started this whole thing licks the edge of the room again, sweet and not sorry. Cain’s control catches it, squares its shoulders, tells it to sit. The sweetness sits. It still smells like lightning under skin.

“Captain Roan,” Cain says, not letting the word Captain do any work except draw a line under what’s about to be taken away. He shakes him once, a dog’s shake, enough to rattle medals. “You know where you are and who you touched.”

“I—” Roan’s voice scrapes. He glances right, left, looking for a witness that will rewrite what happened to suit him. None offer. The boy-guard stares at a wall because he’s not ready for the way power looks from the wrong side of a hand. Brogan’s mouth is a straight line that says later I’ll be in the yard cutting the heads off dummies so I don’t cut the heads off men.

Cain’s eyes flick to DG and away. His gaze does a full inventory in a heartbeat and leaves behind a set of orders in his own blood: hand print on bicep, swelling to color later; wrist bones hot where a bigger hand sat; hair mussed at the temple where breath didn’t belong; no new breaks, no blood. The ribbon below her throat is a coin of light under skin. It answers him, quick, pleased, possessive, as if scent speaks a language he’s always known and just remembered a word in.

“Brogan,” Cain says.

“Sir.”

“Witness.” It means you’ll stand in a room later and tell it what you saw and your voice will count as law.

“Yes, sir,” she says, as if he offered her her favorite knife.

Cain’s hand leaves Roan’s throat. For a quarter-beat the corridor thinks he’s preparing to be kind. Then he takes Roan’s right shoulder board in two fingers and rips it off so cleanly the stitch gives with a sound like a tiny neck breaking. The brass crest skitters across tile. He tears the other with the same efficient insult. He doesn’t look at the floor when they fall. He doesn’t throw them. He lets gravity do the disrespect.

“By authority vested in me as Commander of the City Knights,” he says, and the corridor’s shadow leans in because it likes ceremony when the ceremony has teeth, “you are relieved of rank effective now.”

Roan jerks as if he can shake off humiliation like a dog shakes off rain. Cain doesn’t stop. He plucks the service pin from Roan’s breast like he’s taking a thorn out of a child’s shirt and drops it into Brogan’s open palm. “Conduct unbecoming. Article Twelve. Violation of royal boundary. Article Two.” He doesn’t spit. He doesn’t need to. The words leave marks. “Assault upon the person of Princess Deegale. Addendum: alpha aggression in contravention of the palace compact.”

Roan finds stupid. “You can’t—”

Cain’s eyes cut to him. The look is not theatrical. It’s a dropped hook in a river. Roan’s next word drowns on the way out.

“Sir,” the boy-guard says, too fast, as if the syllables got away from him before he could ask their permission. “The clock—”

It begins to strike, the big bell in the tower, all bronze and borrowed thunder. The sound spills down the throat of the palace like ale down a well.

“Strip him,” Cain says to Brogan, and for the first time he steps back a fraction, enough to be a wall without being a hand. Brogan moves in with clean hands and a grim efficiency that suggests she has fantasized about this on long nights. She unbuckles Roan’s belt, not slow, not quick, professional, removes the blade with two fingers and offers it to Cain hilt-first. Cain takes it and breaks it on the edge of the stone niche, simple as snapping kindling. The crack echoes the bell.

Roan’s mouth opens. Brogan has his secondary knife in her hand and in Cain’s the breath after. She takes the crest from his beret. She rips the stitching at his shoulder where his unit’s emblem sits, tearing the cloth away from the teeth of the patch. She drops everything into a leather pouch the way you drop trash into a bin that will be set alight in an hour.

“Citizen Roan,” Cain says, and the demotion in name is a guillotine, clean, certain, almost merciful. “You are exiled beyond the city walls. You will be escorted to the north gate. You will not cross it again without a writ bearing my mark, and you will never receive that writ. If you attempt to reenter, you will be detained and tried; if you attempt to reenter armed, you will be put down.” He doesn’t raise his voice on that last phrase. It lands anyway, quiet and cold as a hand over a candle.

“Exile—” Roan chokes. “Over a— over a— scent—”

“Over assault,” Cain corrects. “Over carelessness with authority. Over your mouth.” His gaze flicks to the ribbon mark faint on Roan’s wrist, the thin welt raised where air bit him. His lip does not curl. “Over your teeth in the wrong room.”

The bell strikes again. The corridor feels every second shaved off Roan’s life here like a barber drawing clean lines around a head that thought its hair a crown. Brogan gestures. Two more guards appear, as if the palace itself produced them from the wall: senior, flat-eyed, silent. They flank Roan and don’t touch him until Cain nods. Then they take his arms at the elbow in a grip that will continue to hurt correctly the whole way to the gate.

Roan looks at DG, stupid enough to seek something softer in the face of the person he hurt. He finds nothing soft. The slitted flicker in her eyes has gone; they are round and very blue and very calm, and the red under her skin has settled into the shape of a promise that isn’t his to read.

He looks at Cain again. He expects a speech. He gets economy.

“Walk,” Cain says.

They move him.

The bell’s third strike is louder. By the fourth, they’re at the bend where the corridor takes a right into light. By the fifth, they’re gone.

Silence lands with dust in it. The kid by the arch breathes for the first time since the first shoulder board hit stone. Brogan is already making a note in a little book she keeps in her jacket, neat block letters, time, place, witnesses, charges. She tears the page, folds it, tucks it into the pouch with the crest and the pin and the strip of unit patch, ties the pouch shut, and offers it to Cain.

He doesn’t take it. “Your locker,” he says. “Chain and seal.”

“Yes, sir.” She glances once at DG, not intrusive, not pity, a simple taking in of a bruise that will be lacquered purple by evening. “Highness.”

“Brogan,” DG says, and her voice does not tremble, though now that Roan’s smell is leaving the air her hands want to. “Thank you.”

Brogan’s mouth tilts a micron. “We’ve all been in a bad corridor,” she says, and is gone, stride translating anger into work before it can curdle.

They are alone. Not truly. The castle has ears, the corridor has corners, the city has a thousand gossiping mouths ready to be fed. But the air makes a small, deliberate space around them, and in it the scent is sudden as summer, sweet and wicked and clean.

Cain turns.

Everything in him is a map of damage that learned to be a blueprint. He doesn’t reach for her like a man. He moves like an oath. His hand comes up, slow enough that a skittish thing could watch it approach and decide not to bolt. He stops before he touches her, because he will set the terms for hunger and not let hunger set them for him. She closes the inch for him, because his restraint is so bright it fills her mouth like a taste and she wants to swallow it.

His coat is off his shoulders the next second, one practiced shrug, and around hers without his hands ever closing on any part of her she hasn’t offered. The lining is warm; it smells like pine and gun oil and a man who refuses to drink before he earns it. The collar sits against her throat and the red under her skin makes a sound she’s never heard it make: not purr, not hiss, but a single, contained yes.

He looks at the place where Roan’s fingers left their plan for her skin. He does not bare his teeth. He breathes in, slow, and the control of it is obscene. He lifts her forearm by the coat cuff and turns it so the light can get a good look. The ribbon hums. His thumb floats a hair’s breadth over the bruise’s heat. He doesn’t press. He doesn’t need to. The heat peers up at him like a bad child that just saw the principal and learned there are consequences. The ache in DG’s belly spreads its back, cat content beside a stove.

“Are you hurt anywhere else,” he says, then catches his question and corrects it just enough. “Where else.”

She shakes her head. “Arm. Wrist. Pride.”

“Pride grows back.” His mouth ticks, almost humor, too full of knife to be safe for anyone else to wear. “Wrist first. Medic or Tutor?”

“Tutor,” she says, and his nod is the kind you don’t earn; it’s the kind you inherit by being the person you are. He tips his head and one of the corridor’s shadows unfolds into a runner who must have been there the whole time, because Cain doesn’t call ghosts; he uses them. “Tutor,” he says. “Now.”

The boy goes. Cain doesn’t watch him leave. He is busy imprinting the geometry of DG’s breathing into his own ribcage. She is standing, spine straight, coat on her shoulders like a declaration of jurisdiction. The corridor has stopped trying to judge them. It is too busy memorizing what air feels like when the right two people share it.

“I could have—” she starts, stubborn hitching oddly with the way her body is taking instruction from the scent without checking with her brain. “I would’ve—”

“I know,” he says, and the two words land between them like a hand pressed to a book to keep a page. He doesn’t pet her with comfort. He doesn’t offer her the weak relief of minimizing what just happened. He names the fact of her competency and the fact of his presence in the same breath, and the ache in her belly drops its jaw, lazy and utterly undone by respect.

The clock finishes striking. The last note hangs an extra half-second as if the bell would like to stay in this corridor and see how this chapter gets written. It dies with a little shiver. In the absence it leaves, something else steps into the room. Not a sound. Not a person. A pressure. Prime alpha, muted like a lamp with its shade on, disciplined to the point of cruelty. It rolls off him with no visible source and fills the space very precisely and does not touch anything it hasn’t been permitted to touch. Every guard within three doors forgets how to look directly at them for a heartbeat. Every servant walks on quieter feet. Every beta feels suddenly, inexplicably safer and can’t say why.

DG’s knees think about going soft and then don’t, because she refuses to be a collapse in the middle of her own want. She swallows and the motion drags her throat along the edge of his coat collar; the ribbon thrums in satisfaction so frank she almost laughs. The air tastes like storm. Everyone in the palace who has ever seen a summer come on too fast and split the sky open recognizes the feeling and looks up.

“Any man who lays a hand on you will answer to me,” he says, conversational, in the tone he uses when he tells a roomful of boys what will get them killed and what won’t. “Any man who breathes wrong near you will forget how to speak.” He lets the words sit there, stones thrown into a pond that think they are small until the ripples keep going. He doesn’t say you are mine. He says, without saying: this is my jurisdiction.

DG’s eyes flick to his mouth and away like a thief casing a window. The word she learned this morning as if it had always been waiting under her tongue makes a shape in her throat that she does not let out. The corridor is not the place for High Speech. It knows that. It holds its breath anyway as if it wants to hear it, just once.

Tutor arrives at a quick walk that does not skitter, a satchel and two frowns and no surprise at all. He takes in the coat around DG’s shoulders, the absence of crest on the floor, the pouch tied at Brogan’s belt disappearing down the far end of the hall, the look on Cain’s face that is not a look so much as a kept promise. He nods to all of it as if the morning’s lecture has reached its practical portion. “Highness. Commander.”

“Wrist,” Cain says, and steps aside but not away.

Tutor’s fingers are cool and exact where Roan’s were hot and sloppy. He hums once in his sinuses, pleased with the way the red under DG’s skin hums back. “You bit him,” he notes, not a question.

“The ribbon did,” DG says, and Cain’s eyes flicker, wicked and fascinated, as if he has been given a fact he intends to turn into a tactic.

Tutor swabs, mutters, ties a small charm along the bones that will bring down swelling and sting like justice. He glances at Cain. “Exile?”

“Beyond the north gate before the sixth,” Cain says. “Unarmed. Ungraced. He reappears inside my precincts and he won’t have time to be sorry.”

Tutor accepts this with the same ease with which he accepts when DG says she intends to set a library on fire if the books insist on lying. He tucks the satchel closed and pats DG’s knuckles. “Three breaths,” he reminds her, quiet, and her mouth twitches.

“She took four,” Cain says.

Tutor’s eyes say good. His mouth says nothing. He steps back, making himself less in the space without actually giving any of it up, which is a neat trick and why Cain tolerates him in corridors like this. “We’ll discuss the rest in the archive,” he tells DG. Then, mild, to Cain: “You’ll want to wash. That smell rides hands.”

Cain turns his palm as if it might bloom with something other than callus and memory. The skin looks the same. It feels like a thing on the verge of being given a name. He flexes his fingers. The itch at the meat of the hand is a low hum. He closes his fist and opens it again. The air gets the message and takes a step back.

“Walk with me,” he says to DG, not a request; the kind of order you give someone who has earned you. He offers her the space at his left, not touching, close, coat on her shoulders like a claim no one can accuse him of making. Tutor falls in behind like a shadow that knows how to be a wall if turned sideways.

They move. The corridor breathes in behind them and then exhales a rumor. It tastes like lightning on the tongue of anyone who has ever licked a battery to see if it still worked. Guards adjust their grips. Servants smile into sleeves they haven’t lifted. Somewhere far along the stone belly of the palace, a bell clapper comes to rest against bronze, and the vibration that lingers is not sound at all but the shape of two signatures meeting on a contract the city has been waiting its whole life to see written.

Chapter Text

He doesn’t ask. He lifts.

DG leaves the floor without giving it permission to miss her. Cain’s arm slides under her knees, the other along her back, and the corridor falls away like a bad dream. His jaw is iron. His knuckles are the kind of white that makes skin look like weathered bone. In his hold she is weight and weightless at once. Her body recognizes the geometry before her mind finishes cataloging how wrong it is that something this simple, this obvious, feels like an answer carved into stone.

The palace cooperates. Doors open, people flatten to walls, silence grows a spine. Brogan peels off down a stair with the calm rapidity of a woman disposing of problems. A runner takes a corner at speed to warn Tutor. Somewhere a bell plays the last wobble of its own echo. Cain’s stride never falters. He smells like pine and gun oil, leather and a clean shirt pulled on without ceremony. Under all of that he smells like the right kind of gravity.

Her heat claws and glass inside her. The ache has stopped pretending to be something that can be set aside with tea. It drags its nails along her ribs and purrs when she hisses. She takes the breaths Tutor taught her, three in, three out, warm the tea, cool the tea, and the breath comes apart in her throat when the red at her sternum pushes up against the edge of her skin, desperate to be seen.

The coat on her shoulders is too big and not big enough. The lapels frame her throat like a promise. Every step rocks her against him, and each time the world tips her belly answers with a molten roll that makes her palms slick and her tongue forget ordinary words. He keeps a hand on her shoulder where the bruise will be and does not touch the worst of it, does not crowd the heat, does not flinch from the way her scent threads the air and ties itself to his ribs.

“Door,” he says, and a guard who has never been asked by the Commander for anything in that tone in his entire life opens it before he’s finished speaking.

Her rooms are not girlish. Someone broke that spell years ago. There are boots under the bench, a knife behind the clock, a window left open to tell the sky it’s still invited. Cain crosses to the bed, sets her on the edge of it like he’s setting a piece of evidence down where it can be seen, and steps back with the kind of precision that says if he doesn’t erect a boundary right now he will drown in the tide on purpose.

He means to leave. She can see it. He has already drawn the line on the floor and hung the sign above it that says this is where I do not do the thing I have wanted since the first time I breathed after iron. He turns, measured, and the heat that has been padding the length of her spine sits up and shows its teeth.

Her fingers hook his coat. Not the sleeve. The front. Two knuckles on wool. She misses the button by an inch because her pupils are blown so wide the world is all light and need.

“Help me,” she says.

It is not a ploy. It is not a girl’s trick. It is a battlefield acknowledgment with the flag already torn and the ground already chosen: I am losing this fight without you and I do not want to win without you anyway.

His alpha answers.

It does not roar. It does not crush. It rolls out of him with obscene restraint, a tide checked by seawalls he built out of years of wrong nights, a pressure that fills the room very precisely and does not touch anything it hasn’t been invited to touch. The lamps do a small, guilty flicker. The air warms. The hair at the nape of her neck tightens just enough to make her tilt her head and bare more of her throat without thinking about why.

He comes back to her on the inhale. The blue of his eyes is the kind that makes polished steel remember it used to be ore. He stops in front of her, close enough that her knees brush the line of his thigh when she shifts. His hand finds the collar of his own coat where it sits on her shoulders and he straightens it like a man preparing a soldier for inspection. He is shaking nowhere. She is shaking everywhere.

“Tell me what hurts,” he says, and that is what cracks her: not darkness promised, not teeth, not order. The question. The permission to be the one being asked.

“All of it,” she says, breath catching on the way out like it tries to come back in. “My chest. My belly. My… breath.” The word heat will not be denied. “It won’t stop.”

“It will,” he says. “On a timetable I will set.”

Control as kindness. She swallows a noise that isn’t a laugh and isn’t a sob and is in love with that sentence in a way that is going to get her in trouble.

“Look at me,” he says, and she doesn’t have to be told twice. “Good. Breathe. Three. No magic.”

She breathes. On two, her shoulders drop. On three, the ribbon under her sternum unfurls in relief so explicit it might as well be sound, a salty little moan caught entirely inside her skin. It reaches. It tests the air like a clever thing that thinks it can talk its way into a locked room. It finds him. It leaps.

She gasps. He stands very still while something not-seen bridges the distance and wraps once around his chest the way a thread goes around a post before a knot learns how to hold. For a half-beat his face empties of every human expression, not because he has gone blank but because the thing inside him that has been pacing for years has finally found the door and is standing in it, smelling the night.

The room watches Cain make a decision he has been avoiding since the first time he learned how to say his own name inside iron. He lets the door open.

Prime alpha hits the air like summer thunder rolling up under a porch. Not loud. Inescapable. It’s in the way his shoulders set, in the way his waist eases, in the way his hand lifts and doesn’t tremble. It’s in the permission. She can feel it a breath above her skin, an atmosphere all its own. He does not press it down on her; he builds it around her like a wall that keeps the weather off. The shape of the room changes orientation. The bed becomes the low ground. The window becomes an observation point. The door becomes an instrument for keeping out the world.

“Words,” he says. “You have them. Use them.”

“Please,” she says, because language has collapsed to what is useful. “Stay.”

“I will.” The vow sits easy inside him, like it was built to be there. “More.”

Her mouth opens and the kind of honesty that gets women punished spills out docile as milk. “Touch me.” It is not coy. “Not like he did. Like you.”

His throat works. His hand, the right one, lifts and stops a half-inch from her face. “Here?”

She nods. He sets the heel of his palm against her cheek. Heat liquefies. Her magic hums like a finger run around the rim of a glass. “Here?” he says, and his thumb ghosts the corner of her mouth, a touch so careful it becomes terrible. She nods again.

“Words,” he reminds.

“Yes,” she whispers, desperate and obedient in the same breath. “There.”

He bends until his mouth is a question and she answers it. The kiss is not soft. It is not brutal. It is the precise pressure required to make everything that has been running inside her hit a wall and reorganize into something that can be lived with. He tastes like the end of a long day and the start of a long night. She breathes into his mouth and the ache drops two vertebrae, stretches, purrs.

His left hand finds her wrist, the one Roan bruised, and hovers. He doesn’t touch skin. He touches the air above it, and still the hurt there retreat two steps, ashamed of itself under that regard. “Good girl,” he says, not to make her small but to make what’s trying to eat her shut up and sit. The ribbon shivers and then smooths.

He breaks the kiss first. Control should make her want to break things. Right now it makes her want to kneel on his boots to be taller. He drags his lower lip through his teeth and looks at her throat, not because he’s going to put his mouth there without asking, but because something inside him wants to identify his territory like a map, and the place he is looking at says here is the river, here is the bridge, here is the city you will be responsible for.

“Say it again,” he says, eyes on hers now. “What you need.”

“You,” she says. “You. Here. Now. Please.”

“Good,” he says, exhale almost a groan, the first sound he has permitted himself that isn’t a tool. “Then listen.”

He turns from her for the first time since the door, strides three steps and closes the window with a firm hand and a gentleness that says the sky can wait. He throws the bolt on the door without looking to see if anyone watches. He crosses to the basin, pours water into the ewer with a single pour, sets a cloth beside it, checks the level like a man who will be washing blood he isn’t going to let happen. He moves to the hearth and stirs the embers until they remember themselves and the room eases three degrees further into comfort. He returns to her and the world shrinks to a radius that includes only the width of his shoulders and the span of her knees.

“Words,” he says again, because he is not going to drown her accidentally. “Stop me if I step wrong.”

“Cain.” His name breaks in the middle and reforms, stronger. “If you stop, I will burn the bed.”

“That’s a stop,” he says dry, and she huffs a laugh that takes the edge off the animal that has been pacing in her belly, just enough to keep it from getting clever.

He kneels. Not like surrender. Like worship. Like work. His hand brackets her knee. The other slides up the outside of her thigh where the coat doesn’t cover, riding a seam of leather to the safe place at the hinge where he can learn the heat coming off her without taking anything she hasn’t offered. She opens for him because opening is what her body does when prime says this is mine to handle. He doesn’t look away from her face. Every flicker there is a set of orders. He takes them all.

He bends and puts his mouth to the inside of her knee. Not a bite. Not yet. A claim in the old language that isn’t a word: you are under my hand, you are under my eye, you are safe while both remain. The ribbon throbs so hard it hurts. The ache turns on its back and shows its belly. DG makes a sound that embarrasses the portion of her brain still making lists. The portion making lists is not in charge anymore.

“Help me,” she says again, rawer now, because asking felt like jumping a fence and falling and finding out the ground is kinder than it should be. “Please.”

“You have me,” he says. “All of me. Say yes to that.”

“Yes,” she says, and the word is less a syllable than a shiver.

“Good,” he says. “Now breathe for me.” His palm flattens just below her ribs, the way a man stops a horse from bolting with a single touch and years of knowing when to use it. “Three.”

She breathes. On two, her thighs unlock around the tangled knot of panic and want. On three, the ribbon slips through the meat of his hand where it hovers and cinches, a soft, experimental tug that makes something behind his eyes go bright and dangerous. A film of light skims his palm, there and gone, as if a rune is practicing how it will look when it decides to be seen.

His eyes narrow. He doesn’t take his hand away. He doesn’t chase the light. He accepts the test like a man holds still for a bird that has decided his shoulder is a good place to think about the rest of its life.

“Good girl,” he says again, and her breath turns heady. “Now we do this my way.”

His way is not mercy and not cruelty. It is a sequence: mouth to her pulse where Roan’s breath had no business being, one kiss and no more until she asks; palm along the line of her ribs, heat met with pressure until the pain there lets go of its grip; his forehead to hers, the kind of touch only men who have gone to war use because it puts two skulls together and says we live under the same weather. Each point he claims turns the room to his map.

“Say Saethyr,” he tells her softly, because he heard it in the hall and knows what it did to a man who didn’t deserve to hear it. “Say it to me.”

“Saethyr,” she whispers, and prime answers like metal answers a struck tuning fork. The walls hum. The bedsprings remember why they were built. The air presses cool fingers to the back of her neck and the ache… kneels. Not yields. Kneels.

He smiles, small and wicked, as if someone just delivered him a weapon he thought had been outlawed. “That’s right. Again.”

“Saethyr.” It comes out a little stronger, a little hungrier. The red under her skin throws a loop around his chest and tightens one notch. His hand flares with that not-light and subsides, like breath.

“Good.”

He kisses her mouth again and it’s different now, angled and sure, a line drawn across a map that says we will go from here to there by this road, and nothing you do will make me take the swamp. She answers with the relief of a woman who has been asked to make every decision all day and finally gets to say will you drive and has the right person take the wheel.

“Say stop if you want stop,” he breathes against her lips, and because she is herself and he is himself and the thread has made promises it intends to keep, she bares her teeth in a smile that shows the part of her that is fae and royal at once.

“I am not going to say stop,” she says. “Help me.”

He laughs then, low and real and unarmed. “I am.”

The coat slips from her shoulders and puddles at her hips like a banner; his hands follow the lines the fabric leaves, knuckles reverent, palms heavy. He puts her back on the bed with a pressure that takes choices away only where she wants them taken. He drags his mouth along the hinge of her jaw and the shell of her ear and the hollow at her throat where the ribbon’s glow beats and refuses to be coy. He does not rush. He is a man who has waited too long to hurry now.

Outside the door, people who have no business knowing anything about anything straighten, walk on softer feet, breathe more evenly. The city rolls to a new side in its sleep. A moth hits a lamp and decides to live another minute. Tutor, in the hall, leans against the wall and closes his eyes with a man’s quiet gratitude for the inevitable finally consenting to be kind.

Cain puts his hand, the right one, over DG’s heart, and the ribbon leaps to meet it—and in that contact, not quite seen, not quite said, something draws itself in ink that will wash away and come back stronger next time: the first curl of a rune that knows where it belongs.

“Mine to hold,” he says into her mouth, into her skin, into the place she aches, and the word mine is not possession so much as purpose.

“Yes,” she says, helpless and fearless in the same instant. “Yours.”

“Good,” he answers, and the room warms another degree, and the heat she thought would eat her opens its mouth and purrs.

Chapter Text

The lock turns with a mechanic’s certainty, bolt sliding home like a muzzle finally unbuckled. Cain’s palm stays on the wood a heartbeat longer than necessary, tendons standing in the back of his hand, a tremor so fine it’s almost heat shiver. He tips his head, listening—not for footsteps, not for gossip, but for the last bit of himself that still thinks it answers to iron.

It doesn’t.

He drops the control he’s worn like a welded plate since the Suit, and the room changes pressure.

Not a rush. Not a roar. A tide. The prime comes off him low and organized, a barometric shift that straightens the spine of the furniture and teaches the shadows where to sit. Lamps draw breath and hold it. The hearth licks higher without crackling. The very air learns its job: take the edges off pain, hone desire until it slides where he points it.

DG goes boneless with relief so fast it would have dumped her if she weren’t already on the bed. The little animal under her sternum that has been raking claws down her insides purrs with its mouth open. Her neck bares without orders, head tipping, throat shining, the ribbon under her skin bright as a cardinal’s wing. Pupils blow, then narrow, then blow again, as if her eyes are trying out the different ways they could love this.

Magic leaves her hands like silk run through a ring—two red strands coiling out from the heel of each palm, curious, worshipful. They climb his wrists and settle there, not binding, not even pretending, just lying along his tendons like a cat finds a warm forearm and claims it. The contact makes the itch in his palm flicker into a thin, molten line. Something under his skin tries a loop, reconsiders, tries it again.

He comes back to her at a measured prowl, shedding what remains of ceremony as if it were dust. The field of him is everywhere—floorboards, the seam where the wall meets the ceiling, the breath between her lips—and somehow not on her at all until she gives it permission. That’s the part that undoes her: not the size of him, not the promise of his hands, but the fact that the storm has manners until told otherwise.

“Eyes,” he says, and her gaze snaps to his like a dog to a whistle. “Good.”

He sets two fingers under her chin and lifts. Her throat arches as if it has always belonged to this arc. He leans in without kissing and breathes along her skin, scenting, reading. Pine and leather and him saturate the air; beneath, the sweetness of her heat pulses fat and ripe, cut with ozone where the fae lays claim.

“Mine to hold,” he says into the shell of her ear, and the words carry not possession but task. “I’ll say it until your bones remember.”

She nods. A noise catches in her, small and wrecked. “Please.”

He draws the field tighter, a halo. Pressure climbs a notch—heavier at the edges, lighter at the center, like he’s redistributing gravity so she doesn’t have to carry any of it. The ache sighs and slides down her spine, obedient at last. Her thighs loosen on a flinch, then open because opening has become the easiest thing in the world. Her cunt floods, wet heat seeping through leather in a slow, humiliating, exquisite bloom. He is kind; he is cruel enough not to pretend he doesn’t hear the slick.

“Hands,” he says. She offers them at once, wrists up, palms bare, the silk-magic already lying there like ribbons waiting for a knot. He does not tie. He lays his big, careful hands over hers, heel to heel, and feels the red threads curl over his knuckles in a courtly little embrace. Heat kisses the meat of his right palm. The ghost-line brightens, one more stroke sketching itself in light too shy to be seen.

DG watches his face try not to change and fail. A wicked smile twitches, then vanishes, too disciplined to live. She doesn’t look away from it. She wants every inch of the change. She wants to map it with her mouth.

“Words,” he reminds, thumb circling the soft inside of her wrist without pressing. “Tell me where the pain sits. I’ll unseat it.”

“Below my ribs,” she says, breath hitching. “Between my hips. Everywhere you’re not.”

His laugh is a low spark that finds tinder without looking. “Everywhere I’m not is about to be a very small country.”

He kneels. It isn’t a supplication and it isn’t a performance. It’s a man making his body lower than hers because it teaches hers what to do without disorder. His shoulders bracket her knees; his hands slide up the outside of her thighs, thumbs never skittering inward without permission, all that breadth used to warm and claim and remind.

“Three breaths,” he says, because he will not let magic drive the carriage when her body is learning the road. “Now.”

She drags air through her nose, tastes pine and him and the vague metallic sweetness of her own heat. On the second in-breath, the ribbon under her skin uncurls and reaches for his right hand again like a red fox jumping a low fence. On the third out-breath, the little bite of panic she didn’t want to name gives up ground. Her pelvic floor lets go on a sigh so audible she flushes. He hears it; his eyes go hooded and fond.

“Good girl,” he says, and the praise is a stroke down her spine. “Keep it.”

He doesn’t make her wait. He does make her earn each inch by staying present while he takes it.

His mouth goes to the pulse at the side of her throat where another man’s breath poisoned the air and cleans the place with heat and tongue. Not a bite. Yet. A kiss that kneads authority back into the skin. She moans without intending to. His hand opens over her sternum; the red flares against his palm, grateful and greedy. The flicker in his hand takes another line, sharp, deliberate, then fades like something signing its name in fog.

“Saethyr,” he says against her. Not a command, an invocation, the syllables shaped in a mouth built to enforce laws and make vows. The room hums. Her wings, not yet called, twitch under her skin as if the word has fingers.

She whispers it back and feels the alpha field thicken, not heavy but sure, like a harness cinched to the right hole. The ache kneels a second time. That part terrifies her and saves her, both.

“Come here,” he says, and she does, hips nudging forward along the mattress, a clumsy little offering that would embarrass her any other day. Today it’s holy. He slides his hands under the backs of her thighs and pulls until the edge of the bed is under her ass and gravity makes a suggestion her body takes: spine curved, cunt tilted, heat right up against the air he controls.

He looks. That’s all. He looks at the damp dark at the crotch of her leather, at the way the fabric sticks indecent where she’s ruined it, at the trembling of her thighs doing their best not to close while his shoulders keep them open. The look isn’t consumption. It’s reconnaissance. It makes her wetter.

“Say please,” he tells her, soft as a whip cracking four fields away.

“Please,” she breathes. “Please touch me. Sir.” She didn’t mean to say sir. It falls out anyway, perfect as a penny in a slot.

He groans, barely a sound, as if something old in him just got fed. “There’s my smart girl.”

He palms the outside seam of the leather and peels it, inch by inch, not because he wants to savor her (he does) but because anything faster would feel like disrespect. The zipper gives. The hum of the teeth sounds obscene in a room tuned to his frequency. He guides the leather down her hips with both hands, careful over the tender mark on her arm. When her cunt is bare to the air, he breathes again and it changes the field—lower, hotter, a small drop in pressure that brings blood to her skin wherever he looks.

She is slick. He says nothing about it and everything. His eyes soften and darken at once. He sets his hands wide on her hips, fingers pressing down just enough to locate and cauterize the pain—there, lower. The ache slinks away, banished to the corners with its tail high.

“Keep your hands where they are,” he tells her, and she laces her fingers in the bedclothes like a good soldier. The magic-ribbons twine higher on his wrists, silk over tendon, red flashes of flirtation that make his pulse thrum against his own skin.

He lowers his mouth and doesn’t lick. Not yet. He breathes across her, one long draw that carries the scent down into him so deep it might graft. Her body answers like a field of tall grass in wind—under his mouth, everything leans. He watches for flinch and doesn’t find it. He watches for fear and doesn’t find it. He finds need, raw as a scraped knee, and he smiles against it.

“Again,” she begs, and he obliges, a second breath that skims, a third that ghosts hot open lips over her without taking. Her hips jerk. His hands pin without punishing. The alpha field sits heavy on the corners, light at the center, and sharpened like a blade right where she needs cutting.

“Good,” he says, and then he puts his mouth on her.

Not devouring. Not stingy. A slow, obscene kiss over her clit, pressure exact enough to reset the clocks. Everything in her goes white-noise and then back into focus on a single, thin, bright line of sensation. She hears herself break on it. He swallows the sound like sacrament, licks lazy, flattens his tongue, makes the world’s simplest circuit and refuses to graduate from it until her hips stop trying to boss the rhythm and let him set pace.

He keeps her there, right up against the clean edge of pain, and then moves the line—slick slide down, a gentle press at her entrance, a hum that vibrates against her and makes her spine arc. Prime hum. Fae hum. The combination tastes like metal and fruit on his tongue and he wants to laugh with the joy of its rightness; he doesn’t. He eats. He feeds her to herself until the red ribbon under his hand thrashes and then wraps, wraps, trying to tie.

“Breathe,” he says into her, voice an indecency. She drags air. He rewards obedience with a slow thrust of two fingers that only penetrate knuckle-deep and hold, a stake in ground that tells every panicking part of her, here is where we build.

Her mouth falls open. No safe word. No need. He’s reading the whites of her eyes for language long before her tongue can find it.

“Don’t—don’t stop,” she manages, wrecked polite.

“I won’t,” he says, and the promise is the other half of I won’t hurt you. He curls his fingers one patient inch, stroking the front wall until the melt begins under his hand, and when her muscles get clever and try to clamp, he croons nonsense approval that makes them go soft for him because they were made to.

Her magic tightens on his wrists. Silk becomes a tease of cuff, less than a tie, more than a flirtation. He could yank free; he won’t. He lets it sit, an adornment and a threat, and the rune in his palm draws another quiet line in light that doesn’t want to be seen. The heat of it pours into her through his touch and she gasps at the way it feels like being marked without bite or ink.

“Cain,” she says, pleading and sanctifying the same syllable. “Cain.”

“Good,” he says against her clit, and then turns the tide higher. He drops the last governor on his field, just a notch, just enough to smear slick relief over the raw edges of heat and make her body choose orgasm like it’s the safest place to hide. She keens, soft and immediate. He catches it with his mouth and his hand, moves her through it, doesn’t let it break her, makes it build. She rides his tongue and fingers, whimpering now, and every sound re-roots him on his knees like a man swears into dirt so he won’t be blown back.

He gives her nowhere to go and nothing to do but obey her own want under his orders. It’s the kindest trap in the world.

“Saethyr,” he prompts, because the word makes her vault without scrambling.

She sobs it. The room hums, the hearth flares. The alpha field doubles down on safety, the fae in her turns its face up to the rain. Her orgasm takes her like a tide catching a loose boat—lift, pull, slam, float—and when she crests, she breaks with a sweet, torn sound that puts his name between prayer and curse.

He holds through the quake and the aftershocks, ruthless with his consistency and gentle with everything else. When she tries to twist away, oversensitive, he ignores the flinch and kisses softer, slows his hand, keeps one finger inside her just to keep the door open, takes her down without dropping her. Tears are on her temples; he kisses one without making a thing of it.

She lies panting, wrecked, eyes glittering. Her throat shine is a beacon. She’s not empty. She’s hungrier. He feels it like a new front coming in. His cock is a problem in his trousers he has refused to acknowledge until now; it throbs, heavy, wet at the tip, and he closes his teeth over a groan because he will not rush the sequence even for his own ache.

He climbs up over her in one slow, inexorable pushup, braced on his fists, caging her without crowding, the prime field settling like a hawk over prey it intends to feed, not eat. His mouth hovers over hers. Blue eyes, bright as blade-water in sun, pin her to the bed more thoroughly than his body ever could.

“Good girl,” he says again, praise thick as honey. “That’s one.”

“One,” she echoes, dizzy smile feral. “More.”

“Many,” he corrects, and the promise isn’t a tease. It’s a schedule.

Her magic slides higher, brushing his forearms, his elbows, a red garter-leg feeling that makes him snarl quietly, finally letting one corner of his restraint show teeth. He dips, catches her bottom lip in his teeth and worries it until she whimpers, then sucks it plush and lets it go.

“No safe word,” she says, brazen and tender, eyes blown again. “You won’t need it.”

“No,” he agrees. Not a boast. A fact. “I won’t.”

He kisses her, then, properly, and the field swells to fill the edges of the room. Outside, a footstep slows for no reason anybody can name. A flower on the sill opens in the wrong season. The rune in his palm heats enough to sting, and the red under her skin throws one more loop that almost, almost knots.

“Open,” he tells her, palm settling on her sternum, voice sliding into command so easy it feels like mercy. “I’m going to make you come on my fingers again. Then I’m going to eat you until you beg for my cock. Then I’m going to give you what you’re asking for.”

She makes a sound that doesn’t belong to the court, to common sense, to any species that wasn’t built to be ruined and rebuilt by this exact man. Her knees fall wider without argument. Her hands fist the sheets and then unclench because he told her to keep them easy. Her neck arches like an altar. The silk on his wrists tightens a fraction, red and ready.

“Good,” he says, and smiles with his teeth, and drops.

Chapter Text

He kisses her like a vow: not flourish, not show, the exact pressure and angle you use when you sign your name where it changes a life. His mouth closes over hers and everything frantic inside her is forced to choose a rhythm. She chooses his. The field wraps the room tighter, a low, domed pressure that keeps the weather out and funnels every stray thought back into the bed.

“Good,” he murmurs into her, and his hand slides to her jaw, thumb stroking lazy along the hinge like he’s reminding a skittish animal of its name. She’s not skittish. She’s feral with relief. Her hips roll once without permission and he doesn’t punish her for it; he corrects the angle, a palm under her ass, a lift that tilts her pelvis to him like an offering laid on stone.

“Open,” he says, and she does, mouth, thighs, spine. The ache yowls and then stretches, belly-up under the discipline of his voice.

He breaks the kiss and follows the line of her face with his mouth, jaw to ear, ear to throat, pausing where Roan’s breath had spoiled the air and rewriting the place with heat and tongue. “Mine to hold,” he repeats against the pulse, and her body goes boneless in a way that would have terrified her yesterday. Today it feels like finally.

His right hand settles over her sternum and the ribbon throws itself up at him, shameless. Heat kisses his palm. Light whispers along the meat of his hand, a single thin line curving, stopping, considering where it will live next time. His eyes go sharp, pleased, dangerous; his thumb never leaves the slow, soothing path along her jaw.

“Hands,” he says without looking away from her. She gives them up at once, wrists together, palms up, red magic already sliding into place around his bones. He presses her hands into the mattress and covers them with his own. Not pinning. Possession. Permission expressed as weight. The silk of her magic winds his wrist, soft and smug as a ribbon that has always known what it’s for.

“Good girl,” he praises, and the words take a layer of pain off her like skin from hot milk. She hiccups a sound that’s almost a sob. The control feels like mercy because it is.

He drops, shoulders bracketing her knees, and takes his time. He looks at her, properly, nothing hurried or hungry in the gaze despite the ache taxing his discipline and the wet shine between her thighs that begs to be taken. Reconnaissance. Ownership by way of comprehension. His hands slide up the outside of her thighs, big palms warming muscle, thumbs skimming inward along the crease where thigh meets hip, stopping just shy of slick.

“Words,” he reminds without mercy.

“Please,” she says, because language has boiled down to a single hinge. “Please touch me.”

“Where,” he says, direct.

“My clit,” she answers, wrecked and honest. “Please. I need your mouth.”

“Good,” he breathes, and lowers his head.

The first contact is a kiss. Slow cruelty. Mouth molded over her and held there, still, pressure precise enough to turn the buzzing in her nerves into a single true tone. Her entire body flinches like a wire pulled taut then plucked. He waits until the flinch smooths. He seals his lips and draws, deliberate, and the shock that runs through her vision makes the lamps blink as if they forgot to be brave.

“Breathe,” he commands into her, and she does, sucking air in on a whimper, pushing it out on a sound that makes his pupils flare and his field drop lower over the room like a hawk coming in to perch. He flattens his tongue and strokes, slow, steady, the simplest circuit crafted by a man who believes in fundamentals. No flourish. No hurry. He eats her like a discipline he kept even when iron was all he had.

Her hands strain under his; he presses harder, not to restrain, to remind. She keeps them there. She takes the pace. She shudders when he hums, a little thread of sound that tastes like pine sap and thunder. He smiles into her. “Good girl,” again, and she shakes, throat bare, pupils black.

Two fingers test at her slick mouth, knuckles grazing, patience itself. “Say yes,” he says.

“Yes,” she gasps, and prime answers like a current closing. He slides in, slow, never breaching more than she gives, and the stretch is acute, edged with the clean pain of a thing being made to fit because it was designed for it. He holds knuckle-deep and doesn’t move, letting the shape settle around him, letting her body learn the lesson: fill, hold, soften.

Her cunt flutters, stubborn and hungry both. He croons nonsense praise until the flutter opens. He pushes another inch, then another, the heel of his palm angling just so until he can curl and find the front wall. He hooks there and waits for her nerves to come to him. They do. Her back arcs off the mattress; a broken sound is half laugh, half prayer, all yes.

“Good,” he says, mouth still working her clit in the same unshowy pattern, pace unchanging while his fingers begin their own rhythm, press, curl, hold, release. She tries to chase; he won’t let her. He makes the world small: tongue on clit, two fingers just inside, palm grinding in a way that teaches the ache to be grateful for the pressure. The heat threatens to come apart in sparks; the field makes the sparks choose a firebreak. Nothing gets to burn that he hasn’t sanctioned.

“More,” she begs, wet, shameless.

“Soon,” he says. “Stay.” He strokes the sweet spot again and again until her gaze unfocuses and refocuses with each pass like waves eating a shore. He licks her through the first tremor and refuses to call it done. “That’s not your orgasm. That’s your body remembering. I want the real thing.”

“Fuck,” she sobs, kicking her heels into the bed, heels scraping, thighs shaking. He laughs quietly, fond and cruel. “Language,” he chides, and opens his mouth wider, suction sharpening, the slick suck a lewd guilt that makes her face heat and her cunt pour.

“Cain,” she pleads, name ripped and shining.

“Good,” he says, and adds a third finger.

She gasps like struck. The stretch flares hot, then melts; his thumb bears down in counterpressure at the hinge of her hip to ease it, to own it. Three fills her in a way that makes her spine fight and then give, the kind of fullness that quiets nerve endings by replacing every complaint with astonished yes. He holds there and lets her adjust, palm riding the rhythm of her breath. She shakes, snot-sweet sob catching on his hand, and he presses his palm over her mouth without thinking, covering the sound, catching it, owning even that.

She moans into his skin, feral, obedient, and the way she calms under the weight of that hand is obscene. He leaves it there, a seal. She sucks at the heel of it, not quite a kiss, a gratitude. The rune under his palm flares to life, a brighter streak sketched, here and gone, as if inked in breath. The red at her sternum answers so hard the lamps pop once, recover, gutter, then glow.

“Atta girl,” he groans, his own control fraying just enough to let the gravel into his voice. “Take me.”

He fucks her on his fingers, slow, deep, angle exact, curl relentless. His tongue never breaks pattern on her clit. His hand stays over her mouth, not gagging, weighting, and the way her eyes glaze when he pins her voice makes him bare his teeth against her, a flash of pride that doesn’t need to be witnessed by anyone but her body. She meets him with a grind that starts to become pleading, the kind of tiny panicked twist that means she’s standing at the cliff and doesn’t know if he’ll push.

He doesn’t push. He keeps her there. He makes her beg. He holds the exact plateau that turns everything liquid under his hand and in his mouth and then, when her eyes go helpless and her thighs begin to tremble so hard they thud the mattress, he tips her over with a fraction more suction and a curl that hits dead on.

She breaks.

It’s not artful. It’s not tidy. It rips through her like a line yanked tight through pulleys, and the room answers. The lamps flicker twice, hard. The hearth coughs a breath of heat. The window rattles in its frame. She screams into his palm, raw and crushed-sugar sweet, and the scream turns into sobbing into his skin as the climax rolls on and on, tide and undertow, wave after obedient wave driven by his mouth staying exactly where it needs to be, by his fingers holding her open and full and not letting her flee the good she asked for.

“Breathe,” he orders when she goes to pieces, and he takes his hand away from her mouth only long enough to let in air, then covers her again when the next sob tries to tear her throat. “That’s it. Take it. Take all of it. Good girl.”

The ribbon snaps.

It lashes out of her sternum not in sight but in pressure and heat and a flash of red that shows itself in the layer of the world men don’t learn to look at. It hits his chest like a thrown line and goes through. Not around. Through. He grunts, head snapping up for a heartbeat, mouth and fingers never losing their jobs even as the thing threads him. The tug is soft at first, exploratory, then greedy—little hard pulls that make his breath stutter and his cock kick against the confinement of his trousers so hard he nearly sees dark.

“Fuck,” he hisses into her, control blown back a hair by the sensation of being seized from the inside by a silken, sentient cord. It roots in him like a hook set under the breastbone and then settles, a live wire running from her to him, humming at a pitch only they hear.

She feels the threading and wails, not fear, some deeper relief that makes her thighs shake and her toes curl. Her cunt clamps and flutters around his fingers in a rhythm that matches the tug-tug against his heart. He moans into her, helpless for a second longer than he wants to be, then rules even that: he bears down with his mouth, oxy-sweet suction, fingers stroking through the aftershocks until the spasms smear into softer flexes, until she’s sobbing and laughing in the same breath, until the red steadies, loop complete for now, tug still there, not a leash, a line.

He eases her down like you lower a flag in wind. He doesn’t stop touching. He refuses to let any part of her feel abandoned while her body shakes off the quake. He licks slow circles that don’t ask for anything. He keeps two fingers in her, just to keep the door open, just to remind her that being filled is the new default. He lifts his right hand from her mouth and it shines with spit and light; the rune there sketches one more ghost-stroke before fading, and the sting of heat he feels in that palm is as erotic to him as the taste of her.

“Good girl,” he says, voice gone dark with pride, climbing up her body on his forearms until he’s above her again, caging but not crushing. His mouth finds her jaw, cheek, eyelid, gentling the edges back into place like a mason pressing mortar. “That’s my pretty omega. That’s my clever girl. Breathe.”

She does, shuddering, chin tilting up, throat gleaming, the ribbon’s glow under the skin a steady, satisfied throb. Her pupils are huge, cat-slit flashes teasing under the black when she blinks. She tries to speak and fails and that makes him smile with teeth.

“Again,” she whispers finally, ruined.

“Many,” he corrects, and his right hand slides down, slick with her, to rest heavy and sure on the soft place low on her belly—promise of where his cock will be, where his knot will lock, where he’ll pour until she whimpers and thanks him for the ache. The tug through his chest tightens, a greedy little yank that makes him grunt and press his palm there harder, as if he can soothe the bond into patience.

“Feel that,” he asks, mean and tender.

“Yes,” she breathes, wild-eyed. “Yes. Tug. You— in me.”

“In me,” he counters, and for an instant control is a thin film on top of something primal and obscene. He kisses her with that, lets her taste the man who is going to breed her open and hold her shut and make the palace walls memorize the sound of her coming on his cock. Then he eases back before he breaks his own pacing and laughs against her mouth when she chases.

“Greedy,” he tells her, adoring.

“Yours,” she says, and his composure leaves a dent in the floor.

“Good,” he says again, hoarse now, and drags two fingers out of her with sinful care, lifting them to her lips, not to demand, to ask. Her mouth opens and she sucks them clean with a shiver that makes his field dip another degree toward storm. The red around his wrist tightens possessively. The tug through his chest hums like a plucked string.

“Again,” she says, brave and wrecked and perfect, and he smiles like a man about to march through a door he’s wanted to break down since the day he learned it existed. He kisses her once, soft, savage with restraint, and then pushes her thighs wider with his hands, breathes her in like blessing, and lowers his mouth to make her fall apart the same way, and worse.

Chapter Text

He doesn’t let the world back in. Not air, not doubt, not anything that isn’t her and what he’s decided to do to her.

“Open,” he says, palm steady on her sternum, the field settling like a hand over quiet water.

She opens. Thighs loose, knees high, cunt slick and greedy. Her hands stay where he put them, fingers curled in linen, wrists still circled by the red-laughing hints of magic that drape his own. Her breath comes on the count he taught her. Her pupils swallow light. The ribbon under her skin flutters, fox-tail and flame.

He frees his cock with a sound low in the throat that doesn’t belong to civilized men. Thick, flushed, the head wet and shining with her, he fits himself to her entrance and stops. Not tease. Calibration. He strokes along her clit with two fingers, light, and watches her pupils go wider. He shifts his hips a degree. She whines.

“Words,” he says, the order gentle as a thumb on a bruised apple.

“Please,” she breathes, hoarse. “Breed me.”

His composure shows teeth. “Good girl.”

He pushes.

Pressure. Stretch. The clean, high edge of pain that belongs to being taken the way a door is meant to swing when the right key turns. He doesn’t slam; he advances, relentless, breath threaded with hers, mouth parted like a man trying not to pray. The crown slips past the wet ring of her entrance and her whole body arches, clutches, then allows, allows, allows, molten and trembling.

“Breathe,” he says, and she does, and he takes the next inch on the exhale, the next on the sob, filling her, filling her, until the thick of him sits heavy inside and her cunt has no choice but to make room for judgment. The sound she makes when his hips meet the meat of her ass is not courtly; it’s a wail made of relief and outrage and I needed this burned clean of shame.

He holds there, buried to the hilt. His eyes close. His forehead dips to hers like he’s checking the line on a level. The tug through his chest—red thread quarried out of her sternum and run through him—pulls hard, greedy as a child and sure as a noose. His right hand flares hot. He opens his fingers over her sternum and the ribbon leaps up to kiss his palm. The itch there turns to heat, then to sting.

“Saethyr,” she whispers against his mouth, because she can feel the edge; she can taste the word that will tilt the world.

“Saethyr,” he answers, and slams.

Not fast. Deep. A change in vector that takes him from possession to claim. The bedframe shudders. The lamps gutter and hold. The field drops two degrees closer to storm; the pressure on the corners becomes gravity. She breaks open under him with a sob and then finds words again because he gave them back to her.

“Harder,” she says, and he complies, hips punching a steadied, ruthless rhythm that makes the ache stop making decisions and start obeying. Each drive knocks sound out of her chest; each retreat drags slick heat that borders on obscene. He adjusts an angle by a breath-width and hits the front wall exactly; the jolt arcs up her spine and throws her head back, throat bare. He watches that throat like a soldier watches a border.

“Fucking perfect,” he growls, and every word is a thrust. “Take it. Take all of me.”

She does. She takes him until taking is the only verb left. She meets him with hips that learn his cadence like a song and then give up control because it’s better that way. “Please—” she tries again, not knowing what she’s asking for and loving that he does.

“Soon,” he says. “You’ll ask for it and you’ll get it. Not before.”

He increases. Not speed. Weight. Every drive is a signature hammered into soft stone. Her cunt grips, tries to climb him; he presses her down with the shape of his hands and the law of his body and the tenderness that eats the edges off both. The wet slap of their bodies meeting writes itself into the room’s bones. The hearth’s heat leans toward them, hungry for the story.

The swell comes like a tide under his skin. She feels it where they’re joined first: a thickening at the base of him that nudges the raw rim of her, insisting, persuasive. Her eyes fly wide. He smiles without humor, all possession and patience.

“Say it,” he tells her, and she knows somehow that he means the asking, not the word.

“Knot me,” she begs, shameless. “Please, please, Cain, knot me—”

“Good girl,” he answers, voice gone gravel and rain, and he bears down, cadence controlled to the point of cruelty, bringing the swell against her entrance again and again until her body learns the shape of it and yields, honeyed pain seaming into need. He rolls his hips, grinds, sets the knot at her, and when she pushes against it, when her cunt says yes, he locks.

She wails. Not human, not fae, something older. The swell lodges, their bodies fuse, her cunt clenches around the thick ring and won’t let go; his cock throbs, trapped and perfect, every pulse a brand.

Magic detonates.

It doesn’t explode outward so much as erupt from the braided place inside both of them that the red thread found. The lamps flare white-gold and then settle. The hearth coughs and throws a braided lick of red and blue that shouldn’t be possible. The air is full of iron-sweet scent and the taste of pine sap and fruit, and under it the sound no human ear should be able to hear: stone humming.

The rune on his palm writes itself in pain and light.

It sears across the meat of the hand he has used to hold and strike and pray, a sigil drawn in red-gold like blood pretending to be sunlight. Thick strokes and thin, a curve that insinuates a heart and refuses to be saccharine, angles that remember blades and vows. It burns. He doesn’t let go. He pushes his palm harder to her sternum to meet it, to take it, to make the pain do work. He grunts, swears under his breath, and laughs once, wrecked, at how right it feels to be branded by a thing he chose as much as it chose him.

Its twin blooms on her throat.

Heat licks the soft skin just above her collarbone where he’s been putting his mouth. She cries out, hand flying there on reflex, and then catching, because his hand is there already, heavy, OWNING the place. The sigil glows through his palm, through her skin, a twin to the one on him, reversed like writing made to be read in a mirror. It doesn’t look inked; it looks grown, the way vines grow over old stone. She pants, eyes wet, and then smiles, something savage flashing through the wet.

“Mine,” he says, not triumph, purpose.

“Yes,” she gasps, every part of her milking him, clamped around the swell, every nerve ending ringing, the ribbon in her chest a metronome gone wild. “Yours.”

The bond clamps down. The red line that had threaded him earlier thickens from thread to cable in an instant, live, humming, hot—energy and oath and breath braided. He feels her like touch in his chest, a tug when she moves, a shock when she clenches, a shiver when she whimpers. He groans helplessly into her mouth; she grabs that sound with her teeth and keeps it.

He spills.

It hits hard, not trickle, not sigh—spurts dragged out of him by a body that has learned exactly how to wring him. Heat pours into her in thick waves and the sense of it—filling, filling, filling—is so obscene she laughs and sobs at once, the noise melting against his tongue. He snarls, tips his hips to seat the knot deeper, to seal them, to force every drop where he wants it. His cock throbs and pours; her cunt clamps and milks, greedy as a heartbeat. The rune on his palm blazes; the one on her throat answers, the glow bright enough to paint the lower curve of his jaw.

“Take it,” he grinds, not request; instruction. “Take all of it.”

“Don’t stop,” she begs, nails digging at his shoulders through his shirt, and he couldn’t if he wanted to. The bond hauls at him from the inside, tug-tug, command and invitation braided. He empties until the ache at the base of his spine loosens, until his thighs tremble, until the field goes from storm to a summer rain that just promises more storms later.

The palace’s old stones wake to fae resonance.

You can feel it if you’ve lived in them long enough: a swell in the floor like a big beast shifting its weight, a vibration on the edge of hearing, a taste in the mouth like old wine uncorked. Runes along the spine of hidden arches warm; thresholds that no one uses anymore remember feet; the sealed stair down to the archive breathes. Tutor stops in the hall and puts one hand to plaster and smiles the way men do when prophecies decide to be good for once. Raw, two buildings away, laughs like a child who’s just seen a fox wearing a crown.

Inside the room, Cain doesn’t move except to cage her more gently. Locked as they are, he rocks a fraction, tiny soothing motions that keep his cock deep and the knot snug and her body told in every way that it is done and still doing. He kisses her face like a man douses a fire, not panicked, deliberate, everywhere. Her throat glows under his palm; he lifts his hand to see and the sigil there burns on his own skin in sympathetic answer, heat to heat. He presses back down, claiming the mark with the same economy he uses to claim a street.

She tightens around him reflexively. The knot answers with a little pulse and she gasps, eyes blown, smile dangerous. “Oh—” she says, and laughs breathless, high off her own endorphins. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“No,” he agrees, voice sanded raw, control re-forged for the next movement even as sweat slicks his temple. “We’re going nowhere together for a while.”

“Good,” she says, and yanks on the bond without touching him, tug-tug, wicked. He groans like she bit him. She grins wider, fae in the corners, princess in the bones, omega in the flush. “Again,” she whispers, shameless and sweet and ruling him in the only way that counts.

He laughs, low, the sound ruined and young at once. “Many.”

He doesn’t pull. He can’t. The knot sits, perfect, heavy, owning. He rocks lazy, almost nothing, just enough to make the pressure sing, just enough to keep her cunt clenching around him like it intends to memorize the shape. The field, heavy on the corners, gentles. The ache that tried to drown her floats on its back and purrs, belly-out, carried.

“Look at me,” he says. She does. Blue and blue, and the light from the sigils paints his irises rich, feral. “Say it.”

“Saethyr,” she breathes, and the room hums again, the rune on her throat brightening, the one in his palm answering, and something further down in the palace—a door that was shut by people long dead—slides its bolt home from the inside, content.

He ducks and puts his mouth over the mark he just earned, teeth scraping very gently over the glowing lines like his bite would fit there later. Her whole body shivers. The knot throbs. He moans into her skin.

“Mine to hold,” he says, last time for now, because he likes the way her bones answer. “And I will.”

“Yes,” she says, and the bond tugs like laughter through both their chests, and if the bricks have ears, they will remember that particular word in that particular tone for a hundred years and tell it as a story to the dust.

Chapter Text

Morning drags gold across the ceiling and she shakes like she’s trying to throw last night out through her fingertips. Not fear. Aftershock. Her nerves, rung like a bell, still humming. The knot eased sometime between the hour when the city’s bakers lit their ovens and the hour when gossip put on its shoes, but the fullness he left in her keeps flexing like a reminder: claimed, filled, held.

Cain hovers like a problem that’s learned how to be furniture. He won’t stop. He doesn’t pace. He arranges. A tray appears because he made the world produce it. Broth that smells like bones and cloves, an apple sliced so thin it looks like coins, a heel of bread slicked with butter and honey, water that sweats on the cup. His right hand is a brand he can’t scrub off; the rune glows soft as a coal under skin, and when he curls his fingers around the cup, the light leaks between knuckles.

“Drink,” he says.

She’s on her elbows, hair a battlefield, throat marked in a shape the mirror could memorize and still get wrong. The matching sigil there ghost-burns under his palm print when he touches it, like glass remembering heat. Her hands shake so much she thinks she’ll spill the water down her chest; he guides the cup, patient, one finger under her jaw to steady the angle. She swallows. The first mouthful hits like mercy. The second lets her lungs figure themselves out again.

“You’re hovering,” she rasps, because teasing him is breathing with spice.

“I am,” he says, unapologetic. He slides a slice of apple to her mouth with his thumb and she takes it from him without thinking, lips closing over pulp and skin and the ridge of his fingerprint. The bond gives a happy little tug-tug in both of them, like a child on a sleeve. The rune in his palm warms. The mark on her throat answers. His pupils go a shade darker before he clears it with discipline that borders on religious.

She laughs on a hiccup and then shivers like someone walked through her grave. He sets the tray aside and is already pulling the blanket higher, already tucking it, already reading the tremor to know which kind it is. The field lowers around the bed, heavier at the edges, light where she lies, so pressure is a blanket too.

“Why am I shaking,” she demands of her own body. “It’s not cold.”

“No,” he agrees, seating on the edge of the mattress with a creak that sounds like a ship thinking about wind. “You’re lit. Magic. Endorphins. Prime. First bond. Your nerves are ringing each other’s bells.” He taps her sternum with two fingers, gentling the red shimmer there. “You’ll stop. Then you’ll start again, and I’ll be very smug about the reasons.”

She sucks honey off her thumb, dazed and unashamed; his eyes track it like a hawk tracks a string on a quail. “Hungry,” she says, surprised.

He feeds her. Spoon and slice and crust, no fuss, no teasing, no letting her lift more than she has to. When she tries to sit up more he slides an arm behind her shoulders, his palm a hot brand where it touches her, the rune singing quietly against the mark at her throat. The sound isn’t sound. It’s recognition. She stays upright by way of his arm and pretends it’s her spine; he lets her pretend.

“Say when,” he says, and she eats until she remembers what full feels like, until the tremor smooths to a fine shiver that reads like want by another name.

“Bath,” she whispers, suddenly desperate for water, for heat, for the clean that follows ruin, for his hands in all the places his mouth hasn’t been yet.

He’s already moving. He ghosts from bed to hearth, from hearth to copper tub, shoulders rolling the way a man’s do when he’s about to carry something heavier than his own want. He turns the taps; steam unfurls, ghosts the mirrors, draws fog-runes no one wrote. He tests the water with a knuckle as if his skin has the sense to tell the difference between too hot and perfect for princesses in heat.

He comes back and lifts her in that same quiet geometry, one arm under knees, the other long along her back, his palm bracketed over her mark. The bond tugs, greedy, pleased; her body answers like a horse that’s finally been given the right rider.

He lowers her into water that hugs every inch with heat and salt. She groans like someone paid a debt she had decided would never be forgiven. He kneels on tile, sleeves rolled, forearms already wet, rune a coal under steam. Steam licks his jaw. The blue of his eyes looks cut from glacier and then warmed by candle.

“Hands,” he says. She gives him one. He laves it with a cloth, palm, fingers, careful over the little crescents her own nails wrote into skin last night; then wrist, charm still tied there from Tutor’s steadying. He unties the charm to clean beneath and ties it back with those combat-callow big fingers that think knots the cleanest kind of language. “Arms.” He washes her to the shoulder, the collarbone, the slope where neck becomes clavicle, his mouth following with soft seals and quick kisses that count as a benediction rather than a new demand.

When he gets to her breasts she shudders and gasps and he smiles, the small one that lifts one corner like he’s just had a productive idea. He soaps a palm and cups gently, just weight and heat and circles that tease without tipping. Her nipples stand, ridiculous and eager. He doesn’t pinch. He takes the circle a little wider, then a little narrower, until she’s breathing stupid, mouth falling open on little ohs without vowels.

“Cain,” she says, and that’s an invitation in any language. He leans in and takes one nipple in his mouth, suck light at first, then firmer, his other hand splaying warm on her sternum to keep the red calm as the ache wakes and stretches. She arches, water slapping porcelain, small waves climbing the tub’s belly and slapping back, a little obscene percussion.

“Easy,” he murmurs around a mouthful of her. “I’ve got you.”

He does. He always says the easiest thing like it’s difficult and then proves it isn’t even complicated. He rinses her with handfuls of warm water, the sound of it like silk loosened. He runs the cloth down her side, over the line of hip, into the crease of thigh, not coy, not greedy. He washes her as if she’s a sword he’s sharpening. She shakes again. This shake has a name. He can smell it.

“Turn,” he tells her, gentle. “Hands on the porcelain.”

She does. She rises to her knees in the tub, the waterline cutting her just below the ass, the curve of her back like a long bow drawn only to his ear. Her palms spread on the rim, slick, pretty, perfect. Steam ghosts the mirrors; every movement paints her there in fog-lewd strokes. The mark at her throat glows a lazy ember. The bond tugs, tug-tug, impatient. The ache yowls inside her and then purrs when he takes her hips in both hands, thumbs pressing marks that will be thumbprints by noon.

“Words,” he says, low, forcing her to stay where language lives.

“Please,” she breathes, head bowed, hair dripping, water running off her nose. “Need you. Inside. Sir.” It falls out of her without permission, and both of them shiver.

He growls. The sound is not human, not animal, something engineered by control to be the precise sound that rearranges her molecules into a readiness he can use. He stands, shucks trousers like he’s done it in a hundred barracks, cock heavy and flushed, the head wet and cruel with patience. He stroks along her crack once with the back of his knuckles, gathering soap-slick and her-slick into a cocktail that smells like sex and good order.

“Breathe,” he orders.

She drags air that tastes like him and copper pipes. On the exhale he pushes, angle sure, pressure perfect—just the head, just the ring of her, just enough to burn. She whines through her teeth. He holds. He doesn’t move. He waits for her to soften around the edge he’s set, hand sliding from her hip to her belly to feel it happen, the surrender of muscle, the give.

“Good girl,” he says, and sinks.

Porcelain under her fingers, man inside her, water slapping the tub in shocked noises; she comes apart at the seams and reassembles around him. He fills her inch by relentless inch, hips driving until he’s seated, until the base of him kisses the swell of her ass, until she doesn’t know where pain ends and hunger starts except that he’s exactly where both stop mattering.

He moves. Slow at first, teaching water to be part of the rhythm, to slap and hush in ways that keep her from bruising the porcelain with her hips. His hand on her belly holds her to him, thumb pressing down just above where the thick of him slides; each thrust grinds her clit against the tub lip, obscene and perfect. Steam paints his shoulders, his throat, the cut of his chest hair, the wet glitter of his rune when he changes grips and braces his branded palm over her sternum through her back, the mark through bone.

“Harder,” she gasps, and he makes a noise that would be a laugh if it didn’t have so much promise choking it, and obliges. The slap of water goes from percussion to applause. The mirror ghosts her wings for a heartbeat—just a shimmer under skin, a lift in her scapula that warns the body what it’s about to do when the next crest takes her. He sees it, snarls into the fog, fucks her the way you run a horse that needs to be let, relentless and kind.

The swell begins under his skin again, that thickening demand. He doesn’t force it. He hovers on the edge, holds himself just shy, gives her the heavy, grinding strokes that make a body melt around the knot before it ever pushes. His breath saws. He smells like pine and sweat and a man making himself suffer on purpose so his girl gets more.

“Say it,” he pants, cruel because it’s good for her.

“Knot me,” she begs, voice high and shredded, porcelain cold under her palms, water slapping her belly. “Please, prime, please—”

“Good girl,” he snarls, and locks.

The swell pops home with a hot, brutal pressure that knocks a sob out of her. Her cunt tightens, instinct and bond and madness gripping around the ring of him with the determination of a fist refusing to let go. She cries, “Oh,” so pure it could cleanse a man’s sins. His head drops to the hinge of her neck and shoulder; his teeth scrape there, a hideous tenderness, not breaking skin, marking anyway.

He holds. He grinds, shallow now, locked together, and the friction where her clit kisses porcelain and his pubic bone is lethal. The steam ghosts the mirror into blind; the tub sings a little with the force of them. Her wings burst.

They come out pearly, wet with light, unfurling from her back like the room had kept them in the wall for her and just now remembered. She wails when they spread—pleasure turned into architecture, magic writing itself in feathers. His hands go reverent without losing force. He brackets the new limbs so he doesn’t crush them, protective without pause. “That’s it,” he groans. “Fly on it. Come for me.”

She does. Not tidy, not sweet. She breaks against the edge he’s made of himself, orgasm tearing through her so hard her vision whites, so hard she thinks she hears the tub cry out too. Her wings beat once, splashing the walls. She shakes like she did on waking, but now it’s a seizure of yes. He holds her through it, mouth at her ear, filthy praise poured hot and steady: “Good girl, look at you, that’s mine, take it, that’s it, give it to me.”

He spills with a curse that’s almost a prayer, seed pumping through the locked knot in thick waves that push heat deeper and deeper, every pulse a claim. The rune in his palm blazes against her back; the twin on her throat answers; steam eddies around the light as if it were wind-born. The bond yanks both their chests hard enough to hurt and they moan in chorus, obscene and right.

They stay there, locked and panting, while the water slaps tiredly against their bodies and the mirror tries to remember what lives beneath fog. He strokes her belly, slow, mapping the ache he’s made like he’s proud of his geography. He leans and kisses her shoulder. He says nothing that isn’t already written on her skin.

When the knot softens and the world lets them part, he lifts her out of the water like she’s a weapon he refuses to let rust. He towels her with ceremony that would look ridiculous on anyone else. He uses the towel on himself sparingly, too efficient to preen, too undone to pretend he isn’t shaking a little now for his own reasons.

Back to bed. He builds a nest with a commander’s efficiency and an animal’s greed: blankets pulled into a hollow, pillows stacked, his old coat thrown on top because the smell makes the ribbon purr. He feeds her again. Water. Apple. Bread. Honey off his thumb. He licks a smear from the corner of her mouth and groans like a man shown the ocean and told it’s free.

Outside, the world puts its ear to their door and pretends it isn’t. The court whispers like dry leaves. Did you hear. The Commander. The Princess. Red at her throat. He fired Roan between heartbeats. Exile before the sixth. The stones are humming. Hush. Hush.

Jeb knows before anyone tells him. He feels it in the way the yard breathes, in the way riders swing into saddles like they’re mounting animals that remember a god. He sits on the barracks steps with coffee he can’t taste and watches Raw smile at nothing, a fox-smile, pleased as if someone taught the city a new word and he got to hear it first. Brogan stalks through with her jaw tight and her shoulders easy: the tight for men who needed ruining, the ease for the fact they were.

“Seismic,” Jeb mutters, rubbing at the scar on his knuckle that never healed smooth. “That’s the word.”

“Stones sing,” Raw says simply, as if that explains, and it does. He tilts his head toward the palace like a dog listening for a whistle the rest of the street can’t hear. “Good song. Has teeth. Has ribbon.”

Jeb exhales and lets himself grin, half feral, half ten years old. “Then let the gossips chew. They’ll learn to swallow.”

Back in the nest, DG can’t stop shaking. Cain won’t stop hovering. He has one hand on her thigh and the other at her throat, palm resting on the glow he gave her like the sky rests on a mountain. Every time the tremor kicks, he tightens his fingers exactly enough. Every time she sighs, he softens. He looks like a man who has found the one problem he intends to have for the rest of his life and couldn’t be more delighted.

“Again,” she whispers, shameless, the word fogging the cup when he holds water to her lips. “When you’re ready.”

He smiles with his teeth, wicked and fond. “I was born ready.”

His hand cups low on her belly. The bond tugs, tug-tug, greedy little thief. The rune in his palm warms to meet it. The red at her sternum flares like a spark in tinder. Steam still ghosts the mirrors. The city leans closer to hear the second thunder.

Chapter Text

The nest is ridiculous and perfect: his old coat, blankets shoved into a hollow that remembers the shape of their bodies, pillows that smell like sleep instead of court. Steam still noses the mirrors. The rune in his palm lies warm as a coal. The twin at her throat glows like a secret the room agreed to keep.

He sits with his back against the headboard, long legs planted, shoulders making the world smaller just by existing. He crooks two fingers. She crawls without pride because pride is for people who haven’t learned what relief feels like. She ends up astride one thigh, knees tucked either side of his hip, her belly to his belly, her ear over his heart. The beat there is a metronome and a march and a lullaby. The bond tugs twice—impatient, greedy, affectionate. His mouth tips; his hand finds the back of her skull and leaves it there, weight and warmth, owning.

“Listen,” he says.

It isn’t a suggestion. It’s not hard either. His voice is a clean edge honed on years of keeping worse things out than want.

“These are the rules,” he tells her, each word laid down like a stone you can feel with your bare feet as you cross a stream. “First: you ask for anything. I don’t care what it is. You want my hands, you want my mouth, you want my cock, you want quiet, you want to sleep with your fist in my shirt—ask. I’ll give or I won’t. You do not ration your need.”

Her body melts along the length of him like wax learning heat. Her fingers bunch in his shirt; the bond tugs, small, pleased.

“Second,” he continues, “you can push me. You can claw. You want to bite, you look at me and you bite. You want to test, you test. You do not run. You do not pick a fight with a wall because you’re afraid it won’t move. If you need to hit something, I’ll put my hand there. Not my face. Not last night’s bruise. You hear me.”

She nods against his sternum. The red under her skin flutters. He slides his palm from her nape to her jaw and turns her face up with a touch so gentle it feels like a promise sealed in wax.

“Words,” he insists, low. “I want you careful even when you’re burning.”

“I hear you,” she whispers. “I’ll push. I’ll claw. I won’t run.”

“Good.” He kisses the corner of her mouth like a seal on a contract, then continues, unblinking. “Third: I never go where trust doesn’t open. I won’t ask your mouth to say yes if your body says no. If something tightens wrong, if a sound isn’t the right kind, if your eyes go far when they should be here—” he taps his chest; the rune flares under his skin like a heartbeat agreeing, “—I stop. I will not make you earn care. You don’t perform for mercy. You breathe and you give me your weight and I take it or we wait.”

Her breath stutters. His throat is right there and somehow her mouth is on it, open, reverent, tasting salt and man. She sighs a yes into his pulse because there isn’t any other place to put it.

“Fourth.” He rests his branded hand over the glow on her throat, one mark humming to the other. “If I say hands, you give them. If I say open, you open. If I say drink, you drink. If I say sleep, you sleep because I’ll keep watch. That’s for heat and for danger and for when your head is noise. Obedience is a kindness you give yourself. It lets me work.”

She hums, pliant and wicked at once. “Yes.”

“Fifth.” His tone drops a notch; it settles into her spine and makes vertebrae purr. “No safe words.” He waits until she looks at him, pupils huge. “Because my control is law. Because I hear you whether your mouth finds the syllables or not. Your body is louder than a bell. The bond is louder than any stoplight.” His thumb strokes her mark. “If you need to end a thing, you will think it and I will feel it. You will look at me and I will already be stopping. That isn’t a dare. It’s a promise.”

Fireworks go off under her skin: relief, hunger, something that tastes like a sob if you let it all the way up. “Yes,” she breathes, dizzy, grateful, rude with wanting to be kept.

“Sixth.” He continues as if he didn’t just rearrange her bones with a sentence. “We don’t hide what we do. Not from the court. Not from the stones. We don’t make a show either. We protect the nest. We shut the door. We tend the marks. If anyone puts a mouth to your name with the wrong taste in it, I’ll handle it. If anyone puts a hand on you that isn’t me or someone you named, I’ll remove it. You will not be the one who pays for other people’s bad choices.”

She smiles, small, knife-bright. “I would pay in coin they wouldn’t survive.”

“I know.” Pride cuts through the blue of his eyes like sun on a blade. “That’s why I’m telling you not to waste it.”

She shifts, testing. She drags her nails lightly down his chest through his shirt. The sound in his throat is ugly and good. She presses harder; he catches her wrist and puts her palm flat over his heart.

“Push,” he says, amused. “Harder.”

She does. He doesn’t move. His pulse slams into her hand like a door shutting on the wrong wolf. The bond tugs at them both, greedy. He leans in, mouth at the corner of her jaw, and exhales a laugh that smells like pine and morning and a man finally allowed to be who he is out loud.

“Seventh,” he says into her skin, the vibrations lodging in places that shouldn’t be able to hear. “You bleed only when we mean it. If I mark you with teeth, it’ll be because your eyes are on me and you asked. If you need rough, I’ll give you rough. If you need slow, I’ll make you curse me for it. If you need me on my knees while you ride my throat, you’ll tell me and I’ll open.”

Her hips answer before her mouth does, a helpless little roll that drags wet heat along the muscle of his thigh where she’s straddling. He hisses and tightens his grip at her nape. “Words.”

“Yes,” she says, a confession and a prayer. “All of that.”

“Eighth.” His hand slides lower, warm and flat over her belly where the afterache purrs. “When heat comes, I am your weather. We close the door. We build the nest. No one comes in unless we want them there. You don’t put scent on any man who isn’t me. You don’t take a single careless breath in an open corridor. If you need me and I’m not within reach, you call me with my name or with Saethyr and I will run.”

“Yes.” The word comes out like a sob made polite. “You will.”

“I will.” No brag. Bedrock. “Ninth. After we finish anything, you eat. You drink. You let me wash you. You sleep. You don’t argue that you’re fine. You don’t tuck yourself into corners and pretend your hands aren’t shaking. You come here.” He squeezes. “Here.”

“Here,” she echoes, drunk on the way he says it.

He studies her like a map he intends to memorize to the last bad road. “Tenth.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “If you want to test me, if you want to break a rule because you need to feel the edges, tell me. I’ll build you a wall you can hit. I’ll hold while you hit it. You won’t have to wonder if it’ll hold.”

She stares up at him, viciously soft. “Are those all.”

“For now.” He thumbs her bottom lip, smears honey she didn’t realize was still there. “You’ll get addendums. You’re trouble.”

“You like me trouble,” she murmurs, and bares her throat because it’s the easiest way to say please that she knows.

“I like you mine,” he corrects, and sets his teeth, gentle, over the glow at her throat, not biting, not yet, just holding her with his mouth the way his hand holds the back of her head. The bond surges, a greedy yank that drags a gasp out of both of them. He hums there, pleased, and the hum strokes her nerves like velvet.

“Repeat them,” he says when he lifts his head, cruel teacher. “Abbreviate.”

She tries not to smile; she fails. “Ask. Push. Don’t run.” Her voice steadies as she goes. “You won’t go where trust doesn’t open. Hands means hands. Open means open. Drink means drink. Sleep means sleep. No safe words because you hear me anyway. We don’t hide, we don’t perform, we protect the nest. You cut off the hands that aren’t yours. I bleed only on purpose. I can ask for rough or slow or your knees.” Her cheeks heat; her eyes glitter. “Heat is your weather. Door closed. No careless breaths. If I need you I call and you run. After: food, water, wash, sleep. No corners. Come here. And if I want to hit a wall, you build me one.”

“And?” he prompts, delighted.

“And you’re mine to hold,” she says fiercely, and the bond tugs so hard his eyes go dark for a second.

He kisses her like he’s sealing orders on parchment. The hand at her nape tightens; the hand on her belly slides lower, not to take, to promise. When he breaks the kiss, he rests his forehead to hers. They breathe the same air until “yes” is the only syllable left in the room.

“Good girl,” he says softly, and the praise goes straight to her knees. “Now the enforcement clause.”

Her smirk is feral. “Punishment, Commander?”

“Consequences,” he corrects, prim with wicked in it. “You test, I hold. You run, I catch. You go quiet, I talk until the quiet leaves. You forget to eat, I feed you until you’re bored of chewing. You make that sound—” he drags his thumb over the corner of her mouth until she whimpers on cue, “—and I won’t let you walk right for an hour.”

She laughs, helpless, and bows her head to him, a little tilt that puts her mouth back against his throat. She sighs one more yes there, a warm breath right over the thick, relentless beat he gave himself back when he dropped everything welded on him. The sound that rumbles in his chest answers before his mouth can.

“Say my name,” he tells her, almost gentle.

“Cain,” she sighs into his pulse, tasting the promise in it.

“Good.” He tips her chin; blue eyes catch her like a hook catches the current. “You want more right now or you want to sleep.”

She bares her teeth in a smile that belongs to queens and foxes. “Yes.”

He huffs, pleased and doomed. “Greedy.”

“Yours,” she murmurs, and that settles the question. His hand cups her cunt through the mess he made earlier, not to start, to own, and the field dips low, heavy on the corners again, sharpening desire until it’s a blade he can aim anywhere he wants.

“Then let’s test rule four,” he says, filthy and fond. “Hands.”

She gives them up at once, wrists together, palms up, red magic already whispering around his bones like ribbon. He covers her hands with his own, rune to rune, pulse to pulse. The bond throbs once, bright and happy, louder than bells, louder than any stoplight, and the stones lean in, eager to hear what a promise sounds like when a man like him keeps it.

Chapter Text

The Council Chamber is designed to make people feel small. The ceiling vaults like a sanctimonious eyebrow. The windows pretend to be merciful and then let in a blade of winter light sharp enough to make dust look guilty. Today the benches are full of silks that rustle like cattails before a storm, jeweled throats lifting to see if the rumors come crowned or bleeding.

DG enters with the mark visible.

No pearls at her throat to soften it; no high collar to lie. The sigil gleams low and red where neck becomes shoulder, not ink, not jewelry, a living thing under skin. Every old man in the room pretends not to look and fails. Every young woman looks once and smiles into her sleeve. The stones remember the shape of last night’s hum and settle their muscle underfoot.

Cain takes his place at her left. Commander’s sash, coat clean, brand banked under glove. He carries a folio thick enough to be a weapon and thin enough not to be vanity. When he sets it on the table, you can feel the table decide it will behave.

“Highness,” intones Chancellor Vell, a tall drape of a man who loves precedence the way some men love their own reflection. “We convene for customary review.”

Rell smiles. It isn’t a smile; it’s a slick of grease. Court Advisor Rell has the easy posture of a man who has mistaken longevity for proof of correctness. Old honors shine at his cuffs. Newer arrogance shines behind his eyes. He half-bows, careful enough not to look like bending. “Customary, yes,” he says, letting the word do more work than his spine. “And overdue.”

“At your leisure,” Lavender Eyes says. The queen’s voice is watered steel. She sits like a decree, hands quiet in her lap. She says nothing else. Her gaze cuts once across the room, lands on Glitch where he leans against a carved pillar pretending he belongs to architecture, and stays there a heartbeat too long. He does not smile; his mouth remembers how.

Rell opens his hands to the benches like a man offering bread to pigeons. “We have two matters,” he says. “One, the Commander’s new… enterprise.” He doesn’t swallow the sour on the word Restablishment; he swirls it and inhales. “And two, the question of propriety, which has grown teeth overnight.”

Laughter, tight and thin, ripples through brocade. Adviser to Adviser, the sound says, do say it out loud so we can pretend we didn’t first.

“Question of what, exactly?” Cain asks, pleasant as bread. He doesn’t look at Rell. He looks at the paper in front of him as if it is interesting enough to keep.

Rell cuts a glance at DG’s throat and feigns disinterest so badly it’s an admission. “No one begrudges the Highness her… maturation,” he says, tasting the word like a man chewing a rind. “But the palace compact has always preferred when the body of the crown did not broadcast its circumstances down the length of the city.”

“Broadcast,” Raw murmurs from the gallery, entirely to himself, entirely delighted. “Threads hum, not broadcast.”

Jeb elbows him once, warning, and Raw obediently laces his fingers and hums quieter so only the stones get to hear.

“Your compact predates a great many realities,” DG says. She sits forward slightly, enough to make jewels reconsider their opinion of light. “Including me.”

“Ah,” Rell says, pitying, which is his favorite insult. “And yet the proprieties remain. We cannot have corridors… perfumed.” He says it as if he’s naming a plague. “And we cannot have Commanders… entangled.”

“Entangled,” Brogan mutters from the door like she’s learned a new swear.

Cain lifts his eyes now. The blue is winter-sky flat. “You can define entangled for the record,” he offers, as if the courtesy will be remembered when they carve it on Rell’s stone.

Rell smiles with the corners. “Rumor has its own language.”

“And the law has mine,” Cain says, and opens the folio.

Paperwork makes a sound like weather when it moves in his hands. He draws out one sheet—signatures marching neat; a seal that caught wax clean—and places it where everyone who knows how to read consequence can see. “Tin Man Restablishment: Charter Amendment Twelve,” he says, unbothered by the way the room bristles at the word Tin. “Authorized by Council last quarter. Reallocation of line-items from ceremonial redundancies to clinical, training, and wage support. Measurable outcomes: two-month incident rate down thirty-one percent in precincts one through four. Desertion attempts among re-integrated units down by half. Assault complaints against citizenry by former Tin at near-zero.” He flips to the next page. “Projected savings to crown over two years: more than the cost of your waistcoat, Rell.”

A ripple. Small. Satisfying.

Rell doesn’t blink. He’s had his blink trained out. “Numbers are… nimble,” he purrs. “We all admire your zeal. But customs—”

Cain lays the next sheet on top of the first. “Customs,” he repeats as if it might be a medical condition. “Let’s count those too. Custom used to be locking men in iron. Custom used to be letting captains treat the princess like a scent trail.” He doesn’t turn his head. He doesn’t have to; the room does it for him. “Custom used to be looking the other way when old honors turned into new entitlement. I’m not sentimental.”

Someone swallows hard. It might be the boy who opens the doors. It might be the old man who sits second bench left and has never been spoken to like a man who could bleed.

Rell spreads his fingers like he’s blessing wheat. “I speak for those who wonder if the Commander has overreached. Exiling a captain before the hour was struck—”

“Article Twelve,” Cain says, neither loud nor fast, the way men recite their children’s names. He slides another paper across, this one a copy the court scribe made already, ink barely dry. “Article Two. Addendum Twelve-b. Signed witness. Signed arresting officers. Crest surrendered. Blade broken. North gate before the sixth. You were sleeping. We were working.”

An old noble—Lord Harbis, who thinks his eyebrows are statutes—leans forward on his cane, hungry for the part that tastes like scandal. “And this”—he gestures vaguely at DG’s throat, cheeks flushing with the true thrill of saying what he pretends not to want to say—“this fae business.”

“The word is blood,” DG says, mild enough to cut. “You can say blood.”

“The royal line,” someone bleats two benches back, “has never—”

“Always,” Lavender Eyes says, queen-still, finally peeling one word from her silence. She doesn’t look at the speaker; she looks at Glitch. The word lands in the room and chooses sides. “Always and without fail. We are made of what we took and what was given back.”

“Well.” Rell’s smile chips a tooth. “Even so, the optics—”

“Stop saying optics like you own the light,” DG says, weary, sweet. The red under her skin throbs once, an indecorous little pulse. Several alphas in the room forget to breathe for a heartbeat and then remember how to, embarrassed and aroused and not sure which to be ashamed of. Cain’s field lowers a shade over the edges of the chamber, pressure precise as a lid. Air obeys him with alacrity.

“The optics,” Rell insists, obstinate, “argue for discretion. The palace should not be a perfumery. The corridors should not—”

“Do you want a list of corridors men like you have ruined?” Brogan asks pleasantly from her post. “I can alphabetize it.”

Titter, quickly strangled. Rell’s gaze skates over her and fixes again on Cain, because picking fights with people who can put you on the floor is not one of his vices.

“Commander,” he says, magnanimous, “your program is an expense. Your conduct is… in question. The court wishes to know whether the city’s safety can be entrusted to a man who appears to be succumbing to… personal interests.”

Cain turns one page. Then another. He doesn’t rush. He lets the sound of paper rearranging itself into a wall become the room’s measure. He lays out three columns. Line items. Signatures. Stamps. “Let’s talk expense,” he says, friendly. “Lord Harbis charged the crown twice for uniforms his men never wore. I have receipts, and I have the tailor’s sworn deposition.” He taps, easy. “Madame Cotterill submits invoices for six horses yearly and never stalls more than three. I have names.” Tap. “Advisor Rell’s discretionary fund appears in three ledgers under two categories. One is travel. One is—” he tilts his head, like he doesn’t want to embarrass the word, “—entertainments. Both have line-items round as oranges. Both lack destination and documentation.”

Rell’s smile remembers it is made of lips, not steel. “You impugn my—”

“I’m pointing at your numbers,” Cain says. “If your honor is in there, it will stand up on its own.”

The whisper that runs through the benches now is dry leaves and fire. Glitch’s mouth actually curves this time, quick and savage before he irons it flat. Lavender Eyes doesn’t blink. She watches the man she left sleeping in another century remember how to breathe in this one.

DG rests her hands on the table. She doesn’t lift them. She doesn’t need to. The mark glows, a low ember, and when she speaks every soft consonant lands heavy.

“The palace will not legislate my body,” she says. “Not my heat. Not my bond. I will not scent the corridors by accident because we will not walk them unguarded. I will not command men who don’t belong to me unless the law requires it, and if it does, they will kneel because the law is older than any of you.” She tips her head, not coy, offering the mark the way a soldier offers his badge to be checked for forgery. “You can rename what happened to suit your tongues. It will not change anything that matters.”

Someone says fae under his breath like a curse; Raw hums a single note that makes the word change shape in the speaker’s mouth as it leaves, same syllables, new meaning. The man shuts it without realizing why. Jeb hides a grin in his coffee.

“Commander,” Chancellor Vell says, clearing his throat as if ceremony is a handkerchief big enough to wipe the scent out of the air, “the Program’s charter authorizes you to recruit, to house, to train, to pay. You’re asking for additional—”

“Rooms,” Cain says, and slides over a floorplan. “Beds. Lines of sight that don’t permit bad hands. Schedules that get men off streets where gossip is faster than runners. Funds pulled from pageantry that doesn’t keep anyone alive.” He taps a neat column. “And a clerk who can add. Present company mostly excepted.”

Laughter, unwilling, cracks the benches and makes something in the ceiling stop thinking it’s better than the floor. Vell glances at the queen. Lavender’s eyes move to Cain and then to DG and then back to her hands. “If savings match pace,” she says. “If the incident rate stays down. If the reports land on the table at the first bell on the first day of each month.”

“They will,” Cain says, and everyone in the room believes him because they were here this morning when he made the building learn what the word will means.

Rell is not done. Men like him never are. He laces his hands, threads hiding nerves badly. “And the matter of decorum,” he says, one last stab. “We must consider the optics for the realm beyond this room. The… image of a princess… flaunting—”

DG lifts her gaze to him as if he has knocked on a door and she is deciding whether he deserves to enter. “Do you want to be explicit,” she asks. “Or coy.”

“Highness—”

“Explicit,” she decides, pitying him for liking the word and hating the thing. “The Commander and I are bound by magic older than your chair and law clean enough to sign. If you intend to censure me, do it. Write the motion. Make the case that a princess’s body belongs to a council before it belongs to herself.”

Silence. A breath wide as a field. Then the scuttle of quills being kept very still.

Rell’s mouth opens and then prudence finds his tongue by the scruff. “No one seeks to—”

“Good,” DG says, and smiles. It is a fae thing, that smile; it bares no teeth and still leaves marks. “Then take your concern about perfumes and pour it into soap for the barracks.”

Glitch chokes on a laugh that turns into a cough by the time the sound reaches anyone humorless. Lavender Eyes’s mouth remembers a secret shape and forgets it again.

“Motion?” Vell asks, brittle. He wants to be done. He wants to adjourn with dignity. He wants to tell the story later at a table where dignity leaks like wine.

“None,” Rell says, because he knows the votes and because his hand is not as strong as the room made it feel. “Not at this time.”

“Good,” Cain says. He gathers his papers like drawing a blade back into a scabbard. “Then we’ll leave you to your teeth.” He nods at the benches as if they’re a pack he’d rather not shoot in public. “My men come home clean or the people who dirty them answer to me. The Program continues. Line-items post at first bell.” He looks at Rell without smiling. “Choose your oranges with care.”

Brogan holds the door. The guards stand straighter without knowing they’ve chosen to. Jeb tips an invisible hat at nobody and everybody. Raw pats the column by the exit and says, very softly, so as not to startle it, “Good humming.”

DG rises. The room stands because it remembers manners were invented for moments like this—when fear wants to sit and hope wants to run. She doesn’t curtsey. She doesn’t need the floor’s permission to leave. The mark at her throat glows as if satisfied to have been seen. She walks out with Cain at her left, Glitch’s gaze snagging on Lavender’s one last time, a wire strung between them that’s been waiting for a hand to pluck.

Behind them, court whispers like dry leaves rubbing together in a wind that smells like rain. Some of the leaves are knives. Some of them are brooms. None of them know yet whether they’re kindling or mulch.

In the corridor outside, Cain hands her a single folded page torn from the folio, the edges too clean for accident. She cocks a brow.

“Procurement records,” he says, bland. “Rell’s numbers lie even when he doesn’t. Myrrh can read the dust off them. We’ll let him hang himself with the string he brought to tie us.”

She tucks the page into her jacket, mark warm under leather, bond tug-tug pleased. “Courtly teeth,” she says, amused.

“Teeth are honest,” he says. “It’s mouths I don’t trust.”

They walk on. The stones hum underfoot, pleased with the turn of weather; the city lifts its head and squints toward afternoon as if trying to see what shape the storm will take when it finally breaks where everyone can watch.

Chapter Text

The council’s noise still clung to her like cobweb—voices in silk, a thousand tiny yanks that each wanted her to turn and apologize for breathing. Az walked out before her mouth said something it would frame and hang in the hall. The winter air under the arcades tasted like copper and damp stone. She took it in big animal gulps and then laughed at herself, because she had once commanded storms and now had to remind her lungs they were not furniture.

The yard ran on an older clock. No velvet here, just the music of orders and answers. Brogan’s voice slapped a wall and came back obedient. Rope hissed. Boots found cadence. The Tin Man Re­stablishment recruits were a human problem bent under human answers: you learn where your hands belong. You learn what to do with fear when it turns clever.

Jeb Cain stood at the heart of it, sleeves shoved up, hair kicked by wind, that particular calm men get when gravity remembers their name. He held a practice staff in both hands and moved through a sequence slow enough that boys pretending they weren’t boys could watch and steal the angles. When he spun, the staff became a line that recognized its axis and loved it. When he smiled at a kid who finally kept his lead hand honest, Az forgot to finish her inhale.

Ridiculous, she told the annoyed part of her that lived behind her tongue. Entirely.

He saw her the way a man sees weather—first as light, then as pressure. She had that effect on rooms and men; half of them didn’t survive the misunderstanding. Jeb adjusted a recruit’s grip, looked up, caught her far-side of the yard like a rumor in good boots, and the smile crooked. Not show. Recognition. Her ribs decided they had been tied too tight and loosened one knot without permission.

“Water,” he told his line, and the boys scattered like grateful birds. Brogan took one look at Az, then at Jeb, and decided to drill knots on the far square. The woman had instincts like a wolf that paid taxes.

Raw sat cross-legged on a crate, humming to the floor because the floor had things it wanted to say. His hair had learned a new disaster; his coat had invented a cologne called Leaves and Laundry. He grinned at Az like a cousin who knew what house she’d slept in when she was a child and still liked her.

“Your Highness,” Jeb said when he reached her. The title came out as if it were an observation about clouds. “Enjoy the show?”

“Enjoy would be decadent,” Az said, and ignored the way her body leaned a hair toward the warmth steam-stamping off his skin. “I was… impressed. It’s rare to see someone teach without making the lesson about himself.”

He tipped the staff against his shoulder. “I like them alive. That requires the teacher’s ego to go on break.”

She smirked. “Your ego seems very disciplined. Does it sit when told.”

“Usually,” he said. “Sometimes it heels.” His eyes slid unavoidably to the mark low at her sister’s throat, absent and loud by its absence here. Then back, clean. “You look like you were about to bite someone who couldn’t survive it.”

“I was about to bite everyone,” she said primly. “It seemed inefficient.”

Raw chuckled, low and delighted. “Az burns like clean sugar today,” he confided to the ankle of the bench. “Good for yard. Makes boys stand up straight.”

“Raw,” Jeb warned, fond.

“Raw quiet,” Raw said, unconvincing. He turned the hum down to a secret.

Az could have left. She didn’t. The yard smelled like oil and rope and men trying, and it felt like a room with its windows cracked, and she had always loved watching competence. Jeb set the staff down and offered her one with the invitation held in two open palms.

“Teach me something I don’t know,” she said, because provocation is the only true courtesy.

“Your shoulders like to lie,” he said, not missing a beat. “They have the habit of moving when your hands do. Good for dancing. Bad for fighting. If your shoulders speak without permission, everyone hears your next thought.”

“Everyone,” she repeated, amused. “Or someone particular.”

“Everyone,” he said, and the small grin told her he’d let particular stay between them.

He stepped in. Too close for court. Not close enough to satisfy the piece of her that had started measuring him the way a jeweler measures a stone he refuses to admit he wants. He set his hands—one on the point of her shoulder, one along the outside of her forearm—and all at once the memory of wrong hands in an old life flickered and went extinct under the simple fact of his. Warm. Callused. Present. He smelled like sweat and the bread the barracks baked too early and the coffee he didn’t drink fast enough. The staff found its place in her palms like it had been waiting for them to be honest.

“Stand there,” he said. “There. Not there.” He nudged a toe with his boot, a small correction that had her knee unlock. “Now when your hand moves—” He shifted her wrist a half-inch, “—your shoulder stays.”

She moved and her shoulder stayed. Outrageous. The line of strength changed. It ran from hand to back like the yard had lent her a new muscle.

“Oh,” she said before she could stop it, and he grinned in the quick, boy way that has made more bad decisions than kingdoms, but not here, not now. The grin cut something that had been growing around her heart like a polite vine.

“Again,” he said, and she did it again. “Good,” he said, and the praise landed low and hot, a ridiculous place for words to land. “If anyone gets inside your hands, drop the staff and knife their thigh.”

“I don’t carry a knife in council chambers.”

“That’s a design flaw,” he said. “You want a station blade for your chair.”

She snorted. “I want Rell’s tongue for the queen’s cats.”

“Small bones,” Raw advised solemnly from the crate. “Not enough meat.”

They worked. It was only minutes. It could have been a lesson in a stairwell in a life that didn’t belong to either of them. He corrected nothing he didn’t have to. He let her make ugly moves and find pretty results. When she tested him, he took it, let her staff slide along his with a pleasant crack, let her see how his forearms did all the talking while his shoulders shut up. She wanted to press him backward until his back hit a wall and then see what the rest of him spoke—ridiculous—so she did it anyway.

He gave ground like a craftsman, footwork neat, knowing the wall was there and refusing to need it. When she smothered his staff with hers and found the edge of his shirt with the end of hers, he let the fabric catch and crooked that damn smile again.

“Mean,” he said. “I like it.”

“You like it because it works,” she said.

“That too.”

They were closer now. He hadn’t stepped in; the world had narrowed. His breath touched the hair by her ear and somehow his hands were not on her but she remembered exactly how they had been, warm along her forearm, warm on the peak of her shoulder, warm where no one put a hand without asking. Her pulse was being the wrong kind of conspicuous. Her magic, that treacherous thing, started showing off.

Tiny sparks climbed the wall behind him. Not fire. Spell static. It arced lazily up the mortar in little curious stitches and went out. Jeb’s eyes flicked past her shoulder; he didn’t flinch. He looked back at her mouth.

“Az,” he said, testing it like a man tastes a word he is sure he knows and is willing to be corrected on, “do you want me to go back to teaching the boys while you remember how to breathe.”

“Presumptuous,” she said, airily, and maybe she was breathing too fast; maybe she wasn’t breathing at all. He waited, steady as furniture. Her mouth softened despite her. “Yes. And no.”

“Useful,” he said, amused, and the low thing in his voice made her resolve do a short, embarrassed curtsy. “Another minute,” he offered. “Then you can watch me make them swear at ladders.”

“Two minutes,” she said before she could stop herself.

“Greedy.”

She tilted her head. “Yours?”

His ears went a color that would have humiliated any other man. “That’s not fair play, Highness.”

“I’m very tired of fair play,” she said, and realized she meant it more deeply than this yard, this minute, this man.

He didn’t look away. “Me too.”

Raw made a pleased little fox noise and pretended it came from the crate.

“Again,” Jeb said, because if you don’t know what to do with an ache, you turn it into discipline. He adjusted the angle of her hands on the staff, the way her wrists wanted to overflex when she got fancy. “Simple. Ugly. True.”

“Are we still talking about the staff,” she asked, teeth bright.

His mouth twitched. “Mostly.” He stepped behind her at last, not crowding, an inch where there could have been none, heat a steady back at her spine found insulting and intoxicating. He used the length of his staff to set hers, wood on wood, angle corrected. His breath hit the hinge of her jaw and skittered down into places that did not need a messenger. “Don’t try to look good,” he said. “Try to stay alive. Pretty happens after.”

She moved. The sequence felt different with him behind her, as if she’d stolen his balance and he didn’t care. She learned it twice as fast anyway, because she wanted to and because he didn’t treat wanting like confession. He tsked when her shoulders tried to lie. He put two fingers on the muscle that twitched wrong and the muscle remembered who paid its taxes.

“Better,” he said. “You have a knife now.”

“Do I,” she asked, and he reached around her waist with a speed that would have turned bad if he’d been anyone else and pressed the flat of something cool into her palm.

Station blade, neat, short, wicked. She didn’t look up at him for permission. She felt for the balance and flipped it once on her palm, let gravity teach her the lesson men learn when they stop trying to fight physics. He made a very soft, indecorous sound. Her smile got feral.

“I would like this back,” he said, voice respectable, bones not.

“You think I won’t give it,” she said, testing the weight.

“I think if you keep it you will name it, and then I won’t get it back.”

She had already named it. She refused to tell him the name. “When do you drill ladders.”

“Now,” he sighed, with theatrical regret that was almost convincing. He didn’t step away from her until she moved first. Even then, he let the space go like a concession, not a retreat. “Watch. Laugh only when they deserve it.”

“They always do.” She tossed the knife once, caught it handle-first, and handed it back, fingers brushing his in a nothing-touch that burned places her worst nights hadn’t found.

Raw’s hum climbed a note, pleased enough to embarrass the flagstones. Brogan barked for the line and the line discovered, to its horror, that ladders were not metaphors. Jeb walked away backwards, eyes on Az, the staff riding his shoulder and behaving because his shoulder had asked instead of told.

She watched while he made boys curse new anatomy into existence and refuse to fall. He pretended he didn’t know she was there. He knew exactly where she was, the way a man knows where warm water is when he’s been cold too long. Her magic kept lighting the wall behind her in small, idiot sparks. She put a palm flat on stone to quiet it and felt the stone hum back: a little echo from somewhere far inside the palace where a red ribbon had been tied to a man with blue eyes. She smiled at the wall without meaning to. The wall, romantic fool, tried to sit up straighter.

Jeb caught three mistakes and turned one of them into a lesson the others could learn without bleeding. Raw applauded by clapping the crate’s edge lightly; the crate was very flattered. Az lifted a brow when one boy nearly brained himself and Jeb said nothing sharp; the boy fixed it faster for not being shamed. It was a nasty trick, that kind of kindness. It made people want to deserve it. People were terrible. She loved them sometimes.

When the ladders had finished humiliating everyone, Jeb blew out a breath and rolled his wrists. A few strands of hair stuck to his forehead. He didn’t try to tame them. He looked at her—really looked—and somehow the yard went quieter without changing its volume.

“Walk you back,” he offered.

“To what,” she asked. “Theories about decorum.”

“To wherever you need a door held,” he said, and that put a stupid heat in her cheeks she refused to confess to in any language.

“Raw,” she deflected, because having a third body in the conversation felt like a safety rail, “do you approve.”

“Raw approves,” Raw said gravely. “Hands good. Words good. Teeth later.”

Jeb choked. Az laughed for real and didn’t clap a hand over her mouth to hide it, which might have been the first time this week. Sparks climbed the wall and then decided they were too obvious and faded. The air cooled. The yard remembered it had work.

“Walk me,” she said, and Jeb’s smile did that crooked thing again that made the morning think about becoming afternoon in one motion.

They fell into step, not touching. Raw trailed like a rumor with good intentions, humming. The recruit line tried not to ogle and failed in four different flavors. Brogan watched all of it with the satisfaction of someone who had predicted weather and been correct.

“I hate ladders,” Az confessed as they cut under the arcade’s shade.

“They’re honest,” Jeb said.

“So are knives.”

He glanced down at her hands. “I know.”

“Teach me to throw,” she said, not flirtation, a demand.

He didn’t pretend to be surprised. “This afternoon. With walls. And witnesses,” he added, because he was Cain’s son and had inherited the gene that remembered corridors.

“Witnesses?” She feigned innocence. It didn’t fit. “To your humiliation, I hope.”

“To your triumph,” he corrected, one heartbeat late, and the late made it true.

They passed under a window where a woman with fresh wings had once screamed a palace awake, and the stone there hummed a single note like a blessing. Az tilted her face to the light. Jeb looked at her as if he were memorizing where that light put its thumbs. Raw chuckled like he’d heard this song before and still liked the chorus.

Sparks climbed the walls. They weren’t fire. Not yet.

Chapter Text

The stair to the archive is not on any map worth showing to courtiers. It begins behind a shelf that smiles like carpentry and ends in a keyhole that doesn’t want a key. Myrrh carries one anyway, half for show, half because locks appreciate being courted even when they intend to be seduced by other means.

“Mind your dress,” they say without looking back, voice pitched low enough to keep from waking anything that prefers to dream. Their hair is the color of ink that got tired of being black. Their coat smells faintly of smoke and herbs you cannot buy. They wear a band of beaten copper around the smallest knuckle, which is either ornament or a text.

DG lifts her skirts and follows, the red under her skin a warm coin, the bond tug-tug contented, greedy. Cain walked her to the hidden door and then put his hand flat to the lintel like a man greeting a dog that might bite and said, “I’ll be in shouting distance.” He didn’t kiss her. He looked at her mouth like a man who has learned what it does to him and then gave the door his back on purpose.

The hidden steps spiral. Cold breath creeps up the well, carrying a smell like old rain on stone and the first cut into fresh vellum. Myrrh clicks their tongue softly at a point of air and the point hisses back, appeased. Wards here are not the polite kind Tutor draws when he has guests; they are old house-rules that would put a guest’s hat on fire if it tried to hang itself where it didn’t belong.

At the bottom, the passage narrows, then exhales into a chamber that has no business living under a palace. The ceiling drops its shoulders low enough to remind you where you are. Shelves keep to themselves, thick with spines that never learned to be labeled in the same hand twice. A brass grate covers a dry channel carved into the floor, a concession to floods that have never been water. A lantern hangs from a hook that wasn’t a hook before Myrrh touched it.

“Welcome to the stomach,” Myrrh says cheerfully. “This is where the palace digests the lies people tell on the floors above.”

DG smiles despite the shiver down her calves. The mark at her throat warms as if the stones recognize the twin on the hand that has touched it. The air tastes like tannin and iron and something sweet that doesn’t belong in kitchens. She touches nothing until Myrrh has touched it first.

“What opens it?” she asks, nodding at the first sealed door, a slab of wood swollen with secrets, carved with motifs that are not quite vines. Thorn and spiral. Thread and thorn. Runes caught mid-crawl.

“Names,” Myrrh says. “Used to be blood. We broke it of that habit after the siege.” They lay their palm on the wood, speak three short syllables without vowels, then a fourth that sounds like a laugh refusing to become a cough. The slab unlocks with a sigh and a resentful creak. “Now it’s etiquette.”

The room beyond is colder. Shelves here carry the weight of things that were never supposed to be set down. Books bound in too-supple leather. Slips of hammered bark. Sheaves of plant fiber oiled until they smell like ghosts. Scripts that curl like vines and then uncurly when you look dead-on, as if afraid of being memorized.

Myrrh moves like a person who has taught a cat that the cat is not in charge. Their hands never hover; they commit. “We have three lanes,” they narrate, brisk and kind. “Treaties, genealogies, and the stuff we lied about and later regretted. You want all three.”

“I do,” DG says, and the ache under her sternum hums agreement; the bond answers with a tug she feels under the breastbone and behind the teeth. She presses her palm to the shelf nearest—a reflex she hasn’t learned to stop—and the wood warms under her hand as if a dog has rolled over to show belly. Vines etched in the trim lift their heads and then lay back down. “Sorry,” she tells it, absurd and sincere.

“It’s given worse to worse,” Myrrh says. They put a long, wiry finger to the upper left of the nearest stack. “Thorns and Threads. Our oldest lie.”

DG draws the volume down. The leather is the kind that remembers hands; the pages are vellum that feels like skin left in a cool room. Script jittery with age marches in a neat, smug line. She reads the way she breathes when she’s trying to make her magic behave: slow first, then faster when it realizes she’ll keep up.

Pact of Thorns and Threads, in the court hand that looks like a woman who has never spilled tea. Oath of the Tree-Line. Clause in which the first Lavender agreed to leave the hawthorn stands uncut in exchange for the crown’s roads staying dry. Clause in which the prince of the Dawn Court agreed to send a word to wake the walls when Unseelie teeth came down from the north. Clause in which the same prince demanded, and was given, “a red assurance.”

She touches the phrase without meaning to. The page warms under her fingertip. The script curls a little tighter. Myrrh makes a noise like a person who likes to be right but hates gambling.

“Red assurance,” they say. “Ribbon. Covenant. It was always there. We pretended it said ‘redress.’ It didn’t.”

DG turns the page. Illustrations appear and vanish depending on how you angle the light. A woman at a table, ribbon unspooling from under her collarbone into a cup. A man with his palm open, the ribbon writing something into his skin that could be a heart and could be a sigil and refuses to decide. In the margin, cramped script: Dawn-blood. Prime. Knot. The last word has been scratched out in one ink and rewritten in another, twice, then allowed to stand.

“Dawn-blood?” she asks, though Tutor told her to expect it. Her mouth shapes the fae tongue’s equivalent automatically: saedhrin—dawn-bright—dragging honey across the palate.

“Not daylight,” Myrrh says, hunting another volume one-handed, their other palm steady on Thorns so it doesn’t decide to close itself. “Dawn. The hinge. That hard minute where things decide which way is day. Not Seelie as the songs sell them; not Unseelie as the songs scare them. The court between, the one with a calendar and a sense of humor.” They find what they wanted and slide it into DG’s hands: a slim gathering of leaves bound with a cord that has not rotted. “Marriages and methods. Second shelf, fourth down. Read left-hand pages first; right-hand will behave after.”

DG obeys. The left-hand page is all diagrams: loops and lines that could be knots or letters, hearts drawn wrong on purpose, circles with notches. The right-hand page stays blank until she’s read the left twice; while she reads the third time, ink appears in strokes like a spider learning a new web.

The Red Ribbon Covenant, says the header, smug. A binding permitted only when the hybrid dawn-blooded line holds the crown and a prime without frenzy swears his hand to hold. The bond does not belong to the body. It belongs to what the body has promised.

Something in her belly sits down and puts its head in her lap. She keeps reading.

No safe words; control is law. Consent is older than language, and the bond will pull a liar out of his skin. The ribbon will bite bad hands. The rune will not show on a coward. The knot is a crown when used as crown; when used as leash, it chokes the wearer first.

Her lungs remember to work. She lifts her hand to the mark at her throat; through glove, Myrrh watches the shape of it and doesn’t flinch. The brand under her skin hums like a held note.

“Prime without frenzy,” she says, half to the book, half to the person whose smell is still in her sheets. “He held it for years.”

“He learned,” Myrrh says. Their mouth tilts. “Men who refuse to break make better hammers than men who don’t notice they’re hitting anything.”

DG flips forward. The script purses its mouth at her for wanting dessert first and then gives her the part with pictures: a palm with a sigil notched into it, strokes thick where they need to be, fine where the curve cuts. The same sigil reversed, over the delicate valley where neck becomes shoulder. In the margins: Saethyr annotated in three hands—High Speech, glossed: Belonging; a fae hand, glossed: Leadership That Serves; a palace hand, glossed: I Will Take Care.

The bond is not a chain. The bond is a bridge. The bond is hungry and must be fed. The bond is a weather system when both parties are too proud to admit they live under it; sooner or later it will rain.

DG laughs, a small ridiculous burst she smothers out of respect for the room. On a lower shelf a volume coughs dust in disapproval. She picks it up to placate it and finds something worse and better than she asked for: histories of the Dawn Court written by someone who liked books and did not like people.

They were called dawn-blooded because the line was mixed on purpose; no one survives noon forever. The court made queens out of women whose magic had learned to braid itself with human rules without losing their teeth. The prime in those histories is never a title you can purchase; it shows up when underfed alphas decide control is a craft not an excuse. Dawn-blooded queens never choose men who cannot be told no. They like men who can hear yes properly.

Her skin feels two degrees tighter than it did on the way down. The bond tugs, tug-tug, pleased and impatient. The library, romantic idiot, hums under her boots like a cat learning its person’s footfall.

“Pages with rituals?” she asks, because hunger likes menus even when it isn’t going to order yet.

Myrrh shows their teeth, a little unequal. “Pages with consequences,” they correct. “You know the rites already. Your body is writing them on your bones one by one.” They set another book on the table with too much ceremony for the title page’s rudeness: On Knots by someone who never had a reader. “This one is more pictures. Don’t show it to boys. They will put a rope on the wrong thing and call it love.”

DG flips it with one finger as if it might bite; it doesn’t. The drawings are clean, not dirty, hand over wrist, wrist to post, loop around pillar, quick-release that doesn’t panic when you pull it. Subscript in tiny script: a note on breath, scant but correct; a note on blood, more concerned with not losing circulation than making a mess. She feels stupidly fond of whoever wrote it for remembering that restraint is supposed to be a tool and not a fetish someone forgot to clean.

“What did we hide,” she asks, still scanning. “What did we lie about.”

Myrrh points at the far shelf, third from the bottom, an ugly congregation of buckled spines wrapped in twine. “All the times we used the fae like a well and got mad when the rope came up with a fish. The treaty we broke when it wasn’t convenient. The prince we promised and didn’t marry and then buried in a story about war. The day we learned the houses north of the river had doors that don’t open for any name but one we cut out of the genealogy.”

DG sets On Knots back like a saint returning a sword to an icon. She walks to the shelf where the lies live. The twine gives under her fingers without arguing. The top volume is the shape of a ledger and the weight of a confession. She unties it and the ledger opens itself like it has been waiting for this pair of hands.

Names pour out in neat rows that turn messy halfway down a page as if the scribe’s ink turned sullen at its own work. Fae lines grafted onto human lines with verbs that pretend to be nouns. Stolen oaths. Rents paid late. “Dawn-blooded through theft,” one page says, marginal hand, furious. “Dawn-blooded through forgiveness,” another answers, the hand different, the anger older. She reads her mother’s name where it doesn’t belong and then realizes it belongs in a different tense. Ahamo’s is written three times, careful, and then a fourth time without the same care, as if the hand that wrote it wanted to reprove itself for wanting to be steady.

“Who wrote this,” she asks.

“Everyone who had to wash their hands in cold water afterward,” Myrrh says. “Everyone who thought the next person would be braver and learned they weren’t. Everyone who loved the crown too much to let it pretend it had never eaten off that plate.”

DG keeps turning pages until the hum under her skin is a sound in the room. The mark at her throat warms then cools; the rune in Cain’s palm, wherever he is on the floor above, answers with a sting she cannot touch. Saethyr says something under her tongue, a word she won’t say here because the shelves would lay down and ask to be walked on.

“Show me the rune,” she says.

Myrrh’s mouth twitches. “I would if I could. It doesn’t draw for scribes. It draws for hands.”

“There must be a sketch,” DG insists, though she knows when magic refuses documentation it grows fangs if you try.

Myrrh sighs like a person confessing they did a clever thing when they were young and were proud of it until it turned annoying. “There,” they say at last, reluctant, and fish from the depth of a narrow drawer a piece of tea-stained paper folded so many times it understands two positions: almost closed and being read by the right eyes. They unfold it and lay it face-up.

The line-work looks like a hand that used to run messages learning how to write poetry. It’s not a heart; it’s the idea of weight, it’s a line that stops before it becomes cartoon and then sharpens into meaning. It’s a hook and a cradle. It’s the curve of a shoulder blade; it’s the way a palm cups a throat. It’s a shape that refuses to sit still until a particular palm hovers over it and says, Fine, I know you, stop misbehaving.

“It changes,” Myrrh says softly. “Not enough to break function. Enough to remember the person wearing it.”

“It fit his hand,” DG says, not a question. The papers don’t answer; her skin does, warm flush under the rune, answering the one above that sent heat, answering a bond tug pulled through three doors and four walls. She feels the phantom weight of his palm at her throat and has to put her hand there to remember which belongs to which.

“Does it hurt,” Myrrh asks, genuine, scholarly.

“Yes,” she says, honest. “And it’s good.”

“That’s older magic than the palace,” Myrrh says. “Pleases me when older things get their way.”

The next stack tastes of sap. Histories of the Dawn Court are written in a hand that makes the words look plausible if you read them upside down. Stories of queens who cut ropes before they were hung on them. Stories of primes who learned how not to bite before they earned a collar. One page, half-torn, contains a sketched ritual DG can feel without reading: three breaths, red thread over left palm, bite into the center of the hand that holds and the mouth that commands; one word shared and not repeated for witnesses; a nest made where the bond can see it.

She puts her finger under the line that says the bond will pull a liar out of his skin and presses until the paper gives her a dent to remember. She is not worried about Cain lying. She is worried about the court pretending to like the furniture while wanting to burn the house. The thought has teeth. Myrrh must see it in her posture; they pluck a volume down and set it on the table between them as if laying a placemat where bad plans will have to eat at the children’s table.

“Borrow this one,” they say. The title is a joke that refuses to be funny: Notes Toward Harmonies. “It is about how to make walls sing when you need them, and how to shush them when they start gossiping.”

“I like our walls gossipy,” DG says.

“So do I,” Myrrh says. “But it will please me more if they gossip about the king exiled before the sixth than about you climbing onto your prime in the throne room.”

DG’s mouth twitches. “That ceremony’s private.”

“For now,” Myrrh agrees, star-dry, and then cocks their head. “You feel it when he opens and closes his hand.”

“Sometimes,” she says, flushing for a kind of intimacy that has nothing to do with skin. “The burn. A pull.”

“Good,” Myrrh says. “Then if he bleeds on the wrong floor, you will know which tile to wash.” They nod at the drain in the stone. “We keep this for rivers. And accidents.”

DG folds Harmonies under one arm and tucks Thorns and Threads into the crook of the other because time has blessed her with shamelessness. The lines of the corridor beyond tug at her; she knows the way Myrrh will make the locks hum again when they close. Her skin hums back. She turns once more to the page that named the Covenant and reads out loud, quietly, so the room knows she didn’t come here to pretend.

“The bond does not belong to the body,” she recites. “It belongs to what the body has promised.”

“Say the other part,” Myrrh says, and their voice is not scholarly now; it is the voice of a person who has seen children learn the awful, joyful way that words own them as much as they own words.

DG looks down at the marginalia. High Speech: Saethyr. Gloss: Belonging That Also Leads. The palace gloss: I Will Take Care. Her gloss: I Will Be Kept So I Can Rule.

“Saethyr,” she says, barely, and the shelves do not kneel—old things retain their pride—but for one breath they rise and lower as if something beneath them took a long, pleased inhale.

On the stair back up, the bond tugs hard enough to make her catch a rail. Myrrh’s eyebrows climb up where they like to live when experiments go sideways.

“Problem,” they ask, neutral.

“Solution,” DG answers, flushed, smiling into her collar. The mark at her throat pulses, and the air above the first landing smells like pine and hot skin for a second and then remembers to be stone again.

In the corridor, Cain is waiting without looking like a man who waits. He has an ink smudge on the base of his thumb that is not the rune and that irritates him more than a broken nose. He flicks a glance at the book in her elbow, at the way her mouth looks like a door unlocked, at the light under the skin where his hand will sit the second the door closes behind them.

“Find anything we didn’t want them to hide,” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, stepping into his space because she has learned the fastest way through a door is to put your hand on it and press. She tips her chin to show him the ember-bright mark. He looks like a thirsty man watching a jug he can’t drink from yet.

“Good,” he says. “We’ll make the walls sing later. For now, I have a budget to humiliate and a clerk to recruit.”

“Paperwork as sword,” Myrrh approves, taking the low stair two at a time. “Tell the Chancellor we want more soap.”

“Already did,” Cain says dryly, sliding his palm over DG’s throat just long enough to soothe the mark and make the bond yelp like a delighted dog. “Come on, Princess. We’ll read until your magic hums and then I’ll make sure you remember how to shut it up when you need to.”

“It doesn’t like being shushed,” she warns, breath catching when the rune under his palm says hello to the rune under her skin.

“No,” he agrees, a promise waiting its hour. “It likes being told where to sing.”

They go up into light that has teeth and a court with mouths and a city that has started to learn new words. In her arms the books purr. Under her skin the ribbon winds once around his chest and pulls, greedy. The stones, romantic wretches, hum underfoot as if they’ve remembered a melody from a century ago and intend to keep it in their mouth until someone asks them to sing it loud.

Chapter Text

Morning lies thin over the city, pale and sharp, roofs picking up light like coins. DG stands at the casement with her fingers on the mullion and her chin lifted to the wind. She’s wearing a slip of black lace that should be private and a pair of scuffed leather boots that never are. The window is open a handspan. The air tastes like cold stone and fresh bread and the last of night’s heat fading down in the streets.

Cain steps in behind her like a weather front deciding which way the day will go.

His field lowers without show, that careful barometric shift that teaches a room how to hold its edges. He doesn’t say a word. He takes her in by scent and shape, the lace skimming her shoulders, the glimpse of hip where the hem rides up indecent over a boot top, the glow at her throat lazy as a banked coal. He sets himself close enough that his chest writes itself along her back without actually touching, the promise of weight and heat and something iron under both.

“Hands,” he says softly.

She lifts them off the sill and gives them back, wrists up, palms open; the red comes like it was waiting for the syllable. Magic leaves her in two bright curls, threads sliding around his wrists, twining, tasting, tugging. Not binding—nothing that could stop him if he wanted out—just ownership in silk, a clever ribbon with a mouth. He turns his hands, letting it wind, and smiles that narrow, wolfish smile like a creature who chose the leash because it fits what he intends to do.

“Good,” he says. “Look.”

She looks. The city throws its throat open to the morning. In the glass she can see them both, his shoulders making sense of the room, her hair messy where sleep tried and failed to domesticate it. She sees the brand under his glove flare—feeling her without seeing her—then she feels the glove come off, slow, fingers sliding free. His bare hand settles at the base of her neck, warm and heavy, his palm closing in a collar of heat over the glow he put there.

“Breathe,” he says.

She does. The red answers, purring. He drags his thumb along the notch where shoulder becomes throat and then stills, the weight of his hand making every nerve obedient. His other hand catches in lace at her hip, a polite hook that becomes rude, and pulls. Lace sighs along her skin and hitches. He doesn’t rip; he takes possession. The hem rides higher, baring the slow curve where ass meets thigh. He cups there, thumb pressing an idle promise into the hinge.

“Mine to hold,” he says, breath warm against her ear. “Say yes.”

“Yes,” she breathes to the window and to the city and to the hand that makes her bones behave.

Leather squeaks, boots kissing stone as he nudges her wider, lining her feet on the sill like a stance he’s taught a hundred boys with worse reasons. He draws her forward the smallest degree so the ledge takes a share of her weight. The red threads on his wrists tighten, pleased; he flexes under them, testing, and the ribbon twines higher, a loop over tendon, a loop through fingers, a promise of what he could break and won’t.

“Hands on the sill,” he orders. “Stay.”

She plants them. The glass shows her open mouth and the quick flush climbing her throat. He bends, not to kiss, not yet, but to scent at the hinge of her jaw like a starving man remembering table manners. The exhale he gives her right there turns the ache molten. His palm at her throat presses and eases, presses and eases, each measured weight a reminder that every other part of her is negotiable but this is the law.

“Saethyr,” she whispers without permission.

The room hums. The rune under his hand answers with a sting that licks into her like liquor. “Good girl,” he says, and that, more than the magic, more than the morning, makes her go liquid against the sill.

He explores like a man cataloguing a map he intends to invade and then govern. Fingers into lace at the hem, sliding forward, knuckles parting silk where it clings hot to her. He finds the edge of the panties, black lace to match, thumbs under, skimming. “Up,” he says, and she rises to her toes. He peels them down slow, patient, letting the elastic talk to the backs of her thighs on the way, letting her feel herself getting naked to the window and to his hand and to the day.

They drop around her ankles, caught on one boot. He leaves them there, a flag. He spreads her with two fingers, obscene and usual, and breathes. She’s slick already, needy sweet, heat tacky on his knuckles. He lets a knuckle press, slide; he lets the wet paint his thumb. He draws circles where she’s soft and swollen, slow enough that her breath turns into a metronome banging itself against his hand.

“Say please,” he murmurs, and the glass catches the way her mouth tries not to smile at him and fails.

“Please,” she says, shameless, and pushes back the inch he allows.

He brings the slick thumb to her mouth first because he likes watching her take her own taste, because he likes the way her eyes go feral when she sees herself fed to him in every way. She sucks, eyes closing, throat moving under his palm. The bond tugs, greedy little yanks through both their chests; the rune heats under his skin like a coal finding fresh air.

“Good,” he says, and puts his fingers on her. Two, slow, inside, that same slow cruelty he’s turned into care. She softens around him like a body that’s remembered it can. He crooks and waits for the answer and gets it, that deep answering melt that makes her moan into his hand. He keeps his thumb away from her clit because he wants her clever for a minute longer.

“Look,” he says again. “See yourself.”

She looks. Morning makes them honest. The reflection isn’t pretty, it’s true—her lips parted, his broad hand covering her throat, the red around his wrists glowing like something someone drew and the artist refused to erase. His eyes meet hers in the glass. They are calm and very blue and full of intent.

“Ask,” he reminds, gentle. His fingers inside her hold still like an order.

“Please,” she says, hoarse now, beaten with kindness. “Please, prime. Touch me. Make me—”

His thumb comes down, firm and exact, circling slow, the way that stole her sleep the night she learned not to pretend. The world narrows to four points: his palm on her throat, his fingers steady inside her, his thumb on her clit, the city stretched out beyond the glass as if it might kneel if she told it to. She keens, low, tries to chase; he holds her against the sill with his hand at her neck and patience in his body and takes her apart with the kind of economy that can afford to be generous.

“Breathe,” he says. “Three. Now.”

She breathes. The first inhale makes her eyes sting. The second exhale makes everything from her ribs down compliant. On the third he eases his fingers out, cruel, and she makes a broken little noise that gets lodged in his palm.

“Shh,” he says, and steps back to unbuckle his belt.

Leather whispers. The sound goes through her like a memory she didn’t have time to make last night. He pulls the belt free in one clean motion and loops it, lazy, around her waist. Not tight. Not restraint. A handhold. He tests the catch with a tug and the tug drags her back a fraction, easy as turning a horse toward shade.

“Hands stay where they are,” he warns. His voice is mild. His voice can make steel agree to be wool. “You move them, I put them back.”

“Yes,” she says, dizzy.

He frees his cock. The head bumps her ass, hot, slick, indecent. He doesn’t hurry. He draws himself through her slick, the slide wet and cruel, painting himself in what he’s about to take. He sets the crown at her and then holds it there, pressure sharp, game rigged, time elastic.

“Please,” she says again, nearly angry with need.

“Tell me who you belong to,” he says, because he will not be begged for the wrong thing.

“You,” she answers, full throat, no waver.

He pushes.

She takes him with that first gasp that thinks it’s pain and remembers it isn’t. His hand at her throat pins her voice to his palm and remakes it. Inch by deliberate inch he fills her, slow enough that she can feel the drag, the stretch, the welcome, the obscene fit. The belt around her waist keeps her honest to the sill. His field presses the room down around their edges and lifts its weight off her bones.

“Good girl,” he groans, and when he’s seated, buried to the hilt, he doesn’t move. He makes her feel it. The fullness. The day. The leash he chose wrapped around his wrists and his hand on her neck and his cock in her like law.

“Look,” he says, into her ear, into her throat. “Look what you look like full.”

She looks. She sees the small slack joy in her own mouth, the way her eyes go bright and mean, the heat blur over her skin where his palm sits. She says his name because there aren’t any other words left. He rocks, a fraction, slow as sunrise, and starts to fuck her.

Not hard. Possessive. He keeps the rhythm a weapon and a balm both, long strokes that pull nearly out and press back slow, heavy, grinding the head along the place that makes her breath climb and hunt. Each drive is a signature. Each retreat is a promise he keeps every time he comes back. The belt tugs when she forgets and tries to run; the red around his wrists tightens when he groans; the rune in his palm warms to the mark under her skin until the skin there feels bruised by heat in the best way.

“Say Saethyr,” he tells her, only because he loves the way the world rearranges itself when she does.

“Saethyr,” she moans, and the glass ghosts, the air hums, morning tilts. He presses deeper, angle just a breath changed, and she screams once, pretty and ragged, and breathes again because he doesn’t let her stop.

“Good,” he praises. “Keep your hands.”

She keeps them. Her nails skitter on stone and then dig in. He keeps the pace and the pressure and the tone and she comes without permission, hard and hot, clenching around him in a rhythm that matches the tug-tug through his chest. He rides it out without speeding, without losing patience, mouth against her ear, filth and praise poured into the delicate place that makes her knees stupid.

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs. “Again.”

He gives it to her like a schedule. He doesn’t let her choose wildness over relief; he makes both the same road. When she tries to push it, he eases off, thumb circling narrower, fucking her slower until her body remembers the rule and asks instead of scrabbling. When she gets clever with her hips to force more, he uses the belt to pull her back into the rhythm he wrote. When she whimpers, he says drink and there’s a cup in his hand he didn’t have a second ago and water finds her mouth and her throat and then his cock again, cleaner, filthy.

She breaks the second time with less noise, deeper, a charmed detonation that turns her thighs to silk and her spine to a bow pulled perfect. He still doesn’t hurry. The sun climbs. The window glows. The city keeps going, none the wiser, all the better for what’s happening where it can’t see it.

“Words,” he says, when she floats, hand steady on her throat to keep her tethered. “Do you want my knot.”

She hears it like a bell she can put in her mouth and bite. She pants, cheek on the cold pane, eyes wet and wicked. “Yes.”

“Ask properly.”

“Knot me,” she begs, lovely and ruined and queen. “Please, prime.”

“Good,” he says, praise thick as honey, and he lets the swell come.

It builds under his skin like a tide he controls out of spite for every year he didn’t have a shore. He stays slow. He doesn’t jam; he seats. Each stroke brings the pressure to her entrance and pulls back, again and again, careful, insisting, until her body chooses to open for it. When she pushes and holds, he locks. The knot latches in the soft ring of her and sits, heavy and exquisite. She wails into his palm and tries to climb him and the belt around her waist keeps her in place and he moans into the notch under her ear like a man getting the last piece of himself back.

Magic goes loud. The rune in his palm burns; the twin at her throat shines; red threads cinch his wrists and drag at the bond until both of them groan. Her cunt milks him, greedy, unforgiving, sweet as anything he’s ever met. He grinds, shallow, the only motion the knot allows, and that grind is murder; her clit rubs the sill edge; the glass fogs with her breath; the city looks like it’s kneeling.

“Take me,” he says, not command but fact. “Take all of me.”

He spills. Thick, relentless, pace set by the spasms he can’t stop. Each pulse drains him and gives him back. She clenches around the swell like a fist and it draws a curse out of him that would have gotten him whipped as a boy and gets him a kiss along her jaw now, a bite that doesn’t break skin and still marks. The bond yanks once, hard, and they both laugh breathless, surprised at the tug that won’t stop being greedy even when they’re full and fused and satisfied.

They stand there, locked to one another and to the morning, while the sun climbs and the sill warms under her palms and his field keeps the weight of the world outside the room. He keeps his hand on her throat, not to own, to own. He kneads, slow, until the trembling learns how to be pleasure again and not shock. He loosens the belt with one hand and tosses it aside and it hits the floor like punctuation.

“You’re going to let the whole city see your legs,” he says into her hair, amused and possessive, the kind of joke you make when you could carry a woman across a battlefield and no one would dare correct you. “Scandal.”

“They’d send offerings,” she says, voice sanded to velvet, cheeks wet, smile feral. “Soap. Ropes. New boots.”

“Get me a clerk who can count,” he counters, and she laughs into the glass and it fogs and he feels it against his palm.

When the knot eases and the world allows them to separate, he draws out, slow, a gentle ache and the sweet slide rewarded with a spill down her thighs that makes him groan quiet and wicked. He palms it back up with his fingers, rubs it into her, obscenity turned into ownership. He sets her on the sill itself, spins her, lifts her, seats her there, thighs over his forearms, her boots braced wide. He kisses her open mouth at last, patient destroyed, and she takes it like she took everything else: asked, given, kept.

“Look,” he says one last time when he lets her breathe, angling her head so the window shows the mark he gave her, red and bright, the lace rucked and ruined, the leather scuffed, the sky deciding what blue to be. “See what you look like mine.”

She looks and sighs yes against his pulse, a warm breath against the beat that belongs to him and to her and to the house that lets them think it keeps secrets. The stones hum a single note and file the morning in their mouth like a prayer said right. The red threads slip from his wrists with a coy little parting tug, satisfied. He catches one in his hand and kisses it just to be rude.

“Again,” she whispers, ridiculous, invincible.

“Many,” he promises, and makes the sun work for its climb.

Chapter Text

They walked him to the north gate between two senior guards who didn’t speak and didn’t let their grips loosen. The bell finished its sixth, the wind came thin and mean down the road, and Citizen Roan crossed the line where the stone slab changed color and learned what cold feels like when the city stops pretending it’s your mother.

The wastes didn’t welcome; they tolerated. Frost crusted the ditch-grass like salt on an old wound. The sky was a lid of hammered tin. The first breath outside the wall tasted of iron filings and a rumor of teeth. He kept his shoulders square like a man who meant to make distance a kind of uniform and didn’t turn around to see the guard shave his name off the ledger.

By noon the scent was back.

It didn’t blow on him from the city; it rose from his own skin like guilt under hot water. He washed in a stock trough until his fingers went numb and when he rubbed the welt at his wrist where red air had bitten him in the hall the skin there talked back with a heat that wasn’t weather.

“Bitch,” he said to the world under his breath, and didn’t mean her, not exactly; meant the ribbon, meant the way it had looked at him without eyes and laid its little leash around his bones and pulled.

He slept that night under a broken cart and dreamed glass shattered in his mouth and tasted honey. He woke hard, panting, a snarl jammed behind his teeth, the smell of her heat a ghost pressed over his face until he had to put his hand on his own mouth to make it stop being prayer.

In the first village past jurisdiction they wouldn’t meet his gaze. Exiles are like lightning: the kind of spectacle people fear will learn their names. The tavern woman poured him broth without salt and slid it across the bar with two fingers just in case exile behaved like something contagious. He drank it and didn’t taste it and didn’t blame her and took a second bowl because rage burns through a man’s own meat if he doesn’t feed it something else.

He kept walking. The farms thinned; the hedgerows lost their nerve. He made camp where the road’s gravel turned into hardpan scored by old wagon ruts and listened to nothing but wind and his heart and the sound that wasn’t either, a tug-tug through his chest like a fish testing a line. He told himself he’d cut the hook out and chose a knife to do it with and then didn’t.

The wastes have their own walls. Kites that live on the bones of caravans swing slow circles. Barrow mounds shoulder up out of the grass like the backs of sleeping oxen. There’s a place three miles past the last mile stone where the ground goes glassy for twenty paces and the air tastes like someone broke a ward there a hundred years ago and laughed. Roan walked through that place and didn’t flinch, because flinching is a thing you can spend only so many times and he had plans for his.

At dusk two riders came over the rise with banners furled and no insignia on their breastplates, which is its own insignia. The horses wore clipped manes and quiet mouths. The riders’ cloaks were the color of unmarked ledgers. They reined in ten paces off and didn’t reach for their weapons but didn’t drift their hands away, either.

“Citizen,” said the lead, letting the word do the spit for him. “You’re off crown soil and on nobody’s. What are you.”

“Hungry,” Roan said, truth for the sake of sport. “Looking for work.”

“What kind of work.”

“The kind that pays me to hurt the right people,” he said, and bared his teeth and let them decide if they liked the symmetry.

They glanced at each other. Whatever they’d been sent to find, they’d found something else, and if you’ve ridden this far on someone else’s coin you don’t ride back empty. The rear man tugged his bridle in a small, pleased way. The lead jerked his head toward the stand of black poplars where the wind had braided the highest branches into a kind of crown and turned his horse. “Then you’ll want to talk to the person who sends us.”

They brought him to a fire that didn’t want to be looked at directly. The flames were wrong—blue at their heart, green at their edges, throwing shadows that moved as if they had separate errands. The tent behind it was opulent in a way that a field shouldn’t have had the vocabulary for: silk turned dull by dust, a rolled carpet still smelling of cedar, the crease of something that had been folded around its own importance for travel.

“Remove your weapons,” said a voice from inside. Not raised. Not gendered. Well-fed and iron-laced. “Or leave. You’ve three breaths to decide which.”

He kept the belt knife. You don’t get to keep the belt knife. He took it off anyway, slow, hands visible, mouth shut, because sometimes you play as if you know the rules so the dealer will be tempted to cheat.

“Enter,” the voice said, and the flap lifted on air that smelled like myrrh and foxglove and money.

He didn’t see them. Not their face. Not their hands. A screen hung in the middle of the tent patterned with vines that weren’t vines and thorns that weren’t thorns, and the person behind it sat where power sits: not at the back, not in the middle, on the axis that made Roan stand or kneel in order to see around the screen and choose not to.

“You are the man who touched the princess,“ the patron said as if reading a line item. Roan’s jaw did a twitch; the welt at his wrist burned. “You are the man the Commander threw out of the house like sweepings.”

“I am the man who wasn’t done,” Roan said, smiling with too many teeth.

A pause that wasn’t really a pause. Records being consulted, a mind stacking and arranging the instrument it was about to play. The tent’s shadows rebalanced and came to heel.

“Revenge is a bad currency,” the voice remarked. “It spends quick. It buys show. I am not in the show business.”

“You are if you brought a screen,” Roan said, because if you’re being weighed you put a thumb on the scale.

A soft sound that wasn’t quite laughter. “I brought a screen so the room would listen,” the patron said, pleased to be corrected by someone who knew why. “I have coin. I have men. I have an interest in the Commander’s schedule failing to accommodate itself to reforms the court doesn’t remember voting for.” A rustle of paper he didn’t get to see. “I am willing to pay for an alteration.”

“Money,” Roan said. “Soldiers.”

“And a piece of steel,” the patron said, and the word steel had too many syllables as if it had gone to university. A small box slid out from under the screen, carried by a pair of hands in gloves the color of respectable ash. Roan knelt without meaning to; it felt like a trick and something older. He flipped the catch with his thumb.

Inside: a wire-thin blade, curved like a smile you should not trust, wrapped at the hilt in red thread that had seen oil and worse. The smell coming off it was wrong: salt, old smoke, a hint of sap the way a cut stump bleeds. He touched the flat. His fingertip went cold and then hot. The ribbon-welt on his wrist throbbed. The air in the tent remembered a vow it had forgotten.

“What’s it do,” he asked, hoarse not because he needed to be but because something in his throat had decided this would be a good time to try to molt.

“Cuts what can’t be cut,” the patron said. “Ribbon. Knot. Certain oaths. If used correctly. With malice and a steady hand.” A pause that held a small needle. “Do you have either.”

“Both,” Roan said.

“Bring me something torn and bleeding,” the shadow said, too calm to be melodrama, “and the city may forget you are citizen. It may remember you as captain. It may remember you as commander, if you make the right accidents happen at the right stairs.”

He didn’t need to ask who the something was. Could have been the red herself, could have been the man with the blue eyes and the law in his mouth; either would feed the same wolves. He pictured the mark at her throat under his hand. The scream she hadn’t given him. The way her body had leaned when a better man put his hand where Roan wanted to put it. He pictured Cain’s palm. He pictured cutting the pretty line off both of them and holding it up like a rope he’d ripped out of a well.

“What if I bring you the heart that hand belongs to,” he asked, polite as murder.

“That,” said the voice, delighted, “would be overpayment. But I manage refunds.”

He grinned then. It wasn’t smart; it wasn’t careful. It was hunger with lips. All of it. The years the city had fattened him on ceremonial meat, the month the Commander had made him eat his own pride, the hour in the corridor where something with no teeth had bitten him twice and left him bleeding in front of a princess who wouldn’t tremble for him. He let it show. Might as well. The tent had already decided what it wanted him to be.

“How many men,” he said, practical returning like a jacket put back on after sun. “What colors. What lies do we tell them.”

“Thirty to start,” the patron said. “Grey cloaks. No colors. Knifemen who don’t miss too much when it matters and don’t ask questions that make them expensive. I have a list of stables that will let me overpay. I have a list of boys who think they want to be men.” Paper slid under the screen. Names in a sensible hand. Coins followed, heavy, real. “You tell them you’re going home for your job. You tell them the Tin Man isn’t as hard as he pretends to be. You tell them the princess bleeds like anyone worth money.”

Roan shut the box. The blade left a ghost-cold print on his skin, half circle, a promise. He tucked the purse at his belt and didn’t count the coins because men who have to count from that side of the screen don’t get invited back.

“And you,” he said, because appetites like to know each other’s names even when they both intend to go by lies.

“I’m nobody,” the patron said cheerfully. “It suits me. For the paperwork, I am also a factor of House—” A name that changed shape when you looked at it. “You will tell anyone who asks that a friend of the crown is tired of the Commander’s reforms hurting his entertainment budget. They will believe you. That sort always believes himself first.”

Roan rose. His knees cracked, a little absurd, as if there had been kneeling in them after all in his life and it had only just now reminded him. He slid the knife up his sleeve like a sin you intend to enjoy later. He bowed to the screen more deeply than he needed to, because gratitude is a mask men will forgive on you if it looks like greed.

“Watch for me,” he said.

“I always do,” said the voice, and the tent let him out into wind that cut his ears and made him feel alive.

He began collecting.

The wastes don’t lack for brothers in the wrong way. Disgraced alphas with too much bite left in their mouths. Border-sick soldiery who knew how to sleep with one eye and half a conscience. Knife-sisters who’d learned to stand behind pigs at fairs so they could practice stabbing without scandal. Roan drew a circle in dirt with his heel and men stepped into it because circles are invitations and because he said the right things in the right order: pay, meat, a roof, a chance to be the thing you brag about when you pretend to like yourself.

At night he lay by fires that smelled like rancid fat and old wood and watched the smoke try to make shapes above him and saw instead a throat marked red and a hand with a burning palm. The scent of her heat haunted him like a woman you can’t forget and a meal you weren’t fed—maddening, humiliating, sweet. He tried salt. He tried juniper. He tried rolling in ash like a dog. It didn’t leave. He stopped trying and learned to use it like men use a star: something to steer by even while it refuses to be touched.

On the fourth day out, the road broke itself into ruts that had seen war once. He stood on one and swore.

Not out loud at first. In his mouth, behind his teeth, tongue pressed to the ridge of old cuts where the years had taught him to bite back. Then aloud, because you can’t get a thing to hear you if you won’t say it correctly.

“I am coming home,” he said to the north wind, to the road, to the city that had spit him out like gristle. “I’ll bring coin back that isn’t mine and men who don’t belong to any law you wrote. I’ll bring you something torn. I’ll bring you something bleeding. I will put my teeth where I wasn’t allowed.”

He bit the pad of his thumb until blood came up and froze in the time it took the wind to turn once. He smeared it across the welt the ribbon had left on his wrist and smiled when it stung. Oaths don’t have to be pretty to work. They have to hurt.

He grinned wide enough to show all his hunger and the men around the fire pretended not to see their commander look like a wolf that had learned to wear a man. Somewhere south, a stone remembered a man with blue eyes and set its shoulders. Somewhere nearer, a screen rustled; a gloved hand stacked coins and moved a pin on a map one notch closer to the palace.

Roan slept and dreamed of red thread in his mouth caught on a tooth like silk that refused to tear. He woke smiling and did not wipe his face. The wastes stretched ahead in their old merciless. The city behind him kept breathing like a woman who wasn’t worried yet. He rolled his shoulders, loosened his hands, and taught the thirty men who had chosen his circle how to hear a drum no one else would admit was beating.

Chapter Text

The audit begins with ink.

Cain sits at the long table no one loves and makes the room learn a new rhythm: paper down, stamp, signature, next. He doesn’t raise his voice. He raises standards. Rosters unspool, tidy as parade lines until he fingers the place where a sergeant’s pay column lurches fat for three months after the man died. The ink there looks smug. It stops.

Locker inspections arrive unannounced. So do Cain’s palms, flat and clean on the lids before anyone thinks of palming off what doesn’t belong. He doesn’t use traps. He uses timing. A lieutenant with a taste for skimming ration coin comes to work and finds his lock changed and his receipts on Cain’s desk under a rock from the parade yard that still smells like weather. “Article Twelve,” Cain says without rancor. “Pick a door—out or down.” The man picks down; Cain says good. Men who can be taught get taught. Men who can’t go outside the wall with a blanket, a flask and no unit crest to lie about.

He promotes by how people hold weight.

Brogan stops being the angry rumor at the end of a corridor and becomes Deputy. She takes the brass with a grunt and a grimace like someone handed her a new knife and told her it cuts truth. The beta woman with the sharp eyes—Aila—becomes quartermaster and names-and-numbers in a voice that makes lazy paper squirm; pay stops leaking into pockets that don’t sweat. Stev, who ties bowlines like he was born with rope for veins, gets an extra stripe and a dozen kids who watch his hands like they’re reading. Mil, who learned to breathe again by counting someone else’s breaths, gets overnight watch on the dormitory and a key to the linen store with instructions to spend like a grandmother with a grudge: good pillows, clean straw, no mold. Every former Tin Man who makes it past month one is offered something to hold besides a job title—tool, rope, book, dog if a dog will have him.

He throws the gauntlet at corruption, literally once: a stained, old-issue steel gauntlet thudding onto a desk in front of a captain who thought ghosts belonged on the payroll. “Name every phantom,” Cain says, cold, “or wear that to the kitchen and ladle stew until your arm breaks.” The captain names them. The kitchens feed on his humility for a week. The real men whose names were stolen get stipends and scrip. A plaque goes up where no one can miss it: We do not eat the dead.

Therapy gets a door and a schedule.

Raw’s couch is a crate with a blanket and a once-fine armchair that forgot it was delicate. He hums men open without manhandling them, sits close enough to be real and far enough that shame can breathe without biting. “Bad nights,” he says, as if a weather report. “Breath. Two hands. Touch wall. Wall hums back.” A woman with a healer’s accreditation and the patience of a saint half in love with knives takes second shift. She teaches sleep as a drill: same hour, same light, no drink before; water after; dreams get reported like fires, not secrets. The worst nightmares get walked out like a drunk—arm over shoulders, down the hall, back again—until legs remember there’s floor under them. Boys who can’t stand the dark get the top bunks; boys who can’t stand the top get a nail to hang a talisman on. The Program starts to look like a house that learned to be kind without turning soft. The city notices. Doors stay propped open a little later. The woman who sells apples at the south gate lists the bruised ones cheaper instead of throwing them away. That’s how a street tells you it’s exhaling.

Drill gets tighter. Ladders go from metaphor to muscle ache. The rope square sings with knots tied and untied until hands forget fumble. Brogan’s voice turns recruits into rows that stand like intention, not like fear. “Hands off what isn’t yours,” she barks, and you can feel the sentence land on the part of the yard that remembers corridors. New rules go up plain: No one in any hall alone at first bell or last. No escort alone. No corner without a second pair of eyes. “Witnesses and stone,” Tutor had said, and Cain turns it into a sign you can tap on with your knuckle for luck.

The court doesn’t stop gnashing. It learns to do it quieter. Numbers have a way of shutting mouths when the numbers hold steady: three weekends and nobody had to knock a stallion down in the market; two fights on the trade road and the knives left the sheath only once; the patrols along the river hand in reports that don’t smell like fiction. Cain walks the numbers into rooms like shields and uses them like swords. “Savings,” he tells the Chancellor, and puts a list on the table: fewer funerals, fewer burn-scar salves, fewer bribes to men who were never going to leave. “Spend the difference on soap and thread.”

DG brings food.

Not once for spectacle. Regular as weather. She shows up with Myrrh and a train of kitchen kids who don’t blink at former Tin Men because they grew up on stories and stories taught them that men with bad luck need second bowls. The first time, the yard forgets its own weapon drills and stares because the princess smells like night gardens and leather and the red at her throat winks like a living ember. The second time, the yard looks up and then looks away because it already knows she’ll be there and has learned how not to gawp at a working woman. By week two she’s got a wooden spoon in her hand and a towel over her shoulder and Brogan saying “don’t let it stick to the pot, Highness, I will weep” and DG salting a stew that will make men remember their mothers in ways that don’t hurt.

She carries apple bread in a basket and a knife at her waist. She lines loaves on the table and listens. Mil tells her about the way the barracks smell better when the laundry gets done on the right day. Aila mutters about wool scrip and hopes someday to audit the quill maker. Stev, always too bright-eyed about rope, shows her a quick-release that won’t peel skin if panic gets clever. DG learns to punch a knot loose with the heel of her hand without breaking her thumb. The recruits learn that a princess can say “fuck” like diction in two languages and will ‘please’ them right into shame if their laces aren’t knotted to spec.

Cain smells her before he sees her.

He’s been down in the ledger burrow where supplies go to hide from honest fingers and he comes up mean with dust and a draft’s worth of bad math. The yard smells like rope and oil and hot bread; the yard also smells like her, controlled sweetness under cedar and the clean iron of his own hand where it sat across her throat at the window before light did anything helpful. That scent threads him like a wire. He turns and every muscle he owns remembers what to do with a door that just opened.

She’s by the rope square, head cocked, watching Stev teach an ugly knot that saves lives. Her lace collar is absent, replaced by a ridiculous scarf Raw bullied her into because “winter teeth.” The red mark under it glows through the sheer weave like a sin you put in the window to dry. A smear of flour ghosts her cheekbone. She looks like a woman who will fix a city with the same hand she uses to rub butter into a crust. His hand flexes automatically; the itch in his palm sketches another half-stroke of light that pretends not to be there.

“Highness,” he says. Nobody believes he means the word to be as polite as it sounds. Everyone enjoys him saying it anyway.

She tips her head as if he were the last line on a page she’s been waiting to read. “Commander.”

“Paperwork humiliated?” she asks, wicked.

“For now.” He nods down at her basket. “Bribery?”

“Morale.” She looks past him at the line of boys trying not to look like boys. “And education. We are teaching them that soup exists.”

“Education,” he repeats, deadpan, as Raw materializes at his elbow and steals a heel from the basket with the grave, devout air of a thief who believes in communion.

“Raw pays tax,” Raw assures them both, chewing. He pats the post. “Post hums. Happy post. Good knots. Bread helps.”

Brogan barks and the line moves. Jeb jogs across the yard, face split by a grin that would be ugly on another man and looks like weather turning on him. He tips a chin at DG. “Brought a miracle. You ever babysit ladders, Your Highness?”

“Never,” she says with regal pride. “I intend to watch them fail intelligently.”

“Good,” Jeb says, delighted. “We’re teaching that today.”

Cain doesn’t touch her. He does what he always does—makes a space close enough that he can scent and mark without laying claim in a room that belongs to more than the two of them. The field thickens at the edges of the square, a lid so gentle it could be mistaken for air getting friendlier. The boys who don’t know why their shoulders settle don’t need to. The men who do enjoy it like hot tea.

“Walk,” he says too low for anyone else to need to hear, and she moves beside him without making the act into a performance. He doesn’t take her far; he takes her beyond the first archway where the yard keeps its tools clean and the stone keeps its secrets because it approves of a man who cleans.

“Hands,” he says. She gives them. Red threads come without waiting. He has a glove on; he slides it off with his teeth because he wants the city to smell the next bit in the corridor and use it as a rumor instead of using boys’ mouths. His bare palm settles over the mark through the ridiculous winter scarf, heat going through wool into her skin like a coal into banked ash. The rune under his hand says hello in a sting he likes too much. Her eyes go slitty dark for a second, then round with pure, indecent relief.

“Breathe,” he orders, purely cruel in how kind it is.

She does. The threads tighten on his wrists, proud little bites. He plants a kiss at the corner of her mouth fast enough to be deniable if anyone asks with a straight face and slow enough to scent. His jaw brushes her cheek; stubble burns just enough to brand. He adjusts her scarf one thumb’s breadth as if that ever did anything besides call everyone’s attention to the place his hand likes.

“You’re working,” she whispers, affronted and enthralled.

“I’m always working,” he says, and steals another breath off her skin for later, the kind he’ll exhale into the room when he doesn’t like the numbers and the numbers will fix themselves out of fear of what his breath will do next. “Eat,” he adds, mean. She bites a slice he didn’t hand her, on principle. He approves.

They re-emerge into the square with the kind of casual that is a choreography: his hand falling off her shoulder at the exact angle that makes it look like he never put it there, hers slipping behind the basket handle like she’s never had any intention but to feed his men. It leads to whispers that ask the right question: what does a barracks smell like when the crown likes it?

Glove and gauntlet, then, in front of the boys.

Cain puts the glove back on over the brand and picks fights with paper and with men. He calls an assembly and reads names and not just names. Roles. Rotations. “You don’t get a desk because your cousin has a hat,” he says. “You get a desk because your reports land where they should and if they don’t someone else takes the chair. The chair has memory; it does not have loyalty.”

A sergeant who thought sarcasm was charisma tries a joke about princesses in kitchens and men in nests. The yard goes quiet like the end of a drumline. Cain doesn’t look up. “Article Eight,” he says. The sergeant blinks. “The one about mocking rank not being a sport anyone else wants to play.” He doesn’t raise his voice. The sergeant turns the color of ham boiling. Brogan relieves him of his badge without looking at the ground. He gets slotted into latrine duty with a broom and a son of a noble who used to be his friend. A day later he’s back in the line, quieter. A week later he’s not terrible. Cain will keep him because he can be kept; everyone else gets to see the way consequences work when they aren’t props.

DG tastes the barracks like a queen tasting her city.

She walks the dorm with Aila and points at places where the walls curve wrong and the light gets mean in corners. “Put mirrors,” she says, and Aila writes it down because sometimes the simplest things save a life. She drops an apple into Raw’s hand and takes a knife lesson from Jeb and loses a button laughing and never minds. She threads the red through a knot Stev is working on and Stev does not faint. She stands in the doorway of the therapy room and doesn’t enter because the door has its own rules and she respects them; she leaves bread on the floor under the chair and later Mil eats it, shameproof, because somebody needs to.

The city breathes like it wants to get used to it.

A boy gets caught between two older men’s argument in the covered market and doesn’t get broken because two off-duty Tin Men are there and the way they stand makes a pocket of mercy around the boy until everyone remembers they have places to be. A brewer who used to slip a copper to keep his barrels from getting “lost” finds the barrels multiplied instead of missing; he sends two free to the barracks, sheepish and delighted. The north alley by the farrier’s stops smelling like a crime waiting to happen; it smells like piss and hay the way alleys are supposed to smell and a stray dog who thinks Raw is God sleeps there in a careful curl whenever Raw is on the yard.

Glitch shows up twice and uses his long hands to untwist things with smiles and string; Lavender Eyes walks the inner court and the servants do not hide because they have learned a queen’s silence does not mean wrath; Myrrh steals a ledger and returns it with annotations and a sardonic fig on top.

The gauntlet hits the table in mottled steel one more time, in front of the Commander’s cabinet: a list of names under a title that refuses to stop being an accusation. Cain taps the first three with one finger. “Off. Down. Out.” Two choose down. The third chooses out and acts like it’s defiance. “Good luck with the wind,” Cain says, genuinely. Brogan smiles one tooth to herself. Jeb takes the west patrol with the new boys and returns with all of them and a story about a fox that doesn’t belong to Raw and now apparently does.

Afternoons smell like stew and rope. Nights smell like pine and paperwork and the cold that makes men glad to have a bed that doesn’t bite. Somewhere in all of it, Cain and DG keep their private treaty: he doesn’t take her in corridors that have witnesses who can’t keep their mouths; she doesn’t scent rooms where boys are still learning not to kneel for anyone except law. They get away with murder in thresholds because thresholds like them and walls like to watch.

“Eat,” he reminds her when she forgets and goes too long on bread and coffee and wilfulness. He seals the order with a palm at the throat if the place permits it, a kiss if it doesn’t. She eats to be rude. She drinks water because he says drink. She sleeps because he says sleep and then makes the nest with a soldier’s precision and an animal’s hoard. The bond tugs, tug-tug, satisfied with how often they obey without needing to say the word out loud.

“Throwing the gauntlet,” DG teases, the third evening in a row he’s fired a man before the bell stopped echoing.

“Wearing the glove,” he returns, bland, flexing his hand in the glove like he’s testing a new layer of his own patience. The brand under the leather burns amicably. “For now.”

She leaves the barracks most days smelling like steel and alpha. It starts to mean something beyond gossip. It starts to mean safety. The palace learns the scent and stops pretending not to. The servants know when the scent comes down the hall that there is no need to grab a broom handle for the wrong reason. The guards at the gate hold back a smile and don’t call her “Highness” with the old fear in it. Kids who don’t have the sense to be subtle take big greedy breaths because it smells like something they don’t have words for yet and might get if the world keeps being kind in this one new way a little longer.

They throw a gauntlet at the city: work, coin, law. The city throws the glove back: trust, gates, laughter that doesn’t curdle. Cain wears one, slaps the other down. DG tastes both.

In the quiet after a drill where nobody fell off a ladder and Brogan called it a miracle aloud, DG steps under the arcade with her empty basket and finds Cain leaning against a pillar with his arms folded and his head down like a man who could fall asleep standing if the column asked nicely. She stops in front of him and calls him on his posture with a lift of her brows. He grunts, contrite, and uncrosses his arms, patient while she tucks herself into him like a weapon back in its place.

“Rules?” she asks against his collar.

“Same,” he says, voice already dropping into the floorboards so the wall hums the word back to Raw in the therapy room: ask, push, don’t run, hands when I say hands, open when I say open. He taps her throat with two fingers where the scarf is already sliding because scarves do that when the person looking at them wants them to. “Eat,” he adds, just to hear her hiss. “And you left with my coat again.”

“It likes me,” she says, mulish.

“It does,” he agrees, and drapes it around her anyway because everyone in earshot already did the math. He palms the mark through the wool. The bond yanks in his chest like a kid showing off and he laughs into her hair, a sound so rare the yard straightens without knowing why. “Go make the archives hum at someone,” he tells her. “I’ll be late. Numbers.”

“Numbers,” she repeats, like a threat.

He kisses her mouth once, nothing but soft and promise; she leaves smelling like steel and alpha and apple bread. The yard smells like order. The city likes it. Somewhere beyond the north gate, a knife wrapped in red thread sits in a box waiting for a hand that shakes in the wrong way. Inside the walls, Cain puts his glove back on and his gauntlet down where men can see it and gets back to work making a house where boys can sleep and not be ashamed of waking up. The stones hum a low chord that tastes like a city learning the difference between fear and discipline. The chord has teeth. It has ribbon. It has room for the sound a woman makes when a man puts his hand on her throat and the world gets methodical about allowing it.

Evening drops. Reports land on desks. Laughter lands in halls. The barracks lights cut to low and the nightmares come and the nightmares go, and when they go they don’t take anyone with them. The Program hums, a machine that eats bad habits and spits out warm hands and schedules. Cain reads signatures: Stev, Aila, Mil, Brogan, Jeb. On the last page, in the corner, someone has drawn a glove. Someone else drew a gauntlet. Someone else drew a ribbon. He doesn’t smile; he reeks of it anyway.

On the walk home, he doesn’t take the straightest line. He takes the one that brushes the archive stairs and wakes a hum under the stone. He takes the one that passes the kitchen door and gets him a heel of bread for a boy he knows didn’t eat when he said eat. He takes the one that lets him look at his city the way a man looks at a room he is responsible for: counting exits, blessing corners, memorizing stupid carvings on lintels so that when they crack he can fix them without asking where the cracks are.

Glove. Gauntlet. Either way, his hand knows its job. The brand under his skin stings a little, a coal reminding him this is all happening to someone who used to be iron and is not anymore. He flexes, feels the tug in his chest—tug-tug, greedy—and can’t help the indecent thought that the city and the woman and the program are the same problem in different clothes: all of them want holding. He will hold them. He says it out loud, to the stone, to the cold. “Mine to hold.”

The wind off the river decides not to argue. The stones hum yes. The door he’s about to open knows his hand before he touches it. The night smells like steel and alpha and hot bread and a promise he keeps every time he signs his name.

Chapter Text

They set the room the way old books liked it: low light, a dish of milk on the sill, a pinch of salt along the threshold to tell anything with the wrong teeth to stay polite. Tutor’s chalk made a circle on the floor that behaved only if you stepped into it knowing why. Myrrh’s borrowed volume lay open to a page titled Harmonies For Stubborn Stone and More Stubborn Lovers. The hearth coals were red, indolent, ready to work.

Cain shrugged his coat off and hung obedience on a peg next to it. The brand under his glove flared once like a coal remembering air. He left the glove on. He always did until he didn’t. DG stood in a slip of white that told the room she wasn’t sorry and boots that told the room to watch its toes. The mark at her throat glowed a discreet ember. Under her skin the ribbon stretched and yawned and flicked its tail.

“Ritual,” he said, voice already tuned to the floorboards. “Your version.”

She ought to have teased him; the need in her ran too clean for that. “Three breaths and surrender,” she recited, palm over the collarbone where her red lived. “I breathe. You count. On three, I let go. If I don’t, you take.”

He moved until he was a breath off her mouth, close enough that the shape of his chest mapped itself onto her without touching. “And between.”

“Between,” she said, pupils blowing, “you make me hold.”

He nodded, a decision made and filed. “Hands.”

She lifted her wrists. The red came with them in two clean threads, curling from the heels of her palms like silk charmed out of thin air. They found his wrists as if they’d learned his shape—rounding bone, looping tendon, not binding, not really. He could pull free easier than shrugging off a coat. He didn’t. He flexed once and the ribbon tightened in a possessive little cinch that made the rune under his glove sting and made something low in DG purr like a cat catching the smell of cream.

“Good,” he said. “Lesson one.”

He stepped behind her. His hands found her hips with the kind of warmth that makes a spine turn honest. The room paid attention. He moved her to the chalk’s inner edge and turned her so her toes lined with a sigil he had chalked earlier in a steady, unshowy hand. He lifted her hair off her neck and let it fall so the mark glowed in a kissable frame.

“Breathe,” he ordered. “Three.”

She inhaled through her nose like he’d taught her, pulling pine and iron and the faint sweetness that rose off their nest like a rumor. One breath, out slow. Two, and the ribbon under her skin uncurling, under his glove answering. On the third she trembled because he put his mouth by her ear and didn’t touch her, because the room decided to have a tide.

“Now,” he said, and the alpha in him didn’t roar; it rolled, thick as honey, precise as weather. It filled the corners and lightened the center. It sank into her bones like hot milk.

“Surrender,” she whispered, and let her weight fall back the inch that meant everything.

His hand closed at her throat in a collar of heat—glove removed, bare palm settling over the red as if the brand had missed its home. The sting of it went through her like drink. The threads around his wrists tightened, the ribbon throwing two more loops in quick greedy wraps, and the hum in his palm wrote another faint, cocky line of light that wanted to be seen and refused.

“Lesson one,” he repeated, gentle cruelty. “We lace your magic with my control. We lace my control with your magic. We make a braid that pulls tighter when you try to bite it.”

She bit anyway. She couldn’t help it. It was in the build of her. Her mouth found his wrist where ribbon wrapped and opened on the skin there—no teeth, nothing to bruise, the barest wet claim. He groaned, the sound turned to iron, and the braid pulled taut.

“Spell,” he said into her hair, steady. “Weave it.”

Her fingers traced the air. The red came out of her like a strip of light cut off a sunrise and began to ladder itself between his wrists and her throat, back and forth, a cat’s cradle of heat that responded to his breath. She set a small ribbon-sigil in the space between her breasts and one over his heart. The strands twisted. His field shifted, giving the magic something to sit on that it wouldn’t slide from.

“Hold it,” he told her, and slid his right hand down from her throat to her tits, paying attention like a man who intended to use what he learned. Her nipple stood up under his palm, stubborn and obedient both. He rolled it with his thumb. She gasped and the spell stuttered; a strand flickers.

“Breathe,” he said, because the game was rigged but not unfair. “One. Two.”

She pulled the strand back into place and the circle hummed when it agreed. His left hand, the branded one, found her belly and pressed low. That press made everything inside her stop keening and stand at attention. The red at her sternum coiled around his palm like a snake around a warm rock.

“Slow,” he said, and she didn’t know if he meant the spell or her heart or the way he pressed. She slowed all three. He rewarded her by letting his right hand drift lower, along the ribs, into the silk at her waist, under.

Fingers on her cunt without ceremony. Two, the way he liked to begin, lazy and ruthless. He teased slick along her folds and didn’t circle her clit the way she wanted; he skimmed it and let the flash of it teach her the difference between begging and being asked. She kept the ladder, breath making the strands hum; his control laid under it like a road laid under an army. He slid his fingers in and her hands shook and the red snapped at his wrists in glee.

“Three breaths,” he said. “Say it.”

“Three breaths,” she panted.

“On three.”

“On three,” she agreed, head falling back onto his shoulder, throat hard under his palm, obedience softening the line of her jaw.

“In,” he said, and bent the fingers inside her until the front wall answered him with a melt that blotted out the translation. “Out. In.”

On three he growled, “Now,” and she let go like a person who had been waiting her whole life for a door to open and finally found one that didn’t slam back. The braid tightened. The field sank down, comforting, inexorable. She sobbed once, obscene and relieved, and ground down on his hand in a little involuntary kneel that her thighs made without permission.

“Good girl,” he said, not to make her small but to make the spell purr. The red answered, smug. “Lesson two.”

He turned her in the circle by the shoulders and walked her back four greedy shuffles until her knees hit the bed. He pushed her down onto it on hands and knees, gentle force, and bent to kiss the first vertebrae that stood up under his mouth. Her wings, not out, thrummed like a chord. He slotted himself behind her and tugged.

Red ribbon unspooled off her palms and off his wrists and anchored itself around the bedposts because her body knew how to make a nest before she did. The silk bit into polished wood and didn’t mark; it just shone, bright as fruit. He gathered a length and looped it around her wrists, not tight, not binding, a suggestion with teeth. He palmed the small of her back, thumb drifting to the damp that damp had made there, and pressed her down until her belly kissed the bed and she made a distressed sound that wasn’t no and wasn’t stop and didn’t need to be translated. He laid his branded hand flat between her shoulders and took his time learning the shape of her with his thumb.

“Lesson two,” he said, patient as a blacksmith. “Your magic holds me. My control holds you. We lace.”

“Yes,” she breathed. The ribbon drifted up his forearms in a fresh coil, flirty, pleased with its own tricks. He let it.

“Speak the rune that eases,” he told her.

“Saethyr,” she said into the coverlet, the syllable thick with spit and want.

The room changed pressure. The palm on her back burned in a way that made her bare her throat to the empty air and purr. His hand at her neck found the mark. He pinned her there for a breath, then let it go so that he could reach down and line himself up with his thumb, slow cruelty.

“Ask.”

“Please,” she said. “Please fuck me.”

He pushed in on a long rock back, sheathing himself until she grunted and went quiet, the kind of quiet a body makes when it recognizes home. He stayed deep. He always did, first. He let the fullness force her eyes to shut. He let the ribbon on his wrists cinch at the same time her cunt did. He lay over her and the heat of him made honest everything she would have lied about.

“Hold the weave,” he ordered. “Three breaths.”

She held. He moved. Slow, slow, possessive, a grind that turned the room into a seam he could drive down and a world he could lift from the corners. He set the pace and she learned it even when she pretended not to. The braid tightened when she fought it and warmed when she yielded. He reached around and requisitioned a pillow under her mouth, firm, sweet, a thing to bite when words failed. She bit it now because words did, because he thumbed her clit finally, an ugly little circle that hit where her magic liked being told what to do.

“Breathe,” he said when she started to beg without syllables. “Again. Again. Now.”

On the third, she fell apart, sobbing into the pillow, bright noises stained with spit and the part of her that still liked being a problem. He fucked her through it, patient, relentless, praise a steady spill—good girl, keep it, look at you, yes, that’s it—until the sobs turned to something lower, purring, tail-swishing, the noise of an animal that had found heat and wanted to live there.

“Lesson three,” he said, voice gone rough, patience thinning into want. “You lace me. I lace you. You hold my hands.”

He pulled out only long enough to make her roll. She went like a coin flipped by a clever thumb, face up, thighs open, eyes glassy and feral. He caught her ankle—both—and put her boots over his shoulders as if he intended to carry her like gear. The angle shoved his cock into a place only the word yes should be allowed to name. She made the noise his restraint loved and his cruelty answered. The ribbon rerouted itself, bitch-clever, snapping from his wrists to her thighs, a red garter that rode high, bracketed by the bitten places his fingers had left in the bath.

“Hands,” he demanded. She reached. He only covered them with his, didn’t restrain, didn’t pretend, just put weight there until her muscles forgot where clever lived. The rune in his palm flared against her skin. The twin on her throat answered and lit the bottom of his jaw.

“Spell,” he told her, mean. “Collar me.”

She did, the ribbon leaping up from under his hands like it had been waiting for that command. It looped his wrists and then found his throat and settled there, not a choke, not a tie, a fae suggestion that would have burned another man. It kissed the place under his ear where her teeth sometimes were. He groaned because he liked it and because he let himself, because lesson three was consent: hers to be kept and his to be collared by a thing he could break and chose not to.

“Again,” he said to every part of her, and gave it.

He fucked her like a commandment written on wet skin—long, deep, deliberately slow enough that she had to feel every inch, then faster until the sound of their bodies meeting wasn’t refined enough to suit the room. He let the alpha field swell up thick and then he thinned it until she could feel her own magic twitch its tail again and try to take a bite at his hand; he slapped her thigh lightly for disrespect and her body went molten.

“Breathe,” he said, already counting for her. “One. Two.”

She gasped air in, forced it out, dragged the third in like a sinner and choked on it. “Now,” he said, and she gave herself away with a cry that hurt his body to listen to and made the braid sing. The ribbon pulled at his wrists and throat, satisfied with how they both obeyed. He didn’t stop. He let the rhythm eat the edges off pain until it was only hunger. He laid bruise-colored kisses down her throat like a rosary. He petted the mark there with two fingers, soft in brutality. A handprint rose on her hip, honest; another on the inside of her thigh, obscene and proud.

She was crying now into the pillow he’d jammed under her head, not grief, not fear, the good kind, the way nerves leak when they quit clutching. He took it and made it into purring with his pace. He stroked her clit like a craftsman who loved his tools. He whispered filth right into the place where her pulse hit his teeth. She broke again, smaller, quicker, a shiver of yes that left her eyes wide and stupid with gratitude, and he caught that too and put it in his hand.

“Lesson four,” he said, panting, voice a handful of gravel. “You ride my control. I ride your magic. We meet in the middle and there’s no room for anything else.”

“Please,” she said, because there was a place left in her that needed asking. “Knot—”

“Not yet,” he said, cruel, kind. He edged her, held her there with his cock deep and his thumb light and his hand at her throat heavy until her whole body fought, then surrendered, then fought again because that’s what it does. He praised her for fighting. He praised the surrender more.

“Say it,” he prompted when she arched off the bed like she could run from her own heat. “Say the word that makes stone sing.”

“Saethyr,” she sobbed, and the rune under his hand burned, the brand almost too much, the field going sweet and thick, the braid tightening until the room hummed.

“Good.” He slid his hand from her throat to her belly and lower, fingers spreading over the place where they met and claiming the ache there like acreage.

“Now,” she begged, and that was the surrender he was hunting. Not the third breath. The truth.

“Now,” he allowed, and let the swell come.

It rose under his skin in a tide that had learned obedience. He didn’t slam. He seated it, slow, pressing the thickening ring against the slick-soft edge of her and holding while her body remembered it had been built for it. She whined high, almost ugly, pure; he coaxed, whispered, ground shallow until she pushed, until she opened, until the knot slid home and locked them both.

She screamed into the pillow, new sobs cracking into purr, and he dropped his forehead to hers and laughed once, wrecked. The ribbon at his throat pulled and the pull went through the bond and down into his cock and made him spill in hard, helpless pumps that he couldn’t have denied if the crown asked; he dripped praise on her mouth—fucking perfect, my good girl, take it—and she milked him with a greed that cleaned the last of the ache out of his bones.

They stopped moving. The world didn’t.

He stayed on her and in her, locked, hand pressed low where his seed warmed her, other hand at her throat where the mark blazed soft. The ribbon unlooped from his wrists and threaded itself lazy through his fingers, smug, as if to say see what we did. He smiled against her mouth and bit it, soft. He eased the pillow away from under her face and turned her head so he could see the mess of tears and mascara and triumph. He licked one track off, slow, and swallowed it as if it were sacrament.

“Lesson five,” he said, breath coming back like a river calming. “You sob into a pillow because I told you to. You purr because your body likes obeying.”

She made a weak little laugh that was also a sob. “Bastard.”

“Mine,” he corrected, mild as water.

“Yours,” she agreed, ruined and pleased.

He stroked her until the knot softened and their bodies let go of the locked fuse. He slid out slow, sweet, obscenely gentle with the sore that would be good for hours. He palmed the spill back into her with his fingers and she hissed and he watched her like a man checking the level in a well. He wiped his hand on his own thigh like a savage and then wiped it again because he liked her clean unless he liked her marked.

“Up,” he said finally, and helped her when her legs weren’t legs. He put her on her side and shoved a pillow under one knee and another under her head and tucked a blanket over the parts of her that had some pride left. He drew his thumb along the curve of a bite on her shoulder and kissed it. The fae text on the floor hummed. The milk on the sill had a skin and the skin didn’t break until he glanced at it.

“Again,” she whispered, because greed didn’t embarrass her anymore.

“After you drink,” he said, and put a cup to her mouth. She drank, obedient and dirty with it. He slid a peel of apple between her lips and watched her take it from his fingers like a woman supping at a vow. Her eyes closed. Her hands, still tinted with the ribbon’s heat, curled into the coverlet like claws that forgot they could unsheathe.

“Say it,” he murmured into the hair behind her ear, because repetition made ritual live.

“Three breaths and surrender,” she sighed, and the way she said surrender went right to his cock. “Saethyr.”

“Good girl,” he praised, and the purr rolled through her bones again, almost involuntary now, almost a reflex he’d trained into something glorious. He laid his branded hand over her mark and the two runes warmed against each other, a low affectionate ache.

He left the chalk on the floor and the milk on the sill and the rule written in the air: her magic braided with his control, his control braided with her magic, and the braid tight enough that when she tried to pick at it with her clever fingers it bit back just enough to make her moan. He lay down behind her and covered her like weather, lazy, possessive, hand at her throat even in sleep.

She sobbed once more for the good of it and purred through it, marked up in teeth, palm, and ribbon, a queen being educated by the craft of a prime who had learned how not to break. The stones carried the sound down into the walls like gossip, and the house, scandalized and smug, hummed along.

Chapter Text

The corridor keeps other people’s footsteps. Tonight it keeps theirs.

Lavender Eyes walks like a queen who has forgotten how to pretend her bones don’t hurt. The lamps fold themselves smaller as she passes. Glitch is already at the end of the hall, back to the wall, hands in his pockets like a man trying to smuggle his own tremor past a guard. The lock on the door is new, sensible brass; he picked it last week with a piece of wire and a promise. Tonight he uses the key she pressed into his palm in a room full of enemies without looking at him once.

“Inside,” she says, not command, not plea. He obeys, because he’s learned to do both where she’s concerned and never ask which it was.

The door shuts. The key turns. The corridor loses them. The room smells like lavender oil and paper and the underside of a crown. She sets the diadem down with two fingers the way you lay a baby in a cradle and dare your heart to go on being flammable. His mouth empties of anything stupid enough to try to be witty.

“Your Majesty,” he says, because he can’t not, because his tongue remembers courtesies like scars.

“Ambrose,” she says, and the name hits him like a cup of hot water down a frozen throat. He goes to his knees because he forgot there were other options. She doesn’t move for a long beat. When she does, it’s to slide forward until the silk of her gown sighs against his knuckles and the hem of it lifts a fraction because she has decided the floor doesn’t need that much of her tonight.

“Look at me,” she says.

He does. The years have laid their little knives down and stayed; none of them manage to cut the shape of her mouth. The hair that the country named her for is threaded with white she wears like an extra honorific. There’s an old bruise of sleeplessness under each eye; there’s a new softness at the line of her lip that only people who have spent a decade denying themselves get to keep.

“Are you all here,” she asks quietly, and she means it. He smiles lopsided because the question is old and the answer is ugly.

“I’m here enough,” he says, and puts his palm to his temple where the seam they left him runs under the skin like a solder line. “If something’s missing, I’ll make the rest of me louder.”

Her hands come up of their own accord and stop a breath away from his face. He leans into the space she spared and the room gets smaller and kinder.

“Speak if I forget something you need me to remember,” she says.

“Like how to breathe,” he says, and the line is cocky until you hear where the crack is. She breathes. He follows, obedient as a dog, ridiculous with relief.

“Glitch,” she whispers.

“Say it again,” he says, raw. “Say the one only I get.”

Her mouth curves, dangerous and fond. “Ambrose,” she repeats, but softer, the private way, the syllables liberated from titles and duties. It’s a winter name in her mouth. He shuts his eyes because the room is too bright for a minute and then opens them because he has begged enough from darkness to know not to start that habit again.

He stands. The gown is a war with hooks and he undoes them with the kind of patience you only get if you’ve reassembled engines without instructions and once convinced a cage to open for you by talking to it until it forgot how to be a cage. The silk parts. Her back is a map with a mountain at the base of her neck where the years put their snow; he kisses there and leaves his mouth a second longer than he should, and when he lifts it there’s a wet print like a seal.

She turns. Their brows knock, stupid and perfect, the kind of kiss people write off as accident unless they were born into a house where accidents were the only real thing. Then his mouth is on hers and it tastes like years swallowed and names that never got to be spoken and the thin copper edge of a crown she took into bed because there wasn’t anywhere else to put it.

He doesn’t press. He melts. She doesn’t grab. She holds.

“Careful,” she says against his lips.

“With the crown,” he answers, and reaches behind her to slide the circlet of woven metal she still wears braided into her hair free. He sets it on the table far from where the bed could knock it. “Careful,” he adds, and kisses her again, rougher, “with memory.”

“Cruel with memory,” she corrects in a whisper full of old teeth. “So it stops eating us and lets us eat.”

He laughs, because he cannot bear not to when she talks like that. “There’s my queen.”

“And there’s my brain,” she says, wry, and the pun breaks both of them into this small, indelicate joy that has nothing to do with rank. She reaches for the clasp at his throat; he bats her hands away not because he doesn’t want them there but because pleasure has an order when you’ve been denied it long enough to make the alphabet fight you.

“You’re shaking,” he says.

“Stop narrating,” she says.

“Never,” he says, and means it, and she grins like a fox who has just climbed into the henhouse and found the hens drunk.

They undress without dignity and with a precision that would pass an inspection: silk that refuses to be crushed is folded, not flung; his ridiculous waistcoat ends up on the back of a chair and somehow looks like it’s smirking. Boots thump the floor like applause. Her slip goes last. He does not take it off. He lifts it to her waist and pauses. The pause is obscene. It gives the room time to notice her stomach’s soft old scars, the strength left in her thighs, the pale place on one hip where a man once put his hand and left it long enough to make memory that tonight she will let be cruel enough to die.

“Say it,” he says, breathless now he’s close enough to live.

“Please,” she answers, queen and girl and terrible.

He drops to his knees again because that’s where his body wants to end up anyway when she asks properly. He drags his mouth along the inside of her knee to the soft where blood runs shallow and bites once, not to mark, to check that he isn’t dreaming a taste he has no right to. Her fingers go into his hair without asking; he tells himself he’s allowed. He eats. He is neat about it because he can’t help that and filthy about it because he can’t help that either. He tongues her like a problem he intends to study daily and solve anew every time. She goes loose, then taut, then loose, ribs lifting, and the sound she makes when he lays his tongue flat and holds it is the sound cathedrals learned to build for.

“Ambrose,” she says, and everything in him tries to become younger and cannot; he can only be the man he is now and make it enough.

He rises. She is already reaching for him and has been for a decade. He kisses her and knows what she tastes like now and later. He presses her to the bed and the bed behaves because furniture likes to be used by people who know what to do with it. He touches. He catalogs. He refuses to rush. He refuses to be pious about the refusal.

“Hands,” she says, and offers them because she has never been stingy about asking for what she needs.

He takes them. His are clever and nicked and steady when they must be. He threads their fingers together over her head and uses his weight to keep them there. Her pulse is a fact under his thumb. He kisses her wrist, then the knob of bone where it turns into arm, then the place under her ear where the crown never shadows.

“Tell me if you need me to stop,” he says, a ritual burnt into him by the years he spent under the wrong hands.

“I will never need you to stop,” she says, and it’s not bravado; it’s a report. He nods like a man who has been given the correct number in a column that was trying to pretend to be approximate.

He slides into her like he’s laying himself out on an altar and the altar decides to be soft for once. He shudders at the fit; she sobs once, not sad, and presses her heels into the backs of his thighs as if she can fix him deeper by force. He holds her mouth with his mouth, not to silence, to keep her breath in the room with him where he can check on it.

“Look at me,” she orders again, because she knows what happens in his head sometimes.

He does. He keeps his eyes open. He lets her see him seeing her, a cruelty to memory that makes it behave like a dog told to sit. He moves—slow, relentless, the pace you use when you’re fixing something intricate and you want it to last forever. She takes him in greedy little flexes that make his brain stutter and his hips honest. He puts his hand on her throat but does not press; he rests it there like a vow.

“Say it,” he asks, and she knows what he means. Not her crown. The first name. The one the city does not have.

She gives it to him, quiet as a knife going home, the syllables tucked under her breath like a jewel in a seam. It undoes him better than anything filthy ever could. He answers with hers, not Majesty, not Lavender, the tidy syllables he has hidden under his tongue since getting part of his skull back and finding more of her there than he’d expected. It puts tears in her eyes and relief in his hands and makes the sex an act of grammar as much as want.

He fucks her like he has all night because he does. He changes angle the way you change keys and the body underneath him sings more easily. She arches; the slip rucks under her ribs; his mouth finds a nipple and he sucks until her hand slaps his shoulder like a warning and then stays there because she didn’t mean no, she meant careful, crowns and memory. He is. He keeps one hand on her hip in that old, familiar possessiveness neither of them will ever confess in public; he uses the other to stroke her clit with a ruinous patience that turns her face soft and then bright.

She breaks with a little ugly sound that makes him proud. He holds her through it and refuses to speed. He runs his mouth along her jaw and tells her what he’s going to do to her for the rest of the night in words only someone who has read the plans for the palace could make sexy. She laughs on a sob and pulls his face down to hers like she intends to keep him oxygenated with kisses. He lets her.

“Again,” he asks, and she doesn’t bother with words; she tightens and it’s the best answer in any language.

He pulls out at last because teasing is part of survival. She swears at him like a queen with a private chapel. He smiles like a thief and rolls onto his back, arms open, offering her the kind of surrender men like him aren’t trusted with. She climbs him as if she hasn’t had to climb anything for years and still remembers how not to look down. Her thighs bracket his hips. Her hands brace on his chest. He pets them into place, calluses to calluses, soft to soft.

“Ride me,” he says, and it’s not a dare, it’s a kindness he wants for her. She does. Slow first, because her knees are smarter than pride. Then faster, because pride has always been obedient when taught correctly. He watches, greedily, blasphemously: her stomach tightening, the slip bunched like a flag, the way her mouth falls open when she lowers onto him all the way and stays, the old scar at her hip moving with every stroke. He holds his own wrists above his head because part of him thinks he should be bound for this kind of happiness and the rest wants to see if she’ll do it without silk.

She does. She catches his hands, pins them to the mattress, and fucks him with a queen’s balance and a lover’s cruelty. He gives her his throat. She bites, not to bruise, to write today over the old, stupid marks made by time and other people. He swears into the room and it forgives him. She smiles down at him like a woman who just found a ruby in a bowl of apples and bites him again.

“Say my name,” he begs, and she does, and he comes like he was waiting to be allowed. It’s a relief big enough to fix a winter. She kneels over him, shaking, weeping, laughing, and milks him like she had this planned. He pulls her down and holds her there while both of their bodies remember smaller, more urgent aches, and then he kisses the side of her nose, irreverent, and she snorts and wipes her face like a girl trying not to let her mother know she’s been crying.

They don’t stop. They do slow. He drifts them to their sides and spreads her thigh with his knee and slides back in because being outside her feels like a clerical error he can correct by writing himself in the right box. He’s gentler, then; the room is full of the sound of silk losing its temper and two people who forgot they were allowed to be ugly with need. He puts his hand between them and rubs her again, light, just the shape, no insistence, and she moans in a tone that says if he keeps the pressure the whole city will settle another half-inch on its foundations tonight.

“Be cruel,” she says suddenly, against his mouth.

“Memory,” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, and nods, and he nods too, because consent is a living thing and it likes names.

He tells her what he remembers in a low, even voice while he works her up: the way she smelled the day they burned the last of the Tin Men’s suits; the sound her foot made on marble the day the council voted to lie about the treaty; the dress she wore when she came to the cell where he had the wrong pieces of his brain and told him he was more than the holes other people had put in him. He keeps his hands kind while his words are knives, and together they cut the ugly parts small enough to swallow.

She breaks again, teeth in his shoulder, tears hot, relief savage. He follows because his body likes following wherever she leads when she leads with that voice. They lie in the mess like sinners and saints. He licks the salt off her lip. She pets the scar at his temple. They do not apologize because they’re out of apologies and they have better things to do with their tongues.

After, quiet like a velvet glove. The corridor has not grown ears big enough for this. He prods the bedding until the sheets stop sulking, tucks the corner under her foot, and drags the coverlet up to her ribs. His hands don’t shake anymore. Hers do because the body pays in tremor when pleasure leaves a room too fast; he holds them until they remember how to be hands and not birds.

“Again,” he says, playful, defiant, when he catches her smiling without meaning to.

“Many,” she returns, mocking somebody else’s promise without breaking it.

He goes to the table without putting his trousers back on because some rebellions are good for your spine and pours water. He brings the cup to her mouth. She drinks; he wipes a wet line from her chin with his thumb and sucks it like a thief. He should feel grandiose. He feels human.

He sets the cup down and the crown looks at him. He looks back. “I won’t break it,” he tells it.

“It breaks itself,” she says, already drowsy, the kind of drowsy scarce enough to found a religion on. “We just keep wearing it.”

He climbs back in and spoons her and breathes into her hair. She takes his hand and folds it under her breast like a weapon she intends to use again soon. He thinks of a thousand clever things to say and chooses none. He kisses the nape of her neck. He keeps his palm heavy on her ribs—not trapping, owning. She hums, shockingly soft, and the bed behaves.

“Ambrose,” she says, three-quarters asleep, startled by nothing, anchored by everything. He closes his eyes and swallows the way the name feeds him.

“Say the name only I get,” he asks, because greed is a virtue here and because he is a bastard about certain rituals.

She says it again, the private one, the syllables he will take back to his grave if the country asks him to, and the room doesn’t change but somehow the air gets friendlier. He grins into her shoulder because kings bow and he doesn’t have to. She laughs into the pillow like a girl newly allowed to be one.

“Lock the door,” she murmurs, uselessly late.

“I did,” he says.

“Good,” she says, and sleeps.

He doesn’t. Not yet. He watches the crown a while, and the ceiling where some forgotten artisan hid a vine no one sees, and the door where he jammed a chair under the latch anyway because locks like to be reminded they’re not the only thing keeping the world out. Then he watches her back until his eyes close on their own because that is a habit he is allowing himself: to sleep when she does, to wake when she does, to learn enough of her nights that his brain stitches the missing places closed while she breathes.

In the corridor, dust settles somewhere else. In the city, the whisper crawls that the queen slept and someone kept watch who wasn’t a guard. It makes the wrong people bite their lips and the right people smile into their cups.

Morning will ask for crowns. Tonight they are careful with them and cruel with memory and he calls her by the name only he is allowed to say until even the bed knows it and hums it under their bodies like a hymn anybody honest would kneel to.

Chapter Text

The Great Glass Gallery was built to impress people with money and frighten people with sense. Marble slick enough to drown on, a reflecting pool the size of a poor neighborhood, pillars like polite giants. Music stitched itself across the room in gold thread. Candlelight climbed the mirrored walls and applauded itself. The crown did what crowns do: made everything look like a story that would one day eat its characters alive.

DG endured it in lace and leather. The mark at her throat hid under a whisper of silk that fooled nobody. The red under her skin purred against the rune in Cain’s palm whenever he drifted within scent range. He stood just behind her shoulder, blue eyes soft as a lie, jaw set as if he were sizing the room for coffins on someone else’s schedule.

He smelled the click before he heard it.

Not a sound, a pressure change, tiny pawl engaging—a cane-gun’s spring, a collapsible crossbow catching tooth, the first breath a man takes when he decides to stop being a person and start being a problem. Cain’s head turned the degree that means there’s a new map. The bond tugged, sharp. The hairs at the back of his hand lifted under the glove. The floor under his boots told him where to go.

“DG,” he said without moving his mouth. “Hands.”

Her fingers found his without looking. The red threaded him in one fast lash that felt like a heart finding a body. The maid a yard away tipped a tray, porcelain kissing marble, sound ringing polite, and in the ring Cain heard it, the click again, softened by music, sharpened by intent.

Thunder.

His body moved without waiting for permission from the part of him that keeps people impressed. He pulled DG into the space behind his shoulder and made a wall out of his geometry. His left hand came up, palm bare, glove already in his pocket because instinct peels layers off you when work arrives. The rune lit under the skin like a coal getting air. His right hand did not reach for the inside of his coat where a sane man keeps a gun at a party. It reached for the table where some hostess had laid out clever little knives disguised as cutlery and touched their balance like he’d paid rent there.

The cane-gun coughed.

A pellet took a sliver off the marble near DG’s cheekbone and died against a pillar with a whine like a mosquito realizing it had made career-ending choices. Cain’s knife left his hand as if he’d never done anything else with it. It moved like a short prayer and a bad omen, bright arc, no flourish. The man with the cane had eyes only for his target. He did not see the knife take him under his cheekbone and into the soft logic behind it. He made a noise human throats hate having to learn and stepped backward into the reflecting pool. Water took him, blood taught the marble how to make art.

The orchestra had the bad taste to stumble only when he hit. Then the crowd remembered that the proper response to anything real is screaming.

Another click. Higher. Balcony. Cain twisted, the bond yanking his chest with its greedy tug-tug, and dragged DG with him so precisely the red had no excuse to be offended. The man on the balcony had ratcheted a wrist-bow under his sleeve. He did not have the good fortune to finish ratcheting. Jeb’s hand closed on the underside of the rail and he vaulted with the confidence of a man who had never been taught gravity as a religion. He met the bowman two steps into his plan and taught him the word “floor.”

“Shields,” Brogan snapped from the east door, voice like a slap. A line of Tin Men in their good coats stepped out of the air like someone had folded the hallway wrong and set their bodies between the queen and what wanted her blood.

Daggers glinted. Servants ran. A courtesan in an intelligent dress nocked a hairpin and put it through a grey-cloaked man’s ear with the accuracy of spite. Raw hummed and the stone under the north arcade tightened its shoulders; the floor gained spine. Glitch tugged a length of string out of his cuff, looped it around a wrist with a conjurer’s grin, and made a knife rethink its owner.

The third assassin came from the obvious place because some men are not creative even when paid for it: straight down the long aisle between the tables, moving with an athlete’s promise and a coward’s eyes. He had a knife like a smile you should never trust. The hilt was wrapped in red thread that wasn’t decoration. The smell coming off it made the air coy and wrong, sap and smoke and an argument with a law older than lawsuits.

The blade described a low curve for DG’s chest.

Cain’s branded hand met him first.

Heat and light. The rune flared, flesh-made sigil burning against a weapon that had learned ugly tricks in a tent outside the wall. The blade kissed his palm and the world chose teams. Where steel should have skated, it skidded. Where red thread should have cut ribbon, it hissed as if meeting a cousin it hadn’t been introduced to properly. Pain shot up Cain’s arm like a healthy animal. He didn’t let go. He twisted. Bone went. The assassin’s wrist made a shape it had never meant to. The knife clattered, singing a little, a bad lullaby. Brogan’s boot found the man’s knee and suggested retirement.

“Exit seals,” Cain said, very calm, to no one and several someones. “West arcade shut. North doors barred. Nobody out.” His field dropped over the corners of the room with obscene precision, air learning how to be a lid and liking it. “Jeb. Balcony sweep. Aila, get me eyes on the kitchen.”

Blood kept talking to marble.

Somewhere to DG’s left a lady shrieked and realized you cannot keep screaming forever without becoming ridiculous. The noise turned ragged. Panic began to breed. A man who liked to be called lordly bulled for the door with his wife’s wrist bone in a grip she’d pretend to excuse until dinner. Two alphas bristled like dogs in a thunderstorm and made the mistake of looking at each other instead of the problem.

DG raised her chin. The mark under her scarf glowed in a tidy, indecent pulse.

“Enough,” she said.

Not loud. Not shrill. Omega Command is not volume; it is architecture. The word left her mouth and found the rafters and touched each pillar with two fingers and the rafters and pillars said yes, Highness, how high. The air changed the shape of its weight. Alphas dropped like breath remembering it is easier to kneel than to run out of oxygen.

The lieutenant from the river precinct was first; his body said down with relief before his pride invented reasons. The courtier with the wife’s wrist followed, knees hitting marble so hard they will ache tomorrow in ways that make him reconsider whether he likes the sound of women’s bones. The pair who’d been sniffing for a fight found the floor a well-bred alternative. Betas took a breath like wine. Servants straightened because now there was a plan. Viscounts blinked tears of confusion, which is how you know you’ve dosed them correctly. Even the men on Cain’s payroll bowed their heads for a heartbeat as if answering to a name they had forgotten they had earned.

“Be still,” DG said, High Speech braided into common. Saethyr slithered in the space between the syllables and smiled. “You will not run. You will not trample. You will listen to the Commander and you will obey.”

“Yes,” the room said, made of a hundred people who would stab you to avoid consent in any other context.

Cain didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. The bond tugged pleased against his breastbone like a leash in sweet hands. His palm burned. The cut from the red-thread knife wasn’t a cut; it was a stripe of ache painted across the meat of his hand, a heat that stung and hummed like a threat that hadn’t learned how to be a promise. He flexed and the rune traced a brighter line, answering, telling the old magic to mind its manners or be put outside.

“Brogan, with the Queen,” he said, and Brogan took Lavender Eyes by the elbow with a grip that looked like nothing and would break a man’s fingers if he tried to dislodge it. Lavender had not stood, because queens don’t, and now she did, because some queens do when the floor has learned new hymns. Glitch stood at her shoulder like a sin that got invited to dinner. His eyes were wrong for this light and right for what needed doing next.

Raw tipped his head and the building told him secrets. “Two behind the wine kegs,” he said pleasantly. “One under the tablecloth pretending to be a shame that belongs to the table. One in the gallery above thinking about rope.”

“Rope’s mine,” Stev said from somewhere civilized. “With Aila.” The quartermaster had already left her ledger where it would be safest—in her own hand—and moved with the pleasant efficiency of a woman who will forgive nothing except competence.

Jeb hit the gallery like a wall that had learned to run. A man in a grey cloak tried to decide between jumping and not being seen. Jeb made the decision respectable by catching his boot and introducing his teeth to the rail. The man sagged. Jeb did something polite with rope in a motion that would have made Stev tear up under other circumstances, and gently lowered bad decisions to the floor.

On the main level, one of the grey cloaks at the wine kegs made a move that would have been clever if Raw hadn’t told the stone to unsettle that exact floorboard. He went down to a knee with a noise like a boy caught with a stolen apple. Cain was there before his breath finished appearing in the cold. He stepped on the man’s wrist and kept the other foot available for any arguments. The grey cloak had hunger in his mouth and money in his eyes. Cain bent, picked coin off his tongue with two fingers, and wiped it on the man’s own coat.

“Who paid,” he asked, conversational. The man spat blood and pride and pretended he’d chosen both. Cain bared his teeth in something that would be a smile when work was done. “Later,” he said, gentle as rain. “We’ll do later.”

The man under the tablecloth stopped pretending to be a linen shame when Raw dragged the cloth off with a flourish and said, “Oh look. A rat.” The hall laughed one brittle note because even in disaster the human need to giggle at someone else’s humiliation will not be denied. The rat tried to stab Raw and made the friendly mistake of forgetting that Raw knows how to hear knives plan. Brogan’s baton introduced itself to the rat’s fingers. The knife clanged out a complaint.

“Witnesses,” Cain said.

“Yes, sir,” half a dozen voices answered. Brogan had a runner doing nothing but writing names and times and the color of the sky as if the sky would one day need an alibi.

DG held the room like a leash. Men breathed when she let them. They didn’t when she didn’t. The ribbon at her sternum showed itself like a slash in a layer of air most people don’t learn to look at, a single live red thread looped out and laid around the room’s throat—not choking, holding. Women didn’t so much kneel as decide their shoes had better opinions if they made themselves small; then they stood straighter, petty gods again. The omega command didn’t humiliate; it organized. The room will tell that story forever and pretend it hurt their pride. Their pride needed to be hurt.

Cain’s palm throbbed. He opened and closed his hand and the rune traced itself like a heartbeat. DG’s gaze flicked. Their eyes met across a spill of marble and men. He tilted his hand, very slightly, to show the ache-stripe. Her pupils went to slits and then round, then slits again. The ribbon twitched around his ribs, throat, heart, as if insulted on principle. He let the bond tug him, quick, reassuring. He could feel the knife’s song still, a thin thread in the air. He looked down. The blade lay on the marble an arm’s length away, red thread at the hilt dull against candlelight, little wrong smell still curling off it.

He palmed a napkin, because men like Rell notice when you touch public things with bare hands, knelt, and picked the knife up into linen. He felt heat snap against the rune like a fox having opinions. The red thread tried the oldest trick in any book: curious, cutty, I was made for your ribbon, let me in. His palm told it no with interest. The thread smoked, a faint, offended curl.

“Evidence,” he said. Aila was there, packet open, seal in her fist. He slid the blade into leather like you tuck a bad thought into a drawer with a lock.

“Grey cloaks,” Jeb reported, breath easy, coming down the stair with a small trail of men who had learned to watch their feet. “No insignia. Coin in odd bags. Their boots want city dirt. They smell like axle grease and outside.”

“Rell,” someone said under their breath, and then pretended they had not said it when their wife stepped on their toes.

The man in the pool rose once, slow, arms up like a saint or a puppet, then drifted face-down, bobbing. The blood made shapes the gallery had never commissioned: flowers opening in rust. Two footmen went green and didn’t hide it. Cain’s tide of control didn’t touch them. Let a boy be sick when a man dies in front of him; otherwise he’ll teach fear to hide in meaner places.

“Close the doors,” DG said, and the doors obeyed. “No one leaves until the Commander says so.” She looked at the music like an insult and the music had the good sense to stop trying.

“Lavender,” Cain said, not to the hall, to the queen, because this is what it means to work inside power without convincing it to hurt you. “You’ll take the anteroom. Four guards. Glitch. Myrrh if you can find them; we’re going to need a bright mind and a mean list of who got paid to pour.” Lavender Eyes inclined her head like a reply on parchment.

Glitch adjusted his cuffs, tied a bit of string around a wrist that wasn’t his and ought to have been and smiled without humor at nobody. “I’ll need a bucket and ten minutes alone with the coin bag,” he told Aila. “There’s dust in money you can read if you like poetry. I do.”

Brogan herded the kneelers into usefulness. “One at a time,” she barked. “Witnesses, not an audience. You’ll line up by the pillar that looks the least impressed with itself. If you try to rush, I’ll teach you how a floor feels about heads.”

Raw patted stone that had blood in its mouth. “We sing later,” he told it. “We hunt now.”

The word rippled down the bond, up Cain’s arm, through the room, into the corners where men like to pretend to keep their secrets clean. The door to the service corridor was not quite closed. He looked at it. It flinched. He smiled with his teeth.

He turned to DG. She had not moved from the place he had put her, because she was not stupid. She had managed to put the entire room where he needed it without once using the word please. The red at her throat glowed under the silk like a sin carried in daylight. His hand hurt. He wanted to put it on her and kiss the mark and reset the world. He did not. He inclined his head the degree that means later and she answered with the degree that means now if you let me.

“Hold,” he told her, low.

“I am,” she said, sweet and obscene, and took one tiny step so that her scent threaded the air around him and every alpha who mattered understood whose weather they lived under.

Cain looked at Jeb. “With me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Brogan, all doors in three. Aila, nobody clever touches that blade.” He nodded at the packet. “Raw, hum if the walls remember a name. We find who paid; we make a road out of their bones to the door on the wastes and beat a man with it.”

Raw grinned like a fox who’d just been told the chickens had unionized; the solution was still going to be fun.

Cain stepped into the service corridor. It smelled like onions and ambition. A splash of wine told its own small story down the wall. A scuff at knee-height suggested a man who had learned how to run while staying low. Jeb’s hand already hovered over the place where a boy had tried to be clever yesterday and left a string that wasn’t string.

“Left,” Jeb said.

“Left,” Cain agreed.

They moved like the kind of law men want to survive for: quiet, quick, certain. Cain’s hand ached. He flexed it once and felt the rune answer, the bond pull, the promise he had put into bone rise to meet the promise he had put into paper. Behind him, the Great Glass Gallery behaved itself under a woman’s word. In front of him, something that had made the mistake of agreeing to get paid where he could reach him moved and would stop.

Hunt.

Chapter Text

They cleared the last witness out of the anteroom and shut the door, and the sound in DG’s body kept going like a bad bell that didn’t know the song was over.

Her hands shook hard enough to make the silk at her wrists hiss. Fine tremor at first, then the ugly kind that climbs the bones and decides it will set up house in the joints. The room smelled of wine and wax and fear someone had dropped and walked away from. Cain put his back to the door, set the bolt, and every line in him softened without losing a single edge.

“Here,” he said; it wasn’t a request.

She went. He caught her wrists and felt the tremor in the tendons, the staccato in the pulse. The mark under her scarf burned quiet, wanting his hand like a hearth wants a log. The brand on his palm thrummed—ache-stripe from the red-thread blade singing under the skin—and then found the shape of her and answered, deeper, older, like a drum that knew which army it marched.

“Breathe,” he ordered, already counting for her. “One.”

She pulled air in. It stuttered and tried to be a sob. He didn’t let it. He braced her wrists against his chest and flattened his hand over her throat, palm heavy, heat precise, the weight that tells nerves the room has an owner.

“Two.”

Her shoulders dropped a finger’s width.

“Three.”

The exhale came raw and big enough you could have poured relief through it and filled a house.

“Again,” he said, and she shook her head even as her body obeyed, because she’d given the command that made men kneel and the echo of it was still roaring, and the backlash was knives and glass in her bones.

“Help me,” she said, hoarse, eyes huge and blue and blown like storm glass. Not coy. Not pretty. The battlefield acknowledgment. “Please.”

The bond yanked his chest, tug-tug, greedy, and his control went gentle as summer rain over a hot roof. He kissed her forehead once and the room chose sides.

“What do you need,” he asked, because discipline is a kindness you earn by asking the right question.

She swallowed. Her hands opened on his shirt, shaking so hard her nails scratched and he liked it. “Knot me,” she whispered, feral and ashamed of nothing. “Please. Now.”

“Good girl,” he said, because asking is the first step in owning what fixes you. “Floor.”

“Floor,” she agreed, ridiculous and perfect.

He stripped the table of its cloth and shoved it aside with a single unapologetic scrape, laid his coat down where the boards were old and honest, then his jacket, then the ridiculous scarf because she’d hate the imprint it would leave; the rest of the world could have their silk. She knelt where he put her, breath already climbing the rungs of the ladder he’d set in her chest.

He went to his knees behind her and put his branded hand back where it belonged, across the glow at her throat, collar of heat closing with a shiver that ran down her spine and out her toes. The rune thrummed against her mark so hard her eyes fluttered; the ache-stripe from the assassin’s toy hissed and went quiet like a snake shown a bigger mouth.

“Hands,” he said. She gave them, wrists up. The red came without being called, two bright lengths sliding from the heels of her palms to loop his wrists, not binding, just ownership that purred. The threads tightened on the beat of his pulse. The room warmed.

“Breathe,” he said again, gentler, because the work had teeth and he wanted her to know which did.

She breathed. He put the other hand between her shoulders and pressed her down into the coat, into the floor, into him. Her cheek turned; she bit the wool and let it hold her teeth. He lifted silk with ruthless care—hem up, panties aside, lace rucked, perfume of her heat hitting the air like a mercy. His fingers found her and she was slick already, wrecked sweet, scent running high and alpha, omega, fae, all of it, his brand in her mouth like a name.

“Say it,” he prompted, cruel only in that he loved her terrible honesty. “What you need.”

“You,” she said, almost angry with relief. “Your cock. Your knot. Please.”

“Yes,” he said, and freed himself.

He didn’t tease. He painted the head through her slick once because it is a crime not to, then pushed, a long, relentless seat that forced the tremor back into the walls and put something else in her bones. She gasped, bit his coat, felt the stretch go from sharp to yes in a breath and a sob. He buried to the hilt and stayed, deep, hands a bracket—throat and hip, law and mercy.

“Mine to hold,” he told her, because words build houses. “Say yes.”

“Yes,” she breathed into the wool. Her thighs unlocked. The red threads on his wrists tugged, greedy and pleased.

He moved. Not fast. Possessive. Long strokes that ground the head along her front wall and reset her ragged rhythm to match his. The alpha field thickened on the edges of the room, air getting obedient, corners turning into safe hands. The tremor in her arms went from spasm to shiver to a hum his body could use.

“Breathe,” he said. “Three. Now.”

On the third he slid his branded hand from her throat to her belly and lower, cupping the soft place over the knot’s future with a palm that burned in all the right ways. The mark at her throat pulsed under his knuckles like a quiet sun. The stripe from the cursed knife sang, then harmonized, rune brightening, bond tugging, the whole architecture of them locking into place like a well-oiled door.

“Say Saethyr,” he told her, because the word makes the world kneel correctly.

“Saethyr,” she sobbed, and the floor hummed, the bolt in the door remembered it was shut, the panic in her marrow let go.

“Good girl,” he praised, and let the swell build.

It rose under his skin like storm up a hill. He didn’t jam it into her heat like a man trying to win. He pressed and waited, pressed and waited, letting her body decide to open, cajoling where it needed, relentless everywhere else. The red at his wrists tightened. Her cunt clutched in little helpless grabs that made him grunt and go slower because control was law and law made medicine work.

“Knot me,” she begged, voice breaking like a fever does.

He locked.

The swell seated into her with a hot, brutal insistence that knocked a cry out of her and then turned the cry into a moan that sounded like sleep coming back after a week of bad nights. Her cunt gripped around the ring and wouldn’t let go. He ground shallow, the only thing the lock permitted, and the grind was mercy and murder both; her clit kissed the hard seam of his body; her breath turned into obedient little animals he could count.

“Take me,” he said against her hair. “Take all of me.”

He spilled with a low, cored-out sound he didn’t try to hide, thick pulses dragged out of him by the sweet vice of her body and the greedy tug of the bond. Heat poured into her and the ambient tremor that had been shaking her loose from the inside stilled like a sick child turned on its side and slept. The rune on his palm thrummed against her throat when he slid that hand back up, palm to mark, brand to brand, heat fitting heat. She was purring before either of them realized it, a low honest thing she would never give the court. He smiled into her scalp, savage and fond.

“Good,” he murmured, rocking small, keeping the pressure where it made medicine instead of myth. “Breathe.”

She breathed. In the space between breaths she shook once, last time, then not at all. Her hands unclenched; the red loosened on his wrists and settled like silk after the dance. He stayed on his knees behind her and over her and in her and made the room a lid over both their heads. The coat smelled like him and gun oil and the faint ghost of apples. Her cheek slid on wool when she turned her head to kiss his palm where it pressed her throat. The brand there flared; the mark answered. The ache-stripe from the assassin’s toy hissed and went quiet again, chastened, unwanted, overruled.

“Look at me,” he said, and eased her up enough that he could get his hand under her chin and tip her face back. The eyes were still huge and wet, but now they were here. He kissed her with the patience of a man who intended to keep doing it for the rest of his life. She made the tiny noise that means safe.

“Again,” she whispered, half laugh, half prayer, testing the tremor with the corner of her mouth like she might spook it.

“Many,” he promised, wicked and solemn, and ground once more, just to feel the way her body thanked him.

They stayed locked until the knot softened and the floor forgave them for using it like a bed. When the world allowed it, he slid out slow, obscene gentle with her sore that belonged to him now. The spill slicked her thighs; he cupped it back into her lazy and she hissed and he pretended not to be too pleased with himself.

He wrapped her in the wrecked scarf and his coat and pulled her into his lap on the floor, back to his chest, his brand over her mark, his other hand over her belly, fingers splayed wide. The tremor didn’t come back. The purr did, soft and idiot, the sound a satisfied animal makes when the weather obeys.

“Water,” he said, and reached without moving her, one long arm finding the cup Myrrh had forgotten to take. He held it to her mouth. She drank, obedient and dirty with it. A single drop slid off her lip and hit his thumb and he licked it and made a noise she could feel in her spine.

“You’re bleeding,” she said, breath steadier, eyes on his palm.

“Striped,” he corrected, unconcerned, because the rune was singing over it like a hymn and the bond was on its third pleased tug and the ache read like work done, not damage. “We’ll wash it. Tutor will scowl. He can have the last word if he brings salve.”

She laughed into his chest, wet and wicked. “He’ll bring two.”

“He will,” Cain agreed, and filed the errand in the column of things he’d already decided to handle. “You held the room.”

“I held them because you were hunting,” she said, honest.

“You held them because you’re you,” he returned, more honest, and the purr went louder for one beat like her bones liked that sentence too much to be cool about it.

Outside the door the court remembered how to whisper. Inside, Cain rocked her like a bad storm finally over and a city learning how to sleep on purpose. He kissed her hairline, the mark, the corner of her mouth. He said “mine to hold” one more time, just because he could, and she sighed yes against his pulse like medicine melting on the tongue.

“Up?” he asked when he knew her legs would listen.

“In a minute,” she said, greedy with the right things now. “Again.”

He smiled with his teeth, reset his hand at her throat, let the brand and the mark and the bond talk to each other, and made the floor work for its polish.

Chapter Text

The nest remembers their shapes: his weight cut into the mattress like a coastline, her warmth in the hollows, a crease where his coat lived last night because the coat sleeps where it wants. Lamps turned low, fire licking lazy; the window cracked to let in night and the city’s tired breath. Pine and leather, apples and ash. The rune under his glove hums when the glove comes off. The mark at her throat glows like a banked coal and then brighter because she is looking at him the way queens choose countries.

“Come here,” he says, but she’s already climbing.

Knees braced to either side of his hips, lace a rumor at her breasts, hair a snarl he won’t fix, mouth wicked. She squats slow and takes the crown of him to her slick and holds there like a ruler contemplating a law. His hands lift out of habit and stop because lesson four never leaves him: she rides; he governs the weather.

“Look at me,” he tells her, and she does, blue on blue, command sliding into ritual the way a knife slides into a sheath that knows its name.

She sinks.

Not a rush. A seat. The stretch writes itself up her spine in a bright cursive that makes her lips part. He groans because he likes her greedy and because he will not rob the truth of its noise. She bottoms out and stays there, eyes gone feral and soft at once, body learning the specific miracle of weight in the right place, heat stoked from inside.

“Breathe,” he reminds, because she forgets when want gets clever. “Three.”

She obeys. On the third exhale her pelvic floor loosens and clutches again in little testing grabs that make his hands flex against the sheets and his mouth turn mean with restraint.

“Hands,” he murmurs, and she gives them backwards, wrists offered without breaking eye contact. The red slips from the heels of her palms and winds his wrists in silk with a queen’s flourish—adornment, not arrest. He squeezes once, ribbon tightening in pleased little bites, then lets go because she’s the one dictating the map now.

“Ride,” he says, low.

She rides.

Slow first, hips circling until the head of him grinds along the place inside her that turns thought into light. Her thigh muscles stand like rope under skin; her breath comes stupid and honest; her hands find his chest and then his throat and then his mouth. He bites her thumb, delicate, animal, watches her pupils blow. He doesn’t thrust up; he angles down an inch so the line of him hits the front wall every time she takes him, lets her build the pace like a standard she means to carry through five corridors and a throne room.

“Good girl,” he praises when rhythm knits into inevitability. “Again.”

She shivers and obeys, faster now, weight dropping and lifting, the obscene slick sound sweetened by the wet circle he draws over her clit with two fingers. Her head tips back; her throat offers itself; the mark shines. He wants his hand there; he puts his hand there. Palm to brand, heat to heat, the rune thrums a bass line against her glow and her body answers with a wild, obedient tremor.

“Say it,” he prompts cruel-kind. “Your word.”

“Saethyr,” she moans, and the room changes pressure, air laying down its weapons, wood remembering it loves bodies, the bed taking the weight like a sworn thing.

He brackets her hips and guides, not taking, not stealing pace, finding that tiny forward cant that turns every downward slide from gorgeous to lethal. She gasps; the next circle wrings a half-sob out of her; she’s close enough that the red on his wrists tightens in greedy joy and the bond tugs his chest in little delighted yanks.

“Look at me,” he says again, because flight requires a point on the horizon, and her eyes snap to his.

“Ask,” he orders, because medicine works better said out loud.

“Please,” she begs, feral. “Let me. Let me—”

“Now,” he grants, and she breaks.

Her body shatters in a bright, raw wave that takes sound out of her mouth and puts it in her bones. She rides it like a queen driving a warhorse through a narrow street, relentless and beautiful. And then the light comes.

It isn’t light, not exactly. It’s pearly, wet, a spray of morning condensed and thrown through her skin. Her wings burst from her back as if the room had been keeping them for her in the wall and only now remembered where it put them: translucent, opal-sheened, feathered along the edges like frost on glass, edges iridescent where magic kisses bone. They unfurl with a sound his hands will remember forever. She cries out, shocked and delighted and wrecked.

“Easy,” he says, reverent like a blasphemer, hands leaving her hips to lift and frame the new architecture. Big palms bracketing the joint where wing meets back, thumbs smoothing along the quill-lines, careful not to crush, to keep. He doesn’t stop fucking up into her with those tiny bottom strokes a locked body allows, but he makes himself gentle around the miracle. The alpha field lowers, heavier at the corners so the room doesn’t feel obliged to catch her; his control goes bone-deep tender.

“Mine to hold,” he says, because vows must be said when gods show up, even if the gods are your girl’s bones. He cups a wing and she keens—high, obscene pleasure wired straight into the motion at her hips. He swears, reverent and filthy, and keeps his fingers spread.

“More,” she pleads, tears on her face she doesn’t notice. The feathers shiver like struck glass.

He gives her more. Thumb on clit, firm and exact, the simplest shape of patience in the world, while she rides him through it. Her wings beat once, twice, throwing pearly motes that land on his chest and disappear, melted into sweat and pine. She arches, back bending like a bow, and he slides his hand under the span, supporting, controlling, adoring, everything in one grip.

“Breathe,” he pushes, counting for her when she flounders. “One. Two.”

On three she opens again, wetter, sweeter, the orgasm riding the last one like a second wave climbing a first to see better. She sobs and laughs in the same breath; he keeps the rhythm and the angle and the law and lets the world fall down around them if it wants. His other hand stays at her throat, light collar, only weight, only heat, only the precise pressure that tells nerves the right orders.

“Look at you,” he breathes, awe ruining his voice. “Fucking miracle.”

She’s beyond words; she gives him payment in the currency he loveliest—obedience. Hips, breath, eyes, all for him. The red threads on his wrists flutter and bite, delighted, then slacken as her magic chooses to be held instead of to hold. The bond tugs so hard he bares his teeth.

“Say please,” he asks, cruel for the good of it.

“Please,” she cries, wicked and begging at once. “Please, prime—”

He gives her his cock like a schedule and a blessing and she takes it like law and mercy. When his own crest rises, he does not rush her. He rides her rhythm, fingers on clit steady, hands bracketing wings careful, control a warm lid tamping down the panic that tries to turn joy into noise. He lets himself be used because she needs it; he uses her because she wants it; a loop, a braid, a rule, a religion.

“Now,” she gasps, command and plea braided, and he tips.

He spills with a groan that pins her to the bed more thoroughly than his body ever could. The heat of it pours into her and she milks him with greedy little clenches that make him curse into her mouth and start again lower. He doesn’t lose rhythm; he refuses to. He keeps fucking her through the aftershocks, slow, exact, thumb lazy at her clit until the shivers turn from sharp to sweet to purr.

Her wings tremble, beat once in a weak, beautiful flutter that sends a handful of pearly motes across the lamp’s shade, and then the feathers begin to fade. Not vanish—withdraw. Light unhooks from bone, silk slides back into skin, the nacre settles. He keeps his palms spread and follows them down like a man seeing a tide out and not daring to be angry it has gone. He kisses the place where they tuck back into her, one kiss each side, sacral reverence with a dirty mouth.

“Shh,” he soothes, obscene with tenderness, still deep inside, still moving just enough to keep the medicine warm. “Ride it down.”

She does, hips slowing to little blind rolls that aren’t quite need and aren’t quite memory, breath hitching on the tail-end tremors while he pets her down the long ladder. He releases her throat to wipe her face, thumb catching salt and flicking it into his mouth with an arrogance he can defend in any court that matters. He rubs his nose against hers like a dog, because he can. She laughs, exhausted and feral, and slumps.

“Good girl,” he praises softly, and the praise goes to her knees even though she’s on him.

“Again,” she says, delirious, wicked smile cracked open and shining.

“Many,” he vows, and when the last feather-hum vanishes and the wings are nothing but a memory he intends to bully back out again later, he rolls with her, keeps himself inside, pins her gently to the bed with his palm on her throat and his mouth on her mouth and that slow, endless grind that turns afterglow into a promise.

She goes boneless in stages like a cat bargaining with sleep. He keeps his hand soft at her throat until her pulse forgets war and remembers hymn. He strokes her belly where the ache he put there purrs under his palm. He works her through one more small crest, a tiny bright gasp and a shake that has her nails dragging light along his shoulders and her eyes rolling back for the pleasure of it.

“Look at me,” he tells her, last time for now, and she does, eyes wicked and wrecked, mouth open on a smile that will start rumors two towns over if anyone ever manages to describe it right.

“Say it,” he prompts, because ritual is oxygen.

“Saethyr,” she whispers, lazy and drunk and ruling him with a syllable, and the rune in his palm thrums against her throat, answering, satisfied.

He slides out slow, obscene with care, and the wet sounds make both of them grin like criminals. He palms the mess back into her because he is cruel and because she likes the way he owns what he spills. He wipes his hand on his thigh like a savage and then on a towel like a grown man. He hauls the blanket over her and tucks it with indecent exactitude. He drapes his coat on the bed like a flag.

She sprawls. Truly boneless now, wicked smile sharp as a new knife, wings gone, mark glowing under his handprint, thighs marked where his fingers held, throat under his palm because she likes it there, greedy animal finally fed.

“Queen of the air,” he says, reverent with a smirk, and kisses her ankle because reverence likes to kneel sometimes. “Do it again on me and I’ll start a religion.”

“You already did,” she says, voice wrecked silk. “It’s called you do as you’re told.”

He laughs, low and young, and rolls to his side, one arm under her head, one hand back to her throat, thumb lazy on the mark. The bond tugs, satisfied, greedy still. The city outside exhales. The bed remembers its job. The night decides to give them more hours.

“Drink,” he orders, and holds the cup. She does, obedient and rude, water shining on her lip until he steals it with his mouth. He taps her cheek. “Sleep.”

“Again,” she argues, no heat in it, only promise.

“Many,” he says, because he’s a bastard about keeping his word, and keeps his palm where it belongs while she slides down into the good dark, smiling wicked and wingless, full of him and full of herself, a queen who learned to fly and has every intention of making the ceiling remember how high it’s supposed to be.

Chapter Text

The yard had coughed up its last drill of the day and was licking its sore places. Ladders leaned like tired saints. Rope steamed where boys had sweated knots into it. Jeb stood with his hands on his hips and his breath coming easy, the way it does when your body’s finally honest about being used.

Raw sat on the edge of the loading dock, boots off, toes wiggling in winter air as if the boards were a brook. He watched the yard the way you watch a field you’ve already planted. His hair had invented a new direction. His coat had discovered a pocket full of crumbs and was proud of it.

“You look like you’re about to apologize to the weather,” Raw said without looking over. “Bad habit. Weather never forgives.”

Jeb snorted, wiped his palm down the thigh of his trousers, and took the two steps up to lean beside him. The wood hummed under them. Raw hummed back, as if introducing everybody.

“She’s a wildfire,” Jeb said. He didn’t plan to. The sentence put a hand in his ribs and came out anyway. “I can’t help chasing.”

Raw’s grin was all teeth and childhood. “Better than swamp. Wildfire burns fast. Good for seed.”

Jeb tipped his head back, stared at the slice of sky between the eaves. “Fast is the problem.”

“Fast is the lesson.” Raw fished a pebble out of nowhere and rolled it along his knuckles, a trick his hands had learned without telling him. “You don’t talk to fire with your mouth. You talk with buckets and place to stand. Chase her. Carry water.”

Jeb barked a laugh that didn’t know if it wanted to be relief. “And if I get scorched?”

“Then you were alive,” Raw said, serenely obscene. “Better than walking dry.”

Silence, friendly. The yard’s ropes creaked in a breeze. Somewhere, a dog chose a sunspot. Jeb looked down at his own hands, knuckles nicked, a scar at the first finger that never healed smooth because he kept using it.

“She makes sparks when she’s bored,” he said. “Stands by the wall and the mortar lights up like it’s trying to get promoted. And I think ‘this is a woman who would be a bad idea in a room full of silk,’ and then I think ‘give me the key.’”

Raw’s hum climbed to delighted. “Keys like people who know what doors are for. You are good with doors.”

“I don’t want to ruin it,” Jeb said, quiet, which was as close as he ever got to fear. “Don’t want to make a thing that’s about teeth turn into a story about sorry.”

Raw shoved his shoulder with his foot. “Then don’t,” he said, practical as a broom. “Use hands good. Use words good. Teeth later.”

Jeb laughed again, helpless, and scrubbed a palm over his face as if he could press the grin back where it wouldn’t embarrass him in the mirror later. “Teeth later,” he echoed, and felt the yard agree.

Raw pointed with his chin. “Later might be now,” he said.

Az was at the far end of the arcade, not looking at them, which is how you know she was. She stood with her hands behind her back the way you stand when you’re about to steal something and want the floor to see you coming. The light did indecent things to her cheekbones. The knife Jeb had lent her rode her hip like a joke that had become a habit.

“Chase,” Raw advised. “Carry water.”

Jeb hopped off the dock and went.

Az didn’t wait. She pivoted, walking him backward with a smile that had too much light in it for noon, and cut into the service corridor that fed the storerooms and the laundry. The stones there smelled like soap and metal and secrets that didn’t have the energy to hide. She took his sleeve at the elbow, fingers like a firm instruction, and dragged him through a door that should have complained and didn’t. It shut behind them with a little polite shudder. The storeroom they landed in had sacks of grain, a barrel of oil that nobody trusted, shelves full of jarred things labeled in two hands, and a patch of dust that was about to tell a different story.

She didn’t talk.

He didn’t get to, either. Her hand hit his chest and he hit the shelving and then her mouth hit his and the world took a respectful step back to give them room to be ridiculous.

Kiss wasn’t the word. It was admission. It was proof. It was what the corridors had suspected since the moment she’d corrected his grip in the yard and his shoulders had believed her before the rest of him caught up. She was taller by a breath; she used it to crowd him, knee between his, skirt ridiculous, knife hilt bumping his hip. He made a noise that would’ve humiliated him yesterday and went soft under her hands in the way men talk about when they think nobody’s listening. She kept kissing until his knees put in their resignation.

He slid down two inches. She laughed into his mouth, delighted and a little savage.

“Say it,” she teased, breath roughening. “Confession.”

He caught her wrists because his palms had to hold something or he was going to start praying. “Yours,” he said, too fast to be careful. “If you want me.”

Her eyes flashed, fox and command both. “I am considering,” she said, primly obscene, and took his lower lip between her teeth like a tithe. He swore, honest and ugly; she smiled with all her bad manners visible and swallowed the next word off his tongue as if she were merciful.

She didn’t stop moving even when she held still. Her thigh slotted between his legs. His back found a stud in the wall and thanked it for existing. Her hands slid up under his shirt like she’d been annoyed by cloth since childhood and wanted to free the world of unnecessary layers. Jeb’s breath broke when her palms found his skin—flat, warm, confident—and learned the line of his ribs as if she’d paid for the survey.

“Words?” he managed, a reflex learned from a man who had taught him what hand meant home.

“Yes,” she said, simple, permission and promise both. “More.”

He gave her more. He took her waist, thumb pressing where heat blooms, and felt the way her body told the truth: hunger already building, backbone polite, control not the kind you use to leave, the kind you use to make staying interesting. He let himself handle her. He didn’t go polite with it. He dragged her in, low and hard, and took her mouth like a man who understood this was the last thing he would ever learn and intended to get an A.

She broke it first, just long enough to laugh again, breathless. “You kiss like you mean to live here,” she said.

“I do,” he said, no wit left, and she went soft, a dangerous thing to be in a storeroom with a man who’d just told you the floor plan of his heart.

“Good,” she said, voice wrecked. “Show me.”

He did. He slid five fingers up the back of her thigh under the stupid, perfect skirt, paused at the top because teasing is loyalty when you keep the promise after, and then palmed the curve of her ass with a growl that was gratitude wearing arrogance. She arched against him like a sword being drawn. The shelf at his back decided it would be proud to hold them.

“Knife,” he breathed, sanity’s last little lamp.

“Shh,” she said, and unbuckled it, dropped it into a grain sack without looking, the blade kissing wheat with a whisper. “There. Safe.” She took his jaw in her hand and inspected him like a general checks a line. “Again.”

He kissed her hard enough to make the jars rattle. She laughed into it because she was the kind of woman who laughed at weather. He slid his other hand across her belly and lower, respectful of cloth, disrespectful of it in every way that counts. The heel of his palm found the place that tells you what kind of day you’re going to have. She gasped into his mouth, not surprised, more like the truth had announced itself on time.

“Greedy,” she accused, pleased.

“You want greedy,” he said, and pushed her up against the shelving by the hips. He bent. He mouthed the place where her pulse stuttered at the hinge of her jaw. He bit, delicate, a promise of later that made her body remember how to fall forward. Her hands went to his hair and his shoulders and the space between his shoulder blades like she had been dying to learn the map and resented the delay.

“Tell me you’ll let me,” he asked against her throat, because he wanted the word in the room when they started running.

“I’ll let you,” she said, viciously soft. “I’ll let you and then I’ll make you ask me to let you again.”

He laughed into her skin, stubble rasping, and she made a strangled noise that would embarrass a woman who didn’t intend to repeat it often. He dragged his hand up her thigh and under, fingers finding the tender crease, the silk getting in the way, the heat not minding. He pressed. He circled. He didn’t rush. He was not a starving man; he was a man being fed properly for the first time in a week.

“Fuck,” she said, losing diction. “Fuck, Jeb.”

“Good,” he said, dizzy with the good of it. “Say my name again.”

“Jeb,” she repeated, mean and sweet, and rocked into his palm with the smallest, dirtiest roll of her hips a storeroom had ever seen. He wanted to be kinder. He was already being kind.

She shoved him then, sudden, laughing, making him stumble a step until his knees actually did the thing they promised earlier and went unreliable. She followed him down, a queen who had just decided to sit in a field, and straddled his thigh in a scandal the grain sacks loved. His back hit the shelves; the jar of pickled pears above them made a sound like gossip swallowing.

“Mine,” she said, ceremonial and indecent, hands catching his wrists and pinning them to the wood at either side of his head just to see if he’d let her.

“Yes,” he said at once, because men who tell the truth get laid right. “Yours. If you want me.”

She smiled like a criminal made of silk. “I want you,” she said, and kissed him for saying it without bargaining. The kiss was better than the last one, which enraged both of them with how stupidly good life could be. She ground down on his thigh, slow, a practice run, just to watch his eyes. They did what she wanted. He swore into her mouth and tried for leverage that didn’t exist yet.

“Say please,” she mocked, terrible and perfect.

“Please,” he said, because fast was the lesson and he was done pretending he didn’t learn quick. “Please, Az.”

She purred, honest, filthy, a sound with hips in it. “Later,” she crooned, because she was a bastard about timing. “Teeth later. Now I’m going to ruin your patience and you’re going to thank me.”

“I already do,” he said, helpless. He drew a steadying breath like a man on a ladder, got his hands back when she let him, and put them where they belonged: on her, on the hinge of her hips, on the elegant weapon of her waist. He lifted her a fraction and set a rhythm that would be a sin on a church step. She rode the muscle of his thigh, her skirt indecent, her breath hissing, her fingers leaving little crescents in his shoulders through his shirt.

“Look at me,” he told her, because he’d learned the difference between a man who asks and a man who orders and he wanted to be the one she listened to when she had nowhere else to put her eyes.

She did. Her mouth parted. Her spine forgot politics. Sparks climbed the storeroom wall in discreet little stitches and went out, embarrassed to be caught. She laughed, delighted and furious at herself for the honesty, and kissed him again, hard.

“Good,” he said into her teeth, and felt her start to shake, the right shake, the one the body gives a man when it’s about to be unkind in the best way. He slid a hand between them, found her through the damp silk, pressed exactly, the way a man presses when he’s been paying attention for a month. She swore, exquisitely, every title anyone had ever given her unspooling into vulgarity, and came against his thigh with a little bitten-off noise that made him see white.

He held her through it and didn’t crow like a boy because he’d been raised by a man who taught him that some victories are houses you move into, not flags you wave. He breathed with her. He set her down when the shake went to aftershock. He kissed her mouth soft because he wanted to live.

She stared at him, wrecked and cunning, and then tipped her head back and let out a laugh that the corridor would eavesdrop on and try to pronounce later without success.

“Fuck,” she said, wiping her lip with the back of her hand like a sinner washing. “Terrible idea.”

“Best one I’ve ever had,” he said, and then, because he wasn’t going to be less brave than he’d been ten breaths ago, “Again.”

“Many,” she promised, feral, and then cocked her head like she’d remembered the day had hours and the city wanted them. “But not here. Not now. I have to pretend to be polite at a room full of chairs. You have to teach boys the ladder doesn’t care about their feelings.”

“Later,” he agreed, swallowing down the urge to beg and liking the discipline that replaced it. He slid the knife out of the grain sack, checked its edge because he’s that kind of man, and buckled it back on her hip with a respect that made her pupils misbehave.

“Good boy,” she said, purely to be evil.

He smiled without shame. “Say it like that again and I’ll embarrass you in a stairwell.”

She flashed all her teeth. “Promises, promises.”

She stood and pulled him up with her like he weighed nothing, straightened his collar with a little proprietary flick that did indecent things to his heartbeat, and opened the door. She looked back once, inventorying the room and his posture and her own mouth with a ruthlessness he admired and intended to survive.

“Chase,” she suggested, walking away.

“Carry water,” he said under his breath, and Raw, two corridors away with his ears in places they shouldn’t reach, chuckled and hummed a satisfied chord to the flagstones.

Jeb leaned against the cool wall and breathed like a man who’d run a mile he intended to run again. Then he went back to the yard and broke down ladders for boys who were going to trip over their own feet thinking about the queen’s sister and a man with a steady jaw. The storeroom dust settled. The jars gossiped. The knife on Az’s hip remembered his hands.

Night would come. Teeth later would become now. And if wildfire burned fast, he’d carry water with both hands and call that religion.

Chapter Text

Lavender waits where light is gentled into honesty: the conservatory off the inner court, glass sweating with dusk, citrus leaves glossed and patient, the long table laid with grafting knives and a bowl of clean water. No crown. A shawl. Hands that can sign decrees and strip a thorn from a stem without bleeding.

DG arrives with the archive’s dust still in her hair and the ribbon purring under her skin like a cat that knows dinner is soon. Cain comes because he always does, a length of shadow and weather, and stops in the doorway with his shoulder to the jamb, glove off, brand banked. He smells the room. He tastes the word confession even before Lavender breathes it.

“Close the door,” Lavender says. Cain does it with two fingers, gentling the latch until even the glass approves.

“I have a truth,” the queen says, as if announcing a death.

“Yours,” DG answers. The mark at her throat warms. Saethyr sits behind her tongue and waits to be invited.

Lavender doesn’t sit. She stands like penance. “You read our histories,” she says to DG, gaze steady. “How the first Lavender made treaty with the tree-line. How the dawn prince brought a word to wake our walls. How red assurance bound crown and court.”

DG nods once, hard. “I read what we admitted.”

“We didn’t admit the price,” Lavender says.

The conservatory hushes. The citrus breathes. Cain’s field lowers a hair along the room’s edges without touching either woman. He is a lid, not a hand.

“Say it plain,” DG says, and the kindness in it lands like a blade dressed in velvet. “Not optics.”

Lavender’s mouth twitches, self-mockery crisp. “Optics,” she says. “I have spent a life making light pretend it liked us. Enough.”

She turns her back on them both, not to hide, to look out at the black garden where old hawthorns shoulder the wind as if it were a cousin with bad manners. “The dawn prince came at our asking,” she begins. “He stood where you’re standing now. He woke the walls with the word he kept under his tongue like a seed. He told my ancestor what it would cost to keep the North out of the city: respect for the hedges, iron off the roots, a bridge between our houses built on consent.”

“Consent,” Cain repeats, flat. The word has teeth in his mouth.

Lavender nods without turning. “The first Lavender signed. Then the court—our court, your court—whispered fear into her ear and greed into her hand. She wanted assurance the trees wouldn’t change their minds when winter got cruel. She wanted the prince’s word without having to keep hers clean.” Lavender’s shoulders settle. It looks like dropping a sword she has used for too long. “So she took it.”

“Stole,” DG says. The ribbon under her sternum tightens like a knot someone pulls from both sides.

Lavender dips her chin. “Stole. Stole by tricking him into a circle that pretended to be a dance and was a snare. Stole by laying iron filings where his feet would step after promising there would be no iron. Stole by lacing honey with a binding and calling it wine. They cut his hair. They took a drop of his blood under a vow not freely given. They braided the red thread through his palm and our queen’s sternum and called it the Covenant. He felt it bite and realized it wasn’t a promise; it was a leash.”

The glass goes cold. Raw would say the stones pulled their ribs in. Cain doesn’t move.

DG doesn’t breathe. “What did they do to him,” she asks, very quietly, because asking ugly things correctly is part of being queen.

Lavender’s voice goes polite, which in her means grief has decided it will be composed or it will kill something. “They tried to keep him,” she says. “The old magic did not tolerate it. Dawn accepts bridles only when it chooses. He burned.”

DG’s head lifts, fox-bright and horrified. “Burned?”

“Turned to ash,” Lavender says, looking at the old hawthorns as if their thorns might pry a splinter of guilt out of her palm. “Not fire like torches. Fire like dawn when it decides fog is a lie. He went to light in a breath and taught the room a lesson it has sung to itself for centuries: that consent is older than law. What remained of him—ash and a scent like sap and rain—we bound into the foundation stone anyway. We stole his name from our books. We told ourselves we had allied, not taken.”

Silence, large as a cathedral. DG puts a hand to her throat as if the mark might be choking her; it isn’t. It glows soft, listening. The red in her chest sulks and then paces.

Lavender turns at last. There are no tears. There is a woman who has learned to keep her face still while knives do work inside. “My mother was told a pretty version,” she says. “I was given the prettier one. When I realized the difference—when I found the knotted folio in the drawer where queens keep truths that don’t like light—I did what cowardice and love choose together. I maintained a story I could manage and swallowed the one I owed.”

“Why tell me now,” DG asks, the cruelty kind in her. “Why not when I was a girl. Why not yesterday.”

“Because your ribbon is honest,” Lavender says simply. “Because the mark at your throat glows when he breathes and the walls hum when you say Saethyr and the city has started remembering what dawn feels like when it belongs to itself.” She glances once toward Cain, gives him a credit she hasn’t put on paper. “Because a man with a brand on his palm walked into my council chamber and made numbers tell the truth and I realized I had run out of excuses for letting our walls lie.”

“I’m sorry,” she adds, finally, to DG, and it’s not the courtly sorry. It is the one that costs.

DG looks at her mother and does not flinch from the knife of disappointment; she picks it up, tests its weight, and puts it down. “We set it right,” she says. “We name him. We unbind what we can. We return what isn’t ours even if it’s power. We ask what the Dawn Court requires. We pay debts forward until the ledgers sing.”

Lavender laughs once, brittle, wrecked. “You were always impossible.”

“Yes,” DG says, and steps into the room’s center because center is where work stands. “Myrrh will have names. The archive knows where we buried the lies. We unseal the hawthorn stands. We lift iron off roots. We stop purchasing compliance from forests like they owe us receipts. We take the ribbon off any altar that didn’t ask for it.”

Her eyes go to the old trees. “We speak to what we stole. We apologize out loud where it can hear.”

Cain doesn’t speak. He enumerates. The room can smell it on him like rain about to organize itself. He sees a pyre no one has raised yet. He sees a zealot’s mouth shaping words like corruption and witch and cleanse. He sees a noble’s hand counting what he thinks DG will cost him and deciding the easiest economy is fire. He sees the north gate. He sees a tent with a screen. He sees a thin red-threaded knife trying to learn his palm’s language and refusing to conjugate.

He writes a list in his bones.

Gate rotations tightened on rumor nights. Runners in the alleys that don’t show on maps. A rope-lattice over the square where idiots like to build scaffolds. Soap in every barracks and water on the boil at first bell so if the city decides to remember its old trick of burning a woman it can be interrupted with buckets and law. Names of chants men used last time the world was scared; choke them out with better songs. Priests who like fire: counted, measured, disarmed. The man behind the screen: his scent, his coin, his mistake. A second set of boots under DG’s bed that are not his and never will be, because there will be a night he can’t be in two places at once and he refuses to let math burn what he’s sworn to hold. The gauntlet, back on the table. The glove, off.

Lavender watches him think murder and finds that she is grateful she doesn’t have to.

“What do you need,” she asks DG, queen to queen in a room that has heard worse bargains.

“Authority,” DG says. “Not paper. Permission.” She tips her chin toward the garden. “To enter the hawthorn stands with Myrrh and Raw and the man who wears the rune and ask the trees to speak. To open the part of the archive that bites and let it bite. To tell the court we are not asking if they approve and offer them the consolation prize of being recorded in the version where they survived their own cowardice.”

Behind her, Cain’s brand warms his hand. The mark at her throat answers. The ribbon tug-tugs, greedy, pleased. The room hums a little and then pretends it didn’t.

“You have it,” Lavender says, voice low and mind made. “All of it. We will announce a Reconciliation. We will call it by its true name in High Speech so men who like Latin don’t get to hide under it. We will offer tithe to the tree-line. We will return the prince’s ash to the place the treaty said to keep it.”

“Where,” DG asks, reverent.

“In the oldest hawthorn in the north orchard,” Lavender says, and grief makes the smile she doesn’t let onto her face. “We used it for maypoles when I was young. We were so pleased with ourselves.”

DG’s eyes glisten, not tears so much as the pressure in a pipe that’s about to be useful. “We’ll go at dawn,” she says. “Because that’s when doors change their minds.”

Cain tilts his head a fraction at the word. Dawn. He pictures himself in the orchard with a spear he no longer needs and a rope he does, watching the white breath of men who don’t know yet that they are showing up, letting the first light catch on steel and decide to mind him. He pictures DG with her hands on bark, saying sorry like a queen says yes—low, exact, absolutely.

“Motion,” Lavender says, half to herself, the part of her that knows meetings making sure the chair is straight. “Chancellor Vell will fuss. Rell will smile his grease and ask if it’s wise to upset the trees before harvest. We’ll tell them harvest doesn’t belong to liars.”

“Rell’s already bought a knife that thinks ribbon is a toy,” Cain says, very mild. “He’s going to be upset about the price of ash.”

Lavender looks at him, physician to a man who doesn’t complain. “Your hand,” she says.

“Striped,” he says. “The brand likes the argument. Tutor will sigh in Latin. I’ll pour salve and pretend I meant to bleed.”

DG steps into him because talking about pain puts an idea in her mouth that requires pressure. He sets his palm over her throat through the shawl, and the rune thrums against her mark with a steady, comforting thud. The tremor he hasn’t admitted to having leaves his arm. The room, romantic fool, hums.

“We can’t unburn him,” DG says, to Mother, to Cain, to the trees and the stones and the piece of herself that has always been knife and always wanted to be bandage. “We can stop using his name like a stolen coin.”

“We can give him back his,” Myrrh says from the doorway, having arrived like a polite theft and decided to make the room smarter. They hold a thin packet tied with twine rough as bark. Their mouth is set in a line that means someone has called their annotations opinionated and they intend to embroider the word on a pillow. “Found it where the liars didn’t look,” they add, gentle as a slap. “In a ledger of debts paid early. Fae don’t like to write certain names. They write around. But the dust told me where it sat.”

Lavender’s hands tremble and still. “Say it,” she asks, and her voice is a woman holding a cup she is ashamed to drop.

Myrrh unties the packet. The name lies there in a script that refuses to settle for straight lines. Dawn’s hand. It tastes like apple blossom and iron and the sound of rain you can’t quite hear through stone. DG says it aloud, careful and fierce, and the trees outside the glass lift their thorns like a salute given with terrible grace.

Raw, somewhere in the hall, laughs once, pleased, as if someone had set a bone in a wall.

“We set it right,” DG says again, softer and more dangerous, as vows get when they fit. “We set it right.”

“And anyone who tries to set you on fire for it,” Cain says, finally, as if discussing the price of soap, “I will put out.”

Lavender’s laugh startles even herself. “With water?”

“With anything that works,” he says, mild as a hammer. He studies the queen like a problem he intends to fix with paperwork and weather. “We’ll do this clean,” he adds, as if means airtight. “Witnesses and stone. Rope and record. Men can’t burn what the walls have decided to love.”

DG turns her face into his palm and sighs yes against the beat he lends her. “Dawn,” she says, to the window, to the tree-line, to the name Myrrh brought in like contraband. “Meet me.”

The glass fogs a little. The citrus leaves shiver. The old hawthorns rest their thorns against the night as if it were a door they’re willing to open in the morning if asked correctly.

Lavender sits at last, not collapse, concession to weight. Her hands, empty, look like what they are: instruments that will be used to sign a public apology and to braid a daughter’s hair before dawn so wind doesn’t try to claim it.

“Tea,” she says, absurd, perfect.

“Water,” Cain corrects, and takes the cup to rinse the dust out of the room’s mouth, while writing avenues and barricades and names in the air no one else can see. He is already building the map of who dies if they try; he is already counting buckets.

DG stands between a queen and a man and a grove that will either forgive or learn how to, and smiles like dawn when it takes a bite out of fog and decides to keep eating until the field can breathe.

Chapter Text

Myrrh’s workroom lived between a throat and a stomach—narrowed by shelves, then opening into a round space where heat had manners. Copper bowls nested like sleeping coins. A brazier breathed dragon-breath through a grate. The walls bore hooks for tools that weren’t entirely sure they were tools and not arguments. On the central slab: a long cloth, a strip of hawthorn bark, a shallow dish of milk gone glossy with skin, a sprig of apple blossom out of season because Myrrh has a way with time when it pretends to be botanical.

“Don’t touch the milk,” Myrrh said conversationally as they unwrapped the blade. “It’s listening for wrong names.”

Cain leaned a shoulder to stone at the edge of the circle, glove already off. The brand in his palm sat quiet, coal under ash. DG’s ribbon purred low under her skin and pulled her forward like a leash she held the other end of. She tucked her hair behind her ear and said nothing, because rooms where old things take off their coats like silence better.

The knife wasn’t much to look at first. No elaborate guard. No gem-fat pommel. A curve like a smile that had thought twice. The steel wore the color of water at dawn, blue sunk under grey. Along the spine, shallow notches ran irregular as scars on a river rock. The hilt was hawthorn wood wrapped in linens faded to the brown of pressed leaves, cross-bound with a fine thread you had to squint to see. It didn’t glint. It considered.

“Fae-well steel,” Myrrh said, pleased and annoyed in equal measure. “Forged when certain families still whispered over wells because heaven forbid water arrive without gossip. The ore’s mixed: a vein of sky-iron that fell where it wasn’t welcome, a ribbon of bog iron that doesn’t know how to be ashamed, and three nails pulled out of a gate nobody builds anymore. Quenched in skimmed milk and a kingfisher’s shadow, if the lying old man who traded it to me remembered correctly. It cuts ties. It mends them. Front to sever. Back to splice. Notches to remember who touched it. Keep your fingers behind the thought, Princess.”

DG reached with both hands, cautious and greedy. The blade didn’t hum for her the way Cain’s brand does; it lifted like a dog deciding whether to be convinced. Then her thumb traced one shallow notch in the spine and something under the linen binding warmed like a hidden coal.

“Because we asked nicely,” she murmured. The mark at her throat smoldered. The bond tugged Cain’s chest. He didn’t move. He let himself be tugged and made the tug look like patience.

Myrrh set a ledger open to a page with a hand-drawn figure eight that refused to lie flat. “There are rules,” they said, the way you speak to people who plan to live. “Edge splits oaths when edge asks the right name. Spine closes them when spine is wet with consent. Blood improves accuracy but ruins appetites; we’ll start with milk. Never lay the blade across your own ribbon for fun. Don’t point it at the brand unless you mean to make soap.”

“The assassin’s toy tried to speak my palm,” Cain said, mildly. He lifted his hand so the ache-stripe the red-thread blade had drawn could be seen in the lamplight. It had faded to a line of warmth, a stubborn ember under his skin. “It didn’t conjugate the verbs.”

“This one understands the grammar,” Myrrh said. “It was made by people who could read the parts of speech in a promise.” They dipped two fingers in milk and drew a small, severe sigil in the air: a loop, a hook, a bar. The air held it like a note you could bite if you had the right teeth. “Say the word that suits your mouth,” they told DG. “We don’t make you misspeak.”

“Saethyr,” DG said, and the sigil settled into her wrist like a bracelet that only existed at the temperature of thought.

They put practice on the table. Myrrh likes props. A red thread knotted three times around a pair of iron nails stood for oaths stolen and feigned legitimate. A length of hemp cord, cat’s-cradled and spit-wet with a boy’s false swear, for the parts of the city that learned to lie so they could eat. A ribbon of her own magic, thin as a hair, teased off DG’s sternum and looped around Cain’s wrist with the ribbon’s smug confidence that it belonged there.

“Not that,” Cain said gently, when Myrrh’s fingers tilted toward their bond. “We’ll practice on other people’s mistakes.”

“Coward,” Myrrh said, affectionate, and tipped their chin toward the false knot. “Princess. Cut.”

DG stood within the chalk circle Myrrh had written under the cloth in a hand that believed in straight lines. The knife found her grip as if someone had taught them to dance at a summer fair and their bodies remembered which hand belonged where. She breathed the three-breath ritual Cain loved teaching her because it turns stubborn into useful. On the third breath she angled the blade and lifted it with the respect you owe a tool that’s older than the building. The edge kissed the false knot.

It didn’t slice; it thought.

Steel met thread and decided. The knot parted with a sound like a tight throat letting a sob go. The hemp relaxed, suddenly string again, as if the lies holding it taut had been evicted. DG exhaled and nearly laughed, delighted and dangerous.

“Good,” Myrrh said, almost smug. “Spine?”

DG turned the blade over, cautious of the point by reflex, and laid the spine along the wild ends she’d made. The notches drank a drop of milk where it beaded on the cord. DG thought splice with her whole body the way her magic does when it’s being shameless, and the cord woke up mended. Not the same knot. A better, simpler one that wouldn’t choke anyone who trusted it.

Cain moved enough to set the weight of his palm at his throat like a man who’s watched a child sleep and remembered how to breathe. She looked to him to watch her. He was already watching her the way starving men watch a hand with bread.

“Again,” Myrrh said, as if they’d expected something harder and were glad to have misjudged. “Try the iron vow.”

DG touched the red thread on the iron nails and flinched. “Ugly,” she said, honest. “Feels like hair collected from a brush nobody washed.”

“Cut it,” Cain murmured, because asking is part of holding.

She did. The knife’s edge nipped the thread on one word in a language that didn’t have a polite use for the concept more, and the red hissed as it broke, spiteful and shocked like silk deciding it would rather be smoke. DG turned her wrist and laid the spine to the iron, priest-honest with the part about consent: not closing what never had it, only sealing the wound where the theft had been. The nails clinked against each other, newly useless, relieved.

“Now learn to write,” Myrrh said briskly, producing a bone awl and a pot of silver ink that did not behave as ink should. “Belts. Holsters. Your man is a walking problem; we will make his leather complicit.”

Cain looked down without looking down at the weapons belt on the table: good cowhide, oiled, worn where his fingers worry at it when he reads ugly numbers. Aila’s neat stitch had fixed a rip near the buckle last week and the stitch already smelled like the barracks laundry. He set the belt down reverently as if hands were being laid on a head.

DG rolled her sleeves and the ribbon under her skin lit her forearms with a foxfire glow. She took the awl like a pen. Myrrh’s diagram in the ledger showed eight small sigils for leather intended to hold hard truths: one that bites back at edges that want to play at cutting souls, one that reflects coercion into shame, one that makes a holster sulk if a knife lies, one that turns spilled blood into warning instead of appetite, one that keeps a hand from shaking when it’s better that it doesn’t, one that remembers to drink water, one that encourages soap to find it, one that tells the wearer when a red thread is trying to pretend to belong.

“Start there,” Myrrh said, tapping the last. “The city will be awash in counterfeit ribbon before the week ends if Rell realized he bought a toy that humiliated itself in public.”

DG braced the belt over a rolled cloth. She scored the first curve into the leather with the awl, careful and slow. Cain stood like a dog who has been told to stay and is staying with theological devotion. His hunger wasn’t sex, not only. It was relief clenched tight enough to make a man tremble if he let the tremble out. It was the appetite of someone who has learned to live prepared to fight everything he can’t see and is finally watching someone intelligent and kind arm the world to help him. He wanted to eat the sight of her doing the work. He wanted to lick the ink off her fingers. He wanted to pick her up and put her on the table and say good girl until the room turned its face to the wall.

He kept very still.

“Hands,” she said softly, a private joke and a ritual both.

He turned them up, obedient. The red slid off the heels of her palms and twined his wrists in silk—ownership with a sense of humor. She set the belt across his forearms so he held his own armor while she etched it. The brand in his palm thrummed in time with the bite of the awl. His breath turned into a metronome that she used as a straightedge.

She pricked the leather with a clean series of tiny holes in a pattern that made no sense until she filled them with silver. The ink smelled like myrrh and smoke and a coin struck for law. The sigil took as it dried, not glittering but resting into the hide the way tattoos learn to look like they belong to skin.

“What’s that one,” Cain asked, low, because talking kept his hands where they belonged.

“Ribbon-bite warning,” she said, painting the last stroke and lifting her brush to let a single thread of silver fall into the final notch. “When a red thread that isn’t mine reaches for you, your belt will hum. Your hand will burn in opinion. You won’t be able to pretend you didn’t notice.”

He grunted; the sound had too much relief in it to be proud. “Good.”

“Next,” she said, and set the awl elsewhere.

They worked: she inscribed; he held; Myrrh corrected a curve here and there with a fingernail and a satisfied tsk, then handed DG a pinch of ground carnelian to mix into the silver for the sigil that fortifies steadiness. When she drew that one at the inside of the buckle, Cain closed his eyes without permission for the second it took to imagine his hand not shaking the next time a boy bled in front of him and there was too much paper between him and the knife that had done it.

“Drink,” she said absentmindedly without looking, and it offended him how good it felt to be told. He drank the water Myrrh put to his lips and swallowed wrong once because his mouth wanted to laugh. The brand under his palm lit and dimmed as ink soaked. The stripe the assassin’s toy had painted on him stopped singing and went quiet like a scolded child.

“Now one for me,” DG said finally, rolling Cain’s smaller backup holster under her hand, the one he wears hidden and almost hospitality. “No blade bites you without me approving it first.” She drew a thin sigil behind the seam where leather meets the lining, a hook and a heart and a line interrupted on purpose. It read mine, with a layer of protect underneath for the part of the world that pretends not to notice possession unless it saves something.

She wrote one more without being asked. It lived along the outer edge where a man’s hip rubs the belt when he breathes. The strokes were simple and a little rude. She didn’t explain it. Myrrh didn’t ask. Cain’s mouth curved before he knew it, feral, then eased, then went thoughtful.

“Testing,” Myrrh announced when the silver went matte. They plucked up the cat’s cradle cord and looped it across Cain’s wrist. It tightened with a small, defensive jerk, as if worried that honesty would be a diet that lasted too long. DG took the rune knife by the spine and touched the back of it to the cord with the gentleness she uses when she’s telling her body to stand down. The notches on the back whispered a word that tried to be promise in three languages at once.

The cord let go. No cut. No drama. The knot unmade itself without spite, and the loose end sunned itself like a snake that had finally shed. The belt in Cain’s hands warmed under his forearms. The brand in his palm thrummed yes, that.

“Again,” Cain said, because discipline and superstition are neighbors. “Now make it hurt me.”

DG smiled with too many teeth and took up a ribbon. Not hers. Myrrh had brought a fake—clever ink on silk, spiced with sap to fool fools. She slid it around Cain’s wrist and gave it a coy little tug. The belt in his hands hummed like a post when Raw hums to it. The brand on his palm burned a sharp, clean sting. Not harm. Opinion.

Cain’s lip lifted. “Good.” He didn’t bare his throat. He didn’t have to. She set the fake aside, and for one insolent heartbeat laid a single long red strand from her sternum to the back of his hand where the brand burned. The room got smaller and kinder, and Myrrh pretended to find a tool in a drawer until decency recovered.

“Now cut and mend for the king you may need,” Myrrh said softly, hand light on the ledger, because a day was coming when something tied wrong would require kindness that looked like cruelty. “Belt goes with you. Knife stays here until it’s time. We print the sigils onto other boys’ leather and make them accident-proof against greed.”

DG nodded, fierce and tired and full of light. She set the knife down. The blade took a breath and went quiet. She moved back to Cain like a tide returning to shore and pushed his sleeve to make room for her hand. He didn’t need to be told. He put his palm to her throat.

“Mine to hold,” he said, ritual and law and a man who needs a new thing to hit with and now has it. She sighed yes against his pulse in a tone that made the knife look away out of respect.

“Hunger,” Myrrh observed cheerfully, collecting the bowl of milk before Cain could start imposing on it. “Productive. You both look like people who plan to survive.”

“Plan to set things right,” DG corrected, eyes on Cain’s mouth, then his hand, then the belt, then the city she wears behind her eyes when she eats. “And then survive.”

Cain gathered the belt up and slung its weight into his palm like a promise he’d already kept. The silver in the sigils looked dull, humble, like they meant to do work. The leather warmed, learning him. He reached for the holster and handed it to DG to fasten it for him because there are indulgences a man can afford once the knives are on his side.

“Hands,” she said, and he offered his wrists like a man making an altar with what he has. The ribbon hummed. The brand answered. Outside, far down the hall, Raw laughed at something only the floor was kind enough to say out loud.

“Again,” he told her when she finished, because she had taught him greed where safety is concerned and he doesn't intend to stop ordering it. “Mark the rest of my leather. Then we go teach boys how to listen when their belts tell them the city is lying.”

“Many,” she promised, and bent her head over his weapons like prayer, etching little law into every loop and strap while he watched her with the kind of hunger that finally trusts the hand that feeds it, and intends to be very, very well-fed.

Chapter Text

It starts the way summer storms announce themselves: the air too bright, the skin too keen. DG wakes already crackling, nerves misfiring like fireflies in a jar, and the red under her breastbone pulls tight as a bowstring. Every breath tastes like cedar and a dare. The ribbon hums greedy little yeses. Her name goes thin on her tongue.

Cain feels the turn at the hinge of the day and shuts the world out without noise. Bolt, latch, a palm laid to stone until the room learns a heavier, kinder pressure. Curtains drawn, lamps down to a river of amber. Pine and leather and her, braided into a nest: his old coat thrown like a standard, thick wool, clean linen, water within reach, a slice of apple sweating on a plate, a cloth beside it because discipline does not leave when weather arrives.

“Here,” he says, and his voice drops the field a shade, edges padded, center bright.

She goes to him on bare feet and bad manners, already shaking. He takes her wrists, turns her hands up, and the red comes without being called, twining his bones in silk like a promise that knows where it belongs. His glove is gone. The brand under his skin warms. He sets his palm over the glow at her throat and closes his hand until the tremor finds a name and obeys it.

“Three breaths,” he orders, already counting for her. “In. Out. In.”

By the third, the shake is not panic anymore. It is weather. He tilts her chin with two fingers. “Ask,” he reminds, because the ritual works best when she makes it true.

“Help me,” she says, voice shredded and grateful. “Hold me.”

“Good girl,” he says, and the room chooses sides.

He ruins her in stages.

First is stillness: his palm a collar of heat at her throat, his other hand broad at her spine, easing her down into the nest and making the air obey. He makes her breathe until the ribbon’s frantic hum smooths into a purr and Saethyr sits under her tongue like a spark waiting for the correct wind. He doesn’t hurry. He waits until her eyes are here.

Second is hands: mapping her like a field he already owns and will still walk every fence of, slow, exact, patient. Knuckles along the wing-socket under skin. Thumb pressing the clean ache low on her belly where want lives. Praise given in quiet drops, each one a matchstick. His palm on her throat whenever her body tries to scatter; his palm on her sternum whenever her magic tries to riot. The rune thrums. The mark answers. The bond pulls, greedy, pleased.

Third is the tide: his mouth at the hinge of her jaw, at the pulse under her ear, at the place where her breath forgets its lessons. His voice, precise as a metronome, keeping time while the room’s corners grow heavy and her spine learns the song again. “Breathe,” he says, until her breath is a rope she can hold.

Fourth is mercy: he carries her to the mirror because she asks without words, because the red ribbon is already threading itself visible in the glass, a wet stroke of color from her sternum to his chest, to his hand, to anything the two of them decide to own. He stands behind her like a verdict, body a wall, jaw at her temple, palm at her throat.

“Look,” he tells her softly. “See yourself being kept.”

She does. The glass fogs. The mark at her throat glows a tender ember. The red loops them together in the reflection in a way no one else will ever understand properly. His eyes in the glass are winter-clear and ruined with intent. His hand tightens when the tremor threatens to return. It doesn’t. It kneels.

“Words,” he prompts, not cruel, necessary.

“Saethyr,” she breathes, and the room’s pressure changes; the mirror remembers dawn; the nest purrs; something old in the walls sighs yes.

The world narrows. The bond closes its teeth.

He joins her with a slow inevitability that feels like a door being pushed all the way to. No rush, no show—just fit, depth, relief. Her mouth opens in the glass and forgets the right shapes for letters. He wraps an arm across her ribs and holds her to the mirror’s truth, his other hand owning her throat with a gentleness that has nothing to do with softness. The rhythm he builds is a vow turned into motion: measured, relentless, precise enough to be kind.

“Look,” he says again, forehead to her temple, voice a grit-sweet scrape. “Watch what surrender looks like on you.”

She does. She watches her own spine learn worship. She watches his palm cover the glow he gave her. She watches the ribbon shine like spilled dawn between them. She watches her mouth fail at her own name, replaced by little broken prayers that aren’t words at all. He keeps her eyes open with orders she likes too much to disobey.

When the crest comes, it takes her legs and leaves her rule intact. She breaks against the glass with a sound that would embarrass a lesser room into silence; this one hums back. He holds, he counts, he steadies; she rides; she falls; she rises. The mirror fogs, clears, fogs again under her breath. Her hands slip and he pins them to the frame and the ribbon slides higher on his wrists and bites happily when she obeys.

“Now?” she begs, fierce and wrecked.

“Now,” he allows, law turning to benediction.

The bond latches. The lock takes. It feels like inevitability choosing a shape and sticking to it, a hot ring of certainty closing around the place where they fit and refusing to let go until every trembling part of her remembers whom it belongs to. She gasps, sobs, laughs, then sobs again; the sound becomes a purr so low he feels it in his bones. He stays, a tide holding her to shore, and rocks her through the aftershocks until time forgets it was ever sharp.

“Breathe,” he says, softer now. “I have you.”

She tries to say her name and finds she doesn’t need it. She finds yes instead. She gives it up again and again, a coin minted fresh each time his voice asks for it. He keeps his palm over her throat through all of it, steady heat, steady law, the rune thrumming against the mark until the mirror might as well be a window into the house of their vows.

When the latch loosens and the world gives them back their edges, he doesn’t let her fall. He lifts. Carries. Water. A slice of apple pressed to her tongue. A laugh stolen from a mouth too stupid with relief to hold it. His mouth at her hairline. “Good girl,” murmured into skin that finally stopped shaking.

“Again,” she whispers, skin shining, voice barely a thing.

“Many,” he promises, lining the nest with his coat and the scent of pine, leather, and her. He lays her on her side, palm returning to her throat like a compass that knows home, and makes the room small and bright and theirs while the mirror keeps the story like a scandalous saint.

Outside, the city breathes shallow and then steadies. Inside, he keeps working his patient ruin until language is optional and the ribbon purrs itself to sleep against his heart.

Chapter Text

They convene because the court cannot help itself; if a room doesn’t have teeth, it grows some. The ceiling arches like it wants to tut. The benches floss their pearls. There is a new stack of paper in front of Chancellor Vell, and it has the look of something that thinks it’s a solution because it arrived in a stack.

Rell stands with a smile slick as a fresh-spread oil stain. He has traded his usual pin for a new one shaped like a thin, tasteful no. “Customary review,” he says, voice syruped with habit. “And a small motion to keep our… equilibrium.”

Cain’s field drops at the edges of the chamber, just a shade; it turns the air obedient, not heavy. He stands at DG’s left, glove off, brand banked. Aila watches from the gallery, pencil ready, face set to accounting. Brogan takes the east door and the door takes orders. Raw hums to the flagstones and the flagstones hum back, pleased to be included. Glitch coils string round his fingers as if fidget were a weapon.

“Read it,” DG says, not bored—economical. The mark at her throat shows above silk. Some people pretend not to see it the way people pretend not to notice a dog in a church. Some can’t look away because their bodies have rehearsed kneeling and are proud to have remembered.

Rell smiles with his corners. “A modest proposal,” he purrs, and Cain’s mouth tilts because if you use those two words unironically in a room like this, you are either very brave or very stupid. “Restrictions on fae rites within the palace precincts. A registry, for safety, of those who practice. A ban on public display of—” a delicate cough, as if the word were indecorous, “—marks that might incite. And of course, for the common good, a recall of unauthorized ribbons so that the city does not play at magic it doesn’t understand.”

The benches make their little excited rodent noises. At the back, a priest who likes fire more than candles sits up straight, as if his wick has been flattered.

“Registry of practitioners,” DG repeats, head tilted. “You want me to keep a list. To what end.”

“Protection,” Rell says, sorrowing. “You must see that the public becomes—restive—when the private turns into spectacle. Your… bond… has become a banner.”

“The public wore banners because your knives tried to cut the wrong thing,” Brogan mutters, too pleasantly for anyone to censure her without blushing.

“Unauthorized ribbons,” Cain echoes, bland.

“To prevent counterfeits,” Rell says smoothly. His eyes cut to DG’s throat like a man checking a map he intends to steal. “For the safety of the crown.”

“Safety,” Lavender says, looking at not him. She sits queen-still, a shawl and a spine. The line of her mouth is the kind of line men will sign on the wrong side of and then regret. “You want to restrict rites older than this ceiling by writing a rule that could be used to cage a queen.”

Rell spreads his hands as if he can catch moderation falling from heaven. “Is it caging to keep wolves out of a garden.”

“Depends,” Cain says, mild as the smell of rain before it commits, “on whether you mean wolves or men who bleat like sheep before they bite.”

Vell clears his throat because procedure thinks it can keep the weather off. “The draft is before us,” he says, tapping the stack. Ink gleams. The edges think they’re sharp. “The motion is framed as temporary. Until this… fever… cools.”

“Temporary,” DG says, considering the ceiling like she’s measuring it for hooks.

“Public good,” Rell says.

“Decorum,” another advisor says, because if he doesn’t say it, he might not get invited to lunch.

DG stands.

Not fast. With the unshowy grace of a woman who doesn’t ask furniture whether it approves. The mark at her throat glows tidy as a banked ember. She walks to the table and lays one finger on the top sheet of the motion.

“Decorum,” she says, kind. “Public good. Ah yes. The words men put on chains when they’re shy about the word chain.”

Rell’s smile chips. “Highness—”

DG flicks her wrist.

Wings rise. Not the full glory—she doesn’t owe them that. A flare, pearly light kicking off her scapulae as if dawn had remembered what her bones are for. The mark blooms. The red under her sternum lifts its head like a snake in sun. A hiss, soft and deliciously rude, rides the room’s air. A single feather loosens and drifts, catching candlelight, stupidly pretty.

The draft catches fire.

Not heat enough to blister; this is politics, not vengeance. But the flame is real. It runs the edges of the stacked pages in a neat square, then eats inward. Ink seethes, writhes, and vanishes. The stack slumps to ash with the sigh of a thing that regrets its own lack of imagination. Vell makes a noise like a man who has taught paper to sit and does not enjoy watching it misbehave. Rell’s eyes lose the part of their shine that relies on other people’s discomfort.

DG smiles sweet. It is not sweet. It leaves marks.

“Decorum,” she repeats, and it sounds like a toast at a wake. “You will not register bodies in my city. You will not confiscate ribbons you did not give. You will not ban rites you do not understand because they do not bow to the chairs you like sitting in. If you are worried about counterfeit threads, worry harder about counterfeit oaths. We have a Program for those.”

“Motion withdrawn,” Vell blurts, because if he doesn’t he will be remembered as the man who tried to legislate a queen’s throat and lost. Quills scratch relief and resentment in equal measure.

Cain’s smirk is not theatrical; it’s a baring of the teeth you hope are ceremonial and are not. He doesn’t step forward. He doesn’t need to. The weather gets better around him when he thinks about ruin in a way that sounds like budget lines. He looks at Rell the way a man looks at a ledger he intends to close. Rell looks back at him like a man wondering whether he should move his account to a different bank. He won’t. He doesn’t know how.

“Discussion concluded,” Lavender says. “Reconciliation Proclamation posts in the morning. If any of you intend to object, please do it in writing so that history has your names correct when it thanks you for your candor.”

The court makes noises like dry leaves pretending they’re a forest. Glitch plucks his string like a quiet bell. Raw taps the floor with the side of his boot and the stones, romantic idiots, hum a pleased chord that travels under benches and lifts skirts.

There are always outcries. You can hear them trying to organize themselves into a chorus—decency, tradition, stability—but nobody has taught them harmony.

The city, though. The city is a choir.

By noon of the next day, red threads appear like a new species of flower that decided stone was soil. At the west gate a fruit seller ties a loop to her cart-handle and shrugs at the guards: “For luck,” she says, daring anyone to argue with what luck looks like. The baker at the corner bakery snakes one through his apron string and scores a ribbon into each loaf with a razor so the crust splits with a red-lipped smile. Two girls braid their hair with scarlet yarn and dare a priest to tell them their heads are obscene; he decides he is late for something else. A blacksmith wraps a bit of thread around a hammer haft and the hammer, perverse, swings truer. Brogan pins a short strip under her badge where only the badge and the people who keep laws for a living will see it and smirks when it burns her thumb the first time she lies to herself about being tired.

Aila requisitions bolts of cheap red in quiet bulk and doesn’t ask the quartermaster’s clerk whether he plans to sell some at the market later; she writes his name down neatly for when Cain has time for trouble that can be fixed with math. The seamstresses in the South Row stitch tiny loops into the hems of uniforms, one red thread among the black, superstition weaponized. The dockmen tie strips to pilings and then to each other and suddenly the river looks like it’s in on the joke. The dog who loves Raw wears a red bow and exudes an authority nobody thinks to question.

There are counterfeiters by evening, of course there are. Cheap dye. Inked silk that stinks of sap and a tent. A rat-faced man with a crate calls, “Blessings for your neck, pretty,” and Cain’s belt hums; the sigils DG etched warm under his fingers; his palm burns an opinion. He follows the hum, gentle, and relieves the man of his wares without raising his voice. “Fines,” he says to the two guards sweating beside the rat with a look that promises they are next if they pretend their feet aren’t on the same street. Raw taps the doorframe of the stall and the wood tells him where the crate came from. Myrrh writes a pamphlet titled Ribbon Is Not A Leash, It’s A Bridge and leaves stacks in doorways where literacy will happen by accident if the font is nice enough.

Petty officials try to confiscate threads in three neighborhoods. Brogan arrives in the first with a broom and sweeps them back into their own offices, smiling while her voice explains Article Eight in small, digestible bites. Jeb takes the second, walking the men who came to keep order through a fresh knot and letting them tie their own wrists to a railing by mistake in front of a delighted crowd. In the third, Aila stands on a crate with a ledger and lists the names of every man who has received two meals and a blanket because the Program exists; she doesn’t mention the ribbon on her wrist until the men realize who will be paying their wives if they lose a day’s work and then she does, in a voice that has nothing to apologize for.

Lavender signs the Proclamation with daylight on the paper because kings should stop writing at night when they intend to ask forests for forgiveness in the morning. The script is tidy. The words are simple. The Hawthorn stands are unbound. Iron off roots. The prince’s name—Dawn’s—written in full. The word sorry spelled without politically useful synonyms. Rell reads it at his breakfast table and chews citrus like a man trying to pretend he likes bitterness.

He tries again on the floor two days later. “Committee for Decorum,” he offers, smiling like a man who wants to sell you a chair you already own. “Voluntary, of course. Advising on rites.”

“Voluntary,” DG says, counting to three in a way that makes the floor count with her. “Advising,” Lavender says, as if she is testing the word for sharp. “Decorum,” Cain says, and lays a stack of receipts on the table: how much city coin Rell moved into entertainments that rhymed with private. Rell’s mouth remembers it was made of meat.

“Withdrawn,” Vell says faster this time, wringing ink out of the agenda like a towel.

Cain walks through the market in his coat that smells like pine and law and his belt hums or rests according to its conscience. People fall a little quieter when he passes, then laugh when he’s gone in that way a street laughs when it thinks it might survive a winter with more bread than funerals. He doesn’t take DG’s hand in public. He doesn’t have to. Her scent threads the rise and fall of the city and his brand warms like a coal kept in the kitchen for days when the world refuses to be reasonable and you want tea anyway.

“Sir,” a boy pipes up by the fountain, tugging a sleeve with ink-stained fingers. He’s knotted a piece of ribbon around a chalk stub. “Is it legal if I tie it to the bench.”

Cain considers the bench. Consider the boy. Consider the fact that a man with a cane-gun and a man with a red-thread knife both learned to love the kind of furniture corruption builds, and that this bench was made by a carpenter who charged the city less than he could have because his son slept last night in a bed and not behind a barrel.

“It is now,” he says. The boy grins and ties the knot badly; Cain corrects it without making a ceremony—there, twist, now it won’t choke the wood when rain comes—and the boy will remember forever which end of a ribbon doesn’t lie.

In the barracks, the belts hum and hush according to their nature. DG keeps making leather complicit; Cain keeps bringing her more. “Education,” he says, deadpan, and she paints protection into loops and straps with a silver that has learned it likes his smell.

At night in rooms with locks that know better, he palms her throat and she sighs yes and the ribbon purrs and the world gets very small, very bright, very survivable. In the morning she walks through courtyards and the wings don’t show because they don’t belong to the courtiers and that is lesson enough.

On the third day of this honest foolishness, every statue in the square has a red thread tied to something foolish—a lion’s tail, a saint’s hand, a horse’s ridiculous mane. Somebody has looped a strip neatly around the hilt of an old bronze sword and the sword, idiot romantic, looks happier.

“Optics,” Rell says to a friend in silk, meaning the city’s face will remember this angle.

“Light,” DG says to herself on the palace stair, meaning she is done letting other people own it.

Cain’s smirk spreads slow when he watches fools gather their dignity to make another attempt at writing a law around a woman. It promises ruin without having to say the word. When a runner brings him a scrap of parchment with a list of names—men muttering cleanse, fire, tradition—he writes his own list under it: rotations, ropes, water, records, arrests. He files it under later. He expects later to knock. He looks forward to opening the door.

For now the city wears red. Not all of it. Enough. Enough that when DG steps out onto the balcony to breathe the evening—his palm heavy at her throat for a heartbeat, ritual and practicality both—the streets below glitter with little threads of dawn caught at dusk. The stones purr. Raw pets the parapet and tells it a joke it will take three generations to finish laughing at. Myrrh leans in a doorway and counts the knots they taught people to tie that won’t choke. Jeb walks the yard, touches the ribbon at his wrist like a promise, and thinks about a storeroom door that will forget to latch later. Lavender sleeps for an hour and does not dream of ash, not yet, not tonight.

“Mine to hold,” Cain says, breath at DG’s ear, because ritual is a good cloak in a city that has decided to dress itself.

“Say please,” she murmurs, ridiculous and ruling, and he does, because the law is supposed to obey what saves it.

Chapter Text

They saw him from the north watch: a grey seam against winter fields, thirty riders across with space left in the file for hubris. Roan wore exile like a pressed uniform. Hair cut fresh. Boots that had learned gravel but not alleys. Cloak the color of a bad rumor. The sneer on his mouth had hardened into a scar you could sand furniture with.

Brogan had the gate crew by the book before the bell finished its second: reins surrendered, blades peace-bound, hands out where the wall could count fingers. Aila stood with the ledger like a patient guillotine. The belts along the parapet hummed one after another as if the city had grown a new sense along its hipbones; red-thread fakes, cheap sap ink, a prayer scarf dyed indecent, three knives tied with thread that stank of tent-pitch and foxglove.

Roan raised his head and his voice like a signal flag. “I demand trial.”

You could hear the capital T. You could hear the coin behind it.

Cain came to the apron without ceremony. Coat on, glove off. The brand in his palm sat banked and bright, the ache-stripe from the assassin’s toy a memory now the rune had taught to mind its tone. He didn’t bring a retinue. He brought Brogan and Jeb and a look that said if the ground tried anything clever it would be corrected.

“Article Twelve,” he said, as if he were reminding the air of who signed it. “Exiles returning on challenge surrender weapons, persons, and spectacle. We’ll take two. You don’t get the third.”

Roan smiled like a man picking meat out of his teeth. “I come in the name of law.”

“You come in the smell of outside,” Cain observed. “You have mercenaries in grey because you forgot house colors can be subpoenaed. You have a borrowed knife that thinks it’s clever.” He lifted his hand a fraction. The belts hummed again, a chorus of leather complicit. “Bag the threads,” he told Aila. “Every red that isn’t ours.”

Aila’s boys moved easy and exact. A packet opened; the assassin’s hilt-knives with their fake ribbon went in like rats into a sack. One of Roan’s men bristled. Brogan tilted an eyebrow in the direction of the ocean; the man quieted. Roan held still. Smart. Or rehearsed.

“Trial,” he said again, loud now for the crowd that had come to see if winter had teeth. “Before queen and stones. Before witnesses and wall. Before the people whose princess I tried to protect while a man with a collar in his hand pretended the law belonged to his palm.”

The street liked the shape of that sentence. You could feel it try to swallow. Men edged closer. Women held their children where children could see and learn what their city did to its problems.

“Protect,” Cain said, pleasantly. “You mean the corridor where you put hands on a woman who did not ask for them and laughed when her power stuttered.”

Roan spread his arms like a man doing charity. “I was overtaken by scent,” he declared, and it was a pantomime that would have sold better if he had any shame in stock. “Heat poured out like perfume. She wandered alone. She wanted an alpha’s order and I provided it. Then the Commander—” here, a creep of pathos to the voice, just enough to sound like a pamphlet, “—arrived to perform a private rite in a public palace. We are to be governed by scent now? By collars? By a cock and a ribbon?”

A hiss through the crowd; not the good kind. A priest who liked fire made the first sound his mouth always makes when it wants to be useful and learns it isn’t, a word that rhymes with cleanse.

“Witnesses and stone,” Brogan said under her breath, amused; then loud, to Raw, “Well?”

Raw had come with the train that carries buckets and words you might need to drink later. He put his palm to the gate and hummed. The stone underfoot remembered the corridor, the sound of silk pulled the wrong way, the second slap of a boot leaving cobble when a man is moved faster than his brain. It remembered the red’s quiet bite. It remembered the sound a knife makes when it decides against a throat because a hand was already there to make it rethink.

“The wall says lie,” Raw reported, delighted, to the flag. “Lie wrapped in expensive soap.”

Roan didn’t look at Raw. He looked at the faces along the gate and the handful of men in the crowd whose eyes gleamed the wrong way. He had pamphlets in voices ready to read from memory.

“Trial,” he said, softer now, appealing, the way men perform decency when they’ve been told decency buys lunch. “Before the queen. Your Commander is compromised by a bond that has turned his rank into a leash. He is—what is the word—knotted. The palace perfumed. The city addled. Is this what we swore to protect? A princess, dazed by fae heat? A man, drugged by scent? A ribbon strung through law? I ask for judgment.”

“You’ll get it,” Cain said, as if saying there would be bread. “At first bell tomorrow, Glass Gallery. Witnesses and stone. Your men put up and shut up or wait outside the wall. They so much as hiss at a child, I turn them into paperwork and rope.”

Roan bowed, mock-punctilious, and for a moment the sneer softened because he was pleased to have been given the stage time he wanted. Then he raised his voice and did the other part of his job. “Hear me,” he called, and the crowd obeyed, because crowds will always listen if the sentence promises they’ll be heroes for being angry.

He cast lies carefully, the way you throw a net: that DG had walked scented through halls to collect men’s collars; that children were turning up with red thread tied to their throats by lawless hands; that Cain had “dismissed” captains for refusing to kneel to a woman’s heat; that the Program spent coin on therapy instead of on buying boys their pride back one fist at a time. He said the words with a right cadence and rotted marrow. He had been taught what to say by a man who knows what small minds think makes a city safe.

The street snarled, as asked. A couple of beta boys with stomachs for performance took up a chant that tried to be a chorus and made a sound like a stool dragged across stone. The belts hummed again, a low warning chord. Cain’s field lowered the edges of the square a degree so that fear wouldn’t look like an exit.

“Rotations,” he said without turning his head. “West stair, two lines. Rope to the second balcony. Buckets staged at the fountain. Runners to the market. We don’t give anger time to invent an audience.”

Jeb was already moving, a nod to Raw, a flick to Aila. Rope strung from lintel to post makes a lattice that catches men who haven’t learned the trick of looking up. Buckets, filled and staged, look like nothing until you need to turn fire into steam. Brogan drifted through the crowd gently making people realize the place where they were standing would be more beautiful five paces to the left.

“Trial,” DG said later, in the anteroom where the walls still liked them. She did not look like a woman who had been accused of turning cities into perfume. She looked like a queen who had read in a ledger the price of someone else’s lie and written down what hers would cost and paid it. “Witnesses and stone. Walls that hum. Myrrh with dust. Glitch with string. No flames in the gallery; anyone who so much as thinks torch gets rope for a pet. Lavender?” She looked at her mother.

“Chairs arranged for the old men who panic when they have to stand,” Lavender said dryly. “Chancellor warned. Paper ready where it should be. I will speak once and then I will let the stones speak and then I will sign the next thing that needs signing.”

“And me?” Cain asked, as if he weren’t already moving in twenty directions like discipline hadn’t grown legs.

“You hold,” DG said, and the way she said it plugged a hole in his ribs from the inside. “Anyone throws ‘cleanse,’ you cut the word in half and feed each piece to a different law. Anyone tries to set fire to what they are afraid to understand, you put it out. Anyone reaches for me with the wrong hands, take them off at the wrists and let them clap for themselves.”

He nodded as if she had asked him to bring bread home. Inside his head the list sharpened.

Night: lay water without spectacle. Have Glitch put string around beams that liked to drop at the wrong moment last riot. Put Stev’s knots where ladders like to surprise you. Station Mil in the gallery where the panic starts like mold. Quartermaster Aila buys the kind of sand that eats grease. Myrrh sits with the knife that mends and waits to use the back edge. Raw scribes three theorems on the floor under the middle bench so the stone corrects a lie with a shiver. The belts hum because the city is practicing not being tricked twice.

Roan lodged his mercenaries in an inn someone smart had already warned not to serve them too well. They drank the way men do when fear is the booze and the label says bravado. Two went for girls who had brothers. One tried to sing in the square and found he didn’t know enough of the song. Rell’s clerk was seen speaking to a man with grey on his cloak; Aila’s runner wrote his name down and used a different-colored ink for pleasure.

Morning broke on time and smelled like iron and citrus and witnesses.

The Great Glass Gallery had learned its lesson and was ready to teach it. No candles where curtains reach. Rope ran high like a spider remembered its duties. Buckets staged where Cain could nod and not look like he was nodding at buckets. The band had been asked to stay home and think about why music sometimes has terrible timing; a single drum sat in the corner in case the room needed a heartbeat.

Roan entered with his sneer polished. He’d changed cloaks. The new one had more expense in it and less weather. His thirty were twenty-seven; three had thought better of sleep and found new choices in the night. They took places not assigned them and then looked surprised when men with badges silently rearranged them like furniture with opinions.

Rell sat two benches back with a mouth that had learned to close. His pin said nothing, which is the loudest thing a man like him wears.

DG stood. The mark at her throat showed like a signature written in ink with teeth. She lifted her chin. The red under her sternum curled, present and quiet; the bond tugged Cain’s chest with pleased intelligence. He didn’t move. He made the air behave.

“Citizen Roan,” Chancellor Vell intoned, voice pretending this was all new. “You requested trial.”

“I requested truth,” Roan said, loud enough to reach the men who had been promised a spectacle. “I will have it.”

“You will,” Lavender said. “And you will not like it.”

The first witness was the wall. Raw’s hand on stone, then off. He spoke the corridor back into the room: the pressure, the sour taste of a wrong man breathing too close, the sound the ribbon makes when it bites not with cruelty but with instruction. The floor shivered on cue and half the court flinched as if someone had said their names without permission. Cain watched faces. Fear sparks. Guilt sinks. Money looks around for exits.

“Witness Brogan,” Vell said.

“Hands on the princess,” Brogan said, straightforward. “Thrown off. Crest removed. Blade broken. Exile. He cried later, but only when he realized the gate doesn’t love men who piss on it.”

Several people tried to become furniture. Furniture behaved better.

“Evidence,” Aila said from the table and laid packets: the fake ribbon knives, rendered docile by good leather; the rope from the balcony, clean knots; coin bags with dust Myrrh had read until they named three stables and a tent with a smell too careful to be poor; a receipt Rell’s clerk had not meant to sign with his own hand and had, thinking it would impress his reflection.

Roan laughed. He was good at laughing at the right size. “Manufactured.”

“Dust,” Myrrh corrected, patient as arithmetic, releasing a pinch onto a glass. “Read it. Fields don’t lie, and neither do the feet that walk between them.” They spoke three names and a river crossing like a recipe. The glass fogged. The fog wrote yes on itself and cleared.

Roan made one last try, because men like him always do. He turned to the benches and started the same net he had thrown at the gate: scent, heat, knots, collars, city perfumed, law bent by a throat.

DG did not lift her chin. She bared her throat.

The mark glowed. Not a flare, an ember. She didn’t scent the room. She scented the man who mattered and let the rest of them learn what it looks like when a bond is law and not a leash. Cain’s hand ached to rise; it did not. He kept it where the room could see that control is a craft and comfort a decision.

“Enough,” she said, and her voice had the shape of the city when it will survive. “You spoke. The wall spoke. The coin spoke. Now I will. You touched me without permission. You lied when you were caught. You brought foreign men in grey to make the lie into law.”

Roan opened his mouth to argue in the tone that thinks it is reasonable. Cain let his field drop a shade and the air turned obedient around Roan’s airway. Not choking. Not force. A lid correctly applied.

“You demanded trial,” Lavender said. “You have had it. Sentence: exile confirmed. In custody until the north gate. You leave by mid-bell.”

Roan’s sneer trembled. He recovered. He did the thing the patron behind the screen had paid him to do. “Cleans—” he tried to say, a match to drag along stone.

Cain’s hand moved and didn’t look like it moved. The word cut in half. One piece hit the floor. The other stuck in Roan’s throat and made him cough like a man who had eaten a bad prayer.

“Article Eight,” Cain said, pleasant as bread. “Attempting to incite immolation in a public place is a fine and a broom and six months regretting your ability to form syllables.”

The hall laughed like a breeze getting ideas. The priest with fire in his pocket closed his mouth on what would have gotten his robe confiscated.

Jeb and Brogan took Roan’s arms with the politeness you reserve for men who will bruise if you are careless. The mercenaries in grey looked at each other and found they had misplaced their courage. One broke rank and tried the door. The rope lattice took him like a polite hand. Raw patted the beam as if complimenting it on its new hobby.

They walked Roan out. He laughed once more because there was no point in not finishing the part he had been paid to play. “This isn’t finished,” he called. “There are people who don’t like their city turned into a nest.”

Cain smiled with all his teeth. “Good,” he said. “Let them try to set it on fire. I’ve been counting buckets.”

They took him to the north gate. The wind smelled like old tin and bad decisions. This time the wall did not teach him what cold was; he remembered. Jeb handed him a flask he had not earned. Brogan removed it. “No favors,” she said. “You’re not a soldier. You’re not a boy. You’re weather. Go be wind somewhere it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

He stepped over the line. The stone changed color under his boots again. The sneer looked less like a scar and more like a habit that would be hard to break when there was no audience. He turned to make a last speech. The gate shut like a period.

Inside, the city snarled one more time, then remembered how to breathe. Cain did not unclench. He did not relax. He settled into the cold that makes war doable.

“Rotations hold for three nights,” he told Aila. “Runners double. Rope stays up. Buckets stay full. Pamphlets get printed; Myrrh writes them; Glitch sets them in type that offends men who like bad fonts. Brogan, arrest anyone who lights a torch near cloth. Jeb, ladders, again. Raw, teach the square to sit. Lavender—we post Reconciliation at bell and we do it with more light than the city knows what to do with.”

“And me,” DG said gently.

He let himself look at her. Let himself let the brand burn and not move his hand. “You,” he said, and everything in him that wanted to bare throat and teeth did it and stopped. “Stay where the walls know your name. Wings if you like. The first man who says perfume in a tone I don’t approve of loses his mouth.”

“Mine to hold,” she said, not like a plea.

“Say please,” he answered, because ritual is a cloak and the weather had teeth.

She smiled, ruthless and fond. She didn’t say the word. She didn’t need to. He had already said war. He had already counted water. He was already looking past the gate toward a tent with a screen and a hand in a glove that had not yet learned its wrists were fragile.

The belts hummed along his hips like a city that has decided to keep its blood inside its body. The stones purred and remembered that flood and fire are both easier to survive when someone who knows the shape of a bucket is telling them where to sit. The day went grey. The men in grey went out. The man in blue stood where he belonged and made the air choose a side.

Chapter Text

The library made a habit of shushing weather. Shelves rose like old judges pretending not to gossip. The lamps breathed lemon and dust. Somewhere a clock with too much self-respect clicked in steady absolutes. Az prowled the stacks with a book under her arm and a question under her tongue, and then there he was between History and Lies We Printed Twice, all wrists and patience and that damn mouth that made her forget what she’d come to take.

“Looking for trouble,” Jeb asked, quiet enough not to wake a binding.

“Found some,” she said, and lifted her chin as if the crown of the nearest volume ought to kiss it.

He didn’t touch her first.

She leaned in like a woman reading a line she meant to steal. The kiss was supposed to be civilized for the sake of the room. It tasted like paper and tea and a man who’d jogged the last flight of stairs because he’d decided to be on time. He kept his hands behind his back until she made a noise that peeled another second off his life, then set his palms at her waist like somebody had finally given him permission to stand near heat.

She hooked fingers in his vest and learned how seldom cloth does what it’s told. His breath hit hers like a punched laugh. He said “Az,” like a secret and a caution and then again like a blessing. She smiled into his mouth because she’d planned to be the one to ruin him and he was clearly going to collaborate.

“Door,” she muttered against his lip.

“Locked,” he promised, already reaching sideways without breaking the kiss. The click was clean as a note. The shelves pretended not to approve.

He tried being careful with books and therefore with her, and she recognized the absurdity and rewarded it by walking him into the long reading table as if she were negotiating a treaty with wood. The table had been polished by people with opinions; it slid his thigh into place with indecent efficiency. She set the book she’d brought down in the middle of it, planted her palms on either side, and dragged him into that narrow field where her breath turned into a dare.

“Kiss me like you’re going to get caught,” she said.

He obeyed. The knot in his tie became a problem he solved with his teeth. Her laugh stuttered into a sound less refined when his tongue found the patience to map her mouth and then forgot patience existed. His hands slid down and met the hem of her skirt and paused because a decent man has his reflexes trained; she took his wrist, pressed his palm under cloth, and tilted her hips into it like a woman who had clocked the rules and broken the ones that deserved it.

“Again,” she ordered.

He went again. The heel of his hand found the tense, slick heat of her through silk and he breathed in through his nose like a soldier nodding to a plan he wanted. His fingers learned the cut of her—high, precise, greedy—and she rewarded craft with a little involuntary roll that made the table complain under its breath. He kissed her harder just to see if her spine could forget politics for a minute and smiled against her lips when it did.

“Look at me,” he said, as if he had any right to ask. She did. The prettiness dropped out of her eyes and something honest took over, and his control went from neat to necessary.

She hoisted herself backward onto the table, skirt hitching, boots braced, legs open with a queen’s insolence. Jeb’s hands pushed cloth, not quite rough, entirely sure. The knife he’d buckled on her earlier hit wood with a soft knock; he swore softly and set it aside like a man who respects all edges. Then he got both palms under her skirt for real and swore a little harder, honest, because slick and heat and the warm give of her answered him like a yes he’d been owed.

“Say please,” he asked, half evil, half shaking.

“Please,” she said, shameless, and his brain fizzed out of sequence.

He slid fingers under silk and then the silk aside and then into her, two to start, crooking like a craftsman, not a boy. Her mouth broke open on a yes without vowels. He kept his thumb off her clit until she tried to cheat by rolling for it and then gave it to her like he’d planned to all along, cruel because he was kind, circles precise, pressure honest. She writhed, breath turning into these tiny little animals he wanted to pet and keep, and the table made a private sound that meant it knew what was happening and intended to be structurally accommodating.

“Breathe,” he said, because he’d learned that discipline works where tenderness loses its nerve. She did, on the beat of his thumb, on the curl of his fingers, on the slow promise of his mouth at her jaw. When she tightened with that first telltale clutch that had ruined him in a storeroom once, he eased off and she snarled and he grinned into her neck because they both liked her mean.

“Now,” she hissed, proud to beg.

“Soon,” he lied, and used the hand that wasn’t inside her to drag her closer by the hips, precisely, until the top of his trousers knocked the table and the table agreed to move.

“Jeb,” she warned, a prayer and a threat.

He freed himself. There was nothing elegant left in him; there was just hunger made careful. He dragged the head of his cock through her slick and bit his own lip, gently feral, and pressed, slow, steady, relentless, until she swallowed him in heat and he saw god and god looked like sunlight on lemon oil. He had to close his eyes because men shouldn’t say certain things out loud in libraries.

“Open,” she said, lethal, and he did, he watched her watch him fit, he watched her mouth soften and turn bright, and he watched his own discipline survive contact with a miracle.

He seated deep and didn’t move. He made her feel the fullness. He breathed into her mouth like an oath he was making in front of books. Then he took her hips in his hands, set the angle a breath forward, and started to fuck her, slow enough to be devout, hard enough to be obscene.

The table creaked. The lamps behaved. The book she’d set aside slid an inch and stopped, spine affronted, then decided to be a witness. Az set her palms on his shoulders and then on his throat and then on the edge of the table, went to her elbows a second, swore, laughed, and sat up again to take it at the new angle that made her eyes go ruined.

“Harder,” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said, as if it were a password, and gave her the kind of rhythm stairwells remember. He pulled nearly out and sank back in, long, measured, then shorter, dirtier, every third stroke a grind that let the head drag the front wall and steal a pretty noise from her. He kept his thumb where it mattered, useless to pretend he’d forgotten it, and she broke for him once without permission, a bright shiver that made her boots skid and her voice lose diction. He held her through it and did not speed up.

“Again,” he asked, breath ragged.

“Take it,” she said, and put both hands on the table and rode him.

It got filthy then; it was meant to. She found pace and balance and used both like weapons. Her thighs locked around him; her skirt went scandalous around her hips; the slap of bodies turned into a metronome for blasphemy. He let the table take some of his weight, caught her waist, and met her stroke for stroke until the whole room thought about applauding. The table creaked louder—one rude long groan like a hymn that liked what it was for.

“Look at me,” he told her again, wrecked now, and when she held his gaze he nearly lost his grip on being impressive. “Say please.”

She leaned forward until her mouth brushed his and said it in the filthiest pretty he’d ever been given. “Please.”

He broke with her the second time, not speed, pressure, angle—a locked grind that pulled a low, shocked sound out of her throat and a curse out of his that would have gotten him fisted as a recruit and now made her laugh into his mouth because she was a monster for the noises he made. He spilled deep, thick, helpless, and she milked him with greedy little clenches that taught the table new languages.

They stayed tangled in the noise for a long breath while the room remembered it had opinions about silence. He kissed her jaw because his mouth had to do something or he was going to start trying to pray again and embarrass them both. She leaned her forehead to his and panted like a woman who’d just made three wrong choices and would make them again on purpose in the next ten minutes.

“Fuck,” she said, eyes bright and feral. “We’re doomed.”

“Completely,” he agreed, grinning like a fool, dizzy with the good of it. “Truly catastrophic. Library will never recover.”

She laughed in that new way he’d already started inventing faith around. The sound turned the quiet into furniture again. Somewhere, the clock grew offended and clicked louder, as if punctuality were a moral. She nipped his lower lip for disrespecting time and he swore, delighted, and kissed her back until time forgave them.

“Again,” he suggested, because greed is his best quality.

“Many,” she promised, smug and wrecked, and then looked at the door like she’d dare it to unlock itself. It didn’t. Sensible door. She smoothed her skirt down halfway, failed, didn’t care, and watched him try to make himself presentable with hands that trusted him less than she did.

He brushed a thumb along the edge of her grin, reverent and idiot both. “Say it,” he asked before he could help himself.

“Yours,” she said, not sweet, honest, and the table creaked a last time as if agreeing to be a witness when history asked which furniture mattered.

“Yours,” he returned, dizzy, and then they were laughing again, that helpless, breathless laughter that comes when you realize the ground under you moved and you intend to run right over the edge together.

The library shushed them half-heartedly as they put the knife back where it belonged, straightened the book that had watched, and unlocked the door. Outside, a corridor remembered a storeroom and tried not to blush. Inside, the table considered itself a veteran and hoped the floor would be polite when comparing scars.

Chapter Text

The room was full of breath held like glass.

Not the gallery; that place had learned to be a theater. This was smaller, meaner, pious: the anteroom off the inner court with its painted hawthorn on plaster and the low table dressed like an altar. Daylight filtered through gauze, the kind that flatters nobody. A bowl of river water. A branch of real thorn set in a clay jar. A cup. Ceremonial, old, ridiculous with filigree, its silver chased with leaves that caught light and made it into something better than it wanted to be.

Ahamo lifted it because tradition says fathers drink first when houses confess. His hand was steady. He had the kind of smile that looks like it’s about to tell a good story and then remembers it’s in a palace. Lavender stood beside him, shawl and spine, ready to be brave without rehearsal. DG faced the branch, bare throat, the ribbon under her skin drawing tight in a slow, obedient loop as she prepared to say the apology out loud where the trees would hear it.

“Water,” the herald said, as if naming it would keep it faithful.

Ahamo drank.

His eyes went wide the way a door slams when wind chooses to have a sense of humor. The cup clinked his tooth and rang the room like a coin spun on a tabletop. He made a sound that never belonged to court: a single, hoarse, ugly note, like a rope breaking. The water on his tongue turned winter. He folded without grace, florid robes becoming a spill of color on tile. The cup rolled. The thorn in the jar trembled. The world failed to keep up.

Cain’s sword was out before the body finished the sentence.

No flourish. No show. Steel as punctuation. His field dropped around the room in a lid that taught panic to sit. “Doors,” he said, and the word found Brogan without needing to raise its voice. She was already at the left, baton out, the latch decided, two guards posted who had learned their hands like law.

DG screamed.

Not a court sound. Not a woman’s polite catastrophe. Something wild came out of her chest and learned the room’s size and then refused to be polite about it. Her wings didn’t show—but the light on her shoulders tried to become them and then thought better of making a crowd learn new prayers. The mark at her throat flared, the red under her sternum lashed, and the bond yanked Cain’s ribs—tug-tug, brutal—like a leash on a wolf that already had blood in its teeth.

“Ana,” Lavender said, small and wrong with how quiet she meant to be and how loud she was.

Glitch was moving before anyone understood what the king’s hand was doing on tile. He ran like a man who knows which cupboards lie. Past the table, through the side door, down the stupid, beloved corridor that collects genius and curses both. “Myrrh—milk—char—nightwort—” he threw words like orders at the walls because there wasn’t time to make them people. “We don’t have it,” he told nobody in a voice that hated itself for being correct, and the corridor offered him the smell of old bottles and not enough.

Raw dropped to a knee beside Ahamo, palm to stone, palm to man, humming to the floor to ask it what it had been forced to taste. The floor complained in a language made of cold. Frost and a sweet that belonged to flowers that only open for funerals. The tile under the king’s cheek felt wrong and apologized for it.

“Frostflower,” Myrrh snapped from the doorway, already elbowing Glitch aside and upending a leather roll of wicked little spoons. Their hair had found a new disaster; their hands did not shake. “And hawthorn sap. Who the fuck—no time—open his jaw.”

Jeb was there without being told, fingers gentle and iron. He pried the king’s teeth, unafraid of the bite there wasn’t going to be. Ahamo’s breath came shallow, icy. His eyes had gone glass bright; there was a moment’s long, horrible refusal in them that remembered daughters and a river and a lie about thorns he had inherited without asking.

DG was on the floor then, palms on tile, crawling, obscene, royal, the silk of her gown forgetting how to behave. Cain caught her shoulders and she attacked his hands with a little feral shove he let her win because he knows when a body needs to reach before it remembers to stop. She reached. Ahamo’s fingers found hers with terrifying accuracy and then slid.

“Saethyr,” Cain said, low, command turned into medicine. His bare palm closed around DG’s throat, heat precise, law heavy. The rune under his skin burned; her mark answered; the bond dragged air back into her body where it belonged. She gulped it down like a drowning thing and hated air for being correct.

“Out,” Aila told the room, the only person allowed to speak to numbers like they’re people and rooms like they’re accountants. “Everyone who isn’t hands or witness, out. Brogan—list names. Stev—rope lattice across the inner door now.”

“Don’t touch the cup,” Myrrh bit off, and then touched it themselves with a cloth and a face like a thunderhead. “Rim,” they muttered. “Under the chased leaf. Clever little cunt carved a frost glyph where the light wouldn’t catch. Frostflower soaked. Sap binder. That’s not court poison. That’s orchard spite.” Their eyes cut to the painted hawthorn on the wall and then to the real branch in the jar as if the plant might confess. It didn’t. It hummed like a thing that had a cousin who did bad things in the North.

Glitch came back with a bowl already smoking, harsh, bitter: char and milk and something acrid that peels grief off taste. He slid on his knees like a boy and got his hand under Ahamo’s chin with skill borrowed from other emergencies. “Swallow,” he coaxed. “C’mon, court, c’mon, breathe for me.”

The king gagged. Spat. Tried to throw the poison back at the world. Some of it came out. Most of it had already filed itself under done. The skin around his mouth turned a blue that wasn’t theatrical. The frost that lived in the word frost crawled up his veins like a will that had finally found work it liked. He blinked. He saw DG, dark hair and light like a sin he’d always hoped he’d get forgiven for. His mouth made a shape she knew from when she was eight and broke a window and he told her the sky would always be hot on the other side of the glass.

“Thorns,” he whispered. “And frost.”

His eyes lost everything that wasn’t reflection.

DG made a sound that cracked the room. The glass in the high windows flinched. Lavender put a hand to her own mouth and then took it away on purpose because a queen’s hands don’t hide. She knelt. She did not weep yet; her face found the old stillness that has saved rooms and ruined dinner. She touched Ahamo’s hair with two fingers and placed them like command.

Cain stood without moving.

Sword in his right, law in his left—palm at DG’s throat a little heavier, a little kinder, lifting her into breath she didn’t want any of. His field lowered until the corners of the room remembered they belonged to him. The edges of the air got obedient. Men who had come for a ceremony found they didn’t have anywhere to put their hands that would not be counted against them if they moved wrong. “Doors,” he said again. “Nobody out. Nobody in. Witnesses and stone.”

“Witnesses,” Brogan echoed, already listing names. The guard at the back got pale and not because he was afraid; because he was a man who had played cards in the wrong corner last week and realized suddenly how expensive the deck had been. She wrote his name down and liked him better for looking like he’d never figure out how to run fast enough.

Raw, gentle, obscene with competence, lowered Ahamo’s lids. The floor hummed once, low, like a house lament tilting into keening. “Cold,” he told the tile softly. “Not your fault.”

Myrrh lifted the cup wrapped in linen. They tipped it; a thin slick ran around the inside lip and flashed once in the light like ice under glass. “Temple cups were inventoried yesterday,” Aila said, voice a format men can’t wriggle out of. “This one didn’t sign in.”

“Rell’s clerk had access to the anteroom,” Glitch said without looking up. His voice went from scholar to street. “He counted chairs like a man learning which ones burn prettiest.”

“Raw,” Cain said. “Stone remembers who set the cup down. Not the pour. The set.”

Raw’s hand to tile. His eyes half-lidded, the way they go when the world’s noise picks out one note and makes it into meaning. “Black shoe,” he said. “Heel worn down left side. Lemon oil on sole from the east corridor. Ring hits the table when he breathes. Finger too tight. Hand not used to being dirty.”

“A ring,” Aila repeated, skimming her mental ledger like a river reads bedrock. “Clerk Rhyss. Rell’s. He wears a signet too small for his fat finger, holds his breath when he lies, smells like bad citrus because he wants people to think he’s rich enough to peel them. East corridor passes the servants’ sideboard; he steals a liqueur when he thinks nobody’s counting.”

“Arrest,” Cain said. “Alive.” He tamped down the part of himself that had already shaped the man’s wrist in his hand and decided what to do with it. “Everyone who touched the cup today lays their fingerprints on paper for Myrrh to flirt with later. Rope across the corridor. Water on the boil. No candles in any room that’s not ashamed of itself.”

“Sir,” Jeb said, already moving. The rope lattice went up with a speed that would have made Stev weep if he weren’t in the corner quietly teaching a recruit how to imagine knots that hold men gently and doors cruelly.

DG shook under Cain’s hand like a rope trying to learn to be a wire. He eased his palm, pressed again. “Breathe,” he told her. “One. Two. Three.”

She obeyed because the ritual was smarter than grief in the first five minutes, and grief knows when to let ritual drive.

“Let me—” Her voice broke against her own mouth. “Let me see him.”

He let her. He knelt with her and made himself a wall, not a weight. Lavender moved, making room where rooms don’t usually make it. DG touched her father’s cheek and the cold didn’t matter because love had hands and they were warm for a minute longer than they needed to be. Her wings were a rumor at her shoulder blades, pearly threat under skin. The red under her sternum coiled and uncoiled like a snake trying to decide which thing to kill when it cannot eat poison.

“Thorns and frost,” she said through her teeth, into his coat, into the mark under his palm. “I will burn the right thing for him.”

“Not fire,” Cain said, low, practical, cruel in the way that saves lives. “Water. Rope. Stone. Paper. We put out what they lit. We count. We don’t let the city needle itself into a riot that eats the wrong throat.”

Lavender’s breath came thin, controlled. She looked at Cain as if she could stand without legs if the answer was correct. “Lock it down,” she said, queen. “Not the city. The lie. Lock the lie.”

“Yes,” Cain said. He wasn’t smirking. He was numbers and weather. He was ready for war.

They worked while grief took its first bite and found there was too much meat to swallow at once.

Brogan sent a runner who didn’t look fast enough until he was. Aila produced paper from a pocket that had not existed a second earlier and wrote like vengeance. Glitch burned the last mouthful of antidote on the floor with a sigh he did not suppress and went looking for a recipe that has not been written down; he would build it from memory and hate the time it took. Myrrh wrapped the cup like a corpse and tied it with a ribbon the color of law, then kissed the knot because some old tools still like being wooed.

Raw pressed his palm to stone and told it to remember the good weight too: the father here, the hand on the shoulder, the laughter that smelled like river water when it warms in a bucket. The floor softened under his touch and held the shape for later when DG would need to stand on a place where a man she loved once breathed and not die from it.

Outside the door the corridors put their ears to the wood and learned that the king was dead the way halls learn: by temperature first, then gossip. Someone far away shouted cleanse out of habit; the rope lattice caught it and made it into coughing. A priest lit a taper and Brogan blew it out with a look. Rell adjusted his pin and discovered it had teeth now.

Cain stood.

“Rotations,” he told the air, because the room already knew who he meant. “Gate seals. West stair posted. Market cordon—not to bind, to see. Arrests quiet. No heroics. We catch the clerk and the cook he paid and the hand that signed the cup out of the temple storeroom and we write their names down bigger than they think their bodies are.”

“Sir,” Jeb said, jaw a line.

“And you,” Cain added, turning his body around DG like a circle drawn with a knife, “breathe. Say it.”

“Saethyr,” she whispered, sand and glass and vow. The mark under his palm throbbed and calmed. The ribbon coiled around his wrist in a single mean loop that bit him like a promise. He liked the pain.

Lavender bent, pressed her mouth to Ahamo’s forehead, and gave the city the quiet they would have to climb over if they wanted to riot. She stood tall. She looked at the hawthorn on the wall and the real thorn in the jar and the little frost glimmer on the inside of the poisoned cup.

“We go to the orchard at dawn,” she said, voice a knife wrapped in linen. “We put his name in the oldest tree where it was always supposed to be. And then we take the frost out of the thorns and the thorns out of the men who brought frost into my house.”

“Yes,” DG said, wild and wrecked.

“Yes,” Cain said, and the sword in his right hand and the brand in his left agreed with the same hunger.

They picked the king up together. The cloth Myrrh laid over him wasn’t ceremonial; it was clean. The room exhaled. Outside, the city inhaled, the way a body does before it decides what kind of pain it’s going to be that day.

Somewhere past the north gate, a tent’s silk wall breathed. A gloved hand moved a pin on a map two inches left. In the yard, the belts along the parapet hummed like a choir warming its throat.

Inside, Cain settled cold. Ready for war. He held DG’s throat a second longer than ritual requires and let go only because he had taught himself how. “Mine to hold,” he said, not soft.

“Say please,” she asked, ridiculous, fatal, and he didn’t, because grief made manners, and the city had work.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

The city talks when you teach it how. Rope hums. Buckets wait. Ledger paper grows teeth.

Aila starts with coin. She empties three grey purses onto a tray and doesn’t mind when one drops a smear of something that isn’t grease. “Black honey,” Myrrh says, nose wrinkling, delighted at the ugliness. “Not for bread. For binding. Unseelie keep it for rites they don’t apologize for.”

Glitch loops string across the table, a cat’s cradle of routes and receipts. “Two stables, east road,” he narrates. “One factor who thinks names are decorations. A ferryman who hums the wrong prayer because he owes the right people. Every knot leads back to the wastes and then off the map like the tent doesn’t want to be real.”

Raw squats and puts his palm flat to the flagstone beneath the ledger. The stone listens, sulks, then whispers without words: cold, thorns, a set of feet that don’t choose the groove other men prefer, a voice passing under the arch that isn’t a voice at all, more winter than language. Raw lifts his head, hair a halo of bad decisions, and grins without liking it. “Unseelie,” he says, cheerful as a diagnosis. “Remnant. Not court. The kind that lives in under-bark and old wells. Mad about an old thing.”

“Good,” Cain says, because naming makes work simple. His field thickens at the room’s corners just enough to persuade fear to sit. He flips one coin with a forefinger. It lands wrong—edge heavy, balance off—and rolls to stop against DG’s wrist like it meant to be caught. He watches it sulk there and files away the way its weight feels. “Roan’s coin was never his. He rented teeth.”

Myrrh ghosts a finger through the smear and lifts it to the lamplight. The shine crawls. “Black honey, thorn-sap. Both answer to Unseelie rites and hawthorn law.” A beat, and their voice goes pleasantly venomous. “And nobody keeps both in the same drawer unless they want witnesses to go white in front of polite people.”

Lavender looks like linen left to dry in deep shade. She touches nothing. She watches everything. The set of her mouth says she is prepared to be civilized about being devoured.

“Clerk,” Brogan reports, booted and breathless with the kind of glee that means somebody ran and got caught. “Rhyss. Lemon oil on his shoe. Ring too tight. He delivered a cup that was only a cup when he held it. In the pantry he used for lying we found a little tin.” She puts the tin on the table as if it’s a rat with manners. Inside: a scrap of bark marked with a thorn-prick sigil and a smear of something that smells like funeral wreaths under frost.

Myrrh doesn’t touch. They stare until the air blushes and confesses. “Thorn-mark,” they say. “That’s a pass-token. Unseelie remnant hired a man with a ring to be a hinge. Clever. Mean. Not sophisticated.” Their mouth twists because they prefer sophisticated enemies; they require fewer pamphlets later.

“Why now,” DG asks, calm like water braced behind a sluice. The mark at her throat glows soft, the ribbon under her sternum a patient coil with its head up. The grief in her has teeth; it has learned to heel for the moment.

“Because we’re untying the lie,” Myrrh answers simply. “Because the orchard hour was set. Because your father was going to pour apology into the ground like water and the remnant thinks they were owed blood first.”

Lavender’s hand flinches. A flicker of her husband’s mouth closes over her name and is gone. She breathes like a queen who remembers how to stand inside an impact.

“Remnant,” Glitch says, moving string with graceful disdain. “Not the court proper. Not the dawn folk. The under-well sort that believes old oaths should be kept with frost and thorns and memory that cuts.”

“Memory that cuts,” Cain repeats, mild. He doesn’t look at the sword in the corner. He considers rope, water, paper, the back edge of a knife meant for mending. “Find me the tent with the screen.”

“I will,” Glitch says, and tightens one loop. The string draws the waste-road smaller until it is only the places a man with decent boots and bad ideas would choose to stop. His mouth tics in pleased pain. “Ambrose,” Lavender whispers, too low for the rest. He doesn’t look up. He smiles as if someone just named him home.

Myrrh dusts their hands and decides to ruin everyone’s afternoon. “While we’re confessing to history’s teeth.” They go to a locked case that has never been brave enough to hide from them and open it with a key that isn’t a key and a word that makes glass feel flattered. They draw out a ledger that has learned to look boring. They set it down. Dust rises; a paragraph in the air, an accusation.

“The codex that should be here,” they say. “The one I have never shown you because it wasn’t there to be shown. Missing since the reign of the king who minted the coin we pretend not to pay.” Their fingers, careful and cruel, lift a limp piece of linen paper. On it: the faint ghosts of a pressed title. The sheet is a poor man’s palimpsest, not ink, not rubbings, just the memory of pressure left on the page underneath when someone wrote too hard above it.

They hold it to the light. The words rise pale as scars.

THE THORNS AND THREADS PACT.

DG’s breath leaves without drama. Lavender goes white as a priest’s cuffs. Raw hums a note that makes the floor want to find a deeper bedrock and then remember it already has enough.

“What is it,” Cain asks, generous enough to let the room hear the answer.

“Joint instrument,” Myrrh says, clipped with gratitude that the question was asked correctly. “Not the Red Ribbon Covenant we dress up for display, not the first treaty you read the polite version of. This one belongs to hawthorn and under-well both. Thorns with right to bite; threads with right to bind. A bargain: crown keeps iron off roots, speaks names correctly, returns ash to hawthorn heart; in exchange, Unseelie remnant holds frost back from the wells and keeps their teeth out of children. Written in winter ink. Co-signed with hair and a drop. It was kept here.” They tap the case with something like fury. “It was broken by a king with a temper and a priest who liked torches. Then it was hidden or burned. The page under a page remembers its weight.”

Lavender’s mouth opens. No sound. Her throat works once, then twice, a queen swallowing a nail. “Which king,” she says, and the room leans away.

“The one who undid the maypoles,” Myrrh answers, unkind because kindness would be a lie. “Who declared hawthorn vulgar and made the wells carry sermons. Your grandfather’s—” They stop. The air hardens. “Not an old, safe coward. Closer.”

Lavender sits without remembering to pretend it was a choice. Linen white. Linen clean. Linen ready to be bled on.

“Clauses,” DG says, because language makes nerve behave. Her palms are on the table. The ribbon threads from her sternum to Cain’s wrist for a second and then goes back under the skin, bashful and rude. “What did the missing pages say.”

Myrrh touches the linen palimpsest like a lover with anger management. “Sanctions. Frostflower at the lips of those who speak apology in bad faith.” Ahamo’s mouth, blue, a match struck, a cup. “Thorn-sap in cups that aren’t blessed. Water that refuses to carry poison if asked correctly. Oath renewal by dawn and dusk both—” their glance flicks to DG and then to Cain’s hand without apology “—by alpha and omega, bound and equal, speaking Saethyr over ash returned and iron lifted. A mending allowed once.”

“Once,” Raw echoes, delighted by the elegance of it and miserable that it’s true. “After that it costs teeth.”

Cain doesn’t turn to DG. He watches the room instead. He sees men who will panic use this to make fire. He sees boys who think winter is romantic because they’ve never had to walk it at night. He counts the buckets and the wrists he will have to remove if someone reaches with the wrong hands. The brand in his palm warms. The belts along his hips hum the way leather does when it’s been taught to warn him if a red it doesn’t trust tries to bite.

“Rell?” Aila asks, dry as paper. “Or merely a useful idiot for people who don’t keep dust.”

“Both,” Glitch says without lifting his head, fingers darting from string to string, eyes like calculation learning to purr. “His clerk handled the cup. His money touched the honey. But the whisper under all this is older.” He glances up at DG, and for once there’s no grin. “It isn’t a court plot. It’s a remnant grievance being played like an instrument by men who think they can keep rhythm.”

“Then we go to the orchard at dawn,” DG says, steady, no tremor in it now. “We return ash. We lift iron. We speak the prince’s name and the Unseelie’s, both. We ask for the mending clause and we do not ask twice.”

Lavender’s eyes shutter and open. That white calms into bone. “Do it,” she says. “Do it while I sign the city into behaving long enough to let you.”

Unseen, behind stone, the whisper starts.

Not words. Moths against glass. A susurrus that smells like wells in winter, like foxglove in a priest’s sleeve, like sap that refuses to rise. The walls, romantic idiots, lean in. Raw pats the floor, gentle. “Shh,” he tells it. “We know. Owed. Stolen light. Thorns remember. We’re going.”

Cain steps between the whisper and DG with a motion that’s almost boredom. The field tightens at the edges, a dome in miniature. He puts his palm to her throat—heat exact, rune meeting mark, steady lid on a room that grew new teeth in the last hour—and the whisper doesn’t get in. The ribbon rubs his wrist in a quick, pleased snarl.

“Myrrh,” he says, eyes still on the door as if it might be tempted. “Can your knife splice treaties.”

“The edge cuts lies,” they answer. “The spine closes wounds consented to. If the pact allows mending once, the blade knows the grammar.” Their look is feral and priestly at the same time. “But it wants the right mouths to say yes.”

“Dawn and dusk,” DG says, and it is not a metaphor so much as a schedule. “Alpha and omega. Bound. Equal.” Her throat under Cain’s palm lifts on the breath that will be used to apologize to trees for something someone else burned.

“Rotations,” Cain adds, as if he’s ordering bread. “West stair doubled. Rope lattice at the orchard perimeter before first light. Buckets staged at every path because fire loves ceremony. Arrests quiet. Pamphlets made. Myrrh, write. Glitch, carry. Aila, if Rell breathes on a candle, present him an invoice for the air.”

“Sir,” Jeb says, already moving, grin gone feral for the right reasons.

“Raw,” DG says, and the stone under her palms thrums like a hand. “Tell the trees we’re coming. Tell them we’re bringing ash and law and rope and we are prepared to be very good and very rude.”

Raw hums. The sound walks out through stone and root and clay. Far in the orchard a hawthorn’s thorns lift, remembering a prince’s name and the taste of iron when iron learned manners.

The whisper thickens for a beat, pleased to be heard, then pulls back. A chill like clean water licks the base of DG’s skull. She smiles in a way winter recognizes. “We’re owed,” she tells it, insolent. “We owe. We’re coming.”

Lavender stands. Linen white has learned its second color: resolve. “Then dress,” she says, queen again. “We don’t make the dead late for their own apology.”

Cain releases DG’s throat because he chooses to. The mark throbs under his hand in a steady, obedient beat. The brand in his palm burns once like a coal agreeing to be useful. He looks at the string on Glitch’s table, at the coin on the tray, at the tin with sap and winter in it, at the empty space in Myrrh’s case where a missing codex left a ghost.

He bares his teeth without humor. “Find me the tent,” he repeats. “I want the hand behind the screen before the wells stop sulking.”

Glitch’s grin returns, sharp as a hook. “I’ll bring the whole frame,” he promises, wicked. “You can piss on the silk.”

Rope hums in the rafters. Paper sharpens. The city breathes in. Outside, frost lifts off a leaf and doesn’t know why. Inside, DG touches the linen palimpsest, gentle, angry, and the faint pressed letters tingle under her fingers like they want to be read by someone who will say them right.

“Dawn,” she says, to Myrrh, to Cain, to the walls that have learned to listen, to the prince who turned to ash because consent has sharper teeth than kings. “Dusk,” she adds, because healing likes balance. “Saethyr.”

The whisper under the stone smiles its terrible, delighted smile. The remnant stops pretending it didn’t hear. The oldest hawthorn in the north orchard flexes its roots and decides to keep the earth soft for the weight they will bring it.

Chapter Text

The city woke to rope and purpose.

Lines appeared where there hadn’t been lines. Lattices climbed arches that had previously trusted their own good behavior. Buckets stood in pairs beside every public fountain like chaperones with bad tempers. The bells didn’t ring differently; men did.

Jeb took the west quarter the way a man takes a hill. He walked the routes on his own boots before he gave them to anybody else and burned the pattern into the cobble. Rotations doubled without sounding panicked. Twos became fours. Fours became a net. Patrols crossed at corners like threads through leather; nobody got the same turn twice unless Jeb wanted to find out if a man was memorizing shadows or just getting comfortable. He filed petty bravado under future rope.

“Eyes on roofs,” he said, patient, to a line of boys who still wanted to look at alleys because alleys looked back. “You’ll get love letters from the eaves first. Count ladders. Count chimneys. Count laundry lines. Fire likes manners. Don’t give it any.”

Brogan made the east gate remember it had a spine. The guardhouse corkboard turned into a wall-sized ledger: names, hours, who relieved whom, who breathes too loud when lying. She put a broom in the hands of a man who thought he was too clever to hold one and watched his posture learn humility in front of a floor. “Article Twelve at your teeth,” she told the gate crew evenly. “Say it before you swallow.”

Aila went invisible and everywhere. She walked the stores and wrote lists that made quartermasters wish they had never tried to flirt with arithmetic. Soap, thread, sand for grease, oil for hinges, water rations plotted like troop movements, cheap red cloth requisitioned by the bolt and distributed the way you distribute medicine when you don’t want gratitude to become a weapon. She gave a long look to the pile of reclaimed knives with fake ribbon at their hilts and labeled the crate with a single neat word: rats.

Stev and Mil built a ladder choir. Five frames grew in the yard like patient gallows; men learned to climb them without teaching the street their fear. “Hands,” Stev said, and a boy’s grip fell apart. He put the fingers where they belonged and the boy’s breath changed from vanity to rhythm. “Knot,” Mil said, and the knot wasn’t a parody anymore. A loop for rescue. A quick-release that didn’t eat skin when panic got clever. The ladders grew personalities; the men learned to apologize to them when they missed a rung.

Raw tuned stone. He walked the edges of squares and the rims of wells and leaned his head against walls that were trying to decide whether they were houses or throats. “Hum,” he told the flagstones, and the hum came, low, discipline-shaped. “Shh,” he told the rumor that was trying to breed under the west arcade; it went still like a dog that’s been seen.

The Restablishment Program went on war footing without losing its grace. Therapy didn’t cancel; it moved to the yard in daylight so shadows couldn’t pretend to be necessary. Bad nights got logged like weather. The rule sheet on the dormitory door picked up three lines and lost none: No man alone at first bell or last. Report a dream like a fire. You may stand under the eave and shake for seven breaths; then you come inside and sit where the stone hums. The couch earned a second blanket. The armchair learned to stop apologizing for being comfortable.

Cain drilled them like a man who has died once and refuses to let anybody repeat the trick on his watch.

The yard knew his footsteps and still straightened. He didn’t roar. He didn’t need to. He stood at the board with chalk and a map of the city, and made his hand mean law. Corners got names. Lanes got new rules. “Rope at here, here, here,” he said, tapping lintels, counting breaths. “Buckets there, not there. That alley isn’t an alley; it’s a funnel. We don’t use funnels, boys, we use nets.”

He put steel in hands and never asked a man to swing it before he asked if the hand could write its own name and not shake. He walked the line and tapped scabbards; the belts hummed where DG’s silver sigils sat in the leather, and he listened. Counterfeit red threads nearby made the hum go waspish; he moved men like pieces on a board, soft-eyed and predator-precise.

“Article Eight,” he said to a sergeant who had learned sarcasm as a language and forgot law existed. “If somebody lights a torch near cloth, you don’t discuss it. You undo it. If they insist on flames, you make them carry a bucket until their arms confess.”

He threw them into drills ugly as winter. Firebreaks up in under two minutes. Rope lattice over a balcony in three. The ladder jutted; the body fell; four men caught it without making a miracle about it. “Again,” he said. “You don’t get applause for correct.”

The brand on his palm stayed banked, not shy, present. He kept his glove off when he worked because leather between his hand and the city’s pulse was a liar. DG’s marks shone faint through silk at the edge of the yard when she slipped by with bread and bad coffee; he didn’t look; the field thickened and steadied when she did as if the air wanted the boys to see what law looked like when it loved something that wasn’t itself.

He paired men badly and then taught them to be better. He put the boy who talked too much with the man who didn’t know how to ask for water. He put anger in front of patience and told them to swap shirts. He watched them fail and didn’t blink. He watched them get it and didn’t grin. “Good,” he said, and it landed heavier than praise.

He did not forget paper. He did not let anyone else. Reports went in the ledger the way blood stays in bodies; any page that tried to run got pinned under a rock from the parade yard that still smelled like weather. Aila’s annotations sprouted along the margins in a tidy hand that could skin a man alive without smearing ink.

“Street command,” he said to Jeb at dusk, the yard pinking, rope sighing on pulleys. “If I’m in three places and need a fourth, you’re my fourth. If a boy you like disobeys me and obeys you, you take his badge off yourself and hand it to him tomorrow morning after he’s done with his broom. We keep men. We do not keep habits.”

“Sir,” Jeb said, worried and feral at the same time, which is what you want on a man’s face when he’s about to hold a city with rope.

The city watched.

It always watches. It pretends not to. It watches from market corners where opinion sells for a copper. It watches from behind shutters that learned to be polite after last winter. It watches from balconies where silk likes to gather and practice words like propriety. It watched now as men in coats that fit too well and boots with pride in their polish moved at the Commander’s nod. It watched as ladders went up and rope learned to be rude. It watched as boys who used to be afraid of stairs started to sing on them.

It watched the Commander like a man who knows the weather and the world and refuses to let either be in charge. He was not theater; he was arithmetic with teeth. When he crossed the square, the riot in people’s mouths forgot its lines. When he laid a palm on a post, the post made a sound like a vow being edited. When he told a boy to drink, the boy drank. When he told a woman with a red thread in her hair that the way she tied it would bite her when it rained, she snorted, retied it the way he showed her, and found there was less rain in her face later. The city likes being right; it likes being taught even more.

Gossip did its stupid dance. The word cleanse got caught in rope and coughed to death. Fire tried twice and got turned into steam by boys who refused to make poetry about it. A priest lit a taper in front of the ugly statue that collects the wrong prayers and Brogan blew it out without using her lips. In the South Row, three girls sewed tiny red loops under the cuffs of their brothers’ shirts and then punched two men who called them witches; Jeb walked through at that exact moment and taught the men a knot they would never forget and a lesson about sisters that would save them later.

“War footing,” Glitch said in the archway of the yard, string in his hands, eyes on Cain. “You’re handsome when you bully physics.”

“String your tent,” Cain said, not looking, a smirk like a blade tucked away. “Bring me the man behind the screen.”

“I’m bringing you the whole playhouse,” Glitch said sweetly. “You can piss on the scenery.”

Raw laughed; the wall liked the idea. Myrrh wrote fast in the shade, a pamphlet titled What A Rope Is For And Why Your Mother Was Right.

Night lost its favorite excuse. Men who would have whispered in corners found corners occupied by a quiet Tin Man with a mug and a ledger. The Program’s dormitory turned its light low and did not close its door. A boy woke from a dream where heat had teeth and found two hands already on his shoulders—one human, one wall. He breathed on the third count because someone said “Saethyr” from the hall and the word took the panic by the hair and walked it outside.

At first light the yard went from steel to bread. DG came with apples and knife, with Myrrh and rope, with hair tied up like someone who expected wind and insult. She smelled like wings she hadn’t shown anybody, like grief that had learned to stand up, like law that liked saying please. The men stood straighter without knowing why. Cain didn’t touch her—palm a whisper’s width from her throat for a heartbeat, field heavy enough to make the edges of the square polite—and kept walking.

He drilled them until dusk made the city blush. He drilled them again in the dim where fear likes to hire itself out. He drilled them in silence so they could hear rope talk; he drilled them in noise so they could hear themselves. He made them move barrels and then made them put them back. He broke a broom on purpose and handed it to a man who thought breaking things first was a style. He posted the night rotations and the men read them the way believers read instructions: as if the person who wrote them knew which way their hands liked to turn.

He slept between lists. He ate between men. He let DG wash his palm with a cloth and didn’t let his jaw show that it made his breath hiccup. He touched her throat for a second longer than ritual allowed before he went back into the square and gave the air orders.

By noon on the third day, the city had learned something it would keep pretending it’d always known: fear is a tool, not a god. The rope sang when it was pulled the right way. The buckets waited like promises. The boys stopped looking for applause and started counting exits. The red threads on wrists were not a uniform—more an inside joke the city insisted on sharing with itself. When an old woman spit at Cain’s boots and called him a collar with legs, he handed her his cup, said “Hold,” and climbed a ladder to take a torch out of a child’s hand and put a slice of pear there instead. The old woman tasted the water in the cup and decided she had always liked collars when they were heavy enough.

At sundown, Cain stood in the yard and watched his men stand up without permission and knew he had won the first thing that mattered. Not a battle. A posture.

“Again,” he said, because he is a bastard about survival. “Ladders. Rope. Buckets. Article Eight in your teeth.”

“Sir,” the yard chorused, some with grins, some with the expression that means a lesson stuck.

He turned and the city felt the turn. It followed instead of flinching. Belief is quiet the first week; it hums in the gutters and hangs under eaves like a promise. In the window of the bakery that used to be stingy with crusts, a red thread tied around the bell pull made the bell sound like a better version of itself. A boy who had planned to shout cleanse went home and handed his mother the coin Aila had paid him for carrying sand; she tied a thread around his wrist and told him to use his words on ladders.

Night came. Rope hummed. Water waited. The Commander drilled like a man who has been a ghost and returned with a bad opinion of afterlives. The city watched and, for once, wanted to live more than it wanted to talk.

Chapter Text

Myrrh sets the room to old grammar.

Chalk circle burned into the stone with milk and salt. Hawthorn set in a clay cup that looks like it would rather bite than hold. A low brazier, coals red and civil. The rune knife on linen. A dish of honey so dark it shines, a bowl of water that never learned to mind its reflection. Thread. A strip of DG’s ribbon teased out of her sternum like silk a heartbeat long. A stripped thorn, white and mean.

“Witnesses and stone,” Myrrh says, as if they’re calling two very patient gods. Raw puts his palm to the floor and the floor hums like a drumhead pulled tight across bone. Glitch threads string around the four posts that keep the ceiling in the habit of decency and knots the corners in a pattern that all but says please behave. Aila stands in the arch with a ledger and a look that kills improvisation. Lavender Breathes. Jeb is the hinge in the door, alive and silent, listening for answers that like to arrive as footsteps.

“No fire theatrics,” Myrrh adds, dry. “If anything thinks it needs a blaze it can swallow a bucket and reconsider.”

Cain steps into the chalk. DG follows, the red under her sternum already a thin gleam, eager and insolent as a cat. He’s stripped to shirt and skin; glove off; brand banked and visible. The ache-stripe left by a fool’s knife is a memory the rune has made obedient. He takes his place with the precise disrespect of a man who will not ask a circle to share its opinions. He sets his palm on the small of her back one heartbeat. The field lowers at the edges of the room until air remembers its manners.

“Dawn and dusk,” Myrrh says, looking at them both like a pair of instruments they fully intend to play until their fingers hurt. “Alpha and omega. Equal. Bound. The Pact allows a single mending if the right mouths speak yes and the right veins offer taste. We will not say yes lightly. We will not be shy about tasting.”

They roll the knife in their hand once. Steel that looks like water and wants to be grammar. “Edge to cut. Spine to splice. Blood to remember. Honey to sweeten. Thorn to threaten. Water to keep witnesses polite. Princess. Commander. Hands.”

DG lifts her wrists without being told. The ribbon purrs out from the heels of her palms, twin coils bright and hot, and finds his bones the way it always does—wrapping his wrists without binding, not less and not slack, a living thing choosing which tree to climb. He takes her left hand in his right, and his left he lays—carefully, deliberately—across her throat. Rune to mark. Heat to heat. The thrum that jumps under his skin and into hers is obscene and holy both.

“Three breaths,” he says, because rules are the only way to make feral behave. “In. Out. In.”

On the third, Myrrh lays the blade’s edge to his thumb and lifts a single clean bead. No drama. A drop as precise as a period.

“Now,” they say.

Cain holds his hand over DG’s mouth and tilts. The blood hits her tongue and the world changes temperature.

Iron and sugar.

Not the stink of battle, not the penny-taste of panic. Iron, clean and shocked, and sugar, the sick lovely of honey that’s been taught to mind knives. She groans—quiet, filthy, reverent—and her pupils go to slits and then blow round. The ribbon lights hard, thickening from silk to cord, to rope, to something that moves under its own will like a red snake deciding how to coil. It climbs his wrist and his forearm and then, shameless, threads between her breasts and lays its hot, wet length along the exact center of her chest as if it intends to pry open the place where vows sleep.

“Hold,” Cain orders, because the room needs the word put in the right mouth at the right time. His fingers tighten around her wrist. The pulse under his thumb pounds a drumline into his bones; his cock answers in the rude way it learned at a worse time and refuses to apologize for.

“Saethyr,” DG breathes around the taste, and the knife’s notches shiver. The floor drops half an inch deeper into bedrock and decides not to move again unless asked politely.

“Speak the name of the prince,” Myrrh prompts.

DG does, careful as a woman unsetting a trap. The word blooms in the chalk like frost undoing itself. The hawthorn in the clay cup nods, thorn-points catching a stripe of lamplight and keeping it. Raw smiles at the floor and hums a new harmony. Lavender closes her eyes and opens them like someone returned to her body after being dragged toward a cliff.

“Edge,” Myrrh says, and flips the blade so its bite faces outward. “Cut what you don’t owe.”

DG takes the knife in both hands. The ribbon shifts and lays her a clear path like a living annotation. She touches the edge to the thinnest strand where her magic still loops through the place she was taught to apologize for existing. The knife thinks. The strand parts without pain. A breath she didn’t know she’d been holding since she was eight leaves a mark on the air and goes somewhere better.

“Spine,” Myrrh says, quick. “Close what you choose.”

Cain turns her wrist in his hand so that the underside faces up, vulnerable as prayer. He brings her palm to his mouth and bites—not hard, not mark, just enough to pull a bead. Iron and sugar. He tastes her with the courtesy of a thief who always leaves a coin and a calling card. He slides his fingers down to her cunt, fast now because ritual likes blood but loves sequence, and presses—two fingers in with the ease that belongs only to men whose hands have taught a body how to open.

DG gasps. The ribbon claws his wrist. The rune under his palm flares hotter than the coals.

“Breathe,” he says into her mouth, ruthless for her good, slow-fucking motion of fingers inside her while her tongue licks his seal. “One. Two. Now.”

She rides his hand like law. Myrrh sets the spine of the knife along their joined wrists and says the line in High Speech that makes hunger into contract. The spine warms. The back edge—meant for mending—writes its own little law into their skin.

The rune on Cain’s palm shifts.

It doesn’t just brighten. It changes grammar. The neat, brutal curve he’s worn since the knife first burned him across bone turns thorned. A ring of hooked lines unfurls under his skin, older than the palace, sharper than any vow he has ever tolerated, hungrier than the first time he decided to kill a man for a city that hadn’t asked him to. It bites him with his own consent, a good pain, the animal kind that makes men stay alive in storms. Tung, tug—the bond answers with greedy joy. The mark on DG’s throat flares in twin, not circle but crown, a circlet of tiny points that print against his palm and then lie down like satisfied teeth.

“Say yes,” Myrrh whispers, and the room answers for them and it still matters that they do.

“Yes,” DG says, iron and sugar, cunt clenching around his fingers, tears because there’s too much light and not enough air. “Yes.”

“Yes,” Cain says into the notch where her jaw meets her ear, voice gone low and wicked, dominance turned into covenant. “Mine to hold. Yours to bind. Ours to cut and mend what owes and nothing else.”

“Again,” Myrrh says, delighted now, primordially academic. “On breath and blood. Speak the Pact’s line.”

DG and Cain speak together, the weft and warp catch: “Thorns may bite. Threads may bind. Ash to root, iron off, doors at dawn and dusk. Saethyr.”

The ribbon goes from bright to alive.

It swells and moves between them like muscle under skin. It threads their wrists in a double figure-eight, loops his forearm twice, runs to her sternum and through the mark, a slick sound so rude Glitch huffs laughter he can’t help and then bites his knuckles, ashamed and thrilled. It lifts its head like a snake and taps the back of Cain’s hand exactly where the rune has changed; the thorned ring answers with a pulse so mean and grateful the hawthorn in the cup rustles.

“Now shut the cut,” Myrrh commands.

DG turns the blade. She lays the spine to their wrists. Consent isn’t a word now; it’s a taste. Iron and sugar. Sugar and iron. The back edge purrs and the mended place kisses shut, not scar, memory. The ache in his palm settles. The hunger in him goes from wild to aimed.

“Again,” Cain says, because he is a bastard about what works. His fingers fuck up into her in the exact rhythm that turns the ritual into a body learning a vow. “Breathe.”

She does. The room listens to the sound she makes when she breaks, quiet and ruinous, a wet, bright yes dragged out of her like a thread pulled clean and used in a new seam. He holds her while she shakes, hand at her throat steady, digits flexing inside her so that after becomes medicine and not accident. Her mouth opens and gives him the sugar he wants. He takes it and gives iron in exchange.

“Now—mouth,” Myrrh says, realizing they’re about to lose the window between doctrine and biology. They tip the dish of black honey and thorn-scent toward DG and Cain. “Sweeten. Bind to law. Don’t be sentimental.”

DG licks and the taste makes her hiss. Cain takes the back of the blade and touches the notch against his tongue, tastes thorns and winter and a resolve he didn’t need help growing. He kisses her with it, filthy and formal. The ribbon coils between their mouths and takes its share, smug.

“Witness,” Raw says, because stone likes being invited to dinner. The floor hums a note only certain bones can hear. Aila writes a line she never thought she’d write: Pact mending begun, terms spoken by crown and knife. Glitch throws his string across the posts and makes it into a shape that is secretly blasphemy in three dialects; the ceiling doesn’t mind.

“Again,” Myrrh says, satisfied; then cruel. “Edge for lies.”

Cain takes the knife and touches the sharp to the old, quiet kink of shame in DG that she keeps like a souvenir of an uglier education. It shears clean and doesn’t bleed. He opens his mouth so she can see his hands when he gives her his. She takes the edge and cuts off a lock of his worst habit, the one where he thinks his body must pay for what his city owes. It comes away more easily than he deserves. He expects to be angry; he is relieved.

“Spine for us,” she says, and touches the back to both places. The mended parts glow like a ember in deep ash and then go calm, hungry no more.

“Say it,” Myrrh orders, the last clause because ritual likes closure and sex and this room currently has enough of both. “The thing that makes doorways open and walls love you.”

DG leans in and says Saethyr into Cain’s mouth. The rune bites him sweetly. He answers with his palm at her throat, and his voice drops, command made prayer. “Mine to hold.”

The ribbon answers by thickening one more time, little jaws of light closing around their joined wrists, then slinking back, slow, satisfied, sinking under her skin and his like a river going underground.

When it’s quiet, the quiet isn’t empty; it’s loaded. The rune in his palm is changed; even Lavender can see it. The old curve has thorn teeth now, angled cunning, appetite and law braided; it casts a thin shadow like the ghost of a crown. The mark on DG’s throat mirrors it, a pale wreath under skin that will show when she wants the city to behave and hide when she wants the city to learn. The air tastes like iron and sugar. The hawthorn in the cup has forgiven them for not bleeding on it.

“Done,” Myrrh pronounces, not triumphant—focused. “One mending allowed. You bought it with right words and correct appetite. Don’t squander. Don’t lie to it. Don’t use it for anything smaller than a wrong older than your mothers.”

“Thorns,” Lavender whispers, linen-shocked and clean. “Threads.”

“Dawn,” DG says, shaking, fierce. “Dusk.” She looks at Cain as if he is the practical end of a spell. He is. He looks back like a man who has been handed a new weapon and intends to learn the balance before he swings it. His fingers leave her cunt reluctantly, obscene and tender; he puts them in his mouth because iron and sugar tastes like survival and because he can. She swats his wrist with the back of her hand and then takes the same fingers into her mouth as if she were sharing a secret. Myrrh pretends to fuss with the blade. Glitch looks away because he is not a complete bastard.

“Rope,” Cain says to Jeb without turning his head, already mapping perimeter. “Buckets. West path. Lattice on the orchard gate.”

“Sir,” Jeb answers, gone and moving.

“Aila,” DG says, voice wrecked and regal. “Post the proclamation. Copy what we said correctly. Give Rell a copy; tie it to his pin.”

“With pleasure,” Aila says, making pleasure sound like tax.

“Raw,” Cain says, “tell the trees their mending is paid for once and once only. If they want teeth after, they’ll have to hold their mouths open so we can count them.”

Raw hums something obscene at bark and the bark hums back and isn’t offended.

Myrrh wraps the knife. The room lets its shoulders down. The walls, ridiculous romantics, purr. The thorns look pleased. The honey is less black. For a second, the whisper from the wells goes quiet the way a crowd does when the singer hits the exact note they came for.

Cain’s hand throbs a little; the thorned ring brightens and then settles. He flexes. The brand is not a brand anymore. It’s a crest with teeth. He will have to learn to hold his coffee with his left for a day. DG’s mark looks like an invitation wrapped in a threat. She’s still shaking, slick and wrecked and ridiculous and fine, the iron-sugar on her tongue making her smile like dusk made flesh.

“Mine to hold,” he says one last time, not to own, to close the book. She sighs yes into his palm. The ribbon under her sternum gives one lazy, satisfied coil like a snake that ate correctly for once and intends to hiss at anyone who suggests salad.

They step out of the circle together and the chalk doesn’t mind. The city, out past the stone, tests the edges of its fear again and finds them less interesting than the way rope hums when pulled the right way. Dawn waits. Dusk loosens its cuffs. Iron and sugar on their tongues, law in their wrists, thorns in their hands, they go dress the orchard for an apology and a fight.

Chapter Text

The Great Glass Gallery pretends it learned something from the last time. Candles moved higher. Curtains tamed. Rope tucked clever above cornices so it looked like ornament until a hand that knew knots tugged once and made a lattice fall where panic liked to climb. Music stitched itself polite and sweet as if to say: no knives here. Silk rustled like grass deciding whether to hide leopards.

Masks. Feathers. Painted paper that made nobility of bone. A dozen foxes with the wrong eyes. Three lambs with teeth. A lion whose mane had met a very expensive brush. DG wore a mask of black lace that did nothing to hide the mark at her throat; it had never been intended to. The red under her skin purred against the thorned ring in Cain’s palm when he drifted close. He stood half a pace behind her, glove off, field a quiet dome that taught the corners how to behave.

Lavender wore a filigree that looked like a line item in a ledger. Glitch chose a half-mask, copper and clockwork, one eye free and bright. Brogan had no mask; she had a broom. Aila’s was a slash of black tied neat at the temple that dared a man to ask what exactly he thought he was seeing. Myrrh pinned a little hawthorn sprig to their lapel and told anyone who asked it was for luck and anyone who didn’t to touch wood anyway.

Up in the galleries, the balcony curtains made little rooms out of night. Az stepped into one with a slow, obscene sway of skirts, knife on her hip, hair pinned until the pins gave up. Jeb followed like a man who had finally made a decision his bones had been waiting on. The alcove was deep enough to be decent if decency were a thing either of them had packed.

“Unmask?” she whispered, laughing, and reached. He let her. His came off in her hand and she stared like she’d won a bet with herself. “That mouth,” she murmured, reverent and dangerous, and pulled him into it.

In the hall below, a violin found its throat. A dancer in red turned and the skirts behaved like a good lie. A bell chimed once from somewhere that wasn’t supposed to have bells. Cain’s head tilted a single degree. The belts along the parapet hummed, not loud, a thread through music. Counterfeit red nearby. Fake honey. Cloth that wanted to be fire. He didn’t move. He let the air tighten around the edges and told the room nothing else had changed.

Up on the balcony, Az’s back hit wainscoting in a clack that sounded too much like punctuation. She didn’t flinch. She hooked one leg around Jeb’s thigh and hiked her skirt with the other hand like a woman accepting a coronation. He grunted, low, honest, and slid his palms up the back of her legs, finding silk and heat and everything the long reading table had promised in a different room. She kissed him until his knees confessed.

“Say please,” she ordered into his mouth, a queen being merciful.

“Please,” he said like a hungry man at a door. “Please, Az.”

Her laughter turned raw and kind. She turned him fast and he let her because he has learned the trick of catching his weight. She pushed him until the inside of his thighs hit the balcony bench, shoved his shoulders down with one hand, and climbed him like a bad idea. Skirt up, no patience for ceremony. He got one hand under, then both, and swore that quiet prayer again when his fingers found her ready, slick, greedy.

“Fast,” she hissed. “Before we behave.” She reached into his trousers with a competence that would have made a lesser man faint and freed him like she was excusing him from class.

“Look at me,” he breathed, and she did, smirking and brilliant, mouth parted.

She sank. Not a thought, a seat. He groaned, helpless—deep and low, the kind of sound that turns religion into work. She swallowed him and sat there a breath while her body adjusted from savage plan to execution. He petted her hips like a man learning an instrument that will not forgive wrong notes. She rolled once, just to test how the angle lit her nerves and crossed her wires, and hissed through her teeth.

“Ride,” he begged, honest.

She did. Slow enough to teach him patience, hard enough to make the bench complain under both of them. Her hands braced on his shoulders, then the sill. He held her waist and kissed the damp at her throat and bit where the pulse forgot math. She sawed herself on him, wicked, precise, using him like a tool and a man both, small filthy noises falling out of her mouth into his mouth. The music below climbed a polite staircase of notes; she climbed a ruder one and dragged him up with her.

They almost missed the signal.

A drum hit three times from the north wall, not on the beat. Glitch’s string snapped against his wrist. The belts hummed acid. Raw’s head lifted in the corner like a dog who heard a word he liked. Cain moved his hand half an inch and the air chose a side.

Az froze, eyes going fox-bright over Jeb’s shoulder, not pulling off him, only stilling. “Hear it?” she whispered.

“Left gallery,” he panted, senses dragging themselves upright around the sex. He slid his palm over her mouth to catch a gasp that might be stupidly timed and found himself smiling, wretched and proud, because she licked his hand like a monster.

“Later,” she said into his palm. “Finish.”

Orders like that you don’t argue with unless you intend to die unmarried. He fucked up into her—quick, brutal, precise, the kind of thrusts that bury grief under pleasure for exactly long enough to get the job done—and she came on his cock like she’d rehearsed it. He followed like a man who believes in cause and effect, groaning into her mouth so the room didn’t have to carry the sound itself. She smirked through the end of it, stand-and-deliver, and rubbed her thumb along his lip to wipe a drop of her laughter off it.

“Go,” she said, already climbing off him, cleaning her mouth with two fingers she popped in and out obscene. “Find me a mask to steal and a man to hit.”

“In that order,” he begged.

“In whichever order gives me that mouth again after,” she said, deadly cheerful, and turned, skirts down, knife straight, a woman stepping out of an alcove that had just hosted treason and rehearsal both.

Below, the mask-makers’ work paid off in confusion ripe enough for murder. The fox with the wrong eyes took DG’s hand with perfect court bow and something under the bow—sweat sweet with black honey, a whisper of frostflower, a coil of silk gone mean. Cain’s palm burned an opinion. The thorned ring in his hand flashed meaner than any candle. He stepped a breath closer without stepping at all.

Glitch was already moving, taught string in fingers, attention dirty. He had been watching the way reflections lied. The lion in the mirrored pillar blinked on the wrong beat; the lamb to its left didn’t breathe when he counted three. He cut the distance sideways, smiling at nothing, and looped his string over a polished horn. The knot went clever. He tugged. The lion’s mask came off the lamb’s face.

“Ah,” he said, delighted and cruel. “Right mask. Wrong face.”

The lamb bared a mouth that had nothing to do with innocence. Under the paper, the face was plain; the eyes were not. One frost-pale, one river-dark, black honey glistening at the lip where pretense had made the mouth thirsty. The knife lifted as if the wrist had learned its trick from winter. Fast. Honest. Ugly. It went for DG’s throat exactly the way a secret chooses to kill something beautiful in public.

Cain caught it.

Palm to edge. No flourish. The blade’s kiss was a white-hot yes that would have opened another man’s hand like a book. The thorned ring in his palm bit down like a dog that liked its job and ate the first bite of poison without flinching. Frostflower hissed; the rune answered, hungry and older than manners. Pain lanced up his arm in that clean, good way—this belongs to me, not to you—and he smiled around it like a man who’d been handed a lemon at a funeral and was pleased to have something to do with his mouth.

“Article Eight,” he said, cheerful as sin, twisting his wrist so the blade skated off nerve and into law. “No flames. No throats. Not tonight.”

The faux-lamb tried to pull back. Cain didn’t allow it. He wrenched the knife sideways, the rune flaring in a ring of thorn that left little crowns of light bitten into the assassin’s steel. The back edge of the blade kissed the brand’s new grammar and went stupid. Aila’s boy was there and took the wrist with a rope that had opinions. Brogan put her broom across the kneecaps in a practical, compassionate blow that suggested repentance was coming to sit on both legs.

DG didn’t scream. Not this time. Her hand shot to Cain’s wrist, covering his blood, the mark at her throat flaring in twin of the thorned ring—wreath under skin, bite answered with bite. “Saethyr,” she said on a breath sharp enough to shave. The air changed pressure. Masks lifted a fraction as if faces wanted to confess they were only skin and silk was only cloth.

Across the floor, a second fox moved wrong. Raw pointed, laughing softly because walls spoil him. Jeb was already on that vector, trousers decent, cock mostly composed, jaw set the way it does when he intends to be a hinge and a hammer both. The fox’s sleeve glittered with powder the wrong color for ballroom; Jeb grabbed it and the powder puffed into air meant to singe lungs. Myrrh blew a handful of something into it that made it behave like snow; it fell, etiquette learned, and collected on silk in a dust the color of old tea. “Sap,” Myrrh said, disgusted. “Cheap.”

Glitch had his string around the lamb’s ankles before the lamb remembered their feet still touched the floor. “Smile,” he advised. “The mask loves you.” He yanked; the lamb’s head bucked. The lion mask dangling from the horn gave a metallic little cheer.

Cain let the knife go all at once and shoved the assassin’s wrist up. The blade flew, sang, hit a rope-anchored lattice and bounced into a net that had been waiting for something to call it useful. Stev—unimpressed saint of ladders—plucked it out of the mesh with two fingers and put it into a bag that had the word EVIDENCE stitched on it in Aila’s tidy hand.

“Witnesses and stone,” Brogan announced to the room, broom at a slant that dared someone to call it rustic. “Their names. Your names. Who smelled what. Who held a cup. Who thought cleanse and forgot to swallow.”

Someone did think it—habit more than strategy. DG turned her head slightly and looked toward the sound without turning toward it, omega command making the room’s air choose which throats were allowed to test syllables. The word hit the field Cain had dropped and broke into coughing. The priest in green who keeps practicing being useful closed his mouth on his new favorite sin and decided to remember water exists.

“Palm,” DG said under her breath, not because she doubted him, to claim the thing that was hers.

He turned his hand for her. The cut wasn’t deep; the thorned rune had made the blade slide without learning too much about meat. Blood welled in a bright, well-behaved seam. He liked the sting. It was the kind of pain that reminded the rest of him it had work. She put her mouth to it, obscene and priestly, iron and sugar, and the ribbon under her skin swelled once, greedy, and then settled down purring like a cat told to wait for supper.

“Glove?” Aila offered, one eyebrow up.

“Later,” Cain said, easy, eyes on the rest of the floor. Two more masks were wrong: a dove too interested in its own shadow, a stag that took a breath out of time. Jeb went left. Brogan went right. Raw hummed to a pillar and the pillar told him the stag would trip. It tripped.

Lavender lifted a hand and the band’s bow arms slowed without stopping. Music bent, sweet, heavier, a tide a man could stand upright in. The court, idiots and children, looked at the queen and found themselves obeying before they got to be afraid. Rell, two benches back, tried to smile as if none of this surprised him; his pin chose that moment to come untied and fall into his tea. Aila wrote his name down under a column labeled Things That Will Offend Me When I Have Time.

Az slid down the stair like a woman returning from a confession. Jeb’s mouth was a sin; she gave it a single private glance like a promise, then turned on the dove and took the mask off her face with two fingers and contempt. The face under it was no one. That is the worst, truest kind of assassin: a face saved by nobody, owned by frost, rented by coin.

“Who paid you,” she asked in a voice that invited the answer to arrive wearing its wrists high.

The dove smiled with her wrong mouth. “Winter,” she said.

“My season,” Az murmured, and broke the hand that held the second powder with a twist that will be taught to a boy who thinks he likes to hit things in spring when his tenderness is ready.

The lamb tried one last time, because the script is always the same: reach for her throat, cut the city where it thinks it can sing. Cain’s palm hit the wrist again, casual, not indulgent. He smiled like a man a little drunk on iron and responsibility. “Not today,” he said, and rolled the wrist under, the rope landing there with a snake’s exactitude. The knot bit down. The room sighed.

“Rotations hold,” he said, not raising his voice. “Runners to the market with a story that ends here. Rope stays up. Buckets are not decoration, in case anyone forgot how quickly silk behaves when it panics.”

DG looked at the hall as if the hall might decide to do something useful. “Everyone who came to dance,” she said, pleasant, dreadful, “dance.” And the ones who had come for the show of fear had to either leave or dance and neither option makes a very good legend. They danced. In the corner, someone sobbed quietly and was not told to stop. That is what rope is for: to hold in all directions.

Glitch bent and pressed his mask to his chest like a lover. “Good play,” he told the lion that had been on the lamb’s face. “You were wasted on him.” He handed it to a child disguised as a cat who had been holding milk and courage for the last thirty breaths. “Guard this. It’s important.”

“Yes, sir,” the cat said, and looked at Cain with the reverence children reserve for men who bleed correctly and don’t shout about it. Cain wiggled his fingers once and the cat purred. That was new. He filed it for later.

Raw put his palm to the floor and asked it if it felt better than last time. The stone hummed yes like a thing who has learned that ritual isn’t magic so much as kindness used on purpose. Myrrh collected the knife into their bag with a small banked fury that belonged to scholars wronged by history. Aila tied a neat red thread at the end of the rope lattice and wrote in her ledger that it had worked.

Az arrived at DG’s shoulder like winter approving of a plan. She fixed one curl, straightened a clasp, and signaled with one knuckle at the place where blood had touched lip. DG licked it off with a private little smile that set three men in the back pew on fire in ways no rope could cure.

“Again?” Az asked, wicked.

“Many,” DG returned, not about murder.

Brogan hauled the lamb upright and introduced their head to the idea of walking without dignity. “Trial tomorrow,” she said. “You can rehearse lies in a holding cell so you don’t embarrass yourself in front of stone.”

Cain flexed his palm once more. The thorned ring in his hand settled into a bright ache he liked. He rolled his wrist and did not flinch. He smiled at DG like he’d just carried a bucket up a tall stair and set it down and found his arm had learned something about being alive.

“You’re bleeding,” she whispered anyway, pleased and concerned and filthy with pride.

“Striped,” he corrected, low. “Minor inconvenience.” He tilted his hand and she pressed her mouth to it again, slow this time, like a woman finding iron and sugar a proper dessert.

In the balcony alcove, a bench considered its chances of surviving spring. In the hall, masks returned to faces—some their own, some not—and music tried again at decency. Rope hummed. Buckets waited. The city watched the Commander catch a blade with his palm and smile like pain knew its place and started, slowly, quietly, to believe more than it feared.

Chapter Text

Roan asked for old law with a mouth made for lies.

He did it on the steps where a city learns how to behave: stone worn smooth by boots and weather, the Great Glass Gallery at their backs like a witness that had promised to tell the truth this time. Mercenaries were gone or pretending to be smoke in alleyways; rope hummed overhead; buckets stood like punctuation. The crowd came quiet, not because they were kind, because the Commander had been teaching them how to listen.

“Trial by combat,” Roan announced, voice polished on vanity. He had a new coat that wanted to be honorable and a sword that had never been asked for an apology. He flourished the writ as if paper could make him taller. “Before queen and stone. I demand it.”

“Granted,” Lavender said, shawl and spine, tone of a woman who would sign even uglier things and then make dinner. “Witnesses and stone.”

“Witnesses and stone,” Brogan echoed, already listing, voice as gentle as a seasoned broom.

Myrrh set their satchel on the balustrade like a clever little altar and rolled their shoulders because scholarship is a sport and today would require agility. Aila flipped to a fresh page and drew a neat box where the city would put its verdict. Raw pressed his palm to a step and the step hummed yes in a minor key.

DG stood at the top with her mask off, mark visible, no silk trying to pretend the throat wasn’t a battlefield and a benediction. The ribbon under her skin lay quiet, patient coil, head up. Cain stood below her on the flagstone of the court, glove off, brand bright with the new thorned grammar Myrrh had teased out of the knife. The sword at his hip looked like a tool someone had kept too clean for too long.

“Terms,” Vell said, pretended to be necessary. “Old law binds to three: steel to steel, no flame, no other hands. Yield accepted; death unnecessary; stone decides if mercy holds.”

“Yield,” Roan scoffed, a gasp wrapped in bravado. “Death or I’ll call it theater.”

Cain smiled. It wasn’t kind. “Death belongs to the wall,” he said. “I don’t rent.”

They stepped into the square the way craftsmen step into their shop. Masks stacked along benches. The band’s bow arms found stillness. The city’s throat unclenched.

“Begin,” Lavender said, which is what queens say when they are tired of men warming up.

Roan lunged like a man who loved noise. Big step, confident thrust, the kind of attack that bullies a lesser opponent into having a story about being unlucky at funerals. Cain wasn’t there anymore. A quarter-turn, a step familiar to men who have learned to walk around holes in roads at night, a little geometry that makes a body the shape of the empty part of a sentence. Roan’s blade ate air and embarrassment.

Steel kissed steel, small and obscene, like a bell rung for the wrong saint. Cain’s riposte wasn’t a slash; it was a word, precise, short. Edge met Roan’s guard at a place the guard didn’t know it owned. The shock ran up Roan’s arm and reminded his elbow it had a vote. He grinned anyway, sneer softened into pride by pain.

“Footwork,” Glitch murmured to nobody, string taut between his fingers as if he were holding up the sky with a piece of thread. “Listen.”

The duel was a sermon. Cain preached in cadence and cut.

He moved as if the square were a map only he could read. Steps wrote letters. Pivots wrote punctuation. The rhythms were the ones law uses when it’s tired of explaining itself to cowards. He took the center, then surrendered it as if generous, then took it back with a half-step that would make a clerk forget how to count. Roan chased and found himself corrected.

He made Roan walk. That was the cruelty: not the cuts, not the thin threads of blood that suddenly lacquered Roan’s forearm and the seam of his coat; not even the little bites Cain’s point took out of confidence. He made him walk the precise distance where men think they’re hunting and are actually being led. He let Roan come within a hair of feeling powerful, then turned a wrist and removed the feeling like a chair pulled out from under a boy who thinks he gets to sit first.

Roan had learned in rooms with mirrors. He was quick on the recovery and vain about it. He feinted, flicked, circled, tried the oldest trick any dog learns—teeth high, then low, then high again. Cain answered with hands so calm it verged on unkindness; a small parry became a refusal; a refusal became a lesson.

“Look at his shoulders,” Jeb muttered to the boy next to him who had forgotten to breathe. “Not the blade. The blade lies because it’s metal. His shoulders don’t know how.”

Roan tried to make the duel a song about himself. Cain refused the genre. He let the steel sing instead and wrote harmony on Roan’s boot heels. The square learned the words on the third exchange: slide, bite, step; touch, deny, move. The thorned ring in Cain’s palm glowed through skin when hilts kissed. It didn’t save him; it witnessed. The rune wanted blood like law wants obedience: not for pleasure, for correctness.

He could have ended it early. A hook to disarm at the fifth pass; a wrist turned half a breath sooner; a cut to the thigh he didn’t take. He didn’t, because the crowd needed to be taught what control looked like when it wasn’t cruelty. So he showed them cruelty inside control.

He cut Roan on purpose the way you cut cloth you intend to mend later only to prove you can. Elbow. Rib. The meat over the heart, thin, a whisper of red that didn’t deserve to be called a wound. Roan snarled. The sound was handsome. Cain acknowledged it with a tilt of his head like a craftsman appreciating a tool’s balance. Then he stepped close enough for Roan to smell pine and leather and the filthy correctness of iron and sugar, and made the other man meet his eyes while losing.

“Yield,” Cain offered once, as ritual prefers.

“Never,” Roan spat, which is the word men keep in their mouths when they’re afraid it will taste like cowardice. Their blades rang and stole the sound.

Raw leaned his head to the step. The wall hummed a little louder. It liked rhythm. It liked the way Cain’s steps told the square the floor would keep holding. It watched Roan’s foot slip on a pebble that had been dislodged by somebody’s hurry an hour ago and decided not to trip him until the second pass because that would be a better story.

DG did not speak. The mark at her throat glowed tidy under the edge of a lace collar no longer pretending to be fashion. The ribbon lay against her sternum like a poised snake. She watched Cain’s shoulders, then his hips, then his hand. She saw when he let his field drop a hair so that the air around Roan felt heavy; she saw when he lifted it so roar could run really fast and get tired quicker. She saw what the city was being taught and the part of her that had wanted to burn it down for killing her father steadied its aim.

Roan finally did something respectable: he stopped playing for applause. He cut for bone.

It came as a rhythm change, not an explosion. Feint low, true high. Cain met it not with steel, with an angle. Roan’s blade grazed the thorned ring—hot spark, white pain—bit the skin where the rune lives, and got hungry for it. Frostflower hissed where it still lived in tiny gossiping quantities on Roan’s weapon; the brand’s thorns bit back, took the taste of winter and made it honest.

Cain smiled around the pain like he’d been waiting for a problem he knew how to solve. He stepped in so close Roan had to smell what obedience smells like on a man who has chosen it, and let Roan feel body for just long enough to be an education. Then he turned both their wrists inside the smallest space a man can do work in and did ugliness tidy.

Roan’s sword went to the ground with a little cry of relief that embarrassed it. Cain’s blade stayed where it belonged: at Roan’s throat so gently the skin didn’t interrupt the line.

Silence. Not because the crowd was good at it. Because the sound had gone somewhere else to be alone.

“Yield,” Cain said again, pleasant as bread.

Roan, panting, hair plastered at the temples with honest sweat, eyes wide with the math of it, bared his teeth. He had one trick left: reach when you shouldn’t. His left hand went for a knife he wasn’t supposed to have according to the rules and that meant he had it.

The crowd gasped, greedy, relieved—violations make the story easier to tell later. Cain didn’t sigh out loud. He twitched his wrist so the flat of his blade kissed Roan’s throat with a lover’s exactness and the knife never got all the way born. Roan froze because some instincts come with your fingers and don’t ask permission.

“Yield,” Cain said, final time, and you could hear the period.

Roan looked at the crowd and saw no salvation. He looked at Lavender and saw linen. He looked at DG and saw dawn refusing to beg. He looked at the stone and the stone looked back as if unimpressed by anyone's death face. He closed his eyes.

“Never,” he said again, but this one was small and stupid, and the wall didn’t write it down for the city.

Cain moved, amused then deadly, that familiar flex of a man who has learned to spare through discipline, not mercy. He changed his point by three degrees. Roan felt the cold stanza of the blade at his throat shift to the warmer line over the tendon below his ear. Even a vainglorious man knows anatomy when it wants to be flattered.

DG’s hand landed at Cain’s spine.

Not a drag. Not a command. Warmth. Law. A court that can move without leaving the room. He didn’t need it to keep his control. He needed it to write the ending correctly.

He spared Roan’s life in the space of a breath.

The blade left skin and wrote a shallow line across the collar of Roan’s pride instead. Roan jerked at the non-pain of it. The knife in his left hand fell—clink—like a question nobody would answer because the answer was boring.

“Yield,” Cain said for the last time, and the old law, polite for once, put its hand over Roan’s mouth and made him say it.

“I yield,” Roan choked, hating the way breath behaves around honesty.

The step hummed a pleased chord; Raw petted it like a good dog in love with thunder. Myrrh let a breath out in a sneer that was mostly relief and half footnote. Aila drew a neat checkmark in the box she had drawn and wrote, almost smugly, mercy held. Lavender nodded as if liturgy had done its duty without getting ambitious.

Brogan moved as if she had known all along she would be the one to put rope on Roan’s wrists. Not cruel. Correct. She tied so that hands learned yes and no both. “Article Twelve says you live,” she told him. “Article Me says you don’t get to talk on the way to your room.”

The crowd exhaled like a beast with manners. The word cleanse tried to hatch somewhere near a column and got shamed back into the egg by ten red threads nodding in unison. The band considered playing and decided that was a worse kind of panic; they waited.

Cain stepped back, sword low. He didn’t bow. He gave the air permission to stop trying to be a tool and return to weather. Blood ran along the thorned ring in his palm and down to his wrist in a thin, polite line. He breathed through it. He smiled exactly as much as the pain earned, no more, and the city learned what it looks like when a man refuses to make a scene out of suffering.

DG’s fingers were still a warm pulse at his spine. He put his hand over hers, palm to back, brand to bone, a private circuit. The ribbon under her skin purred, greedy and satisfied. He didn’t turn to kiss her. He didn’t need to. The square could feel the promise exchanged there: later. Many.

“Sentence?” Vell asked, weak with relief at being allowed to speak again.

“Exile stands,” Lavender said. “No return. Trial records posted. Names of coin kept. Anyone who invites him back eats rope.”

“Clerk Rhyss?” Aila prompted, acid with purpose.

“Alive,” Cain said, eyes on Roan, whose breath had become a bad habit he would carry for a while. “He has a room. He has a ledger. He has a broom. He writes until his hand forgets how to lie.”

“And the tent?” Glitch asked, copper mask pushed up onto his forehead, string biting his fingers, eyes hungry for theater that let him be useful.

“Tonight,” Cain said, amused again, deadly again, as if he had found the hour in the day where murder belonged and filed it there. “Bring me the whole playhouse.”

The square took a step closer to being a city that prefers belief over fear. Rope hummed. Buckets waited. The wall learned a new note and promised to keep it. Roan was led away by a broom that didn’t brag. Cain wiped his palm on a cloth Aila handed him without making a pilgrimage out of it. DG laced his fingers in hers for a heartbeat where nobody could see and spoke the word that keeps houses warm.

“Saethyr,” she breathed.

He answered with the one that keeps men alive when they’d rather be righteous.

“Mine to hold,” he said, not gentle, and set the city back on its feet.

Chapter Text

Midnight found the throne room honest.

No courtiers; no music; no candles low enough to gossip. High lamps banked to a dusk that made marble remember it was rock, not mirror. Rope tucked above cornices like a superstition nobody intended to test. The throne sat in its square of old light, an animal that had learned stillness as a trick. Hawthorn bled green in two clay jars beside the dais. The doors were shut, the bolt a bar of night. The city outside slept on rope and good intentions. Inside, law climbed down off paper and waited to be spoken with mouths.

Witnesses and stone, because even privacy needs a court.

Lavender was a shawl and a pulse up in the shadow of the colonnade, eyes steady, the linen of her mouth made for oaths and mercy. Raw had his palm on the step below the dais where kings kneel to die and live; the floor hummed in a key the walls remembered from before the first crown knew its job. Myrrh stood with a book that had fangs hidden under gilding, the rune knife wrapped and ready and irritated to be well behaved. Aila held the ledger open to a blank line with a pen sharp enough to draw blood if it had to. Brogan waited by the north door with a broom and her look, because even queens need a woman whose job is to shoo stupid out of rooms. Glitch perched on the rail, a copper half-mask pushed up like a crest, string in his hands in case the ceiling needed manners.

DG crossed the square of light barefoot, hair unbound, ribbon visible under skin like a sin that likes daylight. The mark at her throat glowed calm and obscene. Wings were rumor at her scapulae, pearly hint, the way dawn shows you what it plans to do without delivering it yet. The red under her sternum purred with a private greed that made the air hot enough to imagine weather.

Cain came from shadow like a decision. Coat off. Shirt open at the throat. Glove gone because leather lies between a man’s hand and the world it intends to rule. The brand on his palm wore its new grammar: a thorn-ring that cast a thin shadow like the ghost of a crown. He smelled like pine and iron and the sugar that doesn’t quite cover it. He took the three steps up to the dais without noise and stood with his hand at the small of her back for one breath that reset the room.

“Dawn and dusk,” Myrrh said, voice reverent and feral. “Alpha and omega. Equal. Bound. Let it be translated.”

Lavender inclined her head the degree that means yes on paper, yes in law, yes in stone. Raw hummed a bar that taught the floor how to listen. Aila wrote the title: Crowning by Ribbon and Rune: Private Rite, Public Law. Glitch looped string into a shape that will be blasphemy in the morning and useful tonight.

“Three breaths,” Cain ordered into DG’s hair, because ritual is the harness that keeps flight kind. “In. Out. In.”

On the third, she climbed him.

Not coy. Not slow. A queen who has been taught to ask correctly and intends to. She put her knees on the throne’s wide seat beside his hips, palms on his shoulders, skirt rucked high, wicked, efficient. He sat and let her. He spanned her waist in both hands like a craftsman measuring wood he intends to love, then slid one palm up to her throat, brand to mark, thorn-ring aligning with the pale wreath under her skin until heat met heat and the thrum went through both of them and into stone.

“Say it,” he murmured, cruel in the way that saves her. “What this is.”

“Crowning,” she said, voice already hoarse; the throne liked the word and stopped sulking. “Mine to give. Yours to wear.”

He freed himself like a sin allowed at church and dragged the head of his cock through her slick until the throne heard its own old stories and got bored with the polite ones. She hissed, hungry, embarrassed for nobody. Her wings flashed outward enough to make the hawthorn in its jars shy. The ribbon slid out of her palms, two red lengths that twined his wrists in silk and then kept going, bright, living, a wet lash that climbed the carved back of the throne and tied it to them like furniture had finally remembered who sits it. The mark at her throat burned; the thorned ring on his hand flared.

“Look at me,” he said, eyes winter-blue, cruel and tender and correct.

She looked. He seated into her, slow and total, home like a sentence finished on a single breath. She took him deep and held it there, mouth open on a shock too honest for words. His hand tightened on her throat just enough to keep the world out. The field fell heavy at the edges of the room, corners obedient. Witnesses’ mouths forgot their bad habits and remembered silence.

“Breathe,” he said, counting for her. “Now.”

She rode.

He made her remember how: hips low and power-forward, the relentless path that drags the head of him along the front wall and changes grief into law and hunger into something the walls will write down correctly. She used his shoulders, his thighs, his mouth where she caught it; he held the rhythm and her throat and the room. Her wings arched up as the pace found itself, pearl-slick feathers unfurling with a sound that made Raw laugh once and the throne settle another half inch into the bedrock like an old dog deciding not to get up.

“Good girl,” he praised into her mouth, humility and arrogance braided. “Again.”

She shivered and obeyed, harder now, pace like a war prayer. His other hand slid to her cunt, thumb exact, circles mean and measured, not to hurry, to direct. She swore with her whole body. The ribbon on his wrist bit, delighted. The thorned ring in his palm thrummed like a bell someone rings with teeth.

“Speak it,” Myrrh said softly, because law likes to be flirted with. “The name that makes doors open.”

“Saethyr,” DG moaned, and the room’s pressure changed. Lamps went still. The paneling remembered it wasn’t here to be pretty; it was here to witness. The hawthorns lifted thorn-tips as if saluting a crime they agreed with. The throne hummed like a cat with a secret.

“Say crown,” Cain said, brutal, breath steady.

“Crown,” she said, and sank all the way, obscene and regal. “Wear it. Be it.”

He took it then. He set a pace that would have been cruelty outside this circle and was mercy in it, relentless stroke for stroke, palms firm at her throat and hip, voice the metronome that makes nerve behave. The field closed tight enough around the dais that the rest of the world became rumor. She gasped and clawed and laughed in those ugly, perfect breaths that mean control and surrender are wrestling and decided to kiss.

“Bite?” she asked, shockingly polite for filth.

“On the oath,” he agreed, wicked, and turned his hand a fraction so the thorn-ring and the mark met in a wet little kiss of magic just over the beat in her throat.

She broke in a surge that lit her bones. Wings went full, white-pearl spray, feathers thrown from her back in a scatter of light that hit Cain’s chest and stuck there like tiny stars intent on sin. She rode the crest like a queen who refuses to let the horse decide who is being carried. He held her in it and did not let the rhythm fail. He didn’t speed. He didn’t slow. He kept her there long enough to turn the pleasure from accident into oath.

“Now,” she begged, wrecked, gorgeous. “Knot. Crown.”

“Yes,” he said in the tone you use when you tell the sky to open.

The swell seated with a brutal, tender insistence, the hot ring locking her down on him until she was the chair and he the man and the throne the witness and the city a minor detail. She cried out, obscene sound, strangled on a laugh, drowned in a sob; he ground shallow, exact, the tiny strokes that make bodies learn their names backward and forward. The ribbon glowed scarlet and thick and slithered a wet coil up along the throne’s carved back to loop around the finial; the knot turned red on it and tightened with a happy little jerk.

“Bite,” she demanded, command like a supplicant. “Now.”

He bent and closed his teeth over the mark at her throat, precise and cruel with a priest’s tender hand, not tearing, not soft, a bite that says mine to hold and writes it into skin at the temperature of law. She came again with his mouth on her throat and his knot inside and the whole room said yes.

It hummed like a bell.

Not metaphor. Stone rang. Columns carried it up. The ceiling took the note and put it into the ribs of the palace and the old bones remembered: bound. Bound to throne, to mark, to vow, to men who keep their hands useful and their mouths correct. Doors that had been shut learned which way yes faces. The stair down to the archive unlocked itself with a click Myrrh heard and smiled for. The hawthorns in the clay jars rustled as if gossiping with the orchard. Outside, somewhere in the yard, ladders purred like good dogs.

Light found his brow.

It wasn’t a crown you can drop or pawn. It was the ghost of a circlet, thorn and silk, a ring of little points that kissed his skin and vanished when you blinked, left only the shadow of teeth and relief. The rune on his palm burned the same grammar onto his hand, a second, brighter ring of hunger and law. Aila’s pen blotted once; she wrote: Crown acknowledged: Red Ribbon, Thorn Rune; office invested in the Prime by omega rite, [Saethyr] spoken; palace assent: sound.

Glitch lay back on the rail and cackled delighted indecency without opening his mouth. Brogan’s broom sighed like a woman who’d seen worse and hoped to again. Lavender closed her eyes and inhaled relief like it was what the room owed her. Raw put his forehead to the step and said something blasphemous and true to rock. Myrrh, who had promised not to be sentimental, bit their own knuckle and whispered please don’t let me ever have to explain this to a student with no hands.

Cain spilled into her on the crest of the hum, heat dragged out of him in pulses that made his jaw clench, his eyes shut, his religion show. He kept the press exactly where the knot insisted; he owned her throat with his hand and his mouth and let the bell do the singing. She milked him in greedy, helpless little clutches, cunt clutching the swell like it had opinions and all of them were yes.

They stayed locked while the palace pulsed and calmed, while the bell echo turned to purr and the stone decided to keep that note for emergencies. He lifted his mouth from her throat and licked the bite slow, obscene and priestly, tasting iron and sugar and the little white heat of magic that loves teeth. He kissed the corner of her mouth for decency’s sake and indecency’s joy.

“Say it,” Myrrh said softly, because papers get hungry if you don’t feed them with the last required line.

DG put both hands on Cain’s face and spoke to the throne, the walls, the city that pretended not to put its ear to the keyhole. “I crown this man Prime by Ribbon and Rune,” she said, voice wrecked and sovereign. “He wears me as collar and I wear him as blade. He speaks law to corners, I speak law to throats. We bind the stone to remember correct.”

“Mine to hold,” he answered, because titles get lonely without their counter-words, and the thorned ring warmed under his palm. “Say please.”

“Please,” she said, small and terrible, and the ribbon tightened once around his wrists in pleased cruelty.

The knot softened when it was ready, not before. He slid out with obscene care and palmed the spill back into her because some movements are a dialect of mercy she likes better than prayers. He lifted her off his lap and set her on the wide arm of the throne, wings beginning to fold, breath learning how to be an instrument again. He slid to his knees on the dais, the crown-shadow on his brow brazen as a sin committed on the right altar, and washed her bitten throat with his mouth like a man who intends to eat what he kills and worship what saves him.

“Done,” Aila said, pen scratching, satisfied, ugly with pleasure for the correct box ticked.

“Translated,” Myrrh said, tone of a scholar who has just watched metaphor become government. “The law will read ceremony in a language fit for chairs.”

Raw patted stone and the stone purred back. Lavender wiped the corner of one eye like a woman who will never admit which tear got away. Brogan thumped the butt of her broom once, old soldier’s applause. Glitch sat up and pretended to be a priest so he wouldn’t laugh like a boy.

DG turned Cain’s face up with two fingers and inspected him like a queen does a weapon that means to be kept proud. “Crowned,” she said, wicked and solemn.

“Worn,” he said, and kissed the inside of her wrist where the ribbon lives when it’s not busy binding thrones.

He rose; she stood on the throne’s step and leaned into him, mark to mouth, palm to palm, thorn to wreath. The doors in the east gallery unlocked themselves with a shy click as if a house were embarrassed to admit it enjoyed being told what to do. Somewhere out past the square, a man who meant to hang a torch lost his nerve and went home because his daughter had tied a red thread around his wrist and he forgot which word he wanted to shout.

The rite had been private and the law had made it public by becoming itself. No one who wasn’t meant to see saw. Everyone who mattered would feel it under their feet in the morning.

“Again,” DG whispered into Cain’s lower lip, because greed is piety when it keeps houses safe.

“Many,” he said, hand closing around her throat like a crown a man is grateful for, while the palace hummed like a bell learning a new note and the stones remembered what it means to be bound.

Chapter Text

The letters came in polite envelopes that had never met a conscience.

Aila slit them like a surgeon. Paper behaved. Ink did not. Routes. Timetables. Guard rotations lifted neatly from ledgers she’d signed herself. A hand that liked its own loops too much. Margins that smelled faintly of lemon and borrowed power. Each sheet wore the little vanity mark of a clerk who hadn’t learned that signatures are mouths.

“Rell’s man wrote these,” Aila said, bored and precise, the kind of boredom that gets people hanged. She laid the papers across the table one by one until the stack became a lesson. “East Gate relief at second bell. Change of patrol in the South Row. The day the ladders moved from the yard to the church square. Sent to Roan, copied to ‘the gentleman beyond the wastes’ in a clever hand that isn’t clever enough to fool arithmetic.”

Myrrh turned the topmost letter sideways and dusted its crease with their thumb. Dust woke up like gossip. “Black honey on the fold,” they noted, pleased and disgusted. “He licked his finger after counting coin. Unseelie remnant’s sweet cloy. The tin on his sideboard keeps it. Clerk Rhyss’s ring pressed the corner. The habit of a man who wants to be seen by a mirror.”

Glitch draped string across the page in a quiet cat’s cradle, tracing the route as if pulling it in would starve it. “From Rell to Roan to the tent,” he sang under his breath. “And back again with coin. He loves timetables because the only power he understands is punctuality.”

Raw put two fingers to the letter’s edge and hummed; the paper told him the room it had slept in, the desk that had sighed under its weight, the chair that had held a man too fond of his own posture. “He wrote these at night,” Raw said, delighted by the betrayal of wood. “When he thought the floor couldn’t see.”

Lavender didn’t touch them. She watched, linen and bone, the line of her jaw an honest place to set a cup. DG glanced down once and returned her gaze to the door as if she were waiting for weather. The ribbon under her sternum lifted its head and rested it on impatience.

Cain took the letters between two fingers as if they were a utensil he meant to throw away after use. He read them once. He didn’t reread. The brand on his palm warmed; the thorned ring bit with polite interest. His field lowered a degree around the table as if the air needed to be reminded of grammar. “Meeting in ten,” he said. “Invite the man who thinks the city owes him for existing.”

They convened in the smaller council chamber where men are forced to sit close enough to hear their own lies. Rope tucked discreet above the cornice. Buckets where vases used to pretend to be useful. Aila at the long table with a ledger and pen. Lavender in her chair like a proof. DG in a simple black dress with her throat unarguable, hands bare on the polished wood. Cain at her left, glove off, brand banked and bright. Brogan at the door with her broom and the kind of smile that makes boys decide to be good.

Rell arrived ten seconds late because habit. He wore a pin that had learned caution the hard way and a mouth that had never met a word it didn’t think it deserved. He saw the letter stack and smiled the way men do when they think flattery will confuse paper.

“Highness,” he purred, bow correct, eyes on DG’s mark for one beat too long. “Your summons said urgent.”

“It did,” DG agreed, pleasant. She poured tea into a cup and the cup didn’t stain because even crockery knows who not to cross. “We’ll be efficient.”

Cain slid the top letter toward Rell with a neat flick that said this would be quick work if the subject cooperated. “Your clerk’s hand,” he said. “Your routes. Your timetables. Your coin on the fold. Your habit of insisting that paper make the city the shape you like when the city declines.”

Rell laughed on the inhale. “Forgery,” he tried, soft as a peel. “An enemy within your own house—Commander, you must see how convenient—”

Myrrh slid a second letter into the light and tapped a tiny flaw in the paper. “This one grew in your desk,” they said. “Splinter mark lower left. Your carpenters leave their signature like proud children. Also, you dot your i’s in the manner of a man who thinks ink is perfume.”

Aila flipped a page, gave Rell a date. “On this night you moved the west patrol by seven minutes to accommodate a reception,” she said. “You wrote it here. You sent it there. Two hours later Roan’s men tried the side door by the bakery because you told them the boy with the key had a fever and a sister.” She looked up at him like he’d spilled soup on her ledger. “He did.”

Rell’s mouth went thin. “Public service,” he managed. “Coordination. The city requires correspondence to flow—”

Raw tapped the floor with a knuckle and the stone hummed irritably. “The floor says lie,” he said, cheerful. “It doesn’t like how your shoes sit.”

Glitch twanged his string, delighted. “Also you don’t breathe right when you’re proud,” he added. “You hold it. Even your lungs know you’re boring.”

Rell’s eyes cut to the door where Brogan’s broom waited to be an idea; to Lavender, who did not blink; to DG, who poured her own tea and somehow made the room thirsty; and finally to Cain, whose face had gone calm in the way that means there is only one version of this left to perform.

“Arrest,” Cain said.

Brogan moved and didn’t leave a shadow. Rope came down from nowhere, a neat loop landing on Rell’s wrists with a pleased little bite. He tried grace, then outrage, then fawn, flickering through men like masks. “This is an error,” he said. “I represent the court’s continuity. I represent—”

“You represent a ledger with opinions,” Aila said, contempt neat as her handwriting. “And a habit of selling the city on time.”

Rell twisted against the loop and looked at DG for the soft thing he thought all women keep curled behind their teeth. She smiled at him, very sweet, the kind of smile you offer a child who insists the floor is lava and must be carried. “You’ve been very busy,” she said. “Do you take milk.”

“What—” He blinked.

“In your tea,” she clarified, lashes a lie. “It might help your throat. You’re going to be answering questions for hours and we wouldn’t want your voice to tire while you explain why you sent Roan our ladders.”

Rell flushed the color of old citrus. “I will not be spoken to as if—”

“You will be spoken to the way the walls prefer,” Lavender said, linen and winter. “Short words. True ones.”

Cain stood. He did not draw a sword. He didn’t need one. He reached across the length of table, took Rell neatly by the collar, and lifted. Cloth groaned in the way good tailoring does when confronted with reality. The thorned ring in Cain’s palm brightened where it pressed linen; Rell’s throat felt that heat and learned a new shape for silence.

“Article Twelve,” Brogan said, quite helpfully, as she stepped aside to let them pass. “Officer may remove a man whose paperwork bites the city.”

“Witnesses and stone,” Vell said faintly, because someone had to, and Aila wrote it in the margin while keeping the main column for the totals. Glitch leaned in Rell’s path as if by accident and plucked the man’s pin off his lapel with a grin that would have broken faith in smaller men. “Souvenir,” he chirped.

Rell found one last trick. “Clean—” he attempted, half the word men keep on their tongues in case courage fails.

Cain’s field dropped over the room like a lid on boiling water. The syllable broke and coughed itself smaller. Rell wheezed. The ribbon under DG’s skin purred, satisfied. “Not in my house,” Cain said pleasantly, and began to walk.

He dragged Rell out by the collar, no hurry, the way you escort a stain off carpet. Rope trailed polite. The north door learned new appreciation for its hinge. The corridor outside hushed in that particular way stone adopts when it is about to enjoy dignity. A recruit flattened to the wall with a face that said he would tattoo this moment inside his ribs if given ink and permission. Raw touched the jamb and it hummed yes.

“Where are you taking me,” Rell tried for dignity.

“To a room,” Cain said. “With a chair. With paper. With the cup your clerk used. You two can reacquaint your hands with honesty in each other’s company.”

“In front of witnesses,” Brogan added brightly. “And rope. Rope loves paperwork.”

They vanished down the hall, the sound of neat shoes scuffing carved stone a useful song. The chamber remained. Silence arrived on time and found itself welcome.

DG poured herself tea.

She did it without theater, which is how you make theater hungry. The steam rose in a quiet curl. She added exactly the amount of honey that makes a room forget about poison and remember bread. She lifted the cup to her mouth and tasted the city like it belonged to her and she intended to keep it.

“You may all go on,” she told the nobles who had been practicing faces since childhood. “We have a Reconciliation at dawn. If you are discovered encouraging men in grey to interfere with it, you will be tired of my voice shortly. If you are discovered doing nothing, you will be bored by my voice less. If you intend to help, sit down and take assignments. The rope does not string itself.”

A few sat without meaning to. The ones who didn’t glanced at Lavender and found they had either knees or spine; both worked. Aila snapped her ledger shut with a noise that sounded exactly like a door closing on a foolishness. Myrrh produced a small stack of pamphlets titled So You’ve Inadvertently Fallen In With The Unseelie: A Guide For Not Making It Worse and fanned them, dealer-cool.

“Glitch,” DG said, still sipping, eyes on the room as if counting the ways it might misbehave. “Please inform the tent with the screen that schedules have been… updated.”

Glitch grinned, string already humming. “I’ll bring you souvenirs,” he offered.

“Only if they’re useful,” Aila said without looking up. “I have a drawer for stupid trophies. It’s full.”

Raw stroked the step with his palm, pleased in a way that would embarrass stone if it had any shame. “The wall liked that,” he reported. “Collars are instructional.”

Lavender stood. Linen and law. “Meeting adjourned,” she announced. “We have an orchard to see at dawn and a city to keep at heel. Those who intended to correct me about decency may bring rope to the gate at first bell and let it correct them.”

They filed—those who had a use and those who had learned they were about to. In the corridor Cain’s voice could be heard in the distance, even and merciless, making a man with a collar explain his own handwriting.

DG set her cup down and finally let her shoulders drop to a height that meant living. The ribbon under her sternum slid against her ribs like a cat, pleased. She looked at the place where Cain’s hand had warmed the wood and smiled, small, indecent, sweet. Law tasted like honey tonight. She intended to feed the city until it stopped looking starved.

Brogan paused at the door, broom on her shoulder. “Highness,” she said, fond as weather. “Do you take milk.”

DG laughed into her tea, wicked and rested. “Many,” she said, which didn’t answer the question and answered all of them, and the stones wrote that down too.

Chapter Text

The first sign wasn’t a scout’s breath in the courtyard; it was bread.

The ovens hiccuped. Heat went sideways. Aila stood in the doorway of the South Row bakery with a ledger under her arm and watched steam lift wrong from a tray of loaves like the air had lost its memory for comfort. The baker muttered a prayer to yeast and stubborn and Aila wrote down the prayer, because tonight even superstition needed receipts.

The second sign was rope.

It hummed where no hands touched it, a small, rude sound that made men straighten like dogs hearing boots in gravel. Lattices sighed over alleys that had behaved for a week like good citizens and now remembered their favorite tricks. Buckets beside every fountain chimed quietly together, a chorus that had learned harmony under the Commander’s hand and now rehearsed without him.

By dusk, the city had learned to shiver.

No wind in the square, but doors breathed cold as if something stood on the other side and practiced smiling. Lamps guttered once, twice, then settled like drunks caught thinking about standing. Children woke from naps with the taste of iron on their tongues and a new vocabulary for the shapes of shadows. A red thread tied to a statue’s wrist untwined itself, changed its mind, and retied around the sword hilt instead.

Raw walked the parapet and laughed softly, almost pleased. “Teeth,” he told the stone. “Shadow with teeth.”

The wall shivered against his hand and, romantic idiot, leaned in.

Glitch did not go to bed.

He sat cross-legged on the floor of the armory like a saint gone strange and built traps that looked like toys. A tin wind-up bird with a belly full of salt, wing-feathers filed to make a wire-snarling hiss in the dark. A child’s top wrapped with copper, a hair of DG’s ribbon stitched under the lacquer; when spun, it would hum Saethyr in a note only doors and Unseelie ankles could hear, then spit iron filings where a shadow thought it could slide. A jack-in-the-box whose spring was a net and whose tune was a lullaby Myrrh had stolen from a well when it was in a better mood. Marbles with dull eyes and tiny bites of magnet; let roll, they’d find cold like blood finds knives.

He stabbed string into the map until it looked like the city had grown veins. He tied and untied a knot the size of a thumbnail that would yank a lattice down with the gentleness of a mother grabbing a child out of horse-traffic. He kissed each finished piece like a man with terrible taste in saints. Copper mask on the table. Eyes bright. Hands a blur. He hummed lullabies that had threatened to bite him and now worked for a living.

“Sleep,” Aila said from the doorway, not arguing.

“After I ruin physics,” Glitch replied, cheerful and a little unholy. “Bring me three more spools. And the good salt, not the polite kind.”

Cain felt it in his teeth before the watch bells changed note. He crossed the barracks yard with his glove off and the brand on his palm hot as a coin held too long. The thorn-ring had learned new grammar last night; it flexed like a hungry mouth and bit down on a sensation that wasn’t a sensation so much as a thesis: cold pretending to be fire.

“Rotations hold,” he said, voice simple enough to be a tool. “Twos to fours. Fours to nets. Rope staged at the orchard gaps, the west stair, the market seam. Buckets in pairs. We don’t run; we do not let anyone else. Any shadow with teeth gets a leash or a broom.”

“Sir,” Jeb answered, already moving, already speaking Brogan’s language to boys who thought speed was the same as readiness. “Ladders sing; men listen.”

Brogan swept the north arcade like she had a lover under the dust. “Article Eight in your teeth,” she told a priest who clutched a taper as if it were an idea. “If you want fire, you can hold a pan of sand and tell it about decency while it goes out.”

Myrrh arrived with the rune knife wrapped like a child and a pamphlet like a weapon. “Wells sulking,” they announced. “Unseelie remnant moving. Not a court, a splinter, angry with the kind of memory that mistakes hunger for fairness. Do not bleed in an alley that smells like wet nettle. Do not drink from a cup you didn’t watch cry when water hit it. If a whisper calls you pretty, answer with tax law.”

Raw tipped his head, listening to far stone. “North gate heard a word and didn’t like it,” he reported, delighted. “Word tripped on rope and is coughing.”

DG stood on the palace stair in a simple coat smelling of pine and iron and a woman who takes what she asks for. Her wings twitched under skin like weather practicing. The ribbon under her sternum lay bright, coiled, head up. She gazed at the yard the way a queen looks at a field she intends to harvest back from a bad summer.

“Say it,” Cain told her softly, and she did, the word that turns panic into obedience. “Saethyr.”

Corners forgot their bad habits. The air remembered it was furniture, not yard dog. The boys took breath into their bellies like water into buckets. The city tilted toward law.

“The orchard,” Lavender said, linen and spine at DG’s shoulder. “Dawn,” she added, and the hawthorns outside the wall lifted thorns like salutes for a crime they approved of. “But tonight we do not let the house be eaten by stories.”

“Stories bite,” Raw agreed, cheek against stone. “Shadow has teeth.”

By full dark the first fires had been persuaded into existence where no wick sat.

It wasn’t flame like a poem. It was frost that burned. The tanners’ yard yelped when hide stiffened mid-pull. A curtain in an east-facing window caught cold and smoked like incense; Brogan whacked it with a wet broom until it apologized and fell in love with water. A string of cheap red threads trying to be ribbon hissed and tried to become vine; Aila plucked it into a bag marked rats and wrote the stall’s name down with a little flourish she intended to enjoy later.

A boy with a mouth like a coin slot yelled cleanse once in the market and choked on rope instead; Jeb’s loop dropped out of nowhere with a conspirator’s grin, and when the boy sputtered he found himself holding the very bucket he’d almost made necessary. “Carry,” Jeb told him, friendly as winter. “You’ll like your lungs better when they do work for living.”

Glitch’s toys learned their jobs.

A wind-up bird hopped under an arch and spat salt into a shape that looked like breath. The breath screamed—soft, insulted—and tried to go around; the copper top hummed Saethyr, rolled, and laid iron over the place where shadow’s ankle wanted to be. It stumbled into a net that fell from nowhere and made a sound like a lie caught out by a ledger. Men with brooms arrived, practical saints, and scolded it into a jar. Myrrh slapped a circle of ribbon over the mouth and wrote neatly in chalk: do not feed.

“Who are you clever for,” Aila asked Glitch, not proud, only taking inventory.

“Us,” he said, without his hands stopping. “And the part of the city that likes to be told when to sit.”

The first Unseelie agent they pulled out of a shadow did not have the decency to look like anything grand.

No antlers, no silk, no frost crown. A woman’s face any street would forget, mouth full of little teeth too even to be made honestly, eyes wrong in a way only people who have kissed darkness would recognize. Her breath fogged the air in a warm room. Black honey clung to the corner of her lip like she’d licked someone else’s greed and called it supper.

Brogan twisted her wrist to encourage humility. “Names,” she suggested.

The woman showed her wrong teeth. “Winter,” she said again, stupid with devotion.

“Your season is rented,” Az said, stepping out of a shadow with a grin that promised very little mercy. She wiped an unholy little smear off Jeb’s mouth with her thumb and stared the agent down like a cat who’d just found a mirror. “Return it.”

The agent went for a knife. Cain’s palm was there before thought, thorn-ring biting, blood a polite silver thread, smile neat. “Article Twelve,” he said, pleased. “You’re going to hate paperwork.”

“Shadow with teeth,” Raw sang somewhere above them, delighted. “Found one. Bites like a bored river.”

“Tell the river a joke,” Glitch called, sending a toy spool skittering under a cart. It unraveled, sang two notes of an old well-folk tune and popped up twenty feet away with a net in its mouth. “Then drown it.”

In the palace, DG stood at the map table and stitched wards through streets with a ribbon and a needle of thought Myrrh had drawn on a page and called a pattern. She walked her finger along the West Stair and breathed into stone; the wall trembled and said yes, home, safe. She laid a thread at the door of the nurses’ hall, a loop at the barracks threshold, a slash across the mouth of the archive stairs that would burn if a wrong ankle tried it.

“More,” Cain said when he came in long enough to drink from her cup and steal the honey off her lip with a breath. “Rope hums. Buckets working. Boys steady. Give me a line across the river path. They like bridges.”

She set it with two fingers and his hand around her wrist, brand to pulse. The ribbon thrummed delighted, greedy. The palace, idiot romantic, purred.

The wind crawled down chimneys that weren’t lit and tried to feel at home. The wells dreamed of frost and woke thirsty; Myrrh flattered them out loud and fed them a handful of salt dipped in honey until they remembered being kissed by oaths. Down in the kennel the dog who loves Raw growled into emptiness, then wagged at a pillar when Raw put his forehead to it and told the stone a joke about cows and kings he’d heard from a tile.

Rell, in his room with rope and ledger, tried to write a letter with his teeth and found that rope reads slower than sin. Clerk Rhyss stared at the cup on the table and cried because it was finally telling him what it had carried.

At second bell past midnight a cold pressed against the north gate like a wet mouth.

No knock. No flourish. Just the feeling of a tent wall breathing, and behind it a hand in a glove about to tap a map. Raw’s laughter rolled down the parapet like thunder too polite to break a teacup. “There,” he said, child-glad. “Shadow with teeth bigger than it knows what to do with.”

Cain walked the line with a stride the city had learned to love. The belts hummed along the parapet where men liked to rest their weight. His palm burned bright, thorned ring a crest throwing a thin crown-shadow over his knuckles. He laid his hand on the gate, the brand’s teeth fitting the old wood’s grooves like a memory. He didn’t ask the gate to hold. He told it what to do with its fear.

“Not a god,” he reminded it. “Just weather.”

DG came up behind him in the cloak that makes men forget their mouths and remember their spines. She put her palm to his spine for a breath, a private circuit that makes vows behave when nerves would prefer to run, and the cold that pressed against wood found itself embarrassed by witnesses and went sideways into an alley where Glitch had set a toy that looked like a child’s hoop and functioned like a court summons.

The hoop rang. The alley learned its geometry. A net dropped. A voice hissed and learned how to cough without lungs.

“Again,” Cain said to the night, amused and deadly. “We have buckets.”

The north, offended, sent whispers instead.

They slid under doors like debt and lay sweet in the mouths of men who had never learned not to love flattery. The whispers cooed about purity and old ways and how pretty it would be to watch a city on fire sing its own name. Brogan’s broom found corners where whispers had set up beds and swept them into jars. Aila stood in doorways with a pen like a knife and said, “Spell it,” and men discovered they couldn’t. Myrrh read a charm off a thorn and the whispers learned tax code and died.

By dawn the city had not burned. It had learned more bad songs and put them into the ledger under Silliness.

Ladders hummed as if they had enjoyed their night of readiness. Buckets slept still-full as if proud to be chosen and not needed. Glitch snored on the floor under a heap of copper and string with his hands still making knots in their dreams. Raw lay on his back on the parapet and hummed the hum back to the wall. Jeb found he had carried water all night and not once wished the fire would come just to make the weight make sense; he put his forehead to Az’s belly in a corridor and both of them laughed like criminals who believe in afternoon.

DG stood at the east window, hair down, mark bright, ribbon quiet but awake, and watched the light decide to be brave. The city smelled like iron and sugar and rope and something else she could taste only when Cain put his palm over her throat to remind her breath how to behave.

“North stirs,” Raw called from above, delighted and worried and beautiful. “Shadow with teeth.”

“Good,” Cain said, counting, amused like a man who has found the hour of the day where murder belongs and filed it. “We’ve been sharpening.”

DG smiled, sweet and obscene, and the stones under her feet remembered how to purr. The wind licked at the gate and sulked back to its tent. The traps Glitch built like toys waited with attitudes. The rope hummed. The buckets stood like promises. The city breathed in. Dawn put its mouth to the orchard’s door.

“Again,” DG said, hands on law, eyes on the horizon.

“Many,” Cain promised, and went to meet the teeth with iron and sugar on his tongue.

Chapter Text

Heat announced itself the way a storm does when it’s still three hills away: the air turned too bright around the edges, and every soft thing wanted arranging.

DG raided his wardrobe like a thief with sacred motives. Shirts went first, then blankets, then the battered old coat he refuses to discard because it remembers more winters than the palace. She built a hollow on the wide bed, a fox-den of pine and leather, cotton and law; a curl of red ribbon lay there like a live ember, purring whenever her pulse stuttered. She burrowed in, knees up, hair wild, cheeks flushed with that telltale glow like sunrise trying to happen under the skin. The mark at her throat breathed light. Her eyes—glassy, fever-bright—couldn’t decide what to look at, so they looked at everything and then at nothing, waiting for one voice to make the day small enough to manage.

The palace kept its distance. Lamps lowered. The stone hummed a lullaby Raw had taught it, soft as a hand over a skittish animal’s eyes. Somewhere down the hall a rope lattice sighed, content to be useful when asked.

Cain opened the door and all the weather in him knelt.

It wasn’t ceremony. His body understood before his mind finished the sentence: she needed something only he could provide and it wasn’t language yet. He was on his knees in the border of her nest, glove already off, the thorned ring in his palm a steady coal. Pine and leather and her. His coat’s old wild scent folded over the two of them like a secret he’d been keeping for the right hour.

“Three breaths,” he said, quiet, counting for her because numbers are a harness that never chafes when worn right. “In. Out. In.”

Her gaze found him. The breath came ragged, then rhythm, then relief, the kind that looks like surrender when you don’t know the word for safety. The ribbon slid from the heels of her palms and wound his wrists, silk claiming bone, permission written in heat.

“Help me,” she whispered, the ache making her voice too honest for court.

“Yes,” he said, and the nest seemed to approve.

He slid into the hollow with her. His hand found her throat, brand to mark, the twin rings meeting like two ends of a promise. The field lowered at the edges of the room so the world would sit and wait its turn. He kissed her brow, then the corner of her mouth, then the place where breath is stored when it thinks it will be needed later. She sighed like a string loosening a fraction and was suddenly softer under the ribs.

“Look at me,” he coaxed, and she did.

He guided her as if they were walking a familiar path at night: no hurry, no show, only the exactness that teaches nerves who’s in charge. His voice kept time. Her pulse learned it. When the worst of the tremor tried to bite, he pressed his palm and it remembered its manners.

“Say it,” he murmured.

“Saethyr,” she breathed, and the room’s pressure changed; that private door opened, that old right was claimed, and everything else put its head down.

He joined her, and the world chose to be small and survivable.

No spectacle, no witnesses save stone and the coat. Only breath, and the slow relentless motion of comfort made physical. The nest took the weight like it had been practicing. The ribbon brightened, the rune in his palm answered, and the palace’s bones settled as if they could hear skin remembering the shape of home. When she arched, he held; when she reached, he gave; when the shiver came hunting her by name, he made it kneel.

“Breathe,” he said, again, again, until breathing was all she had to do.

The crest washed through her like warmth finding a frozen pipe. She shook, then melted, then laughed once into his throat, hoarse with gratitude and heat. He kept her sheltered inside the old wild lock that closes only for them and never when it shouldn’t. The room dimmed to the color of her eyes when relief finally wins. His mouth found the mark at her throat; his teeth set the vow in its right place, careful and exact, a coronet and a collar both, and the stones hummed like a bell that had been granted permission to ring only for love.

“Mine to hold,” he told the place where her pulse forgot fear. “I’ve got you.”

She answered without words, the sound low in her chest, that impossible purr he’s learned to chase and then rest under. He rocked her through the aftershivers with obstinate gentleness, the kind that breaks grief’s teeth and turns weather into walls. Her wings flickered under skin and then calmed. The ribbon slackened around his wrists like a satisfied cat deciding to stay anyway. The field lifted a hair at the corners to let the world back into the room, but only as much as it deserved.

He wiped her face with the hem of one of his shirts because she liked the indignity of it and because the smell made her smile. He touched her hair as if it were the last fragile thing left in a ruin and it wasn’t, but the touch was still right. Water, a sip, another. He stole honey from her lip with his thumb and then with his mouth because taking sweetness where it offers is a religion that keeps houses warm.

“Promises,” she whispered, wrecked and soft, eyes gone heavy.

“Many,” he said, and began to list them—the only litany that ever taught him peace. “Food when you want it. Water before you ask. Hands when you tremble. Teeth only where you’ve asked them to be. No fire reaches you. No rumor touches you. No door closes on you unless you push it with me.”

She made a contented, scandalous little sound and burrowed deeper into his coat, greedy for the smell, for him, for sleep that would be kind. He stroked her spine in the exact rhythm that makes wings stay folded and thoughts turn simple. The palace purred again, ridiculous romantic thing that it is. Far away, rope hummed, satisfied to be ready.

“Again,” she mumbled, already sliding down into dream.

“Many,” he promised into her hair, letting the nest take their weight and their warmth both.

She was asleep before the last word left him, breathing in the tidy cadence he’d counted into her, palm relaxed over his heart, ribbon quiet as a heartbeat curled under skin. He lay awake a while, doing the other work: counting rotations, sorting names, filing risks into rope and water and law. His hand stayed at her throat, not heavy, only sure, the thorned ring warm against the mark.

When sleep finally took him too, the coat held both of them like a veteran of bad nights glad to be useful. The city, hearing what it needed to hear through stone and promise, loosened its jaw and learned how to dream without flinching.

Chapter Text

The first scream came from paper.

Not human. Dry, startled—pages curling as heat found glue and memory and decided to make a meal of both. A runner hit the stair two at a time and spilled the word at the threshold to the council room: “Archive.”

Cain was already moving. Rope, buckets, sand. The hand signal that makes three men arrive before their names do. The field dropped a degree over the hall, corners obedient. DG was on his heel, ribbon lifted, breath already counting itself. Myrrh flew rather than ran, satchel banging hip, fury tied up neat like hair that refuses to misbehave in front of fire.

The door to the under-room breathed smoke like a throat trying to remember winter. Cold fire, frost-burn—black honey hiss in the haze. Myrrh’s mouth went clinical around the obscenity. “Unseelie,” they snapped, and shoved past a guard who had the good sense to look ashamed for existing where a scholar needed to be.

The secret archive below the palace had always pretended to be smaller than it was, stone that liked to be quiet, shelves that had learned to hold their breath. Now it was a bad hymn. Flames ran pale-blue along leather. Frost crawled the spines and then burned like dry straw. The painted circle at the center of the floor—three hawthorns, one ribbon, the old script for consent—wavered as heat played at lying.

“Lattice,” Cain ordered without looking back, and Stev’s rope dropped from nowhere, clever, ready to fall over a failing beam. Jeb’s men went two-by-two, bucket-steady. Sand hissed like a patient opinion. Brogan swung her broom at a licking tongue of frostfire and knocked it stupid.

“Rell’s rat and Roan’s coin,” Aila said through her sleeve, squinting through smoke, ledger in hand because of course it was. “He never learned to like dust. He hired it.”

“Shadow with teeth was here,” Raw reported, palm against the wall, delighted and grieving. “Touched the stone with a glove. Stone bit anyway.”

DG coughed like a woman correcting a social error. She lifted her hand. “Saethyr,” she said, and the air changed pressure, the circle on the floor brightened enough to remember its manners. The nearest flames hesitated, stupid, like children caught stealing sugar.

“Box,” Myrrh said, eyes streaming, hair inventing a new cosmology. “Lead, lower right, back shelf. The one that pretends to be a hymnbook and isn’t. Move.”

Cain went where Myrrh’s voice aimed him, coat up over his mouth, thorn-ring burning in his palm like a coal taught to behave. The shelf had started to weep pitch; he did not touch the pretty. He kicked one bracket; the wood jolted free; a shower of binding-thread fell like shed skin. There—the false spine, lead grey under char, heavy as a grudge. He hauled it and shoved it into Myrrh’s hands without asking it to be grateful.

The lid fought like bureaucracy. Myrrh used the knife. Edge to cut, spine to understand. The latch gave with a yelp that would have been funnier if the room weren’t trying to turn history into smoke. Inside: not neat. Not complete. A clutch of pages bound with hawthorn cord, blackened at the corners, winter-ink flaring between strokes as if relieved to be seen by mouths that pronounce properly.

“Thorns and Threads,” Myrrh breathed, and then gagged because air is petty. “Oh, you wretched, glorious thing.”

A rafter groaned. Rope fell. Lattice took the weight and was proud. Glitch shot under it on his belly like a boy who had found four new ways to contradict death and wanted to try all of them. “Toy,” he sang to himself, and kicked a copper hoop into a corner where frost was trying to breed; it rang like a tea spoon on crystal and spread iron filings as if laws had learned to be confetti.

“Out,” Cain said to the nearest two men. “Alive. Now. You go back when you can see your own hands.”

“Close the cut,” Myrrh barked, a scholar at war, to no one and everyone. They wrapped the codex in damp linen Aila had conjured from a pocket that never existed before an emergency. The pages hissed as water kissed them. Black honey bubbled and ran away. DG swore in fae and English and something older that made the floor wince. She cupped the bundle—burning-cold-hot-sick—and let the ribbon run out of her palms to veil it in red. The silk turned bright and wickedly wet, then settled, breathing like an animal learning it was safe.

Cain’s palm hit the old circle in the floor; the thorned ring in his hand answered; the paint flared and held. He felt the cold sting into skin and smiled around the pain like it was a wizard with too many opinions and not enough hands. “Again,” he said to the bucket line. “Now sand. Now water. Now sand.” He kept the cadence even, the field low and steady so panic had nowhere to sit.

Roan’s sigil slashed itself in soot across a beam as if it wanted to be thanked for being obvious: a crude thorn crowned by a smear of frost. Jeb saw it. Jeb learned what promises look like when written without hands. Jeb filed it under later.

“Myrrh,” DG coughed, voice too hoarse to be queen, too steady not to be. “Can you mend.”

“Not forgiveness,” they snapped, holding the knife the way clergy hold relics they’d prefer to argue with. “Paper. Binding. Thread.” They flipped the blade and kissed the back edge across one charred cord; the notches drank consent; the cord took shape again with a sulky little purr. “Yes. If he doesn’t breathe on me.”

Cain didn’t. He made air behave, instead, and stood between fire and women like a wall that had chosen its flavor of obedience. Raw leaned his forehead to stone and hummed; the floor got jealous of attention and decided to stop helping the frost burn shelves to impress a god it had never met.

Glitch’s box popped and threw a net over a thing that thought it was a person until rope taught it otherwise. Brogan batted it back into the jar with the broom and the jar clinked, self-satisfied. Aila wrote rat with a little flourish. Lavender stood at the top of the stair, linen and iron, and refused to come down because a queen who dies in smoke steals writers their lines.

The worst of it broke like fever—one last ridiculous bloom of blue-white, then ash and stink and water everywhere. Men coughed into rags and learned gratitude. Rope steamed. Buckets sulked, proud they were useful and annoyed not to be glamorous. The beam on the east wall sighed and decided to continue to be wood instead of ruin.

They stood in it. Smoke and ash turned faces into saints’ icons, streaked, holy with work. DG’s hair stuck to her forehead in little black curls; soot made a new mask on her cheeks. Cain’s palm bled one tidy line through grey; the thorn-ring glowed under it, thin crown-shadows catching in the mess. Myrrh cradled the codex like a blasphemy and a baby, eyes feral with possession and relief.

“Roan,” Jeb said from the blackened threshold, shake only in the hand he hadn’t taught to be careful. “Left a mark. We’ll have him.”

“Later,” Cain said, the word a place you put knives to keep them sharp. “He wanted smoke to starve us. He doesn’t get to write our hunger.”

Myrrh laid the bundle on a table that had been patient enough to remember it was stone under changeable cloth. They unwound the linen. The topmost leaf had scorched into lace at the corner, ugly and almost pretty in its failure to be dead. The winter ink between the strokes of the title glowed stubborn as coals. THE THORNS AND THREADS PACT. Under it, clauses DG had not yet had the pleasure of obeying; sanctions they’d guessed, now explicit; the line about a mending allowed once written in a script that did not forgive bad breath.

“Read,” DG said, low, reverent, wrecked.

Myrrh did, forgetting to pretend they didn’t like an audience. “Here—the remnant’s teeth linked to wells and black honey both. Pull one, the other coughs. Cut both, winter becomes a season and not a god. ‘Crown to lift iron, thread to bind thorn, water to laugh at poison, ash to root, dawn and dusk to speak like twins.’” They traced with a fingertip that smelled of smoke and victory. “Also this: ‘A city that sings when it must not burn.’”

Raw hummed and the floor shivered, pleased.

“How do we cut them off,” Aila asked, wiping her pen on a rag she’d regret tomorrow. “Quiet. Cheap. Thorough.”

“Salt,” Myrrh said without apology. “Into the black honey wherever it sleeps. Rope around the wells—literal and law. A fae seal across the mouth of each until dawn and dusk have kissed them together. Tear the thorn-run off their cup rims with the back of the blade and lace our binding in its place.” They tapped another clause. “And this ugliness—‘speak their old name aloud in a place with doors.’ They cannot abide being called what they were before they learned to pretend to be kings.”

Glitch grinned, teeth bright through soot. “I’ll put the name in a toy and make it sing in alleys,” he said, delighted. “Children first. Let winter learn embarrassment.”

“Coin,” Aila said, already listing. “Rell’s chain cut. Rhyss wrung dry of names. Stables that purchase lemon to hide the stink of treason. We file suits. We buy their debt and feed it to the dogs.” She paused, throat tightening despite herself. “Booksellers who carry black honey under poetry; we teach them shame.”

“Rope on the orchard perimeter tonight,” Cain said, counting buckets, counting wrists. “Lattice over the east well. Nets in the alleys that back onto the old mills. Buckets staged by the temple, not inside; I’m not teaching those men subtlety. Jeb—north stair, four men; Brogan—brooms; Raw—floor; Myrrh—knife; Glitch—insult; Aila—paper; Lavender—light; DG—”

“Law,” she said, with a little smile that looked wrong and perfect under soot. “I’ll be dawn and dusk both if I have to. The pact wants mouths. It will have them.”

“Roan,” Jeb repeated, because some words stick.

“Alive if possible,” DG said, throat rough. “He is a symptom. I want the sickness naming itself while I pour salt on its tongue.”

Cain set his palm to her throat through ash and wreckage and all the heat, brand to mark, thorn to wreath, and the purr under her skin came back with its head up. “Breathe,” he said, counting because numbers are the harness that keeps courage kind. “One. Two.”

She obeyed. The room obeyed her. The codex breathed ink. The embers glowed with that particular intelligence fire gets when it realizes it is being used for light, not theater.

“Plan,” Myrrh said, fierce and greedy. “Restore the broken pact, not as nostalgia, as weapon. Dawn: ash to root, iron off, the name said. Dusk: seals laid, honey salted, wells laced shut. Night: we cut their lines and make them walk. When they find no frost to feed on, they starve.”

“Cut the Unseelie off from their power,” DG echoed, tasting the sentence, approving. “We stop letting winter pay its bills with our breath.”

Glitch tied string into a knot small and rude and slid it onto the map where the tent had been the last time it thought the city wasn’t watching. “Playhouse,” he promised, soft. “You’ll get your screen.”

Raw stroked the charred stone and told it a joke about kings who tried to burn books and found their names smoking out of the walls instead. The floor laughed a little. It likes jokes with endings that aren’t lies.

Cain looked at the scorched shelves, the codex saved, the faces blacked with ash and intent, the rope steaming, the buckets sulking, and the circle under his palm holding steady as if it had discovered something better to do than be a painting. He smiled without teeth. Later, he would hunt Roan with correct mercy. Now, he had law to perform.

“Up,” he said, and the room stood because he told it to. “We’ve got a city to feed and a god to starve.”

DG wiped a soot smear off Cain’s cheek with her thumb and then, scandalously, on purpose, licked it clean. Iron and sugar. He arched an eyebrow, ash-mouthed and amused and murderous. “Mine to hold,” he said, not gentle, because the room doesn’t deserve gentle when smoke is still trying to pretend it has a job.

“Say please,” she murmured into the wreck, wicked and certain.

He didn’t. He didn’t need to. The embers understood already. The plan glowed there, new and old and hungry: restore, root, seal, salt, cut. The stones hummed like a bell, not funeral, rally, and the secret archive learned it had survived to be a better secret. Outside, rope hummed. Buckets waited. The north wind licked its teeth and tasted salt in its future.

Chapter Text

Moonlight made the orchard honest.

No lanterns. No music. The oldest hawthorn stood where the land remembered to breathe, trunk twisted into a question that had waited generations to be answered. Salt in little linen bags hung from its branches like pale fruit. The air smelled of iron and sap, of cold grass and the last of the smoke on DG’s hair. Rope lattices ghosted the perimeter. Buckets waited like patient saints. Far off, the city held itself very still, the way a body does before a physician sets a bone.

Raw laid his palm to the earth and smiled, eyes half-lidded, listening to what stone tells roots and roots tell water. “It’s ready,” he said, voice warm as bread. “Hungry in the good way.”

DG stepped into the ring of thorn-shadow, barefoot, throat bare. The ribbon under her sternum woke and lifted its head like a red fox peering from a den. The codex’s words were in her mouth like flint. Behind her, Cain climbed the last rise without sound, glove off, brand bright, the thorned ring under his skin throwing the faintest crown-shadow over his knuckles.

“Witnesses and stone,” Myrrh had said earlier, pressing the knife into her hand and then Raw’s. Now only Raw remained, a brother to soil, an oath with a pulse. He nodded once and put two fingers to the trunk. The hawthorn pricked him just enough to be sure and then relented.

“Dusk clause,” DG said, breath fogging in the cold. “Ash to root at dawn. Tonight we seal and salt.”

Cain took his place opposite her. His palm came up. Her throat leaned into it as if the mark there were a door the room couldn’t see. Not heat. Not hunger. A hinge, turned.

“Three breaths,” he murmured, and they took them like men take water after carrying a ladder uphill. In. Out. In.

On the third, Raw’s hum found the old circle under the grass. The runes woke, thin as scars, paler than milk—faint hawthorn script and the looped grammar of ribbon. Myrrh’s lines had traced them earlier in chalk and patience; now moonlight finished the writing.

“Edge to cut,” Raw prompted gently, “spine to mend. Thorns to bite. Threads to bind.”

DG unwrapped the knife. The blade carried the orchard on its back, steel like water, notches ready to drink consent. She extended her left wrist. Cain didn’t flinch. He turned the knife in his own hand, nicked his thumb neat, and let the bead rise in the cool. It fell to the runes like a polite comet.

Iron kissed hawthorn. The lines lit, a slow glow. Blood licked the old script and it decided to be present tense.

DG drew the edge along her wrist, a whisper, a signature; then flipped the blade and set the spine to both wounds together. Consent, not spectacle. The ribbon slid out of her palms, bright, wet-looking, shameless, and sank into the ground as if the earth had always been missing it. It knit where the runes had split; it lay down under the roots and pulled, tug-tug, a weaver drawing warp true.

“Speak,” Raw said, soft as moss.

They spoke together, the clause that had been waiting: “Thorns may bite, threads may bind; iron off roots, ash to heart; wells sealed at dusk, opened at dawn; doors at dawn and dusk; Saethyr.”

The hawthorn answered with a rustle like a dress on a stair. Salt bags sighed. The cord Myrrh had tied trembled and then sat proud. Cain pressed his bleeding thumb to the base of the trunk; DG laid her marked throat to his palm for the length of a heartbeat. The rune and the wreath answered each other like old soldiers swapping names.

Power arrived like a tide that remembered the shore.

Not flash. Not theater. A standing wave, quiet and inexorable. It spilled under their feet and along the roots and out into the stone seams of the city. Rope heard first, humming a low, delighted note across alleys and arcades. Buckets shivered and went still. Ladders straightened on their hooks as if told to mind their shoulders. Wells that had dreamed of winter shut their mouths, laced with the red silk of DG’s ribbon and the white bite of hawthorn blessing. Black honey curdled where it hid in tins. Cheap red threads that had tried to pretend hardened into brittle yarn and snapped.

In the barracks, a boy with a bad night in his chest exhaled and didn’t know why the air finally loved him back. In the square, a priest lit a taper and it guttered politely and went out. On the north wall, Glitch’s toys thrummed and sang their little oaths in corners where shadows liked to narrate; the shadows forgot their lines.

The city’s spine, out of true for generations, snapped back into place.

You could hear it if you had the right bones: a click, clean and awful with relief, right down the middle. Doors that had insisted on sticking learned which way yes goes. The oldest stair in the palace, the one that keeps bad news in its knees, stood up straighter. The ugly statue in the west arcade—not a saint, not even a good joke—turned its head a fraction toward the orchard and tried to remember what apology feels like.

DG held. Cain held her. Raw held the ground and laughed, quiet and a little indecent, delighted by the way stone purrs when it’s told the truth.

“Seal,” DG said, voice low. “Name.”

They did the ugly line Myrrh had found in the codex, the one that offends the remnant precisely because it uses their first, forgotten word. They said it into the bark and down the roots and along the damp that keeps wells honest. The orchard took the syllables and ate them; the city carried the aftertaste like medicine.

Far away in the wastes, something with a tent and a screen and old grievances felt its throat catch.

Roan howled, a small, thwarted sound dragged ragged out of a man who had loaned his mouth to winter and been handed a bill. It came thin over the flats and broke against the wall, an animal taught the wrong songs. He knew. The tide had turned. Power that had felt like a leash slipped. He had none of his own.

“Again,” Cain said softly, not to her, to the land. He palmed the runes until the thorn-ring warmed and the circle’s light banked steady. “Hold.”

DG lowered her wrist to the grass and let the earth drink the last bright line. The ribbon under her sternum sank like a river going underground and settled there, humming. She bent, pressed her mouth to the bark where Raw’s fingers had rested. “Dawn,” she promised the tree. “We’ll bring the ash home.”

Raw pushed up to his feet and brushed dirt off his trousers like a man who had made a decision he intends to keep. “It took,” he said. “Wells shut. Honey soured. Shadow teeth—” he grinned at the sky, wolf-wise “—chewing on salt.”

Cain stood and extended a hand. DG put her palm in it. The thorned ring and the pale wreath met and the field dropped a hair in the corners of the world, obedient, kind. They stood under the tense blue-white moon with the hawthorn pricking the night into focus and didn’t speak for three breaths because some victories are quieter if you want them to last.

“Go,” DG said at last, turning toward the city with new gravity knitting into her step. “Post the seals. Run the lines. Tell Aila to salt the stores and Myrrh to write the wells the courtiers actually use in large letters so I don’t have to be polite later.”

“Sir,” Raw said cheerfully to Cain, because it made the floor happy when he did, and loped off along the root-line, humming the city awake as he went.

Cain kissed the inside of DG’s wrist where the cut had already learned better and let the air taste what law felt like when it has a body. “Dawn,” he agreed. “Ash to root.”

They left the tree with salt hanging like promises and the circle glowing low enough only stone would remember. The orchard breathed. The palace, ridiculous romantic thing that it is, purred into its foundation. The north wind put its mouth to the gate and tasted iron and sugar and decided to go hungry somewhere else.

Far off, Roan’s howl fell to silence. The tent behind the wastes’ low ridge went still. A gloved hand lifted from a map as if burned by paper.

In the city, power held. Old magic locked. A spine straightened. And under the moon the Thorns and Threads took, binding thorn to thread, well to word, crown to vow, until even the walls knew their job again.

Chapter Text

The chapel had been built for small truths.

No frescoes preaching at your eyes, no choir loft for gossip; just pale stone, two rows of narrow pews, a window the shape of a promise, and a bowl of water that remembered every fingertip that ever touched it. Candles stood at a respectful distance, their light the color of late honey. The city’s new hum had crept even in here, a barely audible purr nested under the quiet, as if the walls had decided to keep time with people who meant it.

Az slipped inside first, hood thrown back, hair pinned until the pins lost the argument. Her boots made that insolent little hush against old flagstone that says some things can only be said properly on two feet. Jeb came a breath later, closing the door without drama, shoulders still carrying a yard’s worth of rope and rotations. The look he gave her had no witnesses and didn’t care.

“No rings,” she said.

“No audience,” he answered.

“Perfect,” she decided, grinning like a thief.

They stood at the bowl and let the water be unromantic and sincere. Fingers dipped; brows touched. “We do this without paper,” Az said, suddenly neat about her diction. “Without signatures. Without anyone getting the fun of announcing us to people who collect announcements.”

“Without permission,” Jeb added, because some vows sound better when disobedient. “With intent.”

She looked up at him, eyes the color of plans. “Say what you mean.”

“I won’t drop you,” he said simply. “When the floor moves. When the rumor turns. When winter remembers it has a mouth. I will be where your hand expects. And when you want to run, I won’t call it fear. I’ll call it strategy and keep pace.”

She laughed into her wrist; it turned into something less defended when she saw he meant every syllable. “I won’t make your steadiness into a job,” she answered. “I’ll let it be a choice you keep choosing. I’ll stop pretending I’m a storm when I’m a person. And if I break a chair in half with my temper, I’ll help fix it before I sit down again.”

They touched the water again, not pious, practical, sealing speech without asking the room to clap. The window held a piece of moon like a coin.

“Say please,” he teased, gentle.

“I am not a miracle you can requisition,” she replied, wicked; then she leaned in and kissed him so the candles didn’t have to guess what came next.

It should have been pious. It was happy. His hands found her waist with the reverence of a craftsman learning an instrument, and the instrument deciding to be a conspirator. She climbed into his lap on the narrow pew because comfort is a negotiation and she always wins those. His back pressed the worn wood; his mouth forgot caution. Laughter kicked against his teeth and she clapped a palm over his mouth, delighted, breathless, the sound of it turning quickly into something not meant for public consumption.

“Quiet,” she whispered, eyes wicked and wide. “We’ll get scolded by a saint who failed out of charm school.”

He made a muffled noise that meant both I agree and don’t you dare stop. She didn’t. The pew creaked in that soft scandalized way furniture acquires after a century of watching people pray for the wrong things. The window’s coin of moonlight painted her throat, her jaw, the hard bright smile that always shows up right before she decides not to be careful. Jeb shut his eyes once, briefly, just to survive how good she looked; when he opened them she was still there, smug, gorgeous, winning.

They moved together as if the room had been built to teach them how. No audience, no choreography, just rhythm turned private law. When laughter tried to barge back in on a gasp, she shushed it with her hand over his mouth again, shoulders shaking gently, and he bit that palm very lightly because consequences are a love language if you’re both honest about it.

After, they folded into the corner of the pew where the back rest meets the end cap and pretended wood was generous. Her cheek rested on his shoulder; his breath made a small steady draft across the fine hairs at her temple. The candles went on behaving like adults. The window silvered the dust in the air so it looked like tiny coins too cheap to buy regret.

“Plans,” she said, the word cozy on her tongue, like thieves counting gold where no one can hear.

“Many,” he answered, automatic and pleased. “First, I ask you properly for a better room than this to behave in. Something with a door that locks without having to bribe it.”

“Mmm. I requisition Stev’s least dreadful spare and put a latch on it that only you and I know how to persuade,” she said. “I steal a blanket from your father because that coat will walk off by itself one day, and I’m not sleeping under a legend that smells like pine and murder without washing.”

“I’ll bring a kettle,” he offered. “Water that doesn’t taste like old prayers.”

“And a chair with arms,” she decided, amused. “For when I decide to be scenery. And a hook for my knives.”

“A hook for your knives,” he echoed, thoroughly smitten with the idea that a wall could be asked to hold exactly the right danger. “I’ll talk to Glitch about a window that opens only for us and not for weather. And I will stand between you and anybody who thinks knocking is optional.”

She tapped her finger against his collarbone in a slow beat, keeping time with the city’s purr. “Children,” she murmured, then smirked when he choked on his own breath. “Not now,” she added, generous. “Later, when the rope hums from boredom instead of readiness and winter has stopped writing us letters. Maybe. Possibly. If we decide we like people as much as we like ourselves.”

He considered the ceiling, as if the ceiling were a tactician. “A small, well-armed person who laughs like you,” he conceded. “I could be persuaded.”

“Good answer,” she said, and kissed his jaw.

He traced futures with the blunt honesty she’d already sworn to. “You with a workshop that has a door nobody else can find. Me with a yard that runs on steadiness, not fear. A Saturday with bread. A Tuesday where we forget to be magnificent. Nights like this, but on purpose.”

“And a spring,” she said unexpectedly, voice gone soft. “A day when I am mean to the world and you don’t try to fix it. You just bring me an apple and sit on my feet until I remember it’s not personal.”

“Agreed,” he said at once, delighted by how easy she made correctness sound. “And if I wake at a bad hour with winter in my mouth, you don’t call it weakness. You put your hand on my throat and make my breath count again until I fall back into a place with a roof.”

“Deal,” she said. “Also I get one storeroom per week without questions.”

“Absolutely not,” he replied, appalled and devoted. “Two.”

She laughed, bright and quiet, and hid her face in his shoulder to keep the room from catching it.

The chapel accepted their whispering like a form of worship it had always suspected was holier than speeches. Somewhere outside the door a rope lattice sighed as the north wind changed its mind about being rude. Far off, the orchard breathed and the wells held their tongues, sealed and sealed again. The city’s spine stayed aligned.

Az angled back to look at him, seriousness slipping in under the mischief. “When the next bad thing knocks, and it will,” she said, “I don’t want to watch you look at the door like you should open it alone.”

He swallowed, because she had the exact knife for truths. “Then I won’t,” he said. “I’ll let you go first and I’ll admire the view.”

“Correct,” she said, pleased. “And if your father tries to assign you to a rotation that makes us strangers for a week, I will remind him that families are not a theory.”

Jeb’s mouth bent into the exact shape of a promise he’d keep even if he had to argue with the Commander like a man who had learned new courage. “I’ll remind him too,” he said softly. “He knows. He just forgets when the city is loud. I can be louder.”

“You can,” she agreed, eyes happy in that mean way she has when she’s proud of someone. “You’re his best work.”

“His second,” Jeb said, glancing at the window’s coin of moonlight that made the world a small room with a bowl of water and a woman in it. “If we’re counting.”

She tsked, a tiny sound. “Flattery is not a plan,” she chided.

“It’s a hobby,” he confessed.

They kissed again because not kissing would have been a disrespect to design. This time it was slower, more like the counting of coins after the heist is done and the doors are barred and the city, for ten blessed minutes, cannot invent a way to ruin your evening.

When they stood, joints complaining on principle about pews being terrible furniture for anything but regrets, Az smoothed her dress and pretended to be surprised she was presentable. Jeb found his balance without looking at the floor and picked one wax drop off the edge of the seat with a care that made her grin. They dipped their fingers in the bowl one last time and left the water with a story worth telling itself.

“Back stairs,” she said at the door, practical. “We look like we’ve been blessed and that offends people.”

“Good,” he said, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. “They can write me up for it.”

“Let them try,” she replied, wicked, and cracked the door.

The corridor outside smelled faintly of rope and ink and apple. The city’s hum met them like a friend waiting at a table, and the pair of them—no rings, no witnesses, pockets full of gold that only two people need to count—stepped into it together.

Chapter Text

They met where the palace keeps its breath: the little clockroom behind the east colonnade, all brass ribs and patient gears, oil sweet in the air, a narrow window set like a stopwatch for dawn. Rope hummed faintly beyond the shutters. The orchard’s hush seemed to carry even here, as if the hawthorn had put a hand on the palace’s shoulder and told it to hold steady.

Lavender stood with her palms on the workbench, sleeves pushed to the elbow, the linen of her cuffs ink-salted. She looked like a verdict trying not to tremble. Glitch arrived as if he’d been made for this room, copper half-mask on his brow, string around his wrist, the smell of solder and good trouble caught in his collar. He took one look at her and stopped pretending he could be anything but honest.

“Ambrose,” she said, not queen, not patient, not kind, and that was all the permission the night required.

They closed the distance as if the floor had learned to move. The first kiss wasn’t careful. It wasn’t even wise. It was two people who had lost too many nouns deciding to be verbs. He braced a hand at the small of her back and felt the idea of crown unwind under his palm; she caught the edge of his mask and dragged him down to where names don’t matter. Brass chimed once in the wall, startled, then steadied.

Buttons learned resignation. Silk folded at the waist with the soft gasp of manners failing. He kissed the old, secret name at her throat and she answered with a breath that made the room smaller. They moved with the quick competence of thieves who have mapped the exits: not rushed, intent. The bench cleared itself of little tools in a scattering clink; the clockwork bird watched from a shelf, fluttered its tin heart, and looked away like a gentleman.

He held her as if engineering had prepared him for this—every brace sure, every angle chosen. She climbed into him with a queen’s insolence and a woman’s relief, laughter breaking once on her own mouth as if she couldn’t help admitting joy even now. His hands learned the old geography again: the line of her spine where courage lives, the hollow beneath her ribs where mercy sits, the slope of her shoulder that remembers losing and still stays. She took his face in both palms, eyes bright and wrecked, and kissed him until the clocks forgot to keep count.

There was a moment when the world could have turned them aside—when grief reached up with cold fingers and tried to take her voice. He spoke to the tremor like a craftsman talking to a stubborn hinge, low, patient, certain, and the hinge obeyed. They found a rhythm that didn’t ask for spectacle, only truth. Brass breathed. Rope hummed. The window fogged at the edges and decided to keep their secret.

After, they stayed tangled where the bench made room, breath easing by degrees, sweat cooling into salt, her forehead resting against his cheek as if words were too expensive to buy. He traced the small creases time had written at the corners of her mouth and wished he could be the man who’d stolen fewer of her days. She looked at him and made the wish unnecessary by believing he could be the man who gave them back differently.

It hit her then—the weight laid in careful layers over the last week, month, life—ash and thorns and rooms where kings don’t wake. She tried to swallow it the way queens are trained to, and failed, and started shaking in a way the city must never see. He didn’t tidy it. He didn’t tell her to hush. He held her like an oath.

One arm under her, the other around her shoulders, cheek to her temple, he let the storm choose its own weather while he stayed. He rocked her gently, small, human, no ceremony; whispered nothings that were, in fact, everythings: here, breathe, yes, I have you. The clocks, indulgent old saints, softened their tick. The copper bird hopped twice and settled, as if even toys know the sound of a heart being safeguarded.

She cried the way people do when they have run out of acceptable verbs. He made himself wide for it. When the worst of it passed, she shivered, sighed, and let his name be a place she could sleep in. He kissed the line where tear met skin and tasted salt and daylight.

“You’re allowed to keep something,” he said into her hair, voice wrecked and definite. “Let it be me.”

“It will be,” she answered, hoarse, the decision written in the way her hand fisted in his shirt and then relaxed, not to release, to anchor.

They sat like that while the moon moved one pane-width across the window and the rope outside finished its song. Eventually he stood, lifting her as if the label fragile were another word for sacred, and found a blanket that smelled like clean linen and old ideas. He wrapped her and himself in it, a single warmed thing, and lowered them onto the narrow divan meant for napping scholars, not coronations. She tucked her face under his jaw and sighed as if the palace had finally remembered how to breathe.

“Tomorrow,” she said against his throat, not a question.

“I’ll still be here,” he said, which is how inventors pledge fealty when they’ve run out of flowers.

She closed her eyes. The clocks resumed their truthful tick. In the frame of the narrow window a square of dark began to lighten, not enough to commit, enough to vow. He held her like a promise he would keep even if it meant making new gears for time. When sleep took her, it did it gently. When it reached for him, he went with it, but not before tightening his arms and resting his mouth in her hair, the kiss a seal that did not ask anyone’s approval.

The palace, ridiculous romantic thing that it is, felt it and purred through the walls. The orchard listened. The rope at the colonnade relaxed half a fingertip. And in the quiet clockroom where brass has learned every story, a queen and her inventor stopped pretending anything less than this would do.

Chapter Text

Dawn came in wrong.

Not pink. Not gold. A hard, iron coin rolled along the rim of the world, and with it a ragged roar that didn’t belong to the city. The north wall stiffened under Raw’s palm; stone doesn’t fear, but it remembers being chipped by men who mistook winter for courage.

“They’re here,” Jeb said, voice already a hinge, already a hammer.

Roan’s rabble hit the waste road as if noise could be strategy. Thirty? Fifty? More behind, grey cloaks like cheap fog, stolen shields with house crests filed off, ladders that learned their balance on dead trees. Unseelie shadow moved among them like bad grammar, edges blurring, breath cold enough to peel paint. Black honey gleamed at a dozen mouths. A banner on a pole showed a thorn drawn by a child and an insult for ribbon underneath.

On the wall, rope already hummed. Nets crouched above the killing ground with the manners Glitch had taught them. Buckets waited two-by-two like tired saints. Men breathed because Cain told the air to let them.

“Article Twelve,” Brogan called, broom slung, grin like a cut. “Say it first or swallow it later.”

“Article Eight,” Stev added, palm on ladder rung. “No flames near cloth. You light it; you carry it.”

“Rotations,” Cain said without lifting his voice. It carried as if the stone had learned to be a throat. “Twos to fours. North gate holds. East stair dances. Rope on the third drop. Lattice if they go clever. Don’t run. We don’t do brave; we do correct.”

He swung into the saddle as if the yard had offered him a chair. Coat off. Glove off. The thorned ring in his palm burned a thin crown-shadow across his knuckles. He set his horse to the parapet and rode the line like a living banner, brand up, field dropped over corners until panic learned it wouldn’t be hired.

“Saethyr,” DG said from the stair.

Not shouted. Said. The word took the teeth of the morning and made them line up.

Her wings opened behind her like a rumor coming true. Not the shy flare she’d shown a room; full span, pearly-lit, each primary edged in a soft knife-glow. The mark at her throat burned like a little sun. The ribbon under her sternum slipped singing into her palms and rose as red, wet-looking thread, slick and obedient. She ran and took the air like a door she’d been meaning to open all her life.

The rabble saw her and howled. Roan, at their knotty center, bared teeth too white for honesty and raised a hand that shook too little to be brave. “Now,” he tried to shout, but the wall hummed, rude, and took the word apart.

Glitch’s toys woke.

A tin bird hopped from a crenel and spat salt at the ankles of the first grey cloaks to reach ladder-length. A copper-topped top whirred, hummed Saethyr in a note only Unseelie joints can hate, and rolled down a brace to kiss three shadows on their wrong mouths with iron filings. Nets fell where rope decided physics is a suggestion. A jack-in-the-box opened on a spring-snarled bless-you and swallowed a man up to his armpits while he tried to explain that he had hoped for glory, not twine.

“Gates hold,” Jeb told the boys at the winch. “You feel clever, you sit on your hands. Clever kills.”

“Brooms,” Brogan said, and the first powder-vial popped in a puff of cold that wanted lungs. She beat it to steam with the briskness of a woman swatting nonsense. Men who had planned to shout cleanse choked on their own invented liturgy; the rope laughed at them and put a bucket in their hands.

The first ladder hit. The wall shuddered. Raw hummed back and the stone remembered that holding is a hobby it enjoys when instructed by interesting people.

“Up,” the greys bawled, and then there were three of them climbing at once, eyes wrong, hands quick, breath fogging where breath shouldn’t. Cain let them come. He kept the horse moving. He was everywhere and a precise number of places: a point of law in motion.

DG cleared the gate and met the morning midair.

Her first sigil was a neat red cut through the dawn: a knot thrown with two fingers, a figure eight of ribbon and intent that landed on the edge of a grey cloak’s blade as it rose. The steel bloomed rust in a single breath and fell to powder like a bad opinion under scrutiny.

Second sigil: three strokes, sharp, flung like a child’s game. A triangle hung for a heartbeat over the head of a man reaching for ladder rung and then wrung him instead. He dropped, not dead, thoroughly instructed.

Third, and the rabble began to understand that daggers and lies are both poor weapons against a woman who has learned to write on the air: a long curve, a hooked tail, a kiss thrown at a spear point. Dust. Dust. Dust.

“Girl,” someone screamed, because it is easier to say syllables than to survive them.

“Queen,” the city corrected, and roared her name.

It came up from the market like thunder with manners, it curled around the east stair, it slid along the rope and into Glitch’s toys, it ran down the barrels, it made Brogan’s broom swing with happier shoulders, it put a sound in Cain’s chest he refused to spend and therefore became iron. DG. DG. DG.

Roan saw her properly then. Saw the crest-light around his enemy’s man. Saw the city’s spine stand up. Fear made him briefly honest. He lowered his hand and tried precision as if tactics could apologize for being late. “Left!” he yelled. “Ladders! Fire the—”

“Myrrh,” Cain said, and the scholar at his shoulder, hair a war god, flung a phrase that turned frostfire to water at the edges. The few sparks the greys coaxed from their powders went sulky and fell in love with sand.

The gate shook again. Jeb barked a laugh. “You pound on that door like it owes you,” he told the greys below, “and you’ll get a broom for your trouble.” He nodded once to Stev. Lattice slid and pinned a ladder where it couldn’t quite think of the right objection.

Roan himself came up on the central ladder, a man who’d convinced fear to get out of his way by promising the future a better liar. Cain rode to meet him as if the stone had never thought to complain about hooves.

Their eyes took each other’s measure. Their mouths declined prayer. Steel spoke twice in quick, obscene syllables—clash, slide—and both men remembered the sermon in the square. Roan tried to make the duel a song about himself again. Cain let him sing for exactly three notes, then changed the key with a flick of his wrist that turned a serious thrust into a question nobody cared to answer.

DG hung above them, a white blaze of wing, red glyphs streaming from her like bright fish. She turned the air into a loom. Sigils fell. Blades died. A grey cloak lifted a bow; buckle dusted. A second drew a knife; handle melted in his hand like shame. A third hurled a coil of foxglove-tied rope; she cut the knot midair and the ends fell with the mortified plop of a trick corrected.

“Saethyr,” she said once, a pulse rather than a word, and men on ladders paused involuntarily, hands remembering they were attached to wrists they might want to keep.

Roan lunged. Cain’s horse sidestepped like a man refusing a clumsy dance. Cane let Roan feel metal. Let Roan think bone was about to learn steel, then denied him. He hit Roan once, twice, not for blood, for education: a cut to forearm, a love-tap under the elbow that would make the arm lie about its strength later.

“Yield,” he offered, because ritual considers itself charming.

“Never,” Roan grated, because he had learned to love that particular stupidity.

“Later, then,” Cain said, and turned to where a cluster of greys had found courage in numbers, not noticing numbers were on the wall’s side.

Aila stood at the breastwork with ink on her knuckles and a coil of cheap red threads in a bag labeled rats. She did not fight, she fought. “Not here, not here, not here,” she told the men who brought supplies, and they listened because she made them heroes at dinner and they had always wanted to be. She tossed a salt bag off the wall to where black honey glittered on a greys’ knife; the bag burst, the honey curdled, the knife gagged, the greys discovered that winter hates chemistry.

Az ran the east stair like a privateer on a prize deck, knife as punctuation. Jeb stayed at the winch with that terrible, careful patience that wins wars and saves boys, the set of his shoulders the exact argument they’d promised each other in a chapel. “Again,” he told the men in a tone that made their knees thankful.

Glitch’s marbles rolled, magnet-mouths clacking gleefully when they found cold. A fox-shaped shadow tried to slip under the ropes; a tin bird landed on its back and pecked it until it was only bad air, then hopped away like a saint pretending it had seen nothing.

Raw’s hum went full laugh, head tipped back, delighted with how the wall feels when a city sings the right thing at the right time. The parapet under Cain’s horse throbbed like a drumhead held by friendly hands.

DG stooped, wing-snap, and the world slowed. Her ribbon wrote in a fast, generous hand; sigils compiled into a low red rain that touched metal and taught it humility. A spear tried her ankle; it turned to dust and kissed her foot. A shield lifted against her; its boss fell off with a plink, embarrassed to be pretend.

“Queen,” the market roared again when she rose, and something in the unseelie splinter flinched at the old word used correctly.

Roan looked up at her once mid-swing and understood—not politics, not bonds, not pheromones that had been his favorite lie—understood that the city would rather be hers than his. He snarled the way men do when the audience leaves before the final trick. He feinted right. Cain didn’t bother to smile this time. He gave Roan his own momentum back in a small, neat package. Roan stumbled. A grey tried to be a hero and became a footnote under Brogan’s broom.

“Hold,” Cain told the gate, and it did.

The fight went sideways then, at the moment when rabble learns what professional stubbornness costs. The greys began to break, not in a flood, in intelligent retreat. Winter wants to save teeth. Roan wheeled, left hand darting for his last certainty: a knife hidden where the writ forbids. He had kept it because cowards do; he threw it because habits get brave when frightened.

DG saw the knife. She didn’t scream. She wrote the smallest sigil she knows—two strokes, rude—and the blade became powder an arm’s length from Cain’s throat. The dust hit his cheek and tasted like a lie. He licked his lips, iron and sugar, and rode forward as if the morning had only asked him to check a ledger.

Roan spat and unhooked himself, survival finally louder than theater. “We go,” he barked, grey voice thin, and the splinter listened.

The retreat wasn’t elegant. It didn’t need to be. It needed to be fast, and fear does that very well. Ladders toppled backward into men who had thought climbing was bravery instead of arithmetic. Nets let go and folded themselves courteous. Glitch’s toys came home like tired cats. Salt bags swung like pale fruit. The gate breathed in and did not open.

Cain didn’t chase.

“Hold line,” he said. “We don’t hunt into fog. We don’t gift them alleys.” He lifted his palm and the thorned ring shone in a thin circlet of light that made recruits suck in a breath as if they’d meant to say sir and forgot the word.

DG hovered once, high enough to see the avenue and the market and the far roofs, then tucked and came down in a long, fierce glide that ended with her boots on stone and her wings settling into rumor. She was flushed, bright-eyed, soot-smudged, grinning in that mean, holy way a woman does when she has saved exactly the thing that deserved it. Her ribbon climbed his wrist as soon as he offered his hand, silk crossing his bones, possession with a sense of humor. He set his palm to her throat because ritual is a door and both of them like to live inside.

“Breathe,” he told her uselessly, and she laughed into the words.

The city cheered. Not polite. Not court. Market stall, barracks yard, bell hanger, seamstress, baker and dog, seam of river, knotted ladders. It rolled along the wall and down the square and into the orchard like a tide that has decided rock deserves the compliment of being worn smooth by something other than lies.

“DG!” they roared. “DG!”

“Hold,” Cain told the men again when applause tempted them to grin too hard to do their jobs. They grinned anyway and then sobered because he turned his head and that was enough.

Aila shut her ledger with a smack and wrote one neat line on the cover: siege met, line held, knives corrected, city instructed. Myrrh slid the rune knife home with a satisfied cluck, bloodless for once and smug about it. Brogan leaned on her broom and took the moment to savor the way fear tastes when it’s cooked all the way through. Raw sprawled on the parapet and told the wall a filthy joke. It hummed, deeply pleased.

Far out in the wastes, Roan’s howl broke in his throat and turned to a cough. The tent wall he loved breathed in and failed to breathe out for a second. Black honey soured in tins. Wells sealed. The splinter’s shadow looked smaller in morning.

On the parapet, Cain gave the air its job back in increments. “Water,” he said. “Bandages. Don’t brag. You did the minimum; it was glorious.”

DG stepped up onto a merlon because height is a language cities learn in two breaths. She looked out over the people who had just decided that fear is a tool, not a god, and lifted a hand. The cheer quieted. It didn’t stop being big; it became focused.

“Doors at dusk,” she called, voice clear and wrecked and queen. “Ash at dawn.”

The hawthorn outside the wall rustled, gossiping with itself about how good the day tasted. The wells swallowed and did not choke. Rope hummed one long, relieved note. The buckets blushed because they’d been useful without spilling.

Cain touched her wrist. She put her palm in his and left it there longer than ritual requires. The brand to the mark. The thorn to the wreath. The city took that as a promise it could sleep on later.

“Again,” she told the wall, greedy for correct. “If they come.”

“Many,” he promised, not smiling, eyes bright, the set of his shoulders the posture that teaches gates how to feel like home.

Chapter Text

Retreat frayed into a snarl at the north sally where the wall hugs the river and pretends not to breathe. Rope hissed down. Nets let go. Greys stumbled backward into their own noise. In the tangle of it, Roan made the bad choice brave men confuse for strategy: he turned, licked fear off his teeth, and came back for one last piece of theater.

Cain met him halfway like a ledger closing.

No flourish. A hand in the collar and a boot behind the heel; momentum corrected. Stone got a new friend. Roan hit the wall with his breath in the wrong place and found it again only when Cain let him. Someone’s ladder clanged down the steps and decided to mind its manners. The belt at Cain’s hip hummed low and pleased, leather answering the thorned ring in his palm as he set Roan’s wrists where wrists can learn.

“You want the old law?” Cain asked softly, in the voice you use on boys and animals. “Here it is.”

Roan snarled like men do when they’ve forgotten they’re not the weather. “Her scent—” he gasped, ugly, awe-drunk even now, “—you smell it, Commander, you drown in it, you—”

Cain smiled with all his teeth. The kind of smile that makes an ending choose itself.

He didn’t hurry. He made it surgical because kindness and cruelty share a hand if you’re honest. Shoulder, not jaw; elbow, not pride. A short, pretty cut under the left eye to teach the blood direction. A cuff across the ear to reset balance. The blade at his hip never left its home. Fingers, knuckles, forearm—Cain’s body’s arithmetic. Every strike an edit. Every edit a lesson.

Roan swung like a man who loves applause. Cain let him. Parried with the back of his wrist and the block that breaks the habit in a hand that reaches the wrong way. Bones thudded. Stone agreed. Somewhere behind them a net swallowed a man with that soft, mortifying sound Glitch had tuned on purpose.

“Yield,” Cain offered once, ritual exact.

Roan spit pink and laughed, tried to be romantic about pain. “Never,” he said through his teeth, eye shining with the wrong kind of worship. “You’re a leash with legs. She made you a collar. Smelled like—” he hissed it, a prayer and a blasphemy “—like heat and fruit and rain on tin, and you put your mouth to—”

The smile went a shade wider. A shade worse.

Cain’s palm took Roan by the throat and wrote a thesis there.

Not choking. Not yet. Heat where the rune lives. Thorn-ring bright, crown-shadow kissing the tendon. The field dropped around the angle of wall and river until air remembered obedience. Roan’s next word hit the lid and broke into coughing. Cain dragged him off the stone far enough to have room to be thorough and walked him three steps into a place where the ground would remember correctly.

“You touched a queen without permission,” he said, conversational murder. “You sold a city by the inch. You brought winter mouths to drink at our wells. Your reward is that I don’t let you die foolish.”

Roan clawed for his wrist because men always do when their throats learn who owns them. Cain let him meet the bone. Let him feel the brand’s teeth under skin. Let him know the difference between a man who has a leash and a man who has a law.

The first break was easy: a twist that took the reach out of Roan’s knife hand. A pop, neat, obscene and small. The kind of sound the wall loves because it means the body just learned to tell the truth. Roan yelped and tried again with the other; Cain moved his own weight a fraction and took that, too, leaving fingers open and stupid, wrists craving rope.

“Say never again,” Cain suggested pleasantly. “See what it buys.”

Roan hissed. “Her scent,” he said again, whine thin, eyes huge with the memory of a corridor he had turned into a confession without consent, “—you think you’re better than me; you’re not; you’re—”

“Oh, I’m worse,” Cain assured him, loving the honesty of it. He drove a fist into the place just under the ribs where braggarts keep their air and then into the meat above the hip where courage goes to sulk after failure. Roan folded and found the floor because the floor was generous. Cain lifted him by the front of his coat and gave him back to the wall, polite.

Behind them, the city’s roar came in waves and then steadied. DG’s red glyphs hissed out above the gate in little bright signatures, turning a last blade to dust for the sake of a boy who hadn’t learned where to put his hands yet. The market kept saying her name like a cure.

Roan’s mouth went for the word cleanse on reflex, as if habit might be a spell. Cain tilted his head. The field pressed, gentle, inexorable. The syllable died in his mouth like a bug.

“Look at me,” Cain said, and it was the first command that had a temperature you could call cold. Roan looked. “Listen to the city choosing. Listen to the stone. That’s what the bond smells like,” he added kindly, as if explaining a tool. “Not your little fantasy. The smell in your mouth is you.”

Roan tried a headbutt in the way of men who mistake surprise for skill. Cain’s forehead met it politely and taught it shame. The second break wasn’t a break. It was a lesson in how kneecaps regret choices. Roan hit the flagstones again with his convictions scattered around him like cheap coins.

“Don’t kill him,” someone panted at Cain’s shoulder, well-meaning and late. A recruit. Cain didn’t answer. He put a palm on Roan’s chest, right over the place where the muscle tries to be brave, and leaned. The thorned ring warmed through cloth. The winter that had learned to hide in Roan’s sleeves hissed and left him, quickly bored with a house that had just had its windows nailed shut by pact and ribbon.

Roan’s eyes went glossy. “She smelled,” he whimpered, clinging to the only language he’s ever thought made him holy. “You smelled it too—tell me you didn’t—tell me you didn’t—”

Cain leaned closer, and for a heartbeat the old thing he keeps under lock picked up its head and looked around.

“Of course I did,” he said softly. “And I can still think.”

He smiled that last, bright, terrible smile. His hand slid from chest to jaw, thumb under the hinge, fingers at the knob where the atlas meets the world. He began to turn.

There’s a way to do it quick. He knows it. He’s done it. He would do it again for less than this if the city asked. The motion began, clean as a sentence that ends on time. Roan made a strangled, eager sound, as if dying in the hand of the man who owned the room were a kind of romance he could finally afford.

“Cain.” DG’s voice.

Not loud. Not soft. The exact weight of a palm laid to a throat where a mark lives.

It landed between tendon and heat like a hand catching a blade an inch from skin. He could feel the ribbon under her sternum pluck the bone in his chest as if it were a string and the note were the one they tuned rooms to now. He could smell her—yes, rain on tin and fruit and something older that has learned to like law—and it didn’t fog him, it aligned him.

“Commander.” The second word came with a lift of her wings that nobody saw; it pressed the air into obedience anyway. “Mine to hold,” she said for him, not a reminder, a completion.

He stopped with Roan an inch from the dark.

The body trembles when it has to cancel a correct motion. He let it. He let the twitch ride itself out along forearm and jaw. Roan whimpered at the almost. Cain listened to the city hum yes around the gate like a throat making gratitude. He unhooked his hand as if removing a ring. He put Roan back on the wall like an object. He stepped away, half a pace, not a yard, because the smell of mercy makes some men think they’ve won and he wasn’t going to let that rumor live.

Brogan was there without needing to be called, rope already in her hands, the knot with opinions arriving as if it had always wanted this particular pair of wrists. She tied him with the gentleness reserved for furniture and the unteachable. “Article Twelve,” she told Roan, sunny. “Lucky you.”

Cain’s palm still burned with the hardly. He flexed it once. The thorn-ring warmed and settled, crown-shadow dimming. He looked up through the noise to where DG stood on the wall-walk, hair whipped, cheeks fierce, eyes the color of a law that hungers and knows its table. Her mark glowed tidy. His hand remembered its place at her throat and eased even without touching.

“You break him,” she called, bright and dangerous, “you waste him.”

Cain nodded as if she’d asked him to pass bread.

He stepped in again, close enough that Roan could see the difference between not killing and not caring. He put two fingers under the chin he had nearly unhooked and lifted it—not roughly, not gentle.

“Listen to me,” he said, and Roan listened because air made him. “You’re finished. That’s the whole sentence. You live long enough to learn paperwork, to cough winter out of your sleeves, to watch her name be the word men say when they mean survive. You get trial, rope, and a broom. You do not get fire. You do not get glory. What you get is me deciding you keep your life the way I keep a ledger: accurate and without romance.”

Roan tried to spit. It dribbled. He tried to say girl. It came out queen, because the wall does not host slander without a tax now, and the tax is correction.

“Good,” Cain said, satisfied. “You can be taught.”

He stepped back for Brogan. She popped his shoulder with a neat little move that would make it hard to lie with his hands for a week. Jeb took the other side, measured, professional. Aila appeared like a receipt. Glitch, filthy with triumph and string, wagged a toy at Roan and made it sing the old name the remnant hates; Roan flinched as if burned. Myrrh walked past with the knife wrapped and did not bother to angle their mouth into contempt; they had better uses for it tonight.

DG came down the stair as the city finished cheering and turned to the useful chores: water, bandage, bragging later. She stepped into Cain’s space without thinking and he into hers as if the motion had been rehearsed on a map. Her palm found his jaw, soot and dust and the thin line of blood where a knife had powdered instead of cut.

“You were about to waste him,” she said, cool through heat.

“I was about to tidy,” he corrected, bone-dry.

Her mouth tilted. “Later,” she promised wickedly, because the room needed the word to stand up straight. “When there’s only one correct thing to put your hands on.”

“Yes,” he said. The field loosened a hair at the edges; the corner of his mouth learned about civility again. He looked past her to the distant grey smear limping north. “He howls later. I will be busy.”

She set her hand quick at his throat in the place the mark lives without touching it, not a bind, an answer. He breathed. The stone purred. Roan made a noise he will never admit to. Brogan’s rope tightened and did not apologize.

“Bring him,” Cain told them, bored again, like a man who has finished his favorite part of a chore and is now willing to suffer paperwork. “Alive. He’ll have a broom in his hand before sunset. We salt the road he walked in on and we bar the gate with his old habit of lying.”

Roan sagged finally, not with relief. With the knowledge that theater had closed. He looked at Cain the way men look at the ocean when they realize it isn’t about them. He looked at DG and almost understood. He looked at the low, patient buckets and hated them properly for the first time.

The line held. The city breathed. Cain flexed his hand once more and felt the almost ease out of the tendons like a ghost deciding to find another house. The thorn-ring stayed hot. He liked it that way. He turned to the wall, to the gate, to the men who had done the minimum gloriously and needed bread and water more than speeches.

“Work,” he said, and the word was a benediction and an order both. The alpha broke had not been him. He had simply taken something that had been calling itself a wolf and taught it to sit.

Chapter Text

The wall had stopped singing battle and learned to breathe again when she came down to the gate barefoot.

Stone bit. Old mortar kissed skin. Somewhere a lantern had shattered; a smear of glass printed a constellation into her arch and left bright wet commas behind her. She didn’t mind. Blood belongs to floors sometimes. The mark at her throat was a small sun. Her wings twitched under skin and stayed rumor. The ribbon under her sternum lifted its head like a fox that had found the path it wanted.

Roan sagged in Brogan’s rope thirty paces away, wrists learning humility in a knot with opinions. Cain stood between him and the living world, glove off, thorned ring bright, jaw set on the shape of a choice he’d already made.

The rabble that hadn’t broken yet hovered at arrow-range, grey cloaks doing the math on fear and not liking the answer. Unseelie shadow flickered in their sleeves and hems like a bad idea trying to pass for fashion. They glinted black honey; they breathed wrong; they waited for a cue that would let them believe they were a tide.

DG stepped past the threshold and climbed the lip of the killing ground as if it were a stage she had rented from history. Honeyed light crawled up the east face of the palace. Rope hummed a low chord like a string drawn back and held. The city poised in its own mouth.

She planted bloody feet in dust, lifted her chin, and gave the world her throat.

“Saethyr,” she said.

Not whisper. Not shout. The exact weight of law in a human mouth. The word went out in a low red wave, a ribbon-thrum that smelled like strawberries crushed in rain and tasted like thunder rolling behind your teeth. It bent the air. It cut the field into shape. It turned the morning that had come in wrong into a room that had agreed to listen.

Every alpha on the ground went to their knees.

Not a collapse. A decision their bodies made before their pride began to draft objections. Aila’s boys with rope in their hands found themselves kneeling neatly with the slack held safe, eyes wide and calm. The greys hit with more confusion and less grace; some clawed at their own throats as if they’d inhaled the wrong prayer. Horses bowed their great heads and blew steam with the docility of dragons remembering they like being told who to breathe on. On the parapet, two hot-headed sergeants sitting too high on their own shoulders blinked, flushed, and let the stone take their weight. The priest who had been looking for a taper closed his mouth on his favorite sin and touched the wall like a man admitting he’d learned a new word.

Cain didn’t fall.

He settled onto one knee one heartbeat late, palm splayed on the dirt beside her bloody toes, eyes up, smirk like an oath he would never announce. Choice, broadcast; obedience, shared. The thorned ring in his hand lit in a thin crown-shadow that made the dust look blessed where his fingers splayed. His field, that heavy lid he uses to teach rooms manners, went from order to amen and carried the kneel to the corners that like to pretend they’re exceptions.

Roan bucked once against the knot. It corrected him. He made a small, appalled noise when his own bones learned how to listen.

DG’s ribbon uncoiled. It slithered down her forearms and across the ground, bright, wet-looking, language turned visible. It found steel where steel still imagined itself brave and wrote on it in cursive rudeness. Blades softened. Edge turned to dust between one blink and the next. A line of spears slumped in embarrassment and sighed into brown powder that stuck to palms like failure.

“Down,” she said, and twenty yards of men with little crowns in their mouths remembered what being told feels like when it’s right. They went. Furious, relieved, wide-eyed, corrected.

The Unseelie remnants learned what roaches do when kitchen light hits.

Whispers tore. The shadows handful-thick in greys’ sleeves skittered backward across dirt like mice who had just lost a religious argument. Black honey curdled on tongues and dribbled. A woman with wrong teeth shrieked and spat a name the remnant hates and found it had no anchor, because Myrrh had laid it into the wells at dusk and the wells had eaten it for breakfast.

Glitch’s toys sang with obscene glee. Tin birds hopped and pecked at skittering cold until it forgot how to be plural. A copper top hummed the old syllable at a pitch only winter ankles could hear and the remnants tripped over their lies. The jack-in-the-box burped and produced a net right where a shadow meant to squeeze; it squealed and folded neatly without getting any more narrative out of the moment.

“Record,” Aila said to herself at the parapet, pen already scratching despite the way her knees had insisted on grace. Omega Command invoked; compliance citywide; collateral minimal; flavor: strawberries and thunder.

Raw leaned his forehead to stone and grinned up at the sky like a man who had gotten away with something righteous. “Hear that,” he told the wall. “That’s what standing feels like.”

DG walked forward three steps, the sound of her feet a wet whisper in dust. Her command wore ceremony like a favorite jacket, then shrugged out of it and left only the shape of obedience.

“Roan,” she said. The rope twitched; he whimpered. He looked up at her like men look at weather when it decides to be law. “Alive,” she continued, voice bright and clean. “For trial. For truth.”

The word trial hit the greys like cold water with good intentions. A dozen men who had dared themselves the wrong way suddenly remembered they had errands. They dropped knives that were already dirt and became mist in alleys. The remnant tried to rally winter into a shape and found the wells sealed and the honey salted and the old name of their god stamped on their feet from three directions at once. They scattered with the specific, horrified scrabble of insects caught thinking themselves necessary.

“Rise,” she told the wall and the men who belonged to it.

They did, smoothly, as if their bodies had been waiting for the permission their pride had not known how to ask. Cain came up with that calm, murderous grace that is what prayer looks like when practiced correctly. He took his place at her shoulder and ground, palm open, brand to air, as if to show whose law held whose leash.

Not Roan.

Her head tipped. The ribbon flicked once at her wrist. “Not you,” she added, almost lazy. He stayed where he was with his knees in the powder of his own knife and a future that had run out of theater. Cain’s mouth tilted, pleased at the exact cruelty of it.

Brogan dragged a broom through the space between rule and temptation and made it tidy. “Article Twelve,” she chirped at Roan cheerfully, because cheer makes men hate you correctly. “Lucky you again.”

Jeb laughed panting into his sleeve and put a hand on the winch boy’s shoulder until the boy remembered to enjoy being alive. “That,” he said, meaning the taste in his mouth, “is what being on the right side of a story feels like.”

Myrrh leaned on the parapet, eyes wet with smoke and indecency. “Flavor noted,” they murmured to Aila, whose pen flicked without pausing. “We should publish.”

“Not today,” Aila said, and underlined trial.

DG turned her face into the wind and the city roared her name.

It wasn’t the shriek of people who want blood. It wasn’t the pretty chant of a market inventing hymnals in three-quarter time. It rolled up from gutters and eaves and under the rope and into the orchard with a hum that made ladders proud and buckets blush. DG. DG. DG. It hit her like applause from the house you’ve rebuilt with your own hands.

She took it with a little wicked smile and then looked back at Cain as if the sound were water and she liked the way he held the cup. He set his palm to her throat for half a breath, brand warm, wreath warmer, making circuit so the room stayed small enough to be real. The command lived there a second, purring, then lay down obediently.

“Orders,” he said, and the word was a bell with no sermon in it.

“Arrests quiet,” she replied. “No victory fires. Salt on the road. Black honey confiscated and drowned. Those who ran drop their boots at the gate if they want the city to even consider them later. Post three notices: trial at noon, charges readable, witnesses and stone.” She glanced at Roan, whose breath had acquired a new respect for chores. “We don’t starve the rat until it tells us where it ate.”

“Yes,” Cain said, smiling with no teeth, amused like a man who knows which nails fit which boards. He tipped two fingers at Brogan and Jeb and it looked like a sacrament because it was.

Roan tried “cleanse” one more time under his breath because habit is an illness. It died in his mouth. He swallowed like a child told to be brave in front of soup. Glitch stepped past him and, with the tenderness of a craftsman at a toy shelf, set a tin bird on his knee. The bird pecked once and Roan flinched and the bird looked very disappointed, as if it had expected better.

“Scatter,” Raw called from the wall to the remnants who were still considering being a metaphor. “Scatter faster.”

They obeyed. Roaches reaching for cracks. Wolves remembering they were only dogs with a winter hobby. The north wind put a sorry mouth to the gate and tasted salt again and went away embarrassed with its hunger.

DG came off the lip of the killing ground with the walk of a woman who has just spent a day being the room’s gravity and intends to get a drink of water like a human. Blood made little medals on the stone behind her. Cain matched her step and pretended not to be counting. She took three deep breaths and licked the corner of her mouth where lightning always tastes like strawberries after.

“Mine to hold,” he said into the little space at her ear that belongs to vows.

“Please,” she answered, tired and invincible, and the whole city, ridiculous romantic thing that it is, purred under their feet like a home that had decided to keep itself.

Chapter Text

Noon made the Great Glass Gallery honest.

Rope tucked high above the cornice like a well-kept secret. Buckets staged at each pillar as if they were vases and the day were about flowers. The band sat with their bows on their knees and the good sense to stay quiet. The city filled the floor and the gallery’s upper walk, market and barracks and balcony silk pressed shoulder to shoulder; the hum that had run under mornings since the orchard rose and steadied, as if the walls had decided to keep time with law.

“Witnesses and stone,” Chancellor Vell intoned, formal without flourish.

Raw put his palm to the central step. The floor hummed back, low, pleased: ready.

“Record,” Aila murmured, pen already cutting lines through paper as if lies could be skinned. She had titled the page before dawn: Trial of Two. Charges legible; sentences enforceable; rope available.

Lavender took her chair not like a throne but like a well-built tool. Glitch leaned against a pillar with string thrumming between his fingers and the copper half-mask hoisted up, eyes bright with the kind of attention that repairs, not ruins. Myrrh stood at the evidence table with the rune knife wrapped in linen; they looked feral and tidy at once. Brogan’s broom waited at the north door, an old soldier pretending to be a household thing.

Cain stood just left of the dais, glove off. The thorned ring in his palm threw a faint crown-shadow across the blue of his knuckles. He did not posture. He held the edges of the room in one hand the way a man holds a map he’s already memorized. DG stood to Lavender’s right in a simple black coat, bare throat bright. Her ribbon lay quiet under her sternum, head up.

“Bring the first,” Vell said.

Rell came in on two feet, wrists wrapped in rope that tied more like manners than pain. The pin on his lapel had been removed; his mouth had not learned what silence costs. He attempted a smile. It forgot what to do halfway through.

“Charges,” Aila read, clean and neat: “Conspiracy with exiled elements. Transmission of guard rotations. Procurement of black honey for use in rites banned by pact. Attempted subversion of public safety through misdirection and forged correspondence.”

“Evidence,” Myrrh said, and set out the letters with Rhyss’s ring mark pressed into the corner like a child’s fingerprint in clay. A tin smelling faintly of lemon oil and regret; a length of cheap red thread glittering with the wrong dye. “Dust reads him,” they added, satisfied. “Desk, habit, vanity, honey.”

Raw touched the step again and smiled. “Floor says he wrote them at night and forgot wood listens.”

Rell made the error men make when they’ve only ever been corrected by mirrors. “I represent continuity,” he began. “The court needs men willing to coordinate—”

“Coordination,” Aila repeated, pity-less, “is not selling the city by the inch.” She flicked one of his letters open so the crowd could see the hand that loved its own loops too much. “Routes. Times. The night the ladders moved. Your clerk carried the cup; your coin folded the note.”

Rell reached for charm; it slid off the air and landed near Brogan’s broom with a sad thump. “Highness,” he tried DG, voice softening into an appeal he’d practiced in smaller rooms.

She did not look at him. “Witnesses and stone,” she said aloud, and the wall hummed yes.

“Verdict,” Lavender said, linen and winter.

“Guilty,” Vell returned; the word hit the air like cut rope.

“Sentence: stripped of name and station,” Lavender continued, each syllable a line drawn, “exiled beyond the wastes. Records to carry only your titles as offenses, not honors. Ledger strikes you out; pin rescinds; your work is a cautionary tale taught to children who think cleverness excuses hunger.”

Aila stood. She crossed the room cleanly. She took his papers out of his hands and handed him the one that mattered. “Your name,” she said, and pointed to the line. He stared, uncomprehending. She drew a neat single stroke through it, ink swallowing ink. The gallery did not gasp; it breathed in and held.

Glitch plucked a thread from his palm-string and tied it in a slipknot around Rell’s empty lapel. “Placeholder,” he chirped. “For the absence.”

Brogan walked to Rell with rope that had opinions but not cruelty. She turned him toward the north door that knows the waste road and let him look once over his shoulder because she is kind to men who will meet nothing kind for a while. He tried to say a word he’d used like a key; it scraped his throat wrong and came out as nothing. Raw tapped the step and smiled wickedly. “Tax,” he told the floor.

“Escort,” Cain said, light as bread. Two Tin Men stepped forward, recovered and steady, and took Rell with a politeness reserved for furniture and old laws.

The door shut. The rope hummed once. The wall said yes.

“Bring the second,” Vell said.

Roan limped in between Brogan and Jeb, rope on his wrists, shoulders square because pride is a habit even when law has put you on your knees. His mouth opened and shut like a fish misremembering water. The mark he’d left in soot on the archive beam had been scrubbed; the shape lived only where paper refused to forget.

“Charges,” Aila read, voice without weather. “Assault on the princess. Conspiracy with Unseelie remnant. Incitement to riot. Attempted murder by poison and blade. Violation of exile. Lying to stone.”

“Evidence,” Myrrh said gently, and lifted the linen-wrapped cup, black honey curdled on its lip like a confession. They laid down Glitch’s string map with pins at stables and tents. They touched the rune knife’s back to the table and the wood purred as if mending was a song it knew the chorus to.

Raw’s palm to the step. His grin brightened. “Floor says he smelled like frost in summer and left it on the arch.”

Roan looked up—not at Lavender, not at the city—but at DG. The word he wanted to use died under Cain’s field without having to be told. He swallowed it and his pride together and choked.

“Verdict,” Vell said. The gallery had learned to breathe correctly—quiet, intent, unsentimental.

“Guilty,” the room answered, not shouted, told.

“Sentence,” Lavender said, and for a heartbeat the gallery could taste what her voice had carried through too many winters. “Labor at the northern tin mines for the term of your natural life.” A ripple in the crowd—Tin Men along the wall stood a degree taller, not vengeful, seen. “You will wear a collar runed for restraint and warning. Any thought or utterance of the princess—” a tiny, perfect pause while the city learned to separate worship from affliction “—will earn you correction. Approach within a hundred paces of her mark without escort and the collar locks you to the ground until our men come.”

Myrrh stepped forward with the collar as if it were sacrament. No torque of humiliation; not iron pretending to be myth. A band of plain, hard leather, stitched with thread the color of hawthorn bark, set with a small disk engraved in the grammar the knife likes best: thorn-ring and ribbon-twist, paired, keyed. When they lifted it the disk sang at the edge of hearing, a quiet chirp, like a well agreeing not to lie. The crowd leaned in without meaning to.

“Demonstration,” Vell said dryly, and the band grinned.

Myrrh glanced at DG. She nodded. “Saethyr,” Myrrh said to the room, and the collar did nothing.

“Princess,” Myrrh said without looking at her, and the collar warmed and hissed: warning, not pain, a small quick snake-sound that pricked the skin with the idea of teeth. Roan flinched. “Think,” Myrrh told him, viciously kind. He did, because men always do when told not to. The collar chirped, hissed again, and tightened a fraction without bruising. The room exhaled a low ooo like a child watching a well-made toy do exactly as promised.

“Keyed to her mark and to consent,” Myrrh said briskly to the record. “It will not punish a man for respect or news. It will hum like a kettle if he tries worship, and it will sing like a saw if he reaches for her in his mind with the wrong hands. If he attempts approach under compulsion, it crawls down his throat with law and sits there until he remembers his manners.” They smiled at Roan with all their teeth. “You will have many opportunities to choose well.”

Brogan buckled the collar with those deft hands that tie rope into honesty. Jeb checked the fit with a gentleness that moved three boys to tears and an older man to remembering a brother. Glitch tapped the disk with his knuckle and it chimed one bright, corrective note that made winter sulk from the rafters.

“Article Twelve,” Brogan murmured to Roan, cheerful as a broom. “You live. Article Me: you work.”

Roan looked again, past them, at Cain—the man he had tried to reduce to leash. Cain met his eyes and let him see it: the almost that had nearly been a killing, the choice, the discipline that had been more cruel than death, because it preserves memory.

“Mine to hold,” DG said quietly, to no one and everyone. The collar did not hiss. Law, satisfied, did not require a demonstration for that.

“Escort,” Cain said.

They turned Roan toward the door that goes not to the wastes but to the north road and the carts. The floor under his boots changed note; Raw's grin turned fanged and happy. Roan moved like a man who has found measure and hates it. The collar lay warm on his throat, hissing once when his mind tried the old injury like a sore tooth. He flinched and kept walking. Good.

Lavender stood. “Sentence of exile executed,” she said. “Sentence of labor bound. The court has spoken; the stone remembers. This door closes. The next day opens.”

Rell was already a small weather system outside the wall. Roan was becoming a weight the mine could measure. The gallery took three breaths together, like a chest that had been braced too long and had finally been permitted to move.

Aila closed the ledger with a clean, satisfied sound. “Posted within the hour,” she told the room, not asking permission. Myrrh wrapped the knife, indulgent as a priest whose god has behaved. Brogan leaned on her broom and, for once, smiled like a woman who planned to go home without scolding anything on the way. Glitch tucked his string into his sleeve and offered Lavender his arm; she took it without pretense and let gratitude be heavier than decorum.

Cain looked at DG across the tiny space the public always tries to make private when it approves of it. She had soot at the corner of her mouth from some earlier hour of violence; he touched his own jaw as if to remind his body it was already catalogued. She lifted one eyebrow. He did not bow. He smiled.

It reached his eyes.

Not because the day had been kind. Because it had been correct. Because a city that once would have set itself on fire to feel pure had knelt in obedience and risen in order, and because a man who had learned to love the part of himself that breaks things had discovered that his favorite violence tonight was procedure.

“Water,” he said to no one in particular and everyone, the benediction he always prefers. The band lifted their bows and did not play. The rope hummed. The buckets waited. The door opened to afternoon, and the city, ridiculous romantic thing that it is, made room for the fact that justice had smelled like ink and thunder and a collar that sings if you think about the wrong throat.

Chapter Text

Night turned generous after justice.

The city settled into its new alignment with the quiet satisfaction of a bone set right; ladders slept, buckets dreamed of being useful tomorrow, rope hummed under eaves like a lullaby that prefers discipline. The palace breathed through its ribs. The orchard whispered to its own thorns. In their rooms, the door bolted with a click that sounded like a promise kept.

They didn’t pretend to be civilized about it.

He crossed the floor with the day still on him—smoke at his collar, the thin shine of effort along his throat, the faint crown-shadow the thorned ring throws across knuckles when it’s pleased. She met him halfway, coat shrugged off, hair unbound, blood cleaned from her feet and pride left there on purpose. The mark at her throat shone like a small, scandalous sun. The ribbon lifted in her, bright and eager, the way a river rises to meet rain.

“Come here,” she said.

“Say please,” he replied, already closing distance.

Bed first, because gravity is a language they share. She climbed him with the insolent grace that turns obedience into art; he caught her as if the room had been designed for exactly this. Hands learned familiar routes—shoulder, jaw, the small of a back that knows how to lie and refuses. His palm found the mark; the rune under his skin woke and lit, a thin ring of thorned light pressing into her pulse in a circle that meant both yes and now. She took him deep and held him there until the room remembered whose weight it was built to carry. The field dropped around the bed like a soft lid. The world shrank to breath and command.

“More,” she ordered, voice wrecked, eyes bright.

“Deeper,” he obeyed, and the answer he made with his body sounded like prayer.

They moved like a rite they’d learned by heart and still found new ways to mean. Her ribbon ran hot along his wrists, claimed and kind; the rune answered greedily, hungry as law when it finds the right mouth. The crest took her in a white-warm rush; he stayed in it, steady, relentless, holding the rhythm that turns relief into covenant. When she told him to lock, he did, heat and weight and the old right that lives where vow meets flesh; the mark and the ring flared together, twin wreaths bright under skin, and the palace purred through the walls as if it had been given permission to be romantic.

Bath next, because water remembers everything and forgives anyway. Steam fogged the mirrors; lamplight turned the room to amber. He washed the trial’s ash from her throat with the gentleness that ruins stronger women; she sank into his hands and let the hot water take the periphery of thought. When she hauled him back under with a hand at his jaw and a hissed command, he went willingly and the tub knocked the wall once, grateful to be included. The rune left faint light on the surface; the ribbon painted heat through the fog; they laughed into each other’s mouths because seriousness had been fed all day and could afford to share.

The floor, because no piece of this house should feel left out. Heat made their skin bright; the rug learned a new religion; he worked her as if there were a quiet war between them and victory meant breath counted perfectly on his say-so. “Yes,” she said to the ceiling when it startled at the right sound, and the ceiling fixed its posture.

Finally the balcony, because air is a witness with a talent for kissing. Night moved across her shoulders and her wings answered, unfurling pearlescent and shameless, catching starlight like thieves divesting a chandelier. She rose onto him in that narrow spill of moon and city-glow, wrote her will along his spine with nails, and ordered him to the deepest places she owns. He gave her every one and a few she hadn’t remembered how to want, heat breaking out of him in rough, low sounds that would have embarrassed a less honest man. The rune burned steady where palm met throat; the ribbon lit through her like the first slice of dawn. Far below, the city’s hum climbed half a step and settled, charmed that law can make a noise like that when nobody’s listening.

“Open,” she whispered, greedy and kind, and he did, and she filled herself on him until words went useless.

He held the line the way he holds a gate: unhurried, implacable, tender by virtue of being exact. She took it, riding, ruling, laughing once when the world forgot its edges and remembered them on her cue. When she demanded he crown it, he did, heavy and certain, flood and lock and shiver, and the mark under his hand beat a wild, perfect time against his palm. He groaned into her mouth like a man who has learned that devotion is a discipline; she answered with a gasp that snapped into a yes and then disintegrated into that bright, wrecked sound he’s earned a right to hear.

After, quiet, because victory had already been loud.

He carried her in out of the night and set about building a nest with materials that have more stories than kings: shirts that smell like pine and ink; blankets with the memory of cold bent out of them; the battered old coat that has watched too many dawns and still thinks mornings can be improved. He made a hollow and lined it with his body; she crawled in like a fox choosing exactly where to sleep. Wings faded back under skin with a flutter that made his ribs soft. The ribbon curled around his wrists one last, satisfied time and slid home under her sternum, smug. He tucked her under his jaw and stole the last salt off her lip with his mouth, a thief at peace.

“Mine to hold,” he said into her hair, not soft, simply true.

“Please,” she murmured, already sliding down into the good dark; then, wicked and sleepy, “Again.”

“Many,” he promised, counting the city quietly behind her breathing—gates and ladders, nets and names—until the arithmetic turned into rest. The rune cooled, the ring still faintly bright like a coal that refuses to forget it once was fire. The palace sighed, ridiculous romantic thing that it is, and agreed to keep watch. The orchard breathed. Rope hummed. Buckets waited. And in the nest that smelled of pine and laughing and law, they slept tangled, red ribbon stronger, thorn rune content, a city bound to what they’d made and better for it.

Chapter Text

Morning dressed the city in law.

Hawthorn garlands stitched in red thread looped every arch that had ever held a rumor. Salt-bags hung pale from gate irons like patient fruit. Wells wore fresh seals: thorn-bit script and ribbon-knot, dusk’s grammar tightened at dawn. The rope above the avenues hummed the low note it favors when it’s content to be readiness instead of warning. Buckets stood two-by-two like witnesses with good posture. Bread ovens steamed truth. The city’s spine, newly set, kept time.

They began at the orchard where the pact had taken. Raw’s palm on root. Myrrh’s knife on belt. Aila’s ledger open to a clean page with a title nobody had earned until today: Coronation and Covenant. DG put her bare feet into the earth and breathed the name that belongs to doors. Saethyr. Cain’s glove was off; the thorned ring in his palm lit with that thin crown-shadow, keen as a blade that remembers being ore. The old hawthorn accepted both of them with a soft rustle like a dress on a stair.

“Dawn clause,” Myrrh said, feral and ceremonial. “Ash to root. Iron off. City bound with thread and thorn.”

They laid the final measures of the mending: ash folded home to the tree’s heart; iron lifted from places it didn’t belong; the spine of the back-etched rite pressed to law. DG’s ribbon slid bright and wet-looking from her hands, sank under the soil with slow, obscene grace, and tugged. Cain bled a careful bead onto the runes and pressed his palm to the bark; the knife’s grammar warmed, thorns and thread married where it matters. Power went out like a blanket being shaken in the cold. Over alleys. Under doors. Through wells. Across stone that has always wanted to be told exactly what to remember.

By noon the city tasted different. Wine woke brighter in cups; iron in tools sat easy in men’s hands; the wind off the waste-road tried to lie and learned shyness. A child in the South Row laughed at a shadow and the shadow forgot its line. The market tied red loops to awnings and didn’t call it fashion. The lion fountain in the square drank and did not choke.

Fealty came like weather and good gossip.

They received in the Great Glass Gallery, windows laundering winter into light, rope tucked high like red-veined lace. Lavender sat linen and steel at the dais and watched with a gaze that made men’s knees behave. Cain stood to DG’s left in the coat she liked to ruin, glove off, brand banked and bright. The dais had been dusted with fine salt, not for theater; for sanity. Myrrh took oaths the way priests collect interesting heresies: delighted when a mouth got the angle right, ruthless when it didn’t. Aila wrote, neat and hungry. Glitch lined the rail with little contraptions that made pickpockets develop hobbies elsewhere.

One by one, the city bent and spoke.

Tin Men first, because the world owes them that kind of order. They knelt with bodies that remembered cages and rose straighter for it. “Prime,” they said to Cain, and meant the hand that opens doors. “Crown,” they said to DG, and meant the mouth that tells a room where yes lives.

Guilds came. Bakers smelling of honest heat. Smiths with iron under their nails and the quiet pride of men whose tools work. Riverfolk with rope-burned palms and the innate comfort of people who always know where the exits float. Courtiers last, wary, careful, newly educated by consequences; Rell’s absence stood beside them like a cold draft. A priest offered a taper out of habit; Brogan blew it out with a look.

“Fealty,” DG said, accepting a woman’s hand and then a boy’s, not making a poem of it. “Work and witness. You will have law, not theater.”

“And water,” Cain added, the benediction he prefers. “When it burns you, tell us. We bring buckets.”

They did not wear crowns you can drop.

They wore what they had made: the pale wreath at DG’s throat, buried under skin, bright when it wanted; the thorn-ring in Cain’s palm, hooked and hungry and satisfied in equal measure. When he laid his hand at her throat as each group rose from their vows, the field made the corners of the room behave and the city sighed that quiet, filthy sigh that means relief. When she turned her wrist into his, the ribbon kissed his bones and the glass stopped trying to be a mirror and learned to be a window.

At dusk they danced.

Not the empty glide of court trying to out-pretty itself. The kind of dancing people do when food was got, fires were kept, and the rope had earned a rest. The hall smelled like wine and iron and sweat that had decided to belong to joy. Boys from the Program made mortifying faces and were granted a reprieve by girls who liked their shoulders. Myrrh, hair a cosmology, stole Vell twice and returned him swearing in polite dialect. Aila allowed one waltz with a quartermaster whose ledger had finally stopped lying. Raw taught a pillar a reel, and the pillar learned.

DG moved through it like a door everyone wanted to use, laughing, wicked, the mark at her throat a coin of light. Cain took her in his hands and claimed her at exactly the pressure that never bruises unless requested. “Say the word,” he prompted, and she breathed Saethyr into his mouth instead, which set three chandeliers to humming and taught the musicians a better tempo. They danced until the floor’s hum matched their breath and the band, old saints to a one, put their instruments down and applauded law.

Midnight learned the difference between spectacle and sacrament.

The throne room was lit for confession: lamps low, shadows honest, hawthorn in clay standing proud at either side like small, polite guardians. The doors barred themselves and remembered not to be dramatic about it. The palace felt them come in and purred a permission that would embarrass stone if stone had any shame. The throne waited: not a chair, a promise of weight.

She didn’t ask.

She climbed into his lap sideways with a queen’s insolence and a woman’s relief, the skirt fisted in one hand, the other on his jaw. His palm found her throat in the same breath, brand to mark, the ring’s thorned light sealing the heat in. She sank onto his cock in a slow, obscene seat that remade the room’s geometry; he filled her and held there like a verdict, breath against her cheek, cruelty inside the control where she kept it. The field dropped in a soft lid. The wolves in both of them put their heads down and watched reverently.

“Deeper,” she ordered, and his answer sounded like prayer.

He set a pace that made language optional: heavy, exact, relentless as the law they’d written on wells and walls. Her cunt took him, flower to fist, clench to surrender, greed to gratitude and back again, riding until the throne learned its job all over again. The ribbon ran out of her palms, bright, wet, shameless, wrung his wrists and climbed the carved back like comet-tail; the disk of the thorned ring glowed harder, hunger braided to oath. When she arched, wings unfurled in a white flare, pearly knives of light ripping out of her back with a sound that made the hawthorn rustle and the glass huff yes.

“Knot,” she demanded, grinning vicious and holy.

“Yes,” he said, voice low and rough, and seated the swell slow until her body chose to open, until the lock took and she cried out into his mouth, and the palace rang like a bell remembering why it exists. He bit her mark precise, coronet and collar both, heat sinking teeth into heat. She shattered on him with that filthy, innocent sound he would set the calendar by if calendars weren’t cowards; he ground shallow inside the lock, exact little strokes that make nerves remember their catechism. He broke with her, flood and throb and devotion, groaning like a man who keeps his promises with his hands.

The red ribbon burned comet-bright between them and then sank, smug and sated, back under skin. The rune in his palm flared and dimmed, thorn-shadows kissing her throat. The throne hummed. The hall listened. The city felt it through stone and said finally without meaning to, and meant it.

They stayed tethered until the lock softened because ritual never rushes. He palmed the spill back in with the kind of indecency that saves lives; she laughed against his mouth, wrecked and triumphant, and took his fingers into hers so law and greed could shake hands. He washed her face with the hem of his shirt because she liked being ruined and restored in the same minute; she bit his knuckle with the exact gentleness that means forever.

“Orders,” he murmured into her hair, because ceremony likes leftovers.

“Sleep,” she said, wicked and tired. “Then bread. Then the river. Then the work. Again.”

“Many,” he agreed, because his favorite violence is procedure.

They built the nest where law does its best dreaming: shirts that smell like pine and ink; blankets with the last of winter kicked out of them; the battered old coat that thinks dawn is a dare. She crawled in, wings flickering back beneath skin, ribbon curled, head on his chest. He tucked her there as if the throne had simply been architecture between now and this.

Outside, the rope hummed. Buckets waited without impatience. Wells slept with their mouths clean. The orchard tasted ash and kept it. The river remembered to be water. In rooms across the city, men who once thought fear was a god found themselves counting ladders instead. In a clockroom, a queen slept in an inventor’s arms. In a chapel, laughter and vows had polished the pew. In the barracks, a boy woke and did not drown in air.

On the throne, where she had ridden him to ring the palace like a bell and make the night wear her name, DG breathed steadily. Cain’s palm lay over her throat, brand warm, wreath warmer, a circuit with no end. Rune and crown, ribbon and thorn, covenant and coronation, pressed into the city