The invitation from the crown arrived in early summer, exactly as Seren’s father had predicted, sealed with wax the deep green of the royal house and addressed to Duke Corwin Veyland and his family in a hand too perfect to belong to anyone but a court scribe who did nothing else all day.
Ashgrave would attend the King’s Founding Assembly in the capital — a fortnight of tournaments, trade negotiations, and the particular species of formal socializing Isolde called, without much fondness, “war conducted with better table manners.”
Kaelen felt the household’s mood shift the moment the seal was broken — Corwin’s flat, practical calculation of what it would cost to travel and house a full retinue for two weeks; Isolde’s sharper, more particular calculation of which of last year’s alliances had thinned and which needed shoring up; Wren’s undisguised excitement wrestling with a thread of real nerves underneath it, since the Assembly would be the first time anyone outside Ashgrave watched her as an heir rather than simply a duke’s daughter.
His own feeling, when he finally sat with it long enough to name it honestly, was harder to untangle.
Some part of it was Seren, plain and uncomplicated.
A larger part of it, underneath, was something closer to the old dream — the sense of stepping toward something vast and unfamiliar with no ground he could yet feel beneath his feet.
Yvaine’s last lesson before they left ran longer than usual, and covered ground she’d never touched before.
“A village fair is loud,” she said, pouring the tea that remained, by her own admission, terrible.
“The capital during Founding Assembly will be loud in a different way.
Not honest-loud, like Ashgrave’s harvest — most of what you’ll feel there will have a mask over it.
You’ll find that much harder to read than a crowd of farmers, not because the feelings are smaller, but because they’ve all had practice hiding the true shape of them, even from themselves.”
“How do I manage that?”
“The same way you manage anything else you’re not ready for yet.
Slowly, and with an anchor close by.” She looked at him over the rim of her cup, and for once there was no careful evasion in it.
“You have more than one now.
Your sister.
That Duskmere girl, if the letters are anything to judge by.
Use them.
And Kaelen — if you feel something in that city that reminds you of the dream, the flying, the cold — you find Wren immediately, and you tell me the moment you’re home.
Not next lesson.
The moment you’re home.”
She didn’t explain why, and he’d learned, by now, not to ask twice when her caution had that particular edge to it.
They left three days later, a modest retinue by capital standards — Corwin, Isolde, Wren, Kaelen, a dozen guards, and enough baggage to outfit two weeks of appearances Isolde considered non-negotiable.
The road south ran for six days through country Kaelen had never seen, and he spent much of it with his head out the carriage window despite Wren’s repeated, cheerful predictions that he’d catch a chill and ruin the whole trip before it started. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
The land changed as they went — Ashgrave’s hard northern hills softening into wide farmland, then orchards, then, on the fifth day, the first proper towns he’d ever seen that weren’t his own, each one carrying its own particular weather that he sampled through the window like a boy tasting dishes at a feast he hadn’t been allowed to touch before.
Grief in one town, over a bridge washed out that spring.
Cautious relief in another, where a harvest had come in better than feared.
He kept mostly to himself about it, the way Yvaine had taught him, letting each town’s feeling pass through without trying to hold onto any of it — practice, he understood now, for a city that would offer him a thousand such towns’ worth of weather all at once.
They saw the capital first as a smudge of pale stone on the horizon that took the better part of a day to resolve into actual walls, and then towers, and then — as the carriage finally rolled up through the gates in the gold light of early evening — into something so large and so loud, in every sense Kaelen had a word for, that he understood immediately why Yvaine had spent an entire lesson preparing him instead of the usual quarter hour.
He found Wren’s hand without thinking about it, the old habit from years of practice, and felt her fingers close around his without either of them needing to say why.
“Ready?” she asked, watching the crowd through the window with the same wide, apprehensive excitement he could feel radiating off her.
“No,” Kaelen said honestly.
“But I’d rather be here not-ready with you than anywhere else fully ready without you.”
Wren snorted, entirely unimpressed by the sentiment and clearly moved by it anyway, and the carriage rolled on into the capital’s noise together.