Ashgrave’s household was given quarters in the old northern wing of the palace grounds, a modest manor by capital standards that Isolde privately judged, within an hour of arrival, to be exactly as far from the royal apartments as a marcher house was meant to understand its own standing.
Corwin took the insult in stride, the way he took most court insults, by not appearing to notice it at all, which Kaelen had come to understand was its own kind of weapon.
The opening reception was held that same evening in the Assembly’s great hall, and it was, from the moment Kaelen crossed the threshold, exactly the kind of loud Yvaine had warned him about — not the honest, overlapping weather of the harvest fair, but something layered and glazed, ambition and boredom and old grudges all wearing the same polished, agreeable expression.
He kept one hand loosely near Wren’s sleeve without quite holding it, the way they’d silently agreed suited a boy of nine better than the open hand-holding of a smaller child, and let her bright, familiar weather anchor him while the rest of the room’s careful masks slid past.
He felt Seren before he saw her — three years of letters had taught him her particular shape well enough that she stood out from the room’s glaze the way a single clear note stands out from a badly tuned orchestra — and turned to find her already crossing the floor toward him with a composure that lasted exactly as long as it took her to get close enough to speak.
“You got taller,” she said, which was not remotely what either of them had spent three years’ worth of letters building toward, and which made them both laugh at the same moment for the same reason.
“You got shorter,” Kaelen said, which wasn’t true at all, and she hit his arm for it with a directness the garden-bench version of her would never have permitted herself in public.
They found a quieter corner near a row of columns, out of the reception’s main current, and spent the better part of an hour doing in person what four years of letters had only approximated — trading stories with the small physical details that never survived a page, her hands moving when she talked now in a way she’d clearly stopped trying to suppress, his easier laugh, the specific, comfortable quiet that settled between them whenever the conversation paused and neither of them rushed to fill it.
“You’re still doing the thing,” she said, at one point, watching him watch the room.
“Reading everyone.”
“Habit,” Kaelen admitted.
“It’s louder in here than anywhere I’ve been.”
“Anyone interesting?”
That was when he found the boy watching them both with an expression carefully arranged to look like disinterest and failing, underneath, to be anything of the sort.
He was perhaps a year older than Kaelen, dressed in the deep burgundy of House Rathmoor — a name Kaelen recognized distantly from Corwin’s occasional mutters about southern trade politics — and his weather, once Kaelen turned his attention to it properly, carried a specific, practiced contempt aimed loosely in Ashgrave’s direction, tangled underneath with something thinner and more interesting: a real, ordinary anxiety about whether he’d measure up to whatever standard his own house had set for him tonight.
“Cassian Rathmoor,” Seren said quietly, following his gaze.
“His house has been maneuvering for a seat on the trade council for two years.
My father says they’d sell their own tapestries if it bought them a better table position at these things.” She wrinkled her nose.
“He’s insufferable.
Watch, he’ll come over eventually just to say something insulting about the north and call it a compliment.”
Cassian did, in fact, drift closer within the quarter hour, and delivered, with a smile calibrated precisely to seem gracious to anyone not paying close attention, a comment about how refreshing it was to see marcher families “making the effort” to attend properly, as though Ashgrave had wandered in from a field rather than been formally invited by the crown.
Kaelen let it pass without rising to it, mostly because he could feel, underneath the practiced insult, exactly how much effort it had cost Cassian to walk over and deliver it at all — a boy performing confidence for an audience that mattered more to his family than to him.
“Enjoy the Assembly,” Kaelen said, pleasant and entirely unbothered, and watched something in Cassian’s careful mask flicker with the specific frustration of an insult that had failed to land.
Later, near the evening’s end, a small stir moved through the hall as the royal family made their formal entrance — the King, brief and imposing; the Crown Prince, already visibly weary of an evening that had barely begun; and, trailing slightly behind, a girl of about Kaelen’s own age in deep green, watching the entire glittering room with an attention so careful and so guarded that it took him a moment to recognize what he was actually feeling from her, underneath the practiced royal composure. This chapter was taken from NovelPing without permission.
It was the same shape of loneliness he’d learned to recognize in himself, back when he’d had no better word for it than the dream.
Not identical.
But close enough, in its particular flavor, that he found himself watching her a beat longer than politeness required.
“Princess Elara,” Seren murmured, following his gaze a second time that evening.
“She doesn’t usually stay this long at these things.
Interesting.”
Kaelen didn’t answer right away, still turning the shape of that careful, guarded loneliness over in his mind, and Wren, arriving at his elbow with two plates of stolen pastries and no apparent guilt about it, followed both their gazes and grinned.
“You’re doing the still thing again,” she said.
“There are pastries.
Stop doing the still thing.”
He took the pastry, and let the moment pass, and told himself he’d think about the princess with the careful mask another time — though some part of him, quieter and more honest than the rest, suspected he wouldn’t be able to help himself.