Rowan lay still in the dark and felt the splinter work deeper.
The ward was quiet.
Somewhere below, the hall’s hearthfire banked to embers.
The wind had stopped hours ago, leaving the Gap in the kind of silence that pressed against the shutters and made him aware of his own pulse.
He should have been asleep.
The Vigor had crept back slow and steady through the afternoon, and his body was tired enough to take it.
But the web held him awake.
Seven threads warm.
One loud.
He traced them as he’d learned to over the weeks not thought, exactly, but a kind of listening that lived somewhere between his ribs and his gut.
Maddoc’s oath, old and settled now, a weight like granite.
Harl’s, new and solid, the warmth of a forge-stone still holding heat long after the coals died.
Bili’s, bright and quick, a line that hummed with something that felt like trust.
And Corlan’s.
Rowan closed his eyes and let himself feel it fully.
Warm on the surface.
Strong.
The loudest strand in the web, a presence he could track even when he wasn’t trying.
He’d told himself that was good.
That loudness meant certainty, that a bond singing clear across the web would hold the wall when the fist came.
But beneath the warmth, something else.
Cold.
Not the sharp cold of a snapped thread or the fading chill of someone who’d Sworn falsely.
Slower than that.
A bitterness working its way up from the root, patient and deliberate, like ice climbing a stone.
He’d felt it yesterday during the rite with the new recruits.
Seven oaths given freely, cleanly, the kind of warmth that settled into the web like hearthstones laid true.
And beside them, Corlan’s bond still warm, still strong, still singing but wrong in a way that made Rowan’s teeth ache if he held his attention on it too long.
He’d pushed the thought away.
Told himself it was just contrast.
That Corlan’s oath burned hotter because the man’s gift was sharper, because his Old Blood ran cleaner, because strength came in different textures and Rowan didn’t yet know them all.
But lying here in the dark, tracing each bond in turn, he couldn’t lie to himself.
The bond was rotting.
He had no word for it yet.
Only the certainty that something had gone wrong at the root, and it was reaching.
Rowan opened his eyes.
The ceiling beams were shadows against deeper shadow.
Somewhere outside, the gate-watch changed.
Boots on stone, voices too low to make out.
The fort settling into the last hours before dawn.
He could feel Corlan’s bond reach toward the others.
Not pulling.
Not grasping.
Just… touching.
The way frost crept across a window one edge at a time, patient and inexorable.
The bitterness spreading outward through the web, thinning the warmth on either side.
Rowan sat up.
The wool blanket slid to his waist.
His breath misted faintly in the cold, a pale ghost that vanished before it reached the ceiling beams.
He should wake Maddoc.
Tell him the Swearing had gone wrong, that the loudest strand in the web was poisoned, that Rowan had made a blunder and now the web carried a rot he couldn’t name and didn’t know how to cut out.
He almost did.
His feet were on the floor.
The sergeant’s bunk was two doors down.
Maddoc would listen.
Maddoc always listened, even when the listening came with the weight of someone who’d said I told you the gift wasn’t clean and been right.
Rowan stopped.
Admitting it meant admitting he’d been wrong.
That the warmth he’d felt during Corlan’s Swearing the loudest, brightest resonance the gift had ever given him had been a lie his own want had dressed up as truth.
That he’d bound a rotten thread into the web because he’d been too hungry for another sworn, too eager to call bitterness strength, too certain the gift wouldn’t lead him wrong.
And what would Maddoc do with that?
Cut Corlan loose?
The bond didn’t work that way.
Rowan didn’t know yet if a rotten thread could be cut, or if trying would tear the whole web, but he knew enough to know it wouldn’t be clean.
So he’d carry it.
Watch it spread.
Hope the cold didn’t reach the others before he found a way to stop it.
Rowan lay back down.
The web hummed around him, warm and full and wrong.
Seven threads like hearthstones.
One like a splinter working toward bone.
Below, the watch called the hour.
Three before dawn.
The coldest stretch, when the body wanted sleep most and the wall needed eyes sharpest.
He could smell woodsmoke and frozen stone through the gap beneath the shutters.
Corlan was on the wall tonight.
Rowan could feel him there, steady and alert, the model sworn keeping faith with his oath.
Learning the rhythms.
Watching the road.
Listening to the older guards talk through the rotations, the schedules, the shapes of the nights when a raid was likeliest.
Something cold turned over low in Rowan’s stomach.
The gift never told him why a thread rotted.
Only that it did.
Only that the cold was spreading, and the web couldn’t shake it loose, and the fist was still coming.
He closed his eyes and made himself breathe slow.
Tried to will the Vigor into steadying the threads, into warming the cold before it reached too far.
But the gift didn’t answer to will.
It answered to truth.
And the truth was a bond he’d Sworn badly, into a web that would carry it until something broke.
Beyond the shutters, the cold deepened by degrees no one was awake to measure.
Rowan lay awake in the dark, feeling the splinter he’d driven into his own web with his own words, unable to name it, unable to cut it, and certain only that it would cost him before the winter was through.
THE STANDING OF THE HOLD PHASE I: THE LAST CLAIMANT · LAND 3/XII · SWORN 7/XII (DEBT: 7/4 CEILING BROKEN) · PROVISION 3/XII · ROADS 0/XII · STEEL 3/XII · WORD 1/XII · VIGOR: PALE (RECOVERED) · SEVEN THREADS WARM; ONE LOUD, BITTER, AND SPREADING · THE LACE WRITES COLD: A THREAD COOLS TOWARD SOURING MAKE THE DEBT GOOD IN THE FLESH, OR THE LACE TURNS IT SOUR
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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By order of the Crown.
The royal vault holds chapters the public throne room has yet to receive.
Long live the Kingdom.