Chapter 240

Drake

“Have you chosen a name for the heir yet, my lord?”

Elder Hollis had cornered me beside the long windows with a glass of dark wine in one hand and the other planted on his cane, and he’d been talking for ten minutes without taking a breath. I’d stopped listening somewhere around his opinions on the southern harvest. I started listening again when he said heir.

“Not yet,” I said.

“My late wife always liked Aurelian. It’s a strong name. A name that sits well on a seal.” He tapped his cane on the marble for emphasis. “Or Octavius. There hasn’t been an Octavius on that mountain for two hundred years.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

Hollis blinked at me. Beside me, Calix laughed, light and warm, and touched the old man’s sleeve.

“Lord Drake means he’s leaving the naming to Lysander,” Calix said smoothly. “He’s learned it’s safer that way. I’m told Lysander has strong opinions.”

“Ah.” Hollis chuckled and wagged a finger at me. “A wise man lets his mate win the small battles.”

“He lets him win all of them,” Calix said. “That’s why he’s still alive.”

The elders around us laughed. I let the corner of my mouth lift because the room expected it, and I watched Calix steer Hollis toward the subject of the river tariffs as if he’d been doing it for centuries. He’d been doing it all night. He’d greeted every elder by name, remembered every grandchild and every sick horse, and smoothed over every awkward pause before I’d noticed it was there. Every time someone mentioned the gala, he lowered his eyes and said he’d only done what any friend would do.

I’d brought him tonight because the council wanted to see him. After what he’d done for Lysander and the heir, half the territory wanted to shake his hand. He’d earned that. I owed him more than I’d ever be able to pay back, and I’d told him so on the night he laid the proof against Julian in front of me.

The assembly hall glittered around us. A hundred candles burned in the iron chandeliers, and the long tables along the walls groaned under silver platters and decanters of blood warmed to body heat. Musicians played in the gallery. Every head in the room turned when I walked through it, and every conversation paused long enough for its speaker to bow before it started again.

I’d stood in this hall for three hundred winters, and I knew how to wear it like my own coat.

What I didn’t know how to do was stop thinking about the way Lysander had looked at me that evening while he fastened my cuffs.

He’d been frightened for days. I’d felt it through the bond every hour since Julian vanished from his cell, a thin, cold thread running underneath everything else, and it had grown thicker every night. He’d told me it was Julian. He’d smiled and made jokes about the baby and tea that tasted like boiled lawn, and I’d let him, because I didn’t know how to push him yet without breaking something.

I’d learned what happened when I pushed Lysander too hard. I’d learned it in the dungeon, and I’d paid for it every day since.

After the banquet, I told myself. Home before midnight. Then I’ll sit him down and make him tell me all of it.

I’d promised him midnight. I’d made Lysander promises before and broken them, and I’d sworn to myself in the dark of that dungeon that I wouldn’t break another one.

“My lord?”

A woman in green silk stood in front of me with a hopeful smile. I didn’t recognize her. Calix leaned toward me.

“Lady Wren of the river holdings,” he murmured. “Her son passed his trials this spring.”

“Congratulations on your son,” I said.

Her face lit up. She curtsied and launched into the story of the trials, and Calix nodded along beside me, asking questions in all the right places. I watched the candlelight on the windows and listened with half my attention.

It came between one heartbeat and the next.

The cold thread in the bond snapped tight and turned to ice. Lysander’s fear rose up through my chest so hard and fast that I nearly dropped my glass. It wasn’t the low, gray worry I’d been carrying all week. This fear was sharp and bright, and it went straight through my ribs like a blade between the bones.

I didn’t move. Three hundred years had taught me how to keep my face still while the floor fell out from under me. Lady Wren kept talking, and Calix kept smiling. My pulse, which barely bothered to move most nights, kicked once against my throat, then again. I set my glass down on the windowsill with great care, because my hand wanted to crush it.

Lysander.

I pushed back down the bond as hard as I could, the way I’d done on the nights he woke up shaking from dreams of the dungeon, and I sent him every ounce of calm I had in me. Nothing came back but more fear.

The bond didn’t carry words. It never had, not from him to me. It carried what he felt, and right now he felt like a man standing at the edge of a cliff with his heels over the drop.

“…and his instructor said he’d never seen a boy take a blade so well,” Lady Wren finished, beaming. “Didn’t he, my lord?”

She was waiting for something.

“Forgive me,” I said. “What was the question?”

Her smile wavered. Calix stepped in before the pause could turn awkward.

“Lord Drake was saying earlier that the river holdings produce the finest swordsmen in the territory,” he said. “Weren’t you, Drake?”

“Yes.”

Lady Wren’s smile came back, and Calix laughed at something she said. Under the strings and the laughter and the clink of glasses, Lysander’s fear kept climbing in my chest, and it didn’t stop.