Chapter 261: Something Is Coming

The servant’s words hung in the room.

"It concerns Lady Morgana."

Nobody spoke. The fire snapped in the grate, and in the silence Draeven became aware of his own pulse. It was not as it had been an hour ago. A second beat ran beneath it, faint and steady, like footsteps heard through a wall. INFERNUS had been quiet on the ride home. He had been quiet through the yard and the long afternoon, curled in the dark of him with the thread of her still warm against his ribs.

But he was not quiet now.

"Something is coming,"the dragon said.

"I know." Draeven replied.

Not a danger. Not yet. A pause, vast and slow. Something old.

Kaelen was on his feet. He had not meant to be. His chair stood pushed back, and the frost along its arm had crept to the seat. "She sat in that chair not an hour ago," he said. "Now this woman comes asking after her."

"She asks for us," Thorne said. "About her."

"It is the same thing."

"It is not." Thorne had not moved. The shadows at his boots had drawn into a tight dark ring, and his eyes were fixed on the open door. "She could have gone to Morgana. She is plainly able. She came to us instead."

"Perhaps she did not wish to frighten her." Kaelen said.

"Perhaps she wished us to hear it first." Thorne replied.

Draeven looked at the young servant, still bent double in the doorway with his cap crushed in both hands. The boy was shaking. He had been sent to the one door in the palace that no page was meant to knock on, and no one had told him why.

"Where is she?" Draeven said.

"Just outside, Your Majesty." The boy’s voice cracked. "I did not hear her follow me up the stair. I did not hear her at all."

That was what raised the hair along Draeven’s neck. He had stood before ambassadors and warlords and two hundred years of courtiers, and every one of them announced themselves. Footsteps, a cough, a rustle of silk. Something.

He drew breath.

"Tell her...."

She did not wait to be announced.

The young servant was still bowing in the doorway when the air behind him shifted, and he stepped aside as though a hand had moved him. Astraea walked into the east study alone.

She wore plain white, a long, unadorned gown with sleeves to the wrist, and her white-blonde hair hung loose to her waist. No attendants followed her. No guard. Her feet made no sound on the old rug. The firelight reached her and seemed to hesitate, as though it were not sure what to do with her, and then it slid across her hair and made it glow like a candle seen through frost.

The three kings rose.

They did it without deciding to. Draeven had not meant to stand, and he found himself on his feet with his hand pressed flat against his chest, because INFERNUS had come awake there so suddenly that it hurt.

"What is she?" Draeven asked his dragon.

The dragon did not answer. It lifted its great head in the dark of him and stared at the girl in white with an expression he had never felt in it before. It was not hunger and not hostility. It was the look of an old animal catching a scent from a long-forgotten year.

Beside him, Kaelen’s jaw had gone rigid. Frost crept along the arm of his chair. GLACIUS was pacing, a restless low growl in the base of his skull, and he gripped the wood hard to keep it from reaching the floor.

Thorne did not move at all.

The shadows at his feet had pulled in tight around his boots and gone still. NOCTYS lay in him like a cat in tall grass, watching, every muscle tensed.

Astraea stopped at the center of the room. She looked at each of them in turn. Her eyes were pale blue-gray, ancient in a face that could not have been older than twenty, and when they rested on Draeven, he felt them like a hand laid flat against his sternum.

She did not bow.

She inclined her head, a small, level motion, the greeting of one power to another.

"Kings," she said.

Her voice was light and clear and very quiet. Totally different from how she had sounded in the throne room the first time they met. It stretched and carried to every corner of the room.

"Lady Astraea." Draeven’s voice was steady. He was glad of it. "You asked for an audience."

"I did."

"You have it."

"I thank you." She glanced at the three chairs, at the fourth where the girl had sat an hour earlier, and she did not take it. She stood by the fire with her hands folded before her. "I will not keep you long. I would rather not stay where I am not wanted."

"No one said you were unwelcome," Kaelen said.

"No one needed to." A faint, dry curve touched her mouth. "Your dragons did."

Nobody answered that.

"We are not accustomed to being read so easily," said Thorne.

"No. You are accustomed to being obeyed." She said it without malice. "It is a different thing."

The fire shifted. Somewhere deep in the palace a bell rang the hour, slow and heavy.

"Sit, please," Draeven said. "And tell us why you have come."

They sat. She remained standing. After a moment he understood that she was not being discourteous. She preferred it. She had the stillness of a person who had waited so long in so many rooms that standing was simply rest.

"I came," Astraea said, "to learn whether she told you."

Kaelen’s head came up.

"Morgana."

"Who else?" She tilted her head. "I told her to tell you everything. It was advice. I did not expect she would follow it." Her eyes moved across their faces, one by one, and stopped. "Judging by the three of you, she did not."

"You were listening," Kaelen said, cold.

"No." Astraea replied.

"Then how..."