The rest of the family filled the gallery in a warm, murmuring row. A blonde head among them kept popping up over the rail to wave at Felicity and Iris until Lucille gently pulled her back down by the tail.
Felicity, who was on duty and being very serious, waved back with two fingers, low, where her father couldn’t see.
He saw. He said nothing.
The royal children had the eastern gallery. Prince Elias, first of his name, three hundred years of unhurried dignity, stood at the rail with his hands folded.
Prince Caelum leaned beside him. Between the brothers, in the white and gold vestments of the Goddess’s church, stood the Arch Priestess Elisabeth, called Dawn Breaker, and her calm was the professional kind that took effort.
"Sister," Caelum murmured. "What does our father’s face say to you?"
Elisabeth studied the carved stillness on the throne.
"It says someone in this hall is already dead," she said.
At the correspondence table set discreetly below their gallery, Queen Morgana read letters and acknowledged nobody.
Many wondered why she wasn’t seated next to Alexios, on her throne as monarch.
One table over, in scuffed adventuring leathers that had scandalized the heralds beyond speech, Lilith of the Scarlet Lilies had put her boots up on the crown’s furniture and was eating an apple.
Duke Zaren of Duskmere had the place of honor among the peers, white-haired and pleasant, with Calienne on his arm. Duke Alastair of Greenvale stood grey and obedient in front of his twin daughters.
And near the back stood Kaede Fujimori, dressed for the occasion, representing the Duchy of Silverwind, with Chizuru at her side.
The horns sounded at the doors.
"His Grace, Tharion, Duke of Ravenshade!"
The doors swung, and the cold came in wearing black and silver.
Tharion Ravenshade crossed the hall without hurry, in full ducal colors, six retainers at his back. His rings caught the light. His face was courteous, mildly puzzled, faultless.
He stopped at the center of the floor, before the dais, and bowed to the throne with exactly the depth the law required of a duke and not one degree more.
"Your Majesty." His voice filled the hall without effort. "You summoned, and Ravenshade answers, as Ravenshade has always answered. Though I confess myself curious what matter requires my presence before..." His gaze traveled the packed galleries with mild amusement. "...the entire realm."
Alexios looked down at him and said nothing at all.
The silence stretched past courtesy, past protocol, into insult, and the duke’s pleasant expression held through every second of it.
Then the king moved one finger, and Stormlord stepped forward to unroll the charge.
"Tharion of House Ravenshade." The commander’s voice came out iron-flat, pitched to reach the last row. "The crown charges you with the creation and mastery of a covert organization operating across the lands you administer. You are charged with the levying of an unwritten toll upon the crown’s roads."
"With the engineered ruin and seizure of the lands of vassals outside your inner circle, and the enrichment of those within it."
"With extortion, arson, blackmail, the trade in children, and high treason against crown and commons."
The hall stopped breathing.
"The crown will hear your defense."
For three heartbeats, the Duke of Ravenshade did not move.
Then he laughed.
It was a single, disbelieving syllable, and it cracked off the marble like a whip. What came up behind it had nothing amused in it at all.
"Defense." He said the word as if tasting spoiled wine. "Defense?"
His voice rose, and the temperature of the hall rose with it.
"Thousands of generations." He turned as he spoke, taking in the galleries, the peers, the banners.
"Thousands of Ravenshade men and women have held the northern border of this kingdom. We bled the Elvardian invasions white while half these banners hid behind their walls. My grandfather’s bones are mortared into the fortresses that let this hall stand and hold... this farce."
His hand cut at the assembly.
"And the crown of Vraven summons ME, before the peerage assembled, to answer for... what did the soldier recite? Tolls? Arson? The trade in CHILDREN?"
The last word detonated out of him, and the nearest nobles flinched back a step.
The pressure came off the duke in a rising tide. He was one of the realm’s great powers, and the room already knew it. The hall’s torches leaned away from him now, and the marble under his boots sang one thin note.
"You permit this," he said, softly now, up at the throne. "You permit this... filth... to be read aloud in the seat of the nation. Against the house whose blood runs in your own children, Alexios. On what? Show me one witness, one paper, one name!"
"As you like," said the king.
His finger moved again, one degree, toward the woman in black at the dais’s left.
The duke’s gaze followed it, found her, and for a moment the towering fury broke on simple confusion, because what stood there was a girl, clearly not old enough to speak up in these halls. She was a full head and a half shorter than his retainers, no house sigil anywhere on her.
"...The clerk?" Tharion said.
"The investigator," said the king.
Something moved behind the duke’s face and was gone. Months ago he had burned a cipher that described this woman exactly, young, red-eyed, carrying no house name, and he had paid well since to learn what it would not tell him.
Iris came forward off the dais steps, unhurried, and her boots were loud in all that silence.
"No matter what this woman wants, you’re holding my vassals on mere suspicion," the duke bit out. "A word that dissolves in any honest court!"
"They’re not being held on suspicion." Iris stopped at the center of the floor, ten paces from him, and looked up into his face with eyes like banked coals.
Her hand opened at her side.
The floor of the great hall of Vraven tore open.
The stone stayed whole. That was the obscenity of it. The seam opened in the air above the marble, wide as a war banner, and it poured heat, ember light, and sound into the seat of the nation.
"What in the Goddess?!"
Hundreds of shouts sounded in the great hall, each more shaken than the last.
Tharion took one step back before he caught himself, and his face did not move at all.
The sound came through first, and it was the sound of thirty-eight men.
Every voice down there had a lifetime of practice at screaming and no way to stop. The galleries of Vraven’s peerage got all of it at once, doubled, wet, and enormous.
Underneath the screaming ran the patient noises of industry: the clink of coin, the scratch of a pen, a warm voice saying, "Sold."
Half the hall was on its feet before the light stopped moving.
Through the seam, laid out below like a province seen from a low cloud, burned the hell of the Demon of Vengeance.
Black metal ground under a sky of banked coals, breathing. And on it, laid out with the tidy logic the machine itself had taught her, stood an economy.
The counting-house came first, roofless, where nine men caught molten coin with the raw bone of their hands, stacked it, lost it, and stacked it again, weeping numbers.
Beyond it stood the long desks, where careful men wrote their own skins into ledgers, reviewed them for errors, and screamed without once spoiling the penmanship.
At the signing table, candle-lit and courteous, lords in the rags of wine-dark cloaks signed and paid, signed and paid, while the auctioneer’s voice announced each collection in the seller’s own scream.
And behind it all, remote as a watchtower on a border, a crooked pillar glowed. The fat silhouette threaded on it was climbing.
Up and down, up and down, never once pausing, never once ceasing the constant scream of pain.
Sound broke the hall.
A count of the middle rows vomited down his own velvet.
At the correspondence table, Queen Morgana turned a letter over and began the next one. One table away, Lilith of the Scarlet Lilies looked down into her brother’s future, took another bite of her apple, and chewed.
Three barons’ wives went down in dead faints, and their husbands didn’t notice, because they could not look away. Somebody, quietly, urgently, had started reciting scripture, and it was one of the clerks of the royal chancery.
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