In the eastern gallery, Arch Priestess Elisabeth had come to the rail like a drawn blade, both hands white on the railing, and her professional calm was gone. What stood in her face was doctrine meeting a thing that had no Chapter.
"Goddess, tell me... Should I..." She was ready to change into battle mode.
"Steady," Prince Elias said quietly, to his own hands.
In the western gallery, the mood was vastly different.
"Oh, now that’s organized!" Jasmine leaned forward with her chin on her knuckles, nodding slowly at the counting-house. "Intake, processing, review, collection. She built a working ministry and she doesn’t even know she did it. I’m soo jealous!"
"That fire looks damn hot," Serika grinned with professional envy.
Kitsara whistled, low and long, five tails going at once. "And she gets to keep them forever~"
"Kaelira." Seraphiel leaned over the rail beside her, entirely too delighted. "Serious question. Is that hot enough to work steel?"
Kaelira studied the glow under the distant pillar with her arms folded, and gave it real thought, because she gave everything real thought.
"What nonsense is that question?" the tomboy elf asked dryly. "Of course they’re hot enough."
"Excuse me for not knowing these things!" Sera scoffed, then growled. "You better drop your attitude, young lady, or else..."
Kaelira merely grinned and ignored the pouting blonde.
The rest of the family watched a duchy’s worth of criminals scream in the ember light, and got comfortable about it.
Somewhere in the middle rows, a baron who had been staring down into the seam turned and stared at the western gallery instead.
"...They’re having fun like this is a family picnic," he said, to nobody who wanted to hear it.
And Duke Tharion Ravenshade stood alone at the center of the floor of the seat of the nation, ten paces from a woman in black, and looked into the seam with his rings hanging forgotten at his sides.
The hall watched him find the faces.
Orvath. The Weirs’ colors were unmistakable, even in rags, even from above. Ostrev beside him, signing. The tax farmer Odam in the counting-house, black to the elbows, shrieking his way through the second toll one coin at a time.
His men. His circle. His machine, running, forever, in a hell that had not existed nine days ago, owned by a girl whose name he did not know.
"What," said the Duke of Ravenshade, "is this."
"Hell," Iris said. "Scum go in, and they don’t come out."
"This is an ATROCITY!" The word came out of him in a blast that guttered every torch in the hall, and he rounded on the throne with his cloak snapping.
"You sit there, under the law of a million years, and you let a nameless creature show me sorcery and call it evidence?! Peers of the realm, in a pit, tortured before the assembly like a carnival, and I am to, what, to confess at the sight of it?!"
He flung a hand at the seam without looking at it.
"Forced testimony. Every word those wretches have screamed came out of them under compulsion, and every court in this kingdom’s history has burned such testimony unread. You know this, Alexios. Your own ancestor wrote the statute. Nothing those men say has legal standing, and nothing they say touches me!"
His voice steadied as it found the old road, the good road, the road of paper and precedent his house had walked since the kingdom’s first stones.
"So I ask the crown again." The court-smooth register came back down over the fury.
"Where is the evidence a court may touch? Show me one document bearing my seal, one order in my hand, one witness who is not screaming in a witch’s oubliette."
"Show me anything at all, or by every law this hall was raised on, this ends with the crown paying reparations to Ravenshade for the gravest insult a king of Vraven has ever offered a loyal house."
Silence.
The seam breathed heat into it, the screaming went on underneath, and the old king on the high throne looked down at the duke for a long, long moment.
"...That’s your defense, then," Alexios said at last, dry as a winter field. "Deniability."
"It is not a DEFENSE, it is the LAW!"
"Mm." The king’s thumb moved once along the flat of the sword of state. "The law. Is there anything else you’d like to say to the crown?"
The nonchalant dismissal stopped Tharion Ravenshade mid-breath.
The two men looked at each other across thirty feet of winter air, a lifetime of dealings in marriages, borders, and debts standing in the space between them. The hall watched the duke’s face change as he arrived, at last, at the bottom of his purse.
One coin was left, the oldest he owned, and he spent it.
"You would let it come to this," he said quietly. Then, louder, with his spine straightening into ceremony: "Then the crown leaves me no choice but to remind it of its own word, here before the peerage, as the old oaths demand witnesses."
"Tharion," Alexios said, low. "Think carefully."
"I have thought of nothing else for days." The duke turned to face the assembled nobility of Vraven, and his voice rang off the banners. "Peers of the realm! Hear what your king swore, and judge what his justice is worth!"
"Three years ago, Alexios Valorian came to my hall. Not I to his. The king of Vraven, dying, came north to Ravenshade, because his crown was a beggar’s crown, because his dukes ruled him and not the reverse, and he needed the one house strong enough to hold the realm’s spine straight while he set it."
The hall had gone very still.
"And a bargain was struck, sworn, and sealed in the king’s own blood."
Tharion’s hand rose, one ringed finger pointing up at the throne. "Ravenshade’s full support, for the rest of his reign, in every decision the crown should make. My armies at his call. My voice behind his edicts. My coin behind his wars. And Ravenshade delivered! When Greenvale burned for its corruption, and for letting those filthy criminals-"
He screamed, pointing at Quinlan himself.
"-ravage his lands?! Whose banners rode? When his unfair reforms gutted half the privileges in this hall, whose voice held the counts in line? EVERYTHING this king has built for the last three years, he built standing on Ravenshade’s shoulders, by the terms of that oath!"
"So that was why..." somewhere in the middle rows, an old count breathed it out loud to nobody. "The Greenvale conflict... Ravenshade rode to help with an army, but it wasn’t big enough to win the competition, as Alastair’s and Kaede’s armies were much grander. It made no sense for him to participate... We all wondered why..."
Duke Alastair of Greenvale stared at the floor of the hall and did not look up, and his twin daughters each took one of his arms.
"And the price!" Tharion’s voice rose over the murmur and crushed it. "The price the king of Vraven swore, on his blood, before the Records above, in exchange for my house carrying his crown!"
He let it hang. He was a master of halls, whatever else he was, and he made the whole realm lean in before he laid it down.
"That his third daughter, Felicity Valorian, would be named heir to the throne of Vraven and crowned its queen."
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