Chapter 12

  Although the palace gathering hadn’t gone the way anyone predicted, he hadn’t completely failed. The King, contrary to River’s gut-level dread, had been friendly, measured, even warm. Not the cold sovereign he’d braced to meet. And yet River couldn’t shake it: the King’s smile had seemed to arrive a heartbeat late. Maybe he was just overthinking. On the ride back to the Dawnmere estate, even William and Virella, who treated optimism like a scarce metal, wore the faint look of people pleasantly surprised.

  When River slipped through the manor’s doors, the house had already folded into silence. Lamps burned low. A few guards paced the gates, their bootsteps soft with routine. Above, the night hung heavy and cloud-swollen; Norvil crouched under the brewing storm. No stars, not even a stubborn one, just cloud and the slow pulse of distant lightning.

  Yet far from the King’s gaze, the anxiety didn’t lift. It sharpened.

  He lay on his back, eyes open to the ceiling. Limbs humming with leftover energy and ache. He wanted to move, train, run until his lungs hurt, shout into the wind, anything to thin the weather inside his skull. Instead he remained there, trapped, thoughts spiraling like gusts through a canyon.

  Calira slept. As ink on his shoulder, she was a banked ember, dulled.

  He could feel her—banked heat, soft and dim as coals. Alone with the quiet, River clenched the sheets until his fingers cooled. He’d made it through the court of kings, yes, but the sense persisted, like pressure at depth, that the real games had only just begun.

  Do something, he told himself. Anything. It was too still; the hush made his thoughts clatter. Sitting still had turned from virtue to hazard.

  He remembered the wards were still under maintenance. The smart thing—future River’s problem—would be to read about runes. The necessary thing now was air. Space. Maybe Margarith.

  He swung his legs over the bed. The floor bit cold against his feet. He didn’t bother with boots. He moved at first like a thief, careful weight on careful boards, then faster as impulse outran caution, jogging the corridor until the stone threw his footfalls back at him. He winced and sent a pulse through the air, just a thread of sound-dampening wind and a thin veil of light-bending. Illusion, crude but serviceable. William and Virella would see through it if they cared to look; he gambled they did not.

  At the grand staircase, he slowed. Two guards flanked the entrance, torchlight rubbing gold along their armor. One yawned so widely it cracked his jaw. The other stood straight-backed and bright-eyed, the sort of alert that wasn’t for show.

  Damn.

  River tucked behind a marble column. Heart racing. Out of habit more than plan, he thickened the glamour around himself; the magic shimmered, softened his edges, dulled his heat-print. Virella or William would still sniff it out. Most others wouldn’t.

  He took the steps like a rumor: barely there. The doors loomed. The guards breathed. The older one, sharper, had tier markings along his fingers: not just a soldier, a mage. If the man worked light, the illusion might shear right off River’s skin if they passed too close.

  River slid to the very edge of the stairwell, hugged a tapestry’s shadow. The mage’s head tilted, nostrils flaring. One pace in River’s direction. A furrow. A pause.

  Don’t notice me. Turn, turn. The guard shrugged, focus drifting back to the door.

  River exhaled, soundless. He abandoned the main entry entirely and angled toward the servants’ wing. He’d seen the route on a tour: a narrow corridor near the kitchens, ending in a maintenance door half-swallowed by ivy.

  He found it fast. The hinges complained; and he answered with a flick of wind to scatter the noise like leaves.

  Outside, the night pressed close. Wind troubled the trees. No shout. No challenge. He was through.

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  He sprinted across grass, low and quick, to the estate wall. Climbing was still muscle memory. Fingers read stone, found holds, made a ladder of imperfections. He hauled up, swung, dropped—rolled once into the gravel and came up easy, breath white in the damp air. The road beyond the wall ran like a ribbon of permission, leading him down toward Norvil.

  As he let the illusion go, a cold pinprick needled behind his eyes. The day’s magic tally presenting its bill. Manageable.

  He took the path down the mountain. The stars were only smudges behind the clouds; the horizon paled with the first bruised hint of dawn. The outer gate at the city’s foot was half-hearted—one guard asleep in a folding chair, the other sucking something pungent and staring into trees like he expected them to speak. River slipped through between a breath and the next, a whisper in the dark.

  The city, of course, refused to sleep. The smell—piss, puke, old beer—clung to the cobbles. Drunks staggered through alleys. A man in a moth-eaten cloak argued earnestly with a cat. Taverns bled warmth and laughter onto the street like open windows spilling music.

  It pulled at an older version of him. Nights on rooftops. Guard patterns. The delicate calculus of hunger versus risk. But fear didn’t ride his shoulders the way it used to. He wasn’t prey anymore. There was a different weight in his step—strength, confidence, a quiet certainty that the world might be sharp but he was no longer bare-handed.

  He took the main road. Last time, people had stared; guards had trailed him like a stormcloud; locals had muttered. Tonight, nobody noticed. The clothes helped. Clean face, clean smell, a coat that fit—he probably read as some young noble making the pilgrimage between a tavern and a brothel.

  A cluster of women leaned in the doorway of a building rimmed in soft pink runes. One—tall, red mouth, hair spilling like wine—stepped into his path with professional grace.

  “Well, well,” she purred, palm light on his chest. “A bit young for your kind of trouble, aren’t you? Or are you here to prove me wrong?” His breath snagged. The words scattered like birds. He blinked once, twice. “S—sorry,” he managed at last. “Just passing through.”

  The glamour wobbled—her question needled at his focus, a flicker no one else would see. He drew a slow inhale and anchored his attention. A cool, green thread of nature essence slid through his veins; the glow dulled, and the illusion settled. He gave an awkward half-bow that almost tripped him and edged past. The woman’s confusion followed him a step—Where’d he—?—then he folded the veil back over himself and disappeared into the crowd.

  Eyes up, he told himself. Rooflines. Margarith’s place lived somewhere beyond those teeth of slate.

  He found the crooked tavern by muscle memory. Slipped into the alley, found the old gutter that had once been his ladder. Climbed. Vaulted the lip. The roof greeted him with familiarity and difference: the hidden blanket gone; the warm tiles turned cool under a lace of moss; the view the same and also not, because he wasn’t the same.

  No time to linger. Margarith.

  He slid back down and circled to the front. He pushed the door with the confidence of someone who belonged there, or maybe just someone who’d decided to belong. The hinge groaned. Heat from the hearth slid over his skin. He took two steps and stopped.

  Margarith stood behind the bar, as she always had. Broad shoulders. Apron ghosted with flour. Tankard in each hand, pouring like a machine that had learned how to be kind. But her eyes breezed right over him. Another customer. Another coin.

  He swallowed and went to the bar anyway. “Hello, ma’am. Could I have a cider?”

  She spared him a glance. “Sure thing, hun.”

  His chest sank a little. He didn’t blame her. Clean clothes, clean smell, the muscle on him now—he had scrubbed the old boy right off his own face.

  He took a shadow-stitched corner booth. Relief surprised him. Not being recognized felt, oddly, like permission to be here at all.

  A moment later she arrived with the mug, amber lapping the rim. Memories hit like a quick wave: the night she shoved a bowl of soup into his freezing hands; the levitating terror of guards’ boots; a pillar of light like judgment. For a second he considered leaving.

  “Anything else for you, love?” Her voice cut him back to size. She turned away with a nod, no second look, and the world stayed ordinary. He drained the cider. It sat warm in his stomach, like a small hearth.

  Outside again, the street had cooled to a dim bruise of morning. She hadn’t recognized him: it stung. And yet she was alive; that was enough.

  Returning to the estate felt easier, like retracing a chalk line. He dressed the glamour thicker this time, layered it: heat-scatter, light-bend, a faint scent-wash for nosy hounds. He slipped past the outer wall and landed in a bed of lavender, and the scent rising sharp and sweet around his knees. He grimaced at the crushed stems; guilt pricked. A breath of nature-essence flowed from him into the roots. The stalks unfurled, knit back into themselves, as if he’d never been there. Smoke through terraces. Silence through corridors. Unseen. Soon the mattress took him again. He lay on his back, hands easy at his sides, only the faintest breath of lavender on his wrist to say otherwise. He kept his eyes closed for any watchful senses roaming the house. His mind refused the performance. It turned, and turned again, on the King’s measured smile, on Margarith’s ordinary kindness, on the road between them, and the road ahead with no map anyone would share.

  What would the coming days bring?

  War? Politics? Assassins?

  He didn’t know which he feared most. He did know he wouldn’t shy away. That he couldn’t shy away.