Phantom Pains

The heirs sleep the better part of a day in Sunveil Keep, and none of them sleep well. Xanthe surfaces again and again out of a panic she cannot name, something in the dark reaching for her, trying to press itself into her. Not Mephisto. Not the dragons. Something else. It is gone before she can hold onto it.

She wakes to servants, Crownclaw knights, and Rohavi Varason at her bedside with a half-written letter in his lap. Two weeks ago he rode to Crown's Rest and petitioned Talon for the Chancellorship of the Treasury, arguing there was no better man in Ederia for it, and the king agreed. The entire council has come to Faithspire with Talon. When Rohavi notices what has happened to her skin, he takes her hand, decides it does not matter, and tells her he trusts her.

Edwinn finds her not long after. He asks what their father said about his mother. Xanthe gives it to him without softening: that Cassia's blood ties him to the Va'Gro necromancers, that Talon feared the taint would surface, and that Xanthe was chosen to watch for it and to end him if it did. She confirms she almost did it in the Ember Hierophant's chamber, the moment he commanded the undead. Edwinn takes it in silence, tells her he would have made the same choice, and says he hopes the gauntlet's destruction clears her conscience. Xanthe corrects him: it was a caution against blood, not against the gauntlet. He stops at the door long enough to tell her he loves her, and goes.

Via goes looking for her father and finds him buried in code-of-law books behind the Cinderglint Throne of Faithspire. She tells him she does not understand and may never understand, but that she refuses to be angry — that if everything else is in motion beyond her control, the one thing she can control is that the two of them still have something. Talon is at a loss for a long moment. Then he explains why he cannot accept it. There will come a day that demands something terrible of her, and loving him would make it impossible to do. When she insists she can love him and still do hard things, he shuts the door on it, calls her Princess Octavia, and dismisses her to attend to other business. She bows deeply and leaves sobbing. Talon cannot bring himself to watch her go, and counts specks of dirt in the tile instead.

Cailynn seeks out Solani Serpentbraid in a glass garden near the keep, and the conversation becomes an examination. Solani asks what she truly knows of the Zhakarii People, and Cailynn answers with all of it — the cycle, the seen and unseen, grief as something to be embraced rather than feared. Solani approves, then offers a piece of history the Grove has found convenient to forget: veilwalking was taught to their people by Szarris, the great green dragon who held dominion over the Serpent's Grove for centuries, and the only written account of a veilwalker's true power lies inside her tomb. She speaks of prophecy as the thing that drives men mad, of Talon cowering in front of a fate he will not look away from, and of balance. An arrow set on your heart does not vanish because you step aside. A life must still be claimed. The trees whisper of one who escaped their ending, and of what those who pierce the veil deeply enough might rewrite. When Cailynn asks whether Solani intends to change her own fate, the answer is a question: who is to say she has not already? Then she asks whether Cailynn ever saw anything attached to Octavia… Something draconic in nature…

The council convenes with Rohavi newly seated and Viktor Bloodmoon confirmed as spymaster. Sallow's Shade is gone; not besieged but consumed, its people untraceable. The corruption has moved inland toward Ebonshade, a city of enchanters and artisans held in permanent twilight at the edge of the Ebonwood Thicket, where a coven of witches is all that keeps millions of restless souls bound. If the witches fall, an army of the damned walks out of that grove. Somewhere inside it lies the Silent Forest, where sound and speech simply cease. Viktor offers his contact, Lady Veskas Draelthir the Eleventh, the Countess's own daughter, who has no love for her mother and wants her people saved, and notes that the Order of the Edict has been seen around Ebonshade, purpose unknown.

Closer to home, Ser Garret Greenmire reports cultists growing bold inside Ederia's borders, striking caravans, watch patrols, and retaken keeps, and giving the Serpent's Grove a wide berth. Elyndra Maelis offers to ride there herself with Bjorn rather than send word ahead of her. The last formal business of the council is Talon formally acknowledges Ser Marik Veltaris-Falkrest, the Green Knight, knighted on the road by Ser Torwyn Astralor. With all the given information The King's Hand chooses Maldaris. Before they scatter, Viktor takes them aside and hands out paired sending stones and matched pocket watches set to speak only at eight each evening. His hesitation when they ask for the room reads not as guilt but as the realization that it is Talon they do not want listening, and Gareth and Garret both glance sideways at their king.

Xanthe returns to the temple where the angel took the gauntlet and finds it derelict. Abandoned for lifetimes, sun and wheat worked into worn stone, older than Faithspire and older than House Emberlyn. A hand of peace at the Church of the Unbroken confirms the ground is still consecrated, and that the bond there runs deeper than in their own halls, as though the faith once shared in those rooms seeped further into the earth. Three weeks ago, during a routine rite, something in that temple seemed to wake. Light came harder through the windows. The warmth felt alive. As quickly as it came, it was gone.

That evening Rohavi walks Xanthe through the gardens after dinner and confesses that his audience with the king was never only about a council seat. He told Talon that serving would be the second greatest honor of his life, and that the first would be her hand. He goes to one knee. Xanthe answers before he can finish, with a kiss. The ring he slides onto her finger is more than just silver: protection, and one that will hold death at bay. She goes straight to Edwinn's door, late and giddy, and tells him first. He cries. Freya will be the flower girl.

Hours earlier, Solani knocks on Via's door. The questions come gently and without pause; her mother's vision, how her divination works, whether she can look into people. Solani suggests that Via and Cailynn together could see tenfold what either sees alone, then asks Via to look at her. Via declines. Solani offers incense instead, ground in her bare palm, a veilwalker's remedy for the resistance that causes the nosebleeds and the pain. Via breathes it in, and when the question comes again she says yes, charmed by Solani’s magic. What she finds inside Solani is nothing. Not shadow, not malice, simply a void where a future should be, something existing out of order. Then the picture resolves the closer she gets: blood, rotted bodies climbing a stone wall that bleeds, but it is not a wall, it’s a beast, and screaming. Via describes it aloud. Solani snuffs the incense, says she has heard enough, apologizes, and takes the entire memory out of her.

Via and Edwinn go to find Zepharos and find an empty room, no belongings, and a sealed letter addressed to Octavia. He is already past the southern border of Faithspire. He plans to goto Crown Rest and kill via’s two friends still tied to the cult, so she does not have to. He intends to find the dragonborn who called to him beneath Cielmir and bring him to justice. He insists none of this is noble, that he is doing it because he cannot stand the thought of a cell and cannot stand the thought of her doing what he could do instead, and that both are true at once, and neither makes him a good man.

Via comes apart in the doorway. She wanted one more day to say goodbye. Edwinn holds her while she breaks.

Several hours south of the city, alone on the road, Zepharos rides for Crown's Rest, and for Dragon's End.