HE GAVE ME AWAY, NOW HE BEGS ME
Chapter 4: The Crown Prince Begins to Doubt
Later, Kastian Draeven would remember the night the western Veil marker went dark as the night he stopped believing his own court, standing at the map table in the Draeven Palace with his mother's steward reciting casualty figures from Rivergate in a flat, rehearsed voice that did not match the scale of what had actually happened there. He would remember thinking, with a coldness that surprised him, that a Binding Rite performed only six weeks earlier should not already be failing, not unless the woman he had bound to it was not what the seers had sworn she was.
That thought arrived slowly. First, there was the ceremony itself, and the small wrongness he had chosen, at the time, to ignore.
The Binding Rite with Seraphine Voss had taken place three days after the Hall of Vows, hurried forward at the Dowager Queen's insistence, performed at dawn in the old sanctum beneath the palace where every Sovereign bonding in four hundred years had been sealed. Kastian remembered kneeling opposite Seraphine at the altar, remembered the priestess drawing the old symbols across their joined hands, remembered waiting for the surge of warmth that every account of every prior Binding described, the moment the Veil itself was supposed to answer and brighten along its whole four hundred mile length in recognition of a true Sovereign claimed.
It had not come. Or rather, something had come, a thin, reluctant flicker along the nearest markers only, gone again within the hour, and the priestess had called it a natural delay, the bond settling slowly the way a fire sometimes needed coaxing before it truly caught. Kastian had wanted very badly to believe her. He had signed the proclamation dissolving his betrothal to Wren Ashdown on the strength of seers his mother trusted completely, and admitting now that the Binding had failed meant admitting he might have thrown away the one thing that could have saved his kingdom for a woman who could not.
He had not let himself think it, not fully, until the western marker went dark.
"How many dead," Kastian asked the steward, in the map room, with Seraphine seated at his right hand looking pale and beautiful and, he noticed now with a discomfort he did not enjoy, entirely unconcerned.
"Eleven confirmed, Your Highness, in the town itself. The ward-keeper's report also mentions a, ah, disturbance among the townsfolk regarding the manner in which the breach was closed."
"What manner."
The steward glanced at Seraphine before answering, which told Kastian a great deal on its own. "Witnesses describe a woman fighting alongside a member of the Night Guard, wielding fire without any visible source. The ward-keeper himself is recorded as saying, and I quote directly, Your Highness, that he witnessed ember eyes for the first time since his own boyhood, and believes the old Sovereign's blood, quote, runs true again."
The map room went very quiet. Kastian felt Seraphine's hand find his beneath the table, cool and deliberate, and did not look at her.
"A hedge mage passing through, perhaps," Seraphine said lightly, too lightly. "The marshfolk tell all sorts of stories after a breach. Fear makes poets of the dullest men."
"Which member of the Night Guard," Kastian said, ignoring her entirely, and watched the steward's discomfort deepen into something close to fear.
"Commander Duskmere has not reported to barracks in five days, Your Highness. His second has been covering his duties and, ah, discouraging inquiry."
Kastian had known Cassian Duskmere for eleven years, had trusted him with his own life on three separate occasions, and had never once, in all that time, known the man to abandon a post without word. A single fact settled into place with the terrible clarity of a door closing. Cassian had disappeared the same night Wren Ashdown was cast out into a storm, and had resurfaced, four hundred miles away, fighting a Hollow breach beside a woman with fire in her hands and a scar the old stories would call the Sovereign's mark.
"Leave us," Kastian said to the steward, and did not raise his voice, though something in his tone emptied the room within a minute regardless, leaving only himself and Seraphine at the long map table, the candles guttering low between them.
"You're thinking something unwise," Seraphine said, once they were alone, her voice losing some of its court polish now that there was no audience left to perform for.
"I am thinking that the Binding failed and you knew it would," Kastian said. "I am thinking that you have known since the moment we knelt at that altar, and have spent six weeks telling me it was settling, the same way a physician tells a dying man his color is improving. I am thinking about a scar on Lady Ashdown's wrist that I dismissed for three years as a childhood accident, because it never once occurred to me to ask why my own betrothed flinched whenever a Voss seer stood too close to her."
Seraphine's composure did not crack so much as sharpen, the pleasant mask falling away into something colder and far more interesting. "Careful, Your Highness. The Dowager Queen has been extraordinarily patient with a great many inconvenient facts on my behalf. I would not test whether her patience extends to you as well."
"Is that a threat, Lady Voss."
"It's a kindness," Seraphine said, standing, smoothing her skirts with hands that did not shake at all. "You cast that girl out in front of four hundred witnesses on the strength of your own mother's word. If she is what Rivergate believes she is, you did not merely break a betrothal, Your Highness. You handed the true Sovereign of Virelia over to your own household's oldest enemy and called it a wedding. Ask yourself very carefully whether you want the answer to that question known before the Veil finishes failing, or after."
She left him alone with the candles and the map of a kingdom whose western edge was, he now understood with a dread that sat like a stone behind his ribs, quietly beginning to come apart.
Kastian stood a long time at the table, staring at the mark on the map where Rivergate sat close against the marsh boundary, and made himself examine, for the first time in six weeks, the version of events he had not permitted himself to consider. His mother had brought him the seers' findings on the same week that trade negotiations with House Voss had stalled badly enough to threaten grain shipments to the capital. His mother had never once produced the Emberblood elders themselves to confirm Seraphine's blood, only their sealed and unquestionable written testimony, delivered by messengers who never lingered long enough to be questioned directly. His mother had wept, three years ago, telling him the story of how the last Emberblood Sovereign had died at bandit hands, and Kastian had comforted her, and had never once asked why a woman who spoke so rarely of court history could recount that single night in such precise, unwavering detail.
He thought of Wren, formally and cruelly discarded on his own words, walking out into a storm with nothing, and felt something in his chest that he recognized, with an unpleasant jolt, as shame rather than duty.
He found his mother before he found Devric, seated in her private solarium with a cup of spiced wine going cold at her elbow and a piece of needlework in her lap that she was not, he noticed, actually working, the needle idle between two fingers while her eyes stayed fixed on nothing in particular. Isolde Draeven had always been a handsome woman, silver haired since her thirtieth year in a way that court poets had once called distinguished rather than aged, and she looked up at her son's entrance with the same warm, unhurried smile she had worn at every one of his childhood bedsides.
"You look like a man carrying bad news," she said. "Sit with me a moment before you deliver it."
"Rivergate lost eleven souls to a breach the western marker should have prevented," Kastian said, remaining standing. "The ward-keeper's report mentions a woman with the old Sovereign's mark."
Something in his mother's face did not change so much as still, a fractional pause before the smile resumed exactly where it had left off, and Kastian, who had spent twenty six years learning to read that face for any sign of true feeling beneath its considerable polish, found himself noticing the pause far more than the smile that followed it.
"Marsh towns tell wild stories," Isolde said. "You mustn't credit every frightened farmer's account of a night he half remembers."
"You told me once that you remembered every detail of the night the last Sovereign died," Kastian said. "Bandits at the wall, you said. You were very precise about it, for a story you'd only heard secondhand from a household you hadn't yet married into."
His mother set the needlework aside with great care, and for one unguarded moment Kastian saw something pass behind her eyes that he had never once been permitted to see in twenty six years of being her son, a flicker of calculation so cold it did not seem to belong to the same woman who had sung him to sleep as a boy.
"You are tired, and the Veil is failing, and you are looking for someone to blame besides yourself for the girl you sent away," Isolde said, gently, terribly gently. "Go and rest, Kastian. We will speak of Rivergate when you are less inclined to invent conspiracies out of a peasant's fever dream."
She rose and kissed his cheek before he could think of an answer, and left him standing alone in the solarium with her cold wine and her abandoned needlework, certain, for the first time in his life, that his own mother had just lied to his face without so much as a flicker of effort.
He crossed to the door and called for his personal aide, a young man named Devric who had served him faithfully since boyhood and had never once, to Kastian's knowledge, reported anything to the Dowager Queen that Kastian had not explicitly authorized.
"Send word to the Night Guard's second," Kastian said. "Quietly. I want to know the last confirmed location of Commander Duskmere before Rivergate, and I want it found without my mother's household learning that I asked."
"Your Highness, if I may," Devric said carefully, "the Dowager Queen has eyes in nearly every division that could answer that question."
"Then find someone who isn't one of them," Kastian said, "because I intend to find Lady Ashdown before my mother's people do, and I would very much like to still have a throne left standing by the time I manage it."
He did not yet know, standing in that map room with the candles burning low and the western marker's darkness spreading a little further with every hour, whether he meant to find Wren in order to protect her, to beg her forgiveness, or simply to understand what, precisely, his own mother had spent twenty years burying. He knew only that for the first time since the Hall of Vows, the certainty that had carried him through his entire life as heir to Virelia's throne had cracked cleanly down the middle, and that whatever filled that crack in the weeks ahead was going to cost him something he was not yet prepared to name.