Volume Eight: The Tower Beneath the Ravens
They dragged Isolde backward through the false wall with a hand fisted in her hair, and the last thing she saw before the passage closed between them was Kael's face, wild with a fury she had never seen him lose control of before, and three of Roran's men holding him back with blades at his throat.
I will come for you, he shouted, voice raw enough to crack stone. Do you hear me. Whatever he does, I will come for you.
That was the moment the old wing's second passage failed them. It began only heartbeats before, with a door that should have led to freedom and led instead into an ambush waiting on the other side.
Roran had anticipated the stables passage, had known of its existence longer than Kael had ever suspected, and the men waiting in the stable yard beyond it were more numerous and better prepared than the ones in the gallery had been. Isolde remembered fire, her own sun magic burning through two attackers before a third came from behind and struck her skull hard enough to blur the world at its edges, remembered Kael's voice shouting her name through a haze that would not clear, remembered hands, too many hands, separating them by force while Roran himself watched from the stable yard's shadowed archway with an expression of open, unhurried satisfaction.
The blow to her skull had not been kind, and the hours after she first stirred passed in a fog thick enough that she could not, at first, be certain how much time had elapsed since the stable yard, whether it had been minutes or the better part of a day. She remembered fragments only, being carried up a narrow winding stair by hands that gripped too hard to be gentle, a door groaning shut and locked behind her, the particular cold of stone that had not seen sunlight in generations settling into her bones long before her eyes fully cleared enough to take in the small round room she had been left in.
She woke fully in darkness, in a tower room she did not recognize, stone walls slick with damp and a single barred window too high to reach, her wrists bound before her with rope that bit deep enough to leave marks she suspected would last long after this night ended, one way or another.
Roran visited her twice before dawn, the first time to gloat, the second to explain, with the meticulous pleasure of a man finally free to speak his true intentions aloud, exactly what tomorrow held. "The council will convene at midday," he told her, seated across the small room on a stool he had brought himself, as though her captivity were a social call rather than a crime. "I will present them with a body, Lady Vaskara, and a story of a Vaskara assassin who attempted, in her final desperate act, to kill my nephew before house guards could subdue her. It is remarkably tidy, when I consider it. Your death ends the Accord's obligation to house you. My nephew's grief, genuine as I expect it to be, will keep him too occupied to question my account too closely, at least until it is far too late to matter. And the Skylands, once they learn their daughter died attempting murder rather than accepting peace, will have all the justification they need to declare the war I have wanted since before you were born."
"Kael will not believe your story."
"Kael will not need to believe it. He will only need to be too broken by grief to contest it publicly, and I have found, in my long experience of that particular emotion, that grief makes remarkably poor company for careful argument." He rose, straightening his coat with the same fastidious care he brought to everything. "You should have let him hate you, Lady Vaskara. It would have been so much simpler for everyone, myself very much included."
"Why?" She had not meant to ask it, had meant to hold her questions and her fear both behind a wall of silence he did not deserve to see past, but the word escaped her regardless, small and genuinely curious in the dark. "Why do you want this war so badly? Your own house will bleed for it as much as mine."
Something shifted behind Roran's eyes, the performance slipping, just briefly, to reveal a truer and more tired thing beneath it. "Because I watched my brother, Kael's father, spend thirty years bowing and scraping to a peace that never once respected what House Draven truly is. We are not merchants or diplomats, Lady Vaskara. We are the blade this kingdom has always needed and never once thanked for the wound it prevented. I am tired of being feared quietly and honored not at all. A war, won decisively, ends that quiet fear and replaces it with something House Draven has not held in two centuries. Respect, freely given, because there is no longer anyone left standing who would dare withhold it."
"That is not respect. That is only fear with a different name."
"Perhaps." He did not seem troubled by the distinction. "But it will feel like respect, in the end, and I find that difference matters far less than idealists like you believe it does."
He believes every word he is saying, Isolde thought, watching him leave, the door groaning shut behind him with a finality that settled cold in her stomach. That is what frightens me most. Not that he is cruel, but that he has convinced himself cruelty is simply the price of being taken seriously.
She thought, in the long hours that followed, of Kael's voice in the dust and moonlight of the old wing, the word love spoken aloud for the first time between them as though it were the simplest truth either of them had ever offered another person. She thought of her brother, ash sealed in a temple wall, and of how strange it was that the man responsible for that grief sat now only a floor below her, close enough that she could, if she strained to listen, hear the faint echo of his voice raised in argument somewhere within the keep's ancient stone. She did not let herself think, not fully, not yet, about the possibility that morning would come and she would not live to see the war Roran wanted so badly finally, definitively, prevented.
He left her then, and Isolde spent the remaining hours of that long night working uselessly at the rope binding her wrists, listening to the muffled sounds of the keep beyond her tower, a household in upheaval, distant shouted orders, once, unmistakably, Kael's own voice raised somewhere far below in an argument she could not make out the words of but could hear, even through stone, was not going his way.
Kael, she would learn only much later, had spent that same night fighting a battle of his own, dragged before an emergency session of Draven's ruling council in chains he refused to struggle against, Roran's carefully cultivated allies painting him already as a man bewitched, compromised, no longer fit to speak for the house his own father had led with honor. It was only the arrival, near dawn, of Lady Thessaly, his father's oldest ally, summoned by the message he had sent days before the challenge was ever announced, that turned the tide even slightly in his favor, her testimony of his father's character and her own long memory of Roran's ambitions lending just enough doubt to the council's certainty that they agreed, reluctantly, to hear him before any final judgment was passed.
It was not enough to free him outright. It was enough, barely, to buy him the one thing he needed most.
Time.
Lady Thessaly, silver haired and formidable in a way that reminded Kael, achingly, of his own mother in the years before her marriage had worn her down to nothing, had stood before the council with a steadiness he envied and did not yet trust himself to match. "I have known this family three generations," she told the assembled elders, her voice carrying easily through the chamber's tense silence. "I watched Roran Draven resent his brother's leadership from the day their father died, and I have watched him, in the years since, build exactly the kind of quiet influence a man builds when he intends, eventually, to use it. I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it without cost to myself. But I will not stand in this chamber and watch this house condemn its own heir on the word of a man I have never once, in thirty years, known to act without a design of his own beneath it."
The council had not been swayed entirely, not enough to free him outright, but the doubt Thessaly planted was enough to earn him a single concession, a delay until midday, and a promise, grudging and heavily qualified, that his testimony would be heard in full before any final judgment was rendered against either him or the woman his uncle had already, in every corridor of the keep, begun calling a condemned assassin.
He used it exactly as she would have expected him to, gathering every ally his father's memory could still command, every retainer whose loyalty had never truly belonged to Roran despite the fear that kept them silent, and by the time the tower's single high window began to grey with the first light of the morning appointed for Roran's tidy execution, Isolde could hear, faint but unmistakable beneath the wind, the sound of a household finally turning, in force, against the man who had ruled its shadows for far too long.
Roran heard it too. She watched, through the bars of her small window, his silhouette crossing the courtyard below with a speed that had nothing left of his earlier unhurried confidence, shouting orders that scattered his remaining loyalists in every direction, and understood, with a surge of fierce and desperate hope, that whatever came next would be decided in minutes rather than hours.
The tower door burst open sooner than she expected, but it was not Kael's voice that greeted her from the doorway. It was Roran's, breathless, furious, a blade already drawn in his hand and every last trace of composure finally, completely gone.
"If I cannot have my war honestly," he said, crossing the small room toward her with a speed that left no time for pleading, "then I will have it the old way. A dead hostage is still a dead hostage, nephew's grief or no."
Isolde had one hand free of the rope, worked loose in the long hours of the night, and as Roran's blade rose she threw every last reserve of sun fire she possessed directly into his path, a desperate, blinding flare that bought her perhaps two seconds, no more, in a room with nowhere left to run.
Roran roared through the light, half blinded, his blade swinging wide, and Isolde threw herself sideways with her wrists still half bound, the stone floor scraping her palms raw as she scrambled for any distance at all between them. She had no weapon left to call. Her sun fire, spent almost entirely in that single flare, guttered weakly at her fingertips, barely enough to warm her own skin, and she understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful in its finality, that whatever happened in the next few seconds would happen without rescue, without Kael's shadow magic tearing through the door in time, without anything at all but her own two hands and whatever courage remained in them.