Page 37 of The Crown's Awakening
“Go,” he says again.
I step onto the plank. The moment my foot touches it, the air closes around me, tightening in a way that feels deliberate, aware, as though something ancient is pressing against me, recognizing me as I move forward.
I take another step, and behind me the force begins to give way, the pressure surging forward again as though it had only briefly been restrained. I turn before I mean to. He stands where I left him, already surrounded, the line behind him collapsing beneath the force pressing in. His power holds for anothersecond, then another, but the strain shows in the way his body braces, in the way the line continues to close around him.
Everything comes down to the distance between us as he looks at me, and something in him falls into place in a way that feels final. It is quieter than everything that came before it, but deeper, the kind of thing I know I cannot carry with me. I hold there longer than I should before something gives, the force behind him breaking as I step forward and cross the boundary without stopping. The pressure lifts at once, the air changing around me as the sound cuts off mid-motion.
And the last thing I see before the wards close around me is Teorin Rathmor still there, and then he isn’t.
Part Two
The Arrival
NOX
Rathmor Palace
Nox steps down from the carriage with the kind of care that comes from not wanting to ruin good boots on wet stone. The rain is steady and inconsiderate. The fog presses low across the courtyard like it has something to prove. She draws a slow breath through it and immediately regrets the decision.
She crosses into the court with quiet purpose when a figure steps into her path. Red hair. Damp. Familiar in the way minor inconveniences tend to be. At first, the face means nothing. Then she reaches.
Brinette's mind opens without resistance, offering the answer immediately and with more enthusiasm than the situation warrants. Edrin. A page. Young, loyal, the sort of person who still believed those two qualities were virtues. Nox adjusts her posture without thinking, borrowing Brinette's habits like an ill-fitting coat. The lowered chin. The softened expression. The particular way the girl held herself, as though the world deserved her gentleness.
It didn’t, but Edrin didn't need to know that.
"My lady." He says it with that hopeful tone people use when they haven't yet learned that hope is largely decorative. "The king has summoned you. Immediately."
To his chambers. Alone.
A slow, dark interest moves through her, immediate and entirely without apology. She had not taken him for subtle, and she did not expect gentleness from men like him. Power like that does not ask. It simply assumes, which she had always found at least honest, if nothing else. For a brief, pleasant moment she lets herself imagine exactly how that would go — feral, rough, the sort of encounter that left marks and required no conversation afterward.
That, she could work with, especially if he was as attractive as the rumors claimed.
"Now?" she asks, keeping her voice controlled because Brinette would have.
"Yes, my lady." He lingers, which suggests he has more to say and insufficient awareness that she does not care. "Any letters from the princess?"
Brinette's memory supplies the answer readily enough. No word. Nothing. Nox delivers it with the appropriate softness, watches Edrin's face do something small and quietly devastated, and moves on before she has to witness the rest of it. He was attached to things that should not matter, and attachment was a problem she had no interest in inheriting along with the girl's mannerisms.
"The king is waiting," he adds, because apparently the conversation required a conclusion.
"I would not keep him," she replies, and moves past before he can think of something else to say.
She reaches again, this time with actual intent, and Brinette's memory answers immediately.
Tables covered in fabric. Arranged with the kind of care that suggested someone nearby had far too much time and far too sincere an investment in color coordination. Brinette standing there, taking it seriously, treating the whole exercise as though it mattered, as though choosing the right shade of something could constitute an act of kindness.
What would she like?The king would ask, and mean it, which was somehow worse. Not whathewanted. What Asharin would like. As though the question redeemed the situation it was embedded in.
The interest dies quietly, leaving something colder and considerably less entertaining in its place.
She moves through the rest of the memory with the grim efficiency of someone cataloguing damage. Servants whispering that Asharin had not come willingly. That she had no choice. That the dinners stretched long and ended in silences nobody was permitted to explain. Brinette absorbing all of it, feeling appropriately terrible, and then continuing anyway with the quiet persistence of someone who had mistaken guilt for conscience.
Nox had a great deal of patience for cruelty. Very little for cowardice dressed up as helplessness.
Brinette had tried once, to her credit.I would like to see her,she had said, careful and precise.If I am to choose well, it would help to know what she prefers.
No.
