Page 116 of Zenith Tower

“The Council has already chosen plenty for us.”

“Which is why I’d rather not help them with the next part.”

He sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. His caution still moved through the bond, but it no longer felt like refusal.

“Aldric stood with me before,” I said. “He could have made Quill’s case easier. He didn’t.”

“Then we protect him by refusing to be hurried.”

I looked at the stitches. “What do we do with it?”

Caspian drew the small knife from inside his coat and worked the point beneath the final knot. The thread resisted, then loosened. He pulled it free in one unbroken length and laid the cloth beside me.

“The lamp,” he said.

He cut through the line of needle holes until no piece of fabric held more than a few marks.

I held the thread over the flame.

It curled against my fingers before the fire caught. I released it into the shallow metal tray beneath the wick. The gray thread blackened, glowed red at the center, and collapsed into ash.

We fed the strips of cloth after it.

Boots sounded at the eastern end of the corridor.

Caspian swept the ash into the spent oil and closed the tray beneath the lamp.

The patrol passed without stopping.

“We tell the others in the morning,” he said. “Every word.”

I nodded.

I leaned against him and felt the tension in his body before he let it go. Beyond the door, the patrol turned at the junction and began another circuit.

By the time the footsteps faded, the cloth and thread were a dark smear in old oil. The sentence remained exact in my memory.

The ledger isn’t closed.

Caspian

My father came to Zenith Tower in person.

The fact unsettled me more than the steward’s summons.

Magnus Ashford preferred distance when feeling threatened. A letter could be written behind a closed door, revised until no uncertainty remained, and sent in someone else’s hands. Crossing the bridge offered him none of those protections.

I waited in a visitor’s chamber on the eastern side of the Tower. A narrow window admitted a blade of gray daylight above my head. Water-light moved beneath it, silver crossing stone, but neither reached far enough to warm the room.

I heard the strike of his cane before the door opened.

He entered with a Council clerk behind him and a steward at either shoulder. His coat was fastened to the throat. The silver at his temples had spread since the formal, though only weeks separated us from it.

The clerk placed a leather case on the table.

“Lord Ashford has been granted a private family consultationunder Council-seat privilege,” she said. “The door will remain under observation.”

“Naturally,” my father replied.