[Vivien’s POV]
The summons arrives without preamble—a guard at my door, face carefully blank. Alastair wants me in the throne room. Now.
I dress quickly, choosing without thinking—the deep blue. My hands are steady, which surprises me more than it probably should.
The corridors fill as I walk—faces carrying the alertness of people who have smelled something burning and cannot find the fire.
The throne room doors stand open. That is my first sign, and it turns something cold in my stomach.
The court stands assembled in full, arranged in the unmistakable formation that means no one was given leave to choose their position. Alastair placed every soul here. Every soul knows it.
Cecil stands in the center of the floor, chin raised, dressed in pale gold—the color she wears when she wants to look as though she belongs somewhere.
She does not yet understand what is happening—I can read it in the set of her shoulders, in the slight pull of her mouth that she mistakes for composure.
I take my position near the left pillar, where I can see both the dais and the floor before it, and I wait.
I have heard Alastair address his court before—formal register, pleasant authority, carrying without effort. What emerges now is none of those things. Quieter. Deliberate. Controlled the way a blade is controlled in the moment before it moves.
"A knight was taken after the tournament," he begins, his voice carrying to every corner without being raised. "He has been questioned at length. His answers were thorough."
He lets that land for a full breath. The court does not move, does not speak, does not risk the sound.
"It was established that this knight did not act alone, nor from his own grievance. He was paid. The coin came through intermediaries—three of them—so that no hand touching it could be traced easily back to the hand that gave it first."
I watch Cecil's face. Denial lives and dies in three seconds—a flicker of ‘that is not right’ with nowhere to land, because Alastair is not asking. He is stating. Justification follows immediately.
"The intent," Alastair continues, "was to manufacture chaos at a precise moment—near enough to the king that violence and confusion could be read as an attempt on the throne."
He pauses. "And the shape of that confusion was designed to implicate a specific man. The queen's bodyguard. A knight whose only failing was riding too close to his duty."
My bodyguard. My Jasper. Named in that even voice as the intended point of all of it. "Her lips part," she begins— "Your Majesty—" —and the two words are so nearly controlled I almost admire the effort.
He does not raise his voice or shift his register. "You will have your opportunity to speak," he says, and closes the room entirely with the evenness of it.
When he finishes, he nods once, and Cecil is given her chance. She takes it badly—the words come too fast, colliding.
"This is a misunderstanding. I was afraid—you must see that I was afraid. Things have changed here, the court has changed, my place in it has changed, and I acted from fear, not from—"
"From what, then?" Alastair says, and the quiet of it is worse than an interruption would have been.
She shifts. I watch her search for ground that will hold her weight. "I did not intend for anyone to be harmed. I only wanted—"
"What did you want, Cecil?" he asks, and the use of her name—unadorned, without title—lands in the room like a verdict before he has even given one.
She abandons the argument then, reaching for something far older—”Alastair, believe me,” not Your Majesty, not my king, but Alastair, the one she has used since they were children here.
Something moves through his expression—not softness, but its deliberate absence, the grief of a man who has done his mourning already.
"Alastair," she says, and the word fractures in the middle of it. "We grew up in these halls together. Surely that must count for something—"
"It counts for this," he says evenly. "It means I trusted you longer than the evidence warranted."
Cecil goes still. The court goes still. I find I have stopped breathing entirely. “You endangered my life, my court, and, most importantly, my queen.” That last word lands like a stone dropped into still water, ripples reaching every face in the room.
"Your history with this court does not make what you did smaller," he says. "It makes it larger. You knew exactly where to strike because I gave you that knowledge freely. You used it."
The sentence arrives precisely. “I am confining you to the dungeons, for a duration befitting the offense. And then—” the color drains from Cecil’s face. “You will remain at court. Not as a lady, or as a guest. You will be a servant.”
Just like that—as a servant. Title stripped. Silk replaced with rough linen. Her presence a daily accounting of what ambition turns to when it crosses into treason.
Banishment would have been a mercy—distance, the grace of not being made to watch. This keeps her in these halls in service to the woman she tried to destroy, humiliation renewed at every threshold.
She is escorted out without ceremony, and the room holds itself entirely still as she goes.
The court breathes. I feel it—the collective release, normal pressure returning. Across the assembled heads, Lady Aldren finds my eye and gives me one small, grim nod—the nod of a woman who knows when justice has been rendered.
I nod back slowly, and I mean it in every part of myself that is still upright and functioning.
Alastair descends from the dais when the room has half-emptied. He crosses to where I stand and takes my arm—not a king's gesture, but a man's, marking the end of something hard.
"I am sorry you had to be present for that," he says quietly. "I thought it right—but I am sorry for what it cost you."
"It cost me very little," I tell him. "Set against what she intended, the standing was nothing."
"She intended a great deal." A pause. "I should have read the resentment sooner. It was there, and I chose not to weigh it as I ought."
"You were trusting someone you had known most of your life," I say softly. "That is not a failing. That is what trust looks like before it has reason to doubt itself."
He considers this. The corner of his mouth moves—not quite a smile, but something warmer than I have catalogued in him before.
"Thank you, Vivien," he says, and the use of my name—not my queen, not the formal distance—settles over me in a way I do not immediately know what to do with.
"Thank you," I answer, and I mean it—this is the part that unsettles me, that I mean it entirely without performance. The gratitude is simply there, genuine and inconvenient, and I cannot manage it into something smaller.
He offers his arm to walk me from the room, and I take it. The court parts around us. I keep my expression composed, as I have always kept it in these halls—halls that have never belonged to me, and have slowly, without announcement, begun to feel as though they might.
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