[Amber’s POV]
The court reception hall is a masterwork of intimidation dressed as hospitality. Candles gutter in iron sconces along the vaulted ceiling, the light caught between warm and threatening—and I stand alone in the center of it like a chess piece someone forgot to move.
Desmond is behind the east doors with his council, his absence carrying more weight than most men's presence. Arthur is stationed at the far wall, arms folded, jaw set—close enough for the bond to hum beneath my sternum like a wire strung too tight.
I take a glass from a passing tray because my hands need a purpose that isn't clenching. Forty courtiers in this room, and not one has looked at me with anything other than the expression you'd give a stain someone has chosen to display.
"You hold that glass like it personally offended you." The voice arrives from my left—warm, amused, belonging to a woman in copper silk with dark hair swept into something architectural.
"It hasn't yet, but the night is young." I turn the glass between my fingers, studying her sidelong. "And you are?"
"Lady Seren Ashvale." She steps beside me as if we've known each other for years, her gaze sweeping the room with the boredom of someone who stopped counting these evenings a decade ago.
"I wanted to reach you before the vultures did." Her mouth curves—not unkind, but sharp enough to cut if needed. "You deserve at least one conversation tonight that doesn't come with talons."
Nobody at this court does anything without calculation—I learned that my first week here. "And yours comes with what, exactly?"
"Information, packaged in gossip—which makes it more digestible and less likely to get us both killed." She tilts her glass toward mine in a mock toast. "Shall we?"
"Michele." She drops the name a minute later, when we are considerably away from others’ ears, the way you'd set a blade on a table—carefully, hilt toward me. "The court tells it like a tragedy—beautiful woman, volatile temperament, died too young."
My spine goes rigid, the glass stem suddenly too thin between my fingers. Every mention of that name rearranges the air in whatever room I'm standing in.
"Michele was not volatile." Seren's voice drops, the amusement thinning to something sharper. "She was dangerous—deliberately, brilliantly dangerous, the kind of woman who could take a household apart and make everyone inside believe it was their own fault."
She turns her glass by the stem, watching the wine catch light. "Her death is not the tidy thing this court presents. There are people in the Reach who remember Desmond before grief reshaped him—the brother he was to Arthur, the prince he was before her."
My nails press crescents into my palm, a sharp bright pain I use to keep my face neutral. "Why tell me?"
"Because you're standing exactly where she stood." She holds my gaze, steady as iron. "And I'd rather not watch the same story end the same way."
Then her entire bearing shifts—the gravity folding away, replaced by something lighter, almost nostalgic. "The blood moon ceremony. Three days."
"Desmond's mentioned it, I assume." She lifts an eyebrow, watching me over the rim of her glass.
"He has." I keep my expression arranged into the diplomatic mask I've been perfecting since my first week behind these walls.
"What he certainly didn't mention are the old consort rites—traditions older than the throne itself." Her tone turns half-amused, half-wistful, like someone recounting rules to a game nobody plays anymore.
"The consort once held real power—binding power." She ticks a finger. "The right to address the court without the prince's permission, the right to claim mercy in matters of blood."
"And the truly spectacular one—the right to halt a formal challenge mid-blow, if she speaks the words before the killing strike." She pauses for effect, and I hate that it works.
Something behind my ribs goes very quiet, a held breath I don't let reach my face. I lift my wine instead and give her nothing to read.
Seren laughs—bright and genuine, turning two nearby heads. "Don't sharpen your claws yet, darling. Those laws haven't been tested in three centuries."
She waves a hand, dismissive and fond at once. "Older than the throne, technically still carved into the founding oaths—but ancient and entirely useless."
I file it alongside everything else—the corridors, the names that carry weight, the doors that lock from the outside. No more or less important than the rest, just another thread in a pattern I haven't finished reading.
"Be careful with the midnight blue," she murmurs as she turns to leave, and before I can ask what that means, she's dissolved into the crowd like smoke into candlelight.
The reception empties by slow degrees. Arthur falls into step beside me in the lower corridor, and the hum beneath my breastbone sharpens—an involuntary tightening I crush before it can take shape.
The shadows carved under his eyes are worse than yesterday—four nights of rotation stripping something from his face, leaving the bones too close to the surface. I catalog it without meaning to, the exact geography of his exhaustion, and my teeth find the inside of my cheek.
"The breakfast." I say it low, because the corridor is empty enough to risk it. "The tenderness, like he woke up a different man."
"The forehead kiss." My voice drops. "Like I'm something he's decided to keep instead of break."
Arthur's stride stays even, but his hand closes at his side—a slow, deliberate fist that whitens every knuckle. "My brother only becomes gentle when he is planning something."
The words settle behind my sternum like a stone dropped into still water. "What kind of something?"
"The kind that closes around you before you realize it's moving." He keeps his eyes fixed ahead, his voice barely louder than our footsteps on stone.
"When Desmond is cruel, he is predictable." His jaw works, and what comes out next is quieter, rougher. "When he is kind—that is when the damage is already done."
We walk in silence, the torchlight pooling and retreating like something breathing. My mouth opens before the rest of me agrees. "Are you careful?"
He stops—not a deceleration, a cessation, as if the floor itself demanded it. When he turns, his expression is something I won't name because naming things here gives them weight, and weight gets people killed.
"No." The word carries the gravity of a man who has done his calculations and accepted the numbers. "Not anymore."
The corridor holds us—his gaze locked on mine, the bond singing between us, thirty inches of charged air doing more damage than skin ever could. Then he steps back, and the distance reopens like something torn.
He leaves me at my chamber door without another word. Inside, the room is dark—and when I light the candle on the side table, the flame catches something spread across the bed that stops me in the doorway.
Midnight blue silk, so deep it drinks the light. The gown is exquisite—structured bodice, beading along the collarbone like scattered starlight, fabric pooling across my sheets like a spill of dark water.
Beside it, a folded card in handwriting I'd know with my eyes closed—Desmond's precise, unhurried hand, just a few words that rearrange the air the way his name rearranges everything else.
For the blood moon ceremony. Wear this. Nothing else.
My fingers close around the note until its edges cut into my palm. The gown lies across the bed like a beautiful, patient trap—and somewhere beyond the door I cannot lock, Desmond's footsteps cross his chamber and go perfectly, deliberately still.
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