The Frostbound Vow: The Sisters Gambit

The wine cellar stank of oak and old vinegar, and Lord Brindle held his sleeve against his nose as he descended the last stair. Torchlight guttered against casks stacked floor to ceiling, their iron bands crusted with salt. Maren Vael stood at the center of the vault, a single beeswax taper set before her on an overturned crate, its flame so steady it seemed painted. Two stools flanked her. A third waited empty.

"My lord," Maren said, and her voice was bright as struck glass. "You are the last. We may begin."

She wore no crown, no brooch of house. A plain wool dress, undyed, the color of milk left in a cold pan. Her hair was bound back with a strip of leather. She looked, Brindle thought, like a girl playing at rebellion, and then he thought again. Her eyes were not a girl's eyes. They were the eyes of someone who had been reading in the southern wing while her sister trained with the sword.

Lord Halloran leaned against a cask marked VINTAGE 471, his hands folded across his embroidered waistcoat. He smiled at Brindle the way a man smiles at a dog he has just fed. Halloran's coat was deep saffron, almost amber in the torchlight, and his rings caught the flame as he shifted his weight.

"Lord Brindle," Halloran murmured. "So good of you to join us."

Brindle sketched a bow that bent a little lower than protocol required. "The invitation reached me at the fourth bell. I confess I almost did not come." He let a small laugh escape, oily and quick. "A wine cellar. At this hour. The Queen Mother would not approve."

"The Queen Mother," Maren said, "is the matter we have come to discuss."

Brindle settled onto the empty stool. The wood was damp and he felt the chill creep through his breeches. He flexed his fingers inside his gloves, counting rings. The cellar was colder than it should have been, as though the stones remembered the river that ran beneath the castle, and the river remembered winter. He could smell the wine souring somewhere in the dark, a wet rot that lived behind the casks.

"The Lord of the Inner Treasury," Maren continued, and her voice warmed as she spoke his title, "controls the votes of three houses on the Sapphire Reach caucus. Without him, we have no quorum. Without quorum, we have no petition. Without petition, my mother rules until she dies or the Wintersworn break the gate."

Brindle tilted his head. "Your Highness flatters me. The caucus does not love me, only my ledgers."

"Your ledgers," Maren said, "are why the caucus listens."

Halloran cleared his throat. It was the barest sound, a velvet scrape, and yet it filled the vault. "Let us speak plain, child. You have summoned two lords to a wine cellar at the fourth bell. You have not yet named your purpose. If Lord Brindle is to risk his name, his lands, his pretty accounts, he must first hear what you ask."

Maren did not flinch at the word child. She had, Brindle suspected, been called worse things by her sisters. She reached into the pocket of her wool dress and withdrew a folded paper, which she laid upon the crate beside her taper.

"It is already drafted," she said. "The petition. Seventeen signatures. We need twenty to force the Conclave to hear us."

Brindle blinked. "Seventeen? Your Highness, you have been busy."

"I have been patient." Maren unfolded the paper and smoothed its corners. Brindle could see, even at the distance, the columns of names inked in careful hand, the seals of minor houses pressed in red and black. "The houses of the inner reach. The river lords. Three of the priesthood. My sister does not know. The Conclave does not know. The Queen Mother does not know."

Halloran leaned forward, the amber of his coat catching a new angle of light. "And what does the petition say?"

"It says," Maren answered, and her voice dropped into something low and precise, the voice she must use when reading aloud in the southern wing, "that Queen Thessaly Vael, by reason of grief prolonged beyond reason, by reason of decisions that have cost the realm the Pale Ford and the village of Clearsong and three hundred men of the standing watch, is unfit to hold the throne in her own right. It says that Prince Oren Vael, heir apparent, being lost to the realm by circumstance unknown, his sister Maren Vael shall assume the regency in his name, with the Conclave as council, until such time as Oren is returned or his fate is proven beyond doubt."

The words fell into the cellar like coins into a well. Brindle heard them strike the cold air, and then he heard nothing at all for a long moment. He watched Maren's hands, which did not tremble. He watched the taper, which did not waver. He watched Halloran's smile, which did not move.

"Unfit," Brindle repeated. The word tasted of iron. "You are calling your mother unfit."

"I am calling her what she is." Maren's soprano thinned, but did not break. "She has not slept in her own bed for a season. She speaks to my brother's empty chair. She has refused the war council three times. She has let Lord Halloran's caravans pass unmolested while she starves the watch at Clearsong."

Halloran raised one hand, palm outward, as if to catch a thrown blade. "Careful, child."

"I am not accusing you, my lord." Maren did not look at Halloran. She was looking at Brindle. "I am accusing my mother. Lord Halloran is a symptom. The fever, Your Highness, is on the throne."

Brindle's mouth went dry. He reached for his cup, remembered he had not brought one, lowered his hand. He thought of his ledgers. He thought of the debts he owed, the debts others owed him. He thought of Halloran's ring on his own finger, the one Halloran had pressed into his palm two winters ago in the corridor behind the treasury, with a smile that had meant everything and nothing.

"Your Highness," he said, and he made his voice thin and rising, the wheedle that had served him at every caucus for twenty years, "this is a grave thing you propose. The queen is still the queen. Her name is in every charter, every prayer, every oath the watch still swears. To declare her unfit is to declare the realm unfit. And the Wintersworn will not wait for our deliberations."

"The Wintersworn," Maren said, "are at the Pale Ford because my mother would not march in autumn. The Wintersworn are at Clearsong because my mother would not send the reserves. The Wintersworn are at the gate because my mother will not see Lord Halloran for what he is, or my sister for what she is not."

"The Pale Ford was lost before any decision of the queen's," Halloran said smoothly. "I grieve for it. Every lord in the Reach grieves. The winter came early. The river froze in a night. No council could have prevented what the gods sent."

"Lord Halloran." Maren turned to him now, and her voice was bright again, almost musical. "You control the southern trade roads. You have profited from every shortage the war has made. You are the reason the watch at Clearsong starved, because you held the grain in your warehouses and waited for the price to rise. I have the manifests. My sister does not know I have them. The Conclave does not know. But Lord Brindle, who keeps the inner treasury, may guess."

Brindle guessed. Of course he guessed. He had signed the receipts. He had, on three occasions, looked the other way when a wagon's contents did not match its bill of lading, because Halloran's man had come to his office with a purse and a smile, and because Brindle's own accounts would not survive a true audit. He had told himself this was politics. He had told himself this was the price of survival. He had told himself, in the small hours before dawn, that every man in the Reach did the same.

Now a girl in a wool dress was telling him that she knew.

"Your Highness," Brindle said, and his voice climbed higher, almost a whisper. "I am a man of small affairs. I keep books. I count votes. I do not meddle in thrones."

"You meddle every day you open the treasury," Maren said. "You meddle every time you sign a manifest that says Halloran's grain went north when you and I know it went east to his warehouses in the Sapphire Reach. You meddle every time you let a caucus vote pass without raising the count. You have meddled for ten years, my lord. The only question is whether you will meddle for my mother, or for me."

Halloran's smile had not changed. It sat on his face like something carved. "The child has fire," he said. "I will grant her that."

"The child," Maren answered, "is offering you a seat at the regency council. The child is offering Lord Brindle the same. When my mother is set aside, and I take the regency in Oren's name, the treasury will remain in his hand. The southern roads will remain in yours. The war will be fought as it should be fought. The watch will be fed. The Pale Ford will be retaken, or avenged. And the manifests, my lords, will sleep in a drawer where no one will find them."

Brindle looked at Halloran. Halloran looked at Brindle. The torchlight jumped, and for an instant the saffron coat seemed to bleed into the dark.

"A seat," Brindle said. "For me."

"For you," Maren said. "And for Lord Halloran. And for the seventeen lords whose names are on this paper, and for the three we have yet to win."

Brindle's hands were sweating inside his gloves. He could smell the wine rotting in the cask behind him, sour and sweet. He could feel the damp wood of the stool against his thighs. He could hear, very faintly, the river running beneath the floor, a sound like a long held breath.

He thought of his debts. He thought of Halloran's purse. He thought of the queen, who had never once looked at him except to ask after a sum, and who would not look at him again if this failed.

"Your Highness," he said, and his voice rose to its highest, most slippery pitch, "you ask me to commit treason against the crown."

"I ask you to commit prudence for the realm," Maren said. "The crown will wear a different name by winter. The only question is whose."

Halloran pushed off from his cask. He stood straight, his hands still folded, his rings catching the taper's light. "We will need a second meeting," he said. "Smaller. To discuss the matter of the third signature. There is a house on the river whose lord has been unwell," and here his smile thinned, "but whose heir is most eager to please."

"The heir will not do," Maren said. "The lord himself must sign, or the Conclave will not hear it."

"Then we must visit the lord," Halloran said. "And we must bring Lord Brindle, who is so very good with the counting of votes."

Brindle swallowed. The cellar seemed to press in around him, the casks leaning closer, the dark thicker between them. Somewhere above, the castle went on with its small sounds: a bell, a footstep, the creak of a door. Somewhere above, the queen sat at her table and did not eat.

Maren folded the petition and slid it back into her pocket. "Tomorrow," she said. "The third bell after midnight. The same stairs. Bring your gloves, my lords. It is colder than it looks."

She took up her taper and walked toward the far stair, her shadow long behind her, and the cellar was dark except for the torch by the door, and the sound of the river beneath the floor, running and running toward a sea that would not freeze this winter, or any winter after.

The cellar door closed behind her with the soft suck of damp wood against damp wood, and the tapersmoke curled once against the lintel and was gone. Lord Brindle stood where she had left him, his gloves still half on, his throat working on nothing. The torch by the door threw his shadow long across the casks, and then threw it again, doubled, against the far stair, as though there were two of him and both of them were waiting to be told what to do.

Lord Halloran had not moved. He stood with his hands still folded at his waist, his rings dull in the guttering light, and his smile had not altered by a hair. It was the same smile he had worn when he had first laid the petition on the barrelhead, the same smile he had worn when Maren had picked it up. It was the smile of a man who had rehearsed every ending of this scene and was content with the one he had been given.

"Well, my lord," Halloran said, and his voice was warm, was honeyed, was the voice Brindle had heard a hundred times across the table of the caucus, smoothing votes, smoothing objections, smoothing Brindle's own thin protests into acquiescence. "I believe we have our answer."

Brindle swallowed. The cellar smelled of river and tallow and old wine, and beneath those things, faintly, the iron smell of his own sweat. He could feel his pulse in the hollow of his throat, quick and small, the pulse of a small animal that has heard a hound's voice in the next field and knows it has not yet been seen.

"Her Highness is very young," he said, and heard his own voice climb at the end of the sentence, the wheedling rise he could never quite master. "The queen, my lord. Her mother. If she were to learn of this, if it were to come to her ears, I am not at all certain that my position in the caucus, my accounts rather, my lord, would permit me to be seen in such company, in such a cellar, at such an hour."

Halloran tilted his head. The torch popped. A bead of tallow slid down the wall and pooled on the floor and began to set into a small pale shape like a shut eye.

"The queen," Halloran said, "has not slept above four hours a night for seven years. Her eyes are gone. Her temper is shorter than her patience, and her patience was never long. She hears only what Lord Brindle wishes her to hear, and Lord Brindle has been so very good at telling her what she wishes to hear." He stepped closer. The floor was uneven and his boot found a puddle, and the small splash was the loudest sound in the cellar. "Do you think she will trouble herself, in this winter of all winters, to count the votes of a man whose debt to me she does not yet know about? Do you think she will look closely at the cellar?"

Brindle's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"She has other cares," Halloran said. "The northern passes. The Wintersworn. The disappearance of her eldest, which has eaten the light out of her as a moth eats a curtain. The younger princess, who reads books and wears veils and has never held a sword, and who walked into this cellar tonight of her own will and her own mind, and who will walk out of it tomorrow morning with a name no one can take from her."

Somewhere above, a bell rang the small hour. The sound came down the stair like a pebble dropped into a well, and the cellar received it and did not give it back.

"Now," Halloran said, "let us speak of Lord Harren, who is unwell in his house on the river. Let us speak of his heir, who is eager. Let us speak of the third signature, which we shall obtain, with your most valuable assistance, before the first snow."

Brindle heard himself say, "Yes, my lord," and heard how small the words were, how round, like coins dropped one by one into a purse that was already full.

He did not know, as he said it, that on the other side of the east wall, where the cellar's stones gave way to an older passage of brick and damp, a woman stood with her back flat against the wall and her hand over her mouth, and her breath came through her fingers in a thin and shaking mist.

---

The servants' passage ran the length of the east wing and had not been used by any servant in living memory, though every serving woman in the castle knew of it and pretended she did not. It was a relic of an older keep, narrower than a man's shoulders in places, paved with brick that had gone soft with centuries of seepage, and lit at long intervals by the thin grey light of arrow-slit windows half-choked with ivy. Lirien had found it at twelve, when she had been small enough to slip through where the wall had crumbled, and she had used it since whenever she needed to be somewhere she had not been bidden. Tonight she had come down by the back stair, through the disused scullery where the brazier had gone cold, and into the passage, because she had seen Maren's taper moving through the lower windows an hour past and had known that wherever her sister was going, it was not where she had been told to go.

She had not meant to stay. She had meant only to find the door, to look through, to see what Maren was about, and to scold her gently and lead her back to her rooms before the queen's women came to count the candles. But the door had been ajar. And the voice on the other side of it had been Lord Halloran's.

She knew that voice. She had heard it at state dinners, at the receiving of envoys, at the formal audiences her mother held when she could not bear to hold them herself. She had heard it charm the Sapphire Reach caucus into votes that had cost the crown three villages and a stretch of the eastern road. She had heard it laugh, once, in the gallery above the throne room, at something the Winterborn ambassador had said, and the laugh had been the laugh of a man who had already won and was enjoying the slow part of the game.

She knew, too, what that voice could do to her sister. Maren had always been the bright one, the quick one, the one who lived in books and believed the books. She had not been trained to hear the edge beneath the honey. She had been raised in the sunlit southern wing, where the windows were wide and the carpets were thick and the world came to her already shaped into a question with a tidy answer at the back. Lirien had been raised in the training yards of the Citadel. She had been taught to hear the second meaning in any sentence. She had been taught, by the masters who had later forsworn her, that the most dangerous words were the kindest ones.

Through the crack in the door, the cellar's torchlight flickered. Maren's shadow had gone. The two men's shadows remained, one long and one short, and the short one was trembling in a way that shadows do not usually tremble, because the man it belonged to was not standing still.

Lord Halloran was speaking. Lirien pressed her ear to the gap, and the words came through in pieces, as though she were listening through water. The queen. The northern passes. The elder princess who had vanished into the wild seven winters ago and left a hole in the world shaped like a son. The younger princess, who had walked into this cellar of her own will, and would walk out of it with a name no one could take from her.

Lirien closed her eyes. The brick at her back was cold enough to ache, and the damp of it soaked through her sleeve and found the skin beneath. She could taste the cellar on her tongue, river and stone, and beneath that, the faint salt of her own mouth that she had bitten without knowing she had bitten it.

Her sister. Her bright, bookish, wounded sister, who had worn veils to the last three state dinners and who had spoken, only this morning, of how the throne would pass one day to Lirien, and how Maren would be glad of it, glad to be rid of the weight of it, glad to live in a library somewhere with a cat and a cup of tea and no one asking her to be anything but quiet. Lirien had believed her. She had believed her because she wanted to believe her, and because wanting had always been easier than seeing.

Now she heard the truth of it, which was that Maren was not glad of anything, and had not been glad for years, and had been waiting, with the patience of someone who has been left in a sunlit room while her sister learns to fight and her brother vanishes into the snow, for the moment when someone would notice that she was there and ask her what she wanted. And Lord Halloran had asked her. Of course he had asked her. He had asked her very sweetly, and she had said yes.

Through the door, Brindle's voice rose in its thin, oily way. Something about debts. Something about the caucus. Something about being seen in such company. Lirien's hand, still over her mouth, curled into a fist, and her nails bit into the heel of her palm.

She heard Halloran answer. She heard the small splash of a boot in a puddle. She heard the bell above, faint, the small hour. She heard Brindle say yes, my lord, in a voice like a coin dropped into a purse.

Then footsteps. The cellar door opened, and torchlight poured through the crack and blinded her for a moment, and a shape came through, brushing past the wall not a hand's breadth from her face. She smelled the perfume on him, sandalwood and something sharper underneath, and she smelled the sweat, and she knew without looking that it was Lord Brindle, because Lord Brindle was the only man in the queen's household who wore that particular sandalwood, which he had brought back from the Reach in a small bottle and rationed as though it were gold.

He passed. He did not see her. The passage was dark and he was not looking for what was in it. His footsteps went away up the stair, quick and light and wrong, the footsteps of a man who has done a thing he cannot undo and who would very much like, for the next few minutes, not to be himself.

Lirien stayed where she was. The brick at her back had stopped feeling cold and had begun to feel like a thing she was leaning on, and she let it hold her for the length of three breaths, and then she let it go, and she stood upright, and she listened to the cellar on the other side of the wall, where Lord Halloran was humming, very softly, a Reach lullaby that no one in the north had any business knowing.

The cellar door closed behind Lord Brindle with the soft click of an oak latch settling into its socket. He stood in the corridor above, one hand on the wall, the other pressed flat against his own chest, as though he could feel through the ribs and the linen and the skin whether his heart was still where it ought to be, or whether it had crawled up into his throat to be sick at him.

The sandalwood on his collar had gone stale. He could smell the cellar on himself now, the damp of it, the dust, the sour tang of lamp oil, and he pinched the front of his doublet between thumb and forefinger and lifted it from his body, as though the smell were a thing he could shake off if he held his coat at arm's length like a dog with a caught hare.

He could not shake it off.

He had said yes. He had stood in the cellar with Lord Halloran's hand on his shoulder and the grin on that man's face like a lantern swung low, and he had said yes, my lord, in a voice that had not sounded like his own, in a voice like a small coin dropped into a much larger purse. He had said it because the alternative was for the next invoice on his desk, the one with the seal he did not want any of his colleagues to see, to be opened by anyone but Lord Halloran. He had said it because Lord Halloran had made the alternative sound like a thing a man could not survive. And perhaps a man could not. Lord Brindle had never tested the proposition. He had paid.

So now he climbed the stairs to the formal court, and his boots were too loud on the stone, and he kept stopping to listen behind him in case anyone was following who should not have been. The corridor was empty. The palace was asleep around him, or near enough to it; only a few candles burned at the far end, near the great hall, where the hearths had been lit early against the chill that crept in through the northern windows.

He came out into the gallery above the throne room and saw them below, the lords and the ladies and the functionaries of the queen's household, filing into their places with the slow and solemn gravity of men and women who had been told they were going to witness a thing of consequence. They had been told, he understood. Halloran had told them. Halloran had told Maren. Maren had, no doubt, rehearsed.

Lord Brindle took his place in the front row of the lesser lords, where his rank entitled him to stand, and he folded his hands before him, and he smiled the smile he always smiled in public, which was the smile of a man who is pleased to be anywhere, especially here, which was a lie he had been practising since before he could shave.

He did not look at the gallery to his right where, he knew without looking, Lord Halloran was leaning against a pilaster in his blue velvet and his small silver chain, watching the room with an expression of warm interest, like a man at a play he has paid to see.

He did not look at the dais, where the

where the queen's empty throne stood waiting beneath its canopy of frost-white silk, and beside it the lesser chair that Lirien would occupy if she came down from her tower, and beside that nothing at all, because no one had thought to set a place for Maren, which was the first thing that Halloran had paid to ensure.

Brindle felt the sweat prickle at his temples. He could feel the gaze from the gallery, warm as a hand on his shoulder, though he did not turn to confirm it. Halloran was patient. Halloran was always patient. That was the quality that Brindle had failed to appreciate when he had first gone to him with his little problem of the ledgers and the missing silver; he had thought it softness, and he had been wrong, and now he knew it was the patience of a man who has already decided how a thing will end and is content to wait for the world to catch up.

A trumpet sounded, thin and silver in the high vault of the hall, and the queen entered from the far door, and the room bowed as one body, a hundred spines curving in the same practiced arc. Queen Thessaly walked with the slow deliberation of a woman who has learned that haste is a kind of weakness, her black gown trailing over the stones like a shadow, her crown catching the candlelight and throwing it back in small sharp splinters. Behind her, at the proper distance, walked Lirien, and Lirien's face was the face she always wore in public, which was to say it was not a face at all but a mask of pale composure, and her eyes were fixed on some middle distance that no one else in the room could see.

Lirien took her chair. The queen took her throne. And for a long moment nothing happened, and the silence had a texture to it, like velvet drawn over glass, and Brindle stood in his place among the lesser lords and felt his heart knocking against his ribs in a rhythm that was not the rhythm of the court.

Then Maren came through the small door at the side of the dais, the door that was meant for servants and messengers, and she came alone, and she was wearing white.

She was wearing white, and in this court of blacks and greys and the deep blues of the Reach, white was the color of mourning and the color of mourning was the color of declaration, and Brindle understood, with the sudden clarity of a man who has been standing in a dark room and someone has thrown open the curtains, that he had been wrong about what tonight was for. He had thought it was Halloran's move, Halloran's evening, Halloran's patient unfolding of the trap he had been building for the queen since the day her son had walked into the north and not come back. But it was not. It was Maren's.

She walked to the foot of the dais and she stood there, very straight, very small, her white gown pooling on the stones around her like spilled milk, and she held something in her hands. A book. A small leather-bound book, old, the leather cracked and darkened with age, and Brindle could not see what it was from where he stood, but he saw the way the queen's face changed when she saw it, and he saw the way Lirien's hands tightened on the arms of her chair, and he understood that whatever was in that book was a thing that the queen had believed was lost, or a thing that the queen had believed was buried, or a thing that the queen had believed would never be spoken of again.

"Mother," Maren said, and her voice was clear and bright and carried to every corner of the high hall, and it was the voice of a girl who has rehearsed this speech a thousand times in her mirror and has finally, at last, been allowed to speak it aloud. "I have found the letters."

The room did not move. The room did not breathe. Brindle felt the air in his lungs turn to stone, and he felt, with the precision of a man who has spent his life counting small coins and balancing small ledgers, the exact weight of the silence that followed, and he knew that whatever was in those letters was a thing that would unmake someone, and he knew that he was going to have to choose, very soon, whose unmaking he was willing to pay for.

He glanced, without meaning to, toward the gallery, and Halloran was there, leaning against his pilaster, and his face was not the face of a man who has been surprised. His face was the face of a man who has been given a gift he did not expect but is not unwilling to receive, and he was smiling, and the smile was warm, and the smile was the smile of a man who is already calculating what this new thing is worth and to whom he ought to sell it.

Brindle closed his eyes. He thought of the ledgers. He thought of the silver. He thought of the small, cold room where Captain Dreya had left him, and the cup of water she had not offered him, and the sword on her hip that she had not needed to draw because the sword was not the point. The point was that he was already caught. The point was that he had been caught since the day he had first gone to Halloran with his hand out, and every kindness since then, every small favor, every patient smile, had been the drawing in of a net he had not seen because it was made of silk and not of rope.

He opened his eyes. Maren was speaking. He did not hear the words. He heard the tone, which was steady, and he saw the queen's hands, which were trembling, and he saw Lirien, who had risen from her chair and was standing very still with one hand on the back of it, as though she had forgotten what she had meant to do next.

Then Halloran moved. Brindle saw him detach himself from the pilaster and begin to walk along the gallery toward the stairs that would bring him down into the hall, and he was walking with the unhurried grace of a man who has all the time in the world, and Brindle knew, with the certainty of a man who has spent his life reading the small movements of powerful men, that Halloran was going to speak, and that when he spoke he would say something that would sound like wisdom and would taste like poison, and that Brindle would be expected to second it, because Brindle was his, and had been his, and would be his until the debt was paid or the debtor was spent.

But Maren was not looking at Halloran. Maren was looking at the queen. And the queen, for the first time that Brindle had ever seen in all his years of attendance at court, was looking back at her youngest daughter as though she had never seen her before, or as though she was seeing her now for the first time, and the look on the queen's face was not anger and it was not grief and it was not the cold regal composure of the throne.

It was fear.

And Brindle, standing in his place among the lesser lords, with his hands folded before him and his smile fixed and his heart knocking against his ribs, made a small decision. It was not a brave decision. It was not a noble one. It was the decision of a man who has been pushed to the edge of a thing he has been falling toward for a long time, and who has at last decided that the only way out is through. He uncrossed his hands. He stepped out of his place. And he walked forward, into the open space before the dais, into the sightline of every lord and lady and functionary in the hall, and he bowed, low, to the queen, and then he turned, and he bowed, lower, to Maren, and he said, in a voice that was thin and oily and shaking only a little, "My lady. I believe I can help you with that."

The room inhaled. Halloran, on the stairs, stopped walking.

And Maren, who had not expected this, who had rehearsed a thousand versions of this evening and none of them had included Lord Brindle stepping forward from the lesser lords to offer his assistance, looked down at him from the dais with her bright clear eyes, and her mouth opened, and then it closed, and then it opened again, and she said, very softly, "Yes. I believe you can."

The candles guttered in their sconces. The queen sat very still upon her throne. And somewhere in the north, beyond the windows, beyond the walls, beyond the reach of any of them, the wind was beginning to rise.