The chapel smelled of beeswax and lemon rinds — the sort of clean smell the priests liked to pretend was holiness. Sunlight cut through the high windows in bars and fell across the stone like spears. They had brought the Sun Temple staff to bear for the day: garlands, open altars, and the sort of ceremonial robes that made people feel for a moment as though the world could be ordered and kept.
Kaelen stood with his hand on the marble rail and tried to imagine the rest of his life as something that could be located by a vow. Seraphine Serefin stood opposite him, pale and small beneath the carved beams, holding a single orange blossom as if it were the only thing real in the room. She smiled with a practiced gentleness; she knew the answers people wanted and kept her own like a locket against her breast.
"You don't look like a man who enjoys vows," she said, quietly, when no priest listened.
"I don't," Kaelen admitted. "I look like a man who is being made to wear someone else's armor."
She laughed, and it was brief and not angry. "Then we should choose the armor you can move in."
He wanted to tell her how grateful he was that she had agreed — not because of paperwork or alliance, but because she had unexpectedly, quietly, offered her voice against the many that would tell him what to do. He didn't have the words, so he simply offered the smallest, clumsy smile he could manage. The grin made a few of the guards at the back of the chapel relax.
Outside the heavy doors stood the folds of the court — Roderin with the responsibility of frost in his face, Mariya with her ledgered kindness, a dozen lesser lords aligning themselves like waiting teeth. In the corners, gossipers made wagers on tomorrow's bread. The Sun Priests arranged the ceremony like chessmen; Father Malric watched from a pew like a man reading the underside of things.
When the betrothal was announced and the terms read — lands secured, coin promised, the Serefin grain routes committed to the capital in exchange for royal authority over local judges — people clapped in a rhythm that matched the beating in Kaelen's chest. The more practical half of the court cheered at the lines about supply chains and food. The romantic half, such as it was, applauded the pageantry.
"May your table never be empty," the High Priest intoned. The words were old and flat, but when the congregation said amen, the sound filled the space and made Kaelen think for a second that maybe there could be order after all.
Mariya squeezed her daughter's sleeve with a grip that was both fond and businesslike. Seraphine's smile flickered. She was not naïve; she knew that marrying a prince did not mean suddenly having a life of one's own. It meant carrying a nation in your pocket.
After the ceremony there were toasts — wine, thin bread, faces turned bright. The courtyard had been prepared for it: long tables, braziers that smoked and glinted, carvers beating the meat into order. People talked louder when they drank and secrets softened at the edges.
Kaelen and Seraphine walked between tables to acknowledge the small thanks and the obsequious and the true. Elara fell into step at Kaelen's shoulder like a hawk that did not leave its prey. Her stare cut a swath across the courtiers; she had the patience of someone who could also cut short any attempt at falsehood with her blade.
"Keep your eyes up," she murmured, only to him.
"I promised the priests to be seen as a sovereign," he replied. "If I faint, it will be bad for the brand."
"You faint, I'll carry you," she said, and the bare words were odd and human enough that Kaelen almost laughed.
When the feast reached the point where men began to forget about being diplomatic and started repairing old grievances with wine, a page darted through with a face like wet paper. He should not have been there in that manner, but the court never quite managed to stop people who had news.
"There was trouble by the west gate," he said just loudly enough. "A blast. Captain Alric is dead."
Silence slanted sharp across the courtyard. Someone swore, hand knives flashing. Alric's face came to Kaelen without effort: a round, dry face who'd taught the prince to hold reins and to take a hit. Alric had been around since Kaelen had been a boy who still believed in clear roads and honest men. He had been a safe face in a palace where faces were often masks.
"How?" Kaelen asked. His voice came out thin; everyone could hear it. He wanted to believe it was accident — a carriage wheel that split, a careless lantern — but the page's eyes were flat and not young.
"A bolt from a crossbow, my prince. From the parapet. It struck him as he turned."
Crossbows were a specialized tool. They required either a hand skilled in engineering, or a mercenary who had practiced the slow, patient art of killing. Bolts did not fly by accident.
"By the west parapet?" Elara said at once, moving as if she were a dog that had smelled the right foot. Her hand tightened on the hilt of the short blade she kept beneath her cloak. Guards already had their draws; the courtyard's disorder folded into swift, practiced order. Men who had drunk now straightened and snapped into the kind of efficiency battle expects.
Someone cried that they had seen a flash of cloth, dark against the battlement, a hand flinging something like a smoking pot. Another voice said the bolt must have been aimed. Shouts choked the air into a braid of fact and guess.
They ran. Kaelen felt the world narrow to the sound of his boots and the breathing in his ears. He thought of his father on the bed and the line of succession frayed like rope; he thought of Alric's round, dry face now flattened into something that should not breathe again.
They reached the west gate in time to see the body and the bolt and the smear where blood had fallen. Men clustered and argued. Some wanted immediate execution, some wanted to question. That was the thing about courts: reaction and diplomacy both insisted on being the right action. Bria Arland — broad-shouldered, hair braided tight — arrived with two of her father's men. She knelt by Alric as if testing for a pulse she knew would never be. Bria's hands had known ring and lance and thunder; she did not carry ceremony in her motions.
"This was meant to start something," she told Kaelen, chest heaving, eyes hard. "They aimed for the prince, but the wind—or the timing—took the wrong throat."
Kaelen wanted to ask "who?" and to have the answer land like a blade. Instead he looked at the bolt, at its lead head and its shaft smeared with a varnish that reeked faintly of pine pitch. Someone had taken the trouble to weather it, to make it look as though it had been used.
"Find who manned the wall," Bria said, words like commands. "Question every sentry. Check the smith's ledger. No one leaves."
Guards moved. The palace had an efficiency when it wanted: names taken, faces called, stables ordered. Bria stood and looked at the parapet with a soldier's consideration and found a smear of black on the coping — not blood but oil, the kind you used to make sure ropes moved smooth. She sniffed it like it would tell her what language the man had spoken.
"You used pitch," she observed. "Someone used pitch to keep a cord from creaking. That man or woman wanted the bolt to sing true — no rattles, no snags."
"Mercenaries would do that," Elara said quietly. "And who hires mercenaries in the city? Who pays a man to take a prince's life?" Her voice held a tiredness Kaelen had not heard before.
Isolde Derven stepped forward, drawn by the same hunger that had made her pocket the scribe's list the night before. "There was a trader at the south gate selling black tar," she said. "And he had a young boy with him—no sigils, but he had a fur scrap tied to his belt. It looked northern."
Roderin, who had been watching like a man watching a map for fissures, frowned as if a stone had taken his thought. He moved; his presence made space for him the same way winter makes space for itself. "Northern colors? Did you see—"
"Wolf's fur," Isolde said. "A small scrap. Not the noble fur, but the hunter's scrap. It was caught in the boy's belt. He paid with coin that smelled like someone had washed it to hide the origin."
The courtyard swirled with voices. Accusations are funny things: they gather speed the moment you let them out. Kaelen felt the weight of them settle on him. If Morvannis was implicated — even by a scrap of fur and a trader's ledger — the consequences would not stop at argument. Northern banners moved like storms. A word like "north" could start a war in a week.
Bria took command in the only way she knew: direct action. "Take the boy, question the trader," she said. "Search the barracks for men with wolf's fur. Scribe, fetch Alric's ledger — see who spoke with him on watch last night."
The search produced small, bright things: a smear of fur in a gutter behind the smithy; a half-burned scrap of cloth with a crude mark. It was not a clear indictment. It never is at first. People who plan murder know to make their work look like the weather.
Meanwhile, Seraphine hovered near Kaelen as if her nearness could be like bandage. Her hands trembled when she touched his sleeve. Men saw it and mistook it for weakness; Kaelen saw it and felt steadied. She had been trained to marry advantage, to take alliances as one might take an odd tool into the chest — useful, but not warm. Today she brought warmth and it kept him from feeling swallowed.
Varin Taerol came, late and smelling of rain and earth. He stood under the west parapet and looked at the bolt and, for a moment, at nothing people could name. "Not all weapons are made by men's hands alone," he said, voice low. "Some are lent by fear, some by skill, and some by those who have long memories of binding magic to tool."
"Magic?" one of the captains scoffed openly.
Varin did not meet his eye. "I mean nothing more than craft," he said. "A bolt that sings true is as likely to be the craftsman's art as the archer's cross hand. Look for who knows the smiths. Ask the men who taught crossbows to the guards in the last year."
Bria's jaw tightened. "Name them. I want names."
The palace was suddenly smaller, as if walls had folded in to make space for a new threat. Names had been dropped: northern scrap, black pitch, a trader at the south gate. Each was a bead in a chain that felt like it could hold heavy things.
When they finally dragged the boy before them — a thin, sullen thing with a scar at one lip — he would not speak at first. But Bria had a way of looking; she had the patience to press until breath came out like confession. He muttered a name: "Garrin. He pays. Big-man Garrin from the southwards."
"Garrin," the guards repeated, as if speaking it would shape it into useful law. Someone attacked the name with the ledger and found a list of coin disbursed, scribbled in a hand that tried for neatness and failed under hurry.
It was a start. Not proof. Not enough.
Kaelen felt the start of a fever rise in him — not of sickness but of a new understanding. To keep the line he had to be more than ceremony. He had to be the thing men believed in when the lights dropped low. The choice in front of him had become a point of steel.
At the edge of the court, Roderin watched him and said nothing. His silence was a thing that could be interpreted like the rest — as calculation, as confidence, as threat. Kaelen could not tell which.
That night, Seraphine sat with him in a small room lit by a single lamp and spoke without ceremony. "If this is Morvannis," she said, "we will have to be crueler than we like."
"We might have to be crueler than we are," Kaelen answered. The sentence felt like an admission and a vow both.
She reached for his hand then, around the simple meaning of being human. "Then we must choose what kind of cruelty," she said. "For a throne? For a people? For the idea of a shape that keeps the farms fed?"
He looked at her and, for once, the future did not seem like a weight so much as a direction. "For the people," he said finally. The truth made the room colder and somehow clearer.
Outside, the city did not sleep. Lanterns bobbed. Men with wolf-fur scrap and men without walked the same streets. Someone in the dark drank and wondered what price they had bought. Someone else knelt and prayed for nothing more than another day.
And in the palace, Bria unrolled the smudged cloth and turned it over in her hands as if a clue might reveal its secret by being handled with care. She looked at Kaelen with an honesty that did not flatter and said, "If you want answers, you will have to stand where men can see you. Lead, or the lead will find you."
Kaelen folded the blanket around his shoulders and nodded. He had been a prince in the way you wear a name until now. He had never been the thing men shaped by fear and hope. Tonight he learned, tasting the ash of Alric's blood in the air, what it meant to start.