The capital had a way of pretending everything was fine until it could not pretend any longer. When Kaelen rode through the gate the next morning, the city was all flags and forced smiles, but the edges had gone ragged: market stalls with half their wares, people with eyes that did not trust the sun, and children who watched soldiers like they watched storms. The rumor of the Echoing Temple had already become a dozen conversations, each angling it to someone else's interests. That was how cities worked: truth arrived as gossip and left as weaponry.
He found his father in the same bed where the Prince had last stood watch. Emperor Alorin's hands were thin as carved wood, and the color had gone slow from his face the way a stain bleaches. The physician did not try to lie. There was a look in his face that said a man does what men do with their tools and sometimes the tools run out.
Kaelen sat and took his father's hand without ceremony. He'd learned not to perform grief; grief performed you if you let it.
"Do not let them break it," Alorin said in a voice that sounded like it dragged at rope. His eyes were sharp, oddly young for a dying man. "The line is not a throne. It's a promise. Keep it whole."
"Father," Kaelen said. No grand orations. Just the three syllables that held a life.
Alorin's fingers flexed, then stilled. For a breath too long the room did not feel like a place full of men, only two, and then the physician, the Empress Dowager, the priests. The emperor exhaled once, and then he did not breathe again.
The ripple in the palace was not dramatic: no clanging bells in each ear, only men who folded into the fact and moved to do the things that did not look like mourning. The court had its needs: a dead emperor was an absence that invited knives. Kaelen stood as if someone had placed a crown on a child — the weight was not literal yet but it settled into the shoulders.
They kept the funeral private — a small procession to the Sun Temple, a prayer that smelled of citrus and beeswax. The Empress Dowager moved through it like a woman who had always been excellent at supervised sorrow. Seraphine moved with a pale steadiness that made people whisper that she was the right choice for a prince who needed softness and backbone at once.
In the council, things mouthed the niceties. Roderin Morvannis paid his condolences in the way of men who never truly leave their faces at rest. Mariya Serefin spoke with that ledger-sound, careful and kind enough to be dangerous. Bria and Jorund argued about troop placement in a low voice that suggested practicality rather than war-mongering. Harlan kept to the doorway, the wolf of the men he commanded more visible than his opinions.
The crown was put on Kaelen's head in a hand that trembled less than he did. There was no time to spin out a coronation the way poets did in stories. The north might move, the traders might panic, the peasants might decide a new weight on heads meant lighter coin. He swore the oaths with the same lips that had already promised Harlan grain, and it felt like pouring water into a cup that had a slow leak.
"You should not do this," Varin said later, alone, in the private council chamber where plans tended to smell of ink and fear. He looked like he always did after long rides: damp, as if the weather had decided to live on him. "Magic is not a curtain you pull after a funeral. It is a thing you feed and it feeds back."
"I know," Kaelen said. He had been wearing the crown for too little time to feel its teeth, but he felt their bite. "We need more than prayers. We need people to keep the roads."
"You ask the temples for help, and they ask for payment," Varin said. "You accept their terms, and the bill carries a strange currency."
Before Kaelen could answer, the court drums were set — not the celebratory kind but the drums of a feast to seal alliances and show a steady face. They would wash grief into ceremony and, if the gods favored him, make the city see a new king and not a kingdom teetering.
The feast was a carefully choreographed thing. Long tables, platters so large the walls whispered jealousy, cups raised in a rhythm like a heartbeat. Aldric — Chancellor Aldric — stood at the head and made a speech in the old way, praising continuity, praising the dead for their diligence. He finished and then, something like a bought delay, clapped his hands and the hall responded with the practiced applause of men who had learned to adore form.
Kaelen was halfway through a reply when the sound came — not an explosion the way war tells it in the books, but a tearing sweetness of air, a scorched wind that made a dozen torches flare and go dead and threw people back from their chairs like someone had shoved a tablecloth away from a meal. A heat like a hand smacked the side of the hall. Someone screamed and it turned the noise into a warm wet thing.
Aldric hit the floor with a hollow sound. A chunk of the high table had been blown where he sat; the flesh of his chest had been turned inward by something brutal and intimate. Men around him bled like fountains. The air filled with the smell of burned meat and metal and old wine. For a few seconds everyone had no grammar for what had just happened.
"Get out!" someone yelled, and the palace turned into a single animal trying to push itself out of a trap. Chairs overturned. Servants cried. Swords flashed, not as ceremony but as blunt, honest threat. Kaelen found himself on his feet and moving, not thinking about the crown as an ornament but as weight a man had to wear to be visible.
When the dust settled and men picked their way through the bodies and smears of blood and overturned platters, the damage was a jumble of names. Fifteen dead — nobles and servants and a boy who'd been carrying wine. Chancellor Aldric was not among the living.
"Who did this?" Bria asked, voice raw. Men answered with a dozen small things: a whisper that someone had unrolled a cloth like a fuse, a note that a page had run out minutes before and not come back. Then someone found pieces — charred thread with an insignia, blackened embossing like a seal.
The seal matched a Valtra sigil on paper that had been shoved beneath the Chancellor's chair. The paper itself was a note in Kaelen's cousin Renard's hand — a hurried scrawl promising the Chancellor silence on some levy adjustment, a thing that could be read as a favor or a bribe. The guard who found it stared at the script and looked like the world had narrowed into a single, sharp scent.
"It's planted," Kaelen said immediately, because the idea of Renard — a man who'd always wanted the better spoils of the court — jumping so clumsily into murder felt off. "Renard is a greedy man, but he is not..."
"Not careless," Varin finished for him. The old man's eyes had the way of someone reading a page he could not unsee. "No. No one plants such a thing and calls it a clue unless they want the noise to go where it will hurt you."
Murmurs became accusation like threads finding hooks. Roderin's face closed into a stone as he watched; he did not strike, but he shifted as if he might. Mariya's hands went white around her cup. Seraphine crouched by Aldric's body, face stilled by grief into a mask that fit in a way masks rarely do.
In the days that followed the city became a boiling pot. Renard denied everything and tried to leave the capital in a panic. Guards stopped him at the gate. No trial yet, only the shackles of suspicion. Voices in the market called for Renard's head. Houses took sides like cats aligning with thieves; even allies made the point to step back.
"You have to understand this," Mariya told Kaelen in the hush of the private gardens. Her voice was small, the size of a ledger moved by a trembling hand. "You are a new king. A new king is a blade for everyone to test. If Renard is a scapegoat — if someone set him up — then the people will not see that. They will see a Valtra who'd murder his own for advantage."
"I didn't order it," Kaelen said. He had lived long enough to know a voice denied is not always believed. "Someone wants me to look weak, or dangerous. Or both. Someone wants a war."
"You should have allies you can trust," Mariya said. "People who will answer without the ledger and speak from bone."
He thought of Bria, of Seraphine's quiet steadiness, of Varin's careful menace, of Harlan's crude honesty. He thought of Cai, and how betrayals cut differently when the traitor died in his own blood. "I know who I trust," he said, but the words meant less than he wanted them to.
Varin did not pretend to politeness on this matter. He had been to left-over temples, he had seen beads and spoken pieces of a future that made men sick in the chest, and he did not have patience for soft arguments.
"You need protection beyond steel," he told Kaelen one night, voice low. "I can promise some things, but I will not lie: if the thing that killed Aldric had any art to it beyond a pyre, then it may be beyond the reach of simple men. The bead remembers bargains; men remember price. Somethings do not die when they go."
"You mean magic," Kaelen said.
Varin shrugged. "I mean a reality other men will call superstition. Use it badly and you become a monster to your own people. Use it well and you can buy an hour or an army. It is not clean, but neither is murder at a feast."
Before Kaelen could answer, a rider, pale as a drowned man, came for the court. He brought a note: Renard's servant had been found trying to flee with gold sewn into the seams of his cloak. The word "guilty" began to circulate like a chant. The Empress Dowager, with a face closed like a fist, demanded justice. Roderin, with all the cold soap of a man who smelled opportunity, called for swift hearings.
The council assembled and tempers flared. Mariya, who had been careful with her words, resigned from her position at Kaelen's hand. "I will not be used as a prop," she told the chamber. "If the crown will not pursue truth but punishment, I will not lend it my trust." Her resignation was a small thing that said much: a request for distance, a refusal to endorse a narrative.
The streets filled with rumors. "He must be punished," cried some. "They framed him," said others, and the lines of loyalty shifted like sand.
Kaelen moved through it like a man trying to thread a needle with a rope. He had to be decisive and yet not trigger a war. He ordered an investigation, but what is an investigation in a place where ink can be bought and knives can be given as gifts? He ordered the gates sealed. He sent Harlan out to watch the roads and Bria to marshal the remaining loyal hosts. He set a watch detail for Renard and demanded proof.
But proof is an unruly animal. Even when a ledger bears a signature, signatures can be forged; when a man has motive, motive can also be planted. In the middle of logic, the city wanted a throat.
That night Kaelen visited Aldric's body. The old Chancellor had been a fixture of the court — steadier than ministers and plainer than friends. His eyes were open as if asking who had stolen the color from the world. Seraphine stood by the bier, hair undone and face streaked. When Kaelen approached she offered him a piece of the man he had lost: the Chancellor's ring.
"He warned me once," Seraphine said quietly. "About trusting words that sound like promises. He said it was better to be poor and honest than fat with stolen coin."
"You were close to him," Kaelen said.
"We were friends," she answered. "Once. He taught me what it meant to carry responsibility without being crushed by it."
Her voice crumbled like old stone. Kaelen found his own vow fragile against it. He wrapped the ring in his fingers and let the heat of it be a small, private thing.
Outside the hall, the city throbbed. Renard sat in a cell while men argued his fate. The northerners watched and read the moment with the coldness of men who plan wars like harvests. Kaelen realized, with a dull, sinking certainty, that this was not an accident. Someone had used the funeral light and the coronation's show to make a blade speak in a hall full of the people he needed. Someone wanted the conversation to be about treason and not about relief or grain or the old temples.
He thought of Varin's words about price and beads and bargains. He thought of Cael and the small things the boy had given up to make a light in a pass. He thought of Aldric's face, stern and gone. At the edge of his vision Roderin leaned into the shadow and watched a prince who suddenly had more enemies than friends.
Kaelen walked out into a night that smelled of burned food and iron. The crown on his head leaned into his thoughts like a weight. He could feel the empire's hunger in his palms. He had promised to bind the line. Now binding looked like taking blows and weighing them against the price of peace.
Someone whispering the name Renard would be satisfied. Someone who'd planned this wanted that satisfaction to be full voice. Kaelen understood, with the sharpness of a man who has been cut and learned he can still move, that he had to choose: fight the war everyone expected, or find the hidden hand that had lit the feast and pull it out into daylight.
He closed his fist around Aldric's ring and felt the cold metal bite his palm like a reminder. The city around him needed bread and protection and a man who might, improbably, hold to the fragile notion of justice. He had been crowned, but a crown was nothing but an idea until he could make it mean something more than vengeance.
At the edge of the palace, a shadow detached itself from the great archway. For a moment Kaelen thought it was Roderin, testing him with a face like stone. It was only a page: breathless, pale, with a scrap of news. The page handed him a folded paper; inside it was a single line, not inked by any known hand, but cut with the logic of threat.
*Keep your crown whole, or see it burn with those who wore it before.*
The page's eyes were wide. He fled before Kaelen could speak. Kaelen folded the paper and put it in his pocket. The night felt thinner now, as if a breeze had come that wanted to rearrange the city.
He went back to the chamber where the dead lay and stood with Seraphine until morning came. They spoke, quietly, of small things: a book Aldric had loved, a tutor's lesson Seraphine remembered. They did not, in those moments, plan sieges or hold councils. They held the soft things because softness was rare.
But outside, the hard things organized themselves. Men sharpened blades. Merchants counted coins. Varin looked at a map and did not say much. Renard called for a trial. Roderin tested his coldness like a blade.
And in the quiet, Kaelen wrapped the ring in a cloth and tucked it under his tunic. It felt like a pebble in his chest. He had to find the hand that set the feast on fire. Whatever the cost, whatever currency it required — blood, alliance, or a bargain with old ghosts — he would have to pay it. The empire had been given a week of flame to see who would survive it; Kaelen had to decide which fires to feed and which to smother.