They buried Cael on a low rise that overlooked the road south. The earth there bit quietly at the soles of anyone who stood upon it; it was small and practical enough that peasants could come without feeling like guests in a noble house. Kaelen had chosen the place with a bluntness that surprised him later — he'd wanted the dead boy to have a road beneath his hill so people would pass, remember, and maybe learn something from that motion of memory.
Bria stood with a braid of her hair bound beneath a flat stone; Isolde had tucked a scribbled scrap — the ledger entry Cael had once tried to make sense of — into his wrapped hands. Varin would not kneel; he only stooped, and in the way he moved there was the weight of a man who had given a thing away and had been left with more questions than guilt. Father Malric said a short prayer pitched in moon-low tones and left the rest to silence.
Later, when the ranks had thinned and the world felt small and honest, Kaelen sat on the grave's edge with his crown under his arm and let the wind take his hair. He wanted to make the memory tally with action: new grain patrols, better medical posts at the passes, a reward promised to the families of the fallen. He read the list and folded it; the ledger would be made, and then they would argue about it for years.
"You gave him a proper farewell," Bria said quietly. The words were simple. She had a bandage wrapped under her arm and grit in her hair. She leaned with one shoulder on a spear that did not belong as a leaning stick.
"He gave more than he was owed," Kaelen answered. "We have to make it mean something."
"You will mark the day," she said. "You will name a watch, a hospital—something that is not just a story."
He nodded. It felt good and small to promise that. Promises were the instruments of government and also, in the wrong hands, instruments of betrayal. He thought of Renard sitting in a cell, of Aldric's body lying under white linen, of Thorne's capture. The ledger was crowded; he felt guilty even thinking about parchments.
They organized the captured first: prisoners counted, the wounded tended, Thorne led under guard into a hall where banners hung, still proud and singed. Kaelen watched the man in irons — Thorne's scarred nostrils flared like someone who still had a breath of contempt to spare. The Morvannis captain did not plead; he simply waited for the next move with the patience of a man who expected the rules of men to bend and snap like rope.
"You will not kill him," Bria said before any counsel could craft its voice. She had the stubbornness of a thing raised on the notion that justice needed bones to be honest about it.
"I won't do it like that," Kaelen said. He knew the spectacle of blood could be as useful in binding a people as mercy. He also knew executions in public might feed Roderin's tale that the capital was a tyrant. Authority had to be measured now; cruelty could not be foreign to them, but it could not be the only language.
They called a council. The chamber's map was ringed with people who wanted two things: to be useful, and to be seen to be useful. Jorund argued for immediate movement: fortify, march, test Roderin's resolve with targeted strikes. Mariya — she had not returned full time to court but monitored things like a ledger of weather — argued for shoring up grain rotation and opening a temporary relief fund. Harlan wanted to raid supply paths and cut the north's logistics. Varin wanted the bead sealed. Father Malric wanted more prayer and less ostentation. The room smelled like stew gone cold and iron.
Roderin's envoy arrived with the politeness of a man spoiled by long winters. He demanded Thorne's release and a parley in neutral territory. He called Kaelen's victory a "skirmish of circumstance" and offered to keep his men in the north if Thorne were returned and the Valtra would allow a governor of the North to levy for winter. It was elegant: a line that read like law and hid hunger.
Kaelen listened as if he were taking the measure of a blade. "We will not return a captured commander without trial," he said. "We will open a formal parley and let neutral observers attend. If you truly want peace, you will not insist on the man's freedom before an account of his actions."
Roderin's man smelled faintly of pine and brass. "You will do that or watch the North close its markets and starve your trade," he said.
"Or watch the North keep its markets and call us tyrants," Bria shot back. Her voice had the taste of old bread sliced lean.
The envoy left with a warning tunneled into his gait. Kaelen felt the city's skin itch with new irritation. The council's votes split like a bone under pressure. Kaelen made a decision that balanced law and leverage: Thorne would be held in the capital, publicly treated, allowed counsel; a neutral envoy from a minor house would observe the tribunal; and a temporary truce would be proposed if Roderin withdrew to his home territory and turned over any traders proven to have supplied irregular funds.
It satisfied no one fully. That was its strength.
Meanwhile a quieter storm brewed. Isolde and Caden had been running small nets in the city, and they brought Kaelen a list of merchants and ships suspected in the southern shipments to the North. The ledger entries matched the charred paper found at the feast. The evidence was thin and sewn with plausible innocence, but patterns built like coals: certain merchants had been moving sacks at night; certain harbourmasters had looked the other way.
"We can seize the ships," Isolde said. "But if we take goods without proof we will ruin the city's trust."
"We will take and receipt," Kaelen said. "If goods are cleared of treason we return them with apology and compensation. If not — they pay the price."
"Then do it," she said. "Now." Her face had the hard line of someone who'd learned both how to lie and to catch lies.
They moved that night. Sailors woke to men with warrants, to doors forced, to ledgers combed, and to a city that remembered its stomach more quickly than its sense of fairness. Some merchants protested; a few were arrested and found with goods bound for northern buyers. A small ship attempted to sail under cover of darkness and was intercepted at the mouth of the harbor; its captain swore and then went quiet when the manifests were compared to crates. They found coin hidden in false barrels; they found seals that matched papers from palaces in the north. The arrests were not clean — merchants with debts paid the remainder in silence — but the seizure hit the North's logistics in a way that was immediate and visible.
That night Roderin's envoy rode back with a sharper tone. "You press us and we will respond," he said. "If your merchants take a single grain meant for the north, your markets will starve."
"Then we will balance supplies and stamp receipts in full view," Kaelen said. He realized as he said it that trade could be made a weapon, and that sometimes a weapon and a promise must be held at the same time.
The morale in the capital flickered. Households that had cheered the prince's ride at Vesper now muttered about men who died. Varin's sealing of the bead made some priests mutter that the capital now trafficked in gods. The Brotherhood of the Eternal Dawn — who'd sung Kaelen's praise in public — took to offering guards and sacraments in the markets. It was useful, dangerous attention: the Brotherhood's support brought volunteers, but their presence also made temples a political force in the open.
At dawn a new, small outrage arrived on Kaelen's desk: Renard had been attacked in his cell — not killed but left with a scar that mapped someone's message.
The guards found a crudely carved rune pressed into his skin. Renard whispered, in a voice broken by betrayal and fear, that a masked man had visited his window and promised anything to make him confess to a crime he had not committed. "They wanted me to say I signed Aldric's note," Renard told them. "I refused and they burned me to make me speak like a traitor."
The city smelled of paranoia again. Kaelen wondered how many hands had been used to pull the feast into flames. Someone wanted the court to break into factions. Someone wanted a war full and raw.
That afternoon Varin came to Kaelen in private. He had the bead in a leather pouch and a map of temple holdings on the table between them. "There are other temples," he said. "Not all of them friendly. Some orders will see our use of old things and decide you are a man who will bargain with ghosts. Others will see it as heresy. Either way, some will move."
"You mean some will fight us," Kaelen said.
"Some will try to take the bead," Varin answered bluntly. "Others will use the chance to declare you the man who usurped gods. The bead is a small thing; men's greed is large."
Kaelen thought of Cael again, and how the boy's lungs had been folded into the bargain. "Then we must protect what we use and be clearer about why we did," he said. "We must make the public see that it was a defense, not a weaponized god."
"You can tell them until your voice is hoarse," Varin said. "But people choose the story that gives them comfort. Those with sharp teeth will choose the tale that brings them profit or fear."
That night, as Kaelen walked the parapets and watched the city's lights like a scatter of small stars, he realized how thin the veneer of rulership was. He had bought time and lost a boy. He had captured a captain and not yet cured the wound of betrayal. He had a crown and a ledger and an ocean of small, urgent decisions.
He took out Aldric's ring and rolled it between his fingers. It was the size of a promise. He slid it into his pocket and felt its weight.
Below him, a rider came with a torch and a swift gait. The rider stopped and handed a sealed scroll to a waiting scribe. It bore a single line — not a threat but an offer, neat and barbed:
*Meet me at the Willowford bridge at midnight. No guards. No envoys. Come alone if you want the truth about the feast.*
The rider left before Kaelen could answer. The scroll's seal was anonymous. It had the smell of wet roads and last-minute bargains. Kaelen held it until the ink warmed a little, then tucked it into his breast.
He understood the ugly arithmetic: if he went alone, he might get the truth; he might also be dead before dawn. If he sent men, he might lose the chance to hear an unvarnished confession. If he ignored it, the whisper that someone in his own circle set the feast alight might swell into riot.
He folded the crown onto the table and felt the room spin with decisions like a wheel. Dawn would come eventually; between then and now the world asked of him a choice no man should make unprepared. He pressed his palm flat on the table and let the wood keep him steady. He would go to Willowford. But he would not go alone. He would take one man he trusted and one man who could be trusted to be necessary if the night turned knife.
He put the page into his pocket and chose the two: Bria and Isolde.
The city slept uneasy under a crown that smelled of ash. The first arc's frost had cracked; the war lines were being sketched in fresh ink. In the quiet, Kaelen felt the echo of Cael's sacrifice as a chisel in the stone of his days. He had bought a dawn. The question was always the same: at what further price would the empire survive the bargain?