Vorath's head lowered until one vast eye was level with them. "And you, flail-bearer. You came to wake me for a claim. I am awake. Your claim remains contested. Leave your employers that news. If you raise that iron again in my chamber for theater, I will take the hand that holds it, and I will not call it justice. I will call it housekeeping."
Morthen studied the claw, the couple, the dragon. He was many things; stupid was not among them. He hooked the flail to his belt with a practiced motion. The spikes left a faint scratched glitter on his cloak.
"Three days," he said. "Clerks. Chains. Your uncle will be invited to watch. Lady Solenne—your sister eats well, for now. Remember that 'for now' is a Grell specialty."
He backed toward the doors, never fully turning his back until he reached the corridor. Then he was gone into the torchlit stone, footsteps fading, leaving only the smell of cold iron and the torn place in Lucen's cloak.
Silence returned in pieces.
Vorath folded his wings with care, as if aggression had been a tool set back on a shelf. The dragon did not lie down fully. He settled into a watchful crouch, head high enough to see the doors.
"You are bleeding on my floor," Vorath observed.
Lucen huffed a breath that wanted to be a laugh and could not afford it. "I apologize for the housekeeping."
"Bind it," Vorath said. "Then sit. We begin the season with honesty, not with posture."
Brynna tore a strip from the inner lining of Lucen's ruined cloak—dark cloth, clean enough—and bound his upper arm with hands that shook only after the knot was tied. Close to him, she smelled of cold stone and the faint sweet oil she used in her hair before councils. Lucen wanted to apologize for the corridor, for the doors, for Morthen, for the uncle, for every hinge in the world. He said none of that. He said, "Thank you," and meant the bandage and the staying both.
They sat on the edge of a floor channel like two people who had missed the last respectable chair. Vorath watched them the way a mountain watched weather: not unkind, not soft.
"Ask," the dragon said.
Brynna went first, because waiting would have turned her questions into weapons. "Why bind you here at all? Why not freedom or death, which are at least clean?"
"Because your ancestors feared both," Vorath said. "A free dragon might leave. A dead dragon cannot witness. So they made a third thing and called it sacred. I agreed once, when the compact still wore a face I trusted. That face is dust. The compact remains. I remain. You inherit the mess without inheriting the courage that made it."
Lucen's arm throbbed in time with his pulse. "My uncle told me you were a seal. An object that wakes for ritual."
"Your uncle tells himself whatever lets him sleep above ground," Vorath said. "You may continue that habit, or you may stop."