Brynna almost smiled. "High praise."
"Do not spend it," Vorath said.
On the eighth day, Grell's clerks arrived with Morthen in attendance, flail at his hip like a badge. They requested entry to the chamber. Lucen, arm bound clean, cloak mended badly by his own impatient stitches, met them in the corridor with Brynna and two neutral witnesses from House Talren—an older woman with ink-stained fingers and a young man who looked as if he regretted every ambitious choice that had brought him underground.
"You may look," Lucen said. "You may not chain. Vorath speaks for himself."
In the cavernous chamber the blue light made the clerks' pale faces look drowned. Vorath watched them approach until one clerk began reading a claim in a trembling singsong. The dragon waited until the man reached the word "transfer," then spoke over him.
"No."
The single syllable undid an hour of prepared language.
Morthen's mouth tightened. "Refusal is not a legal instrument."
"Neither is your flail," Vorath said. "Yet you brought it. I bring refusal. We are equally ornamental until a season ends."
The Talren woman wrote everything down. The young man swallowed audibly. Brynna's hand found Lucen's sleeve—not clinging, marking alliance in a language the clerks could see.
When Grell left, they left with less certainty than they had carried in. It was not safety. It was a thinner blade at the same throat.
That night Lucen and Brynna sat in the solar with bread neither wanted and spoke the hard honesty Vorath kept demanding.
"I still flinch when you choose principle over exit," Brynna said. "In the corridor I asked to go. You shook your head. You were right about Isera. You were also choosing for both of us without finishing the sentence out loud."
"I know," Lucen said. "I mistook urgency for permission."
"Do not mistake my staying for completed trust," she said. "I am here because shared logistics beat separate escapes. I sleep near you because the watches require it. I read your letters because secrets are how we got a flail at our backs. That is not the same as the soft story people will tell about us if we survive."