The wyvern called once from the courtyard—a long, low note that was not distress and not triumph. Recognition, maybe. Or hunger. Or the simple animal fact of being alive in a place built for humans.
Bram answered under his breath, feeling foolish and sincere. "I hear you."
---
Daybreak arrived the color of old pewter.
The courtyard filled with the careful geometry of power: Vaunt's riders in green and gold, Ashvale guards in silver-grey, council members in fur-lined coats, Mistress Yarrow with her ledger like a shield, Captain Morr with his spear grounded and his face unreadable. King Perrin was not present; Elowen had insisted the boy remain in the nursery wing. *He is nine,* she had said. *He does not need to learn how adults bargain with monsters before breakfast.*
The crimson wyvern stood unchained at Elowen's order. Yarrow had argued for it. *If you want willing submission, stop teaching it that humans only know rope.*
Duke Vaunt stepped forward with his chief binder, a thin man named Master Pellam who carried a collar of dark metal etched with runes that made Bram's teeth ache to look at. The collar was not yet opened. It did not need to be. Its presence was the argument.
"Under Compact law," Vaunt announced, voice pitched for the walls, "a beast that refuses registered riders may be brought to heel by the binding collar, lest it become a danger to town and field. The crimson has refused. We proceed."
Elowen's voice cut across his like a colder wind. "Under Compact law, a demonstration of approach must precede the collar. Three attempts. Willing contact. You will not skip to cruelty because you are impatient for a weapon."
Vaunt smiled. "As the Regent wishes."
The first rider approached with a pike-hook and a prayer. The wyvern's wing swept him aside—not killing, not even fully striking, more like a dismissal. He rolled, groaned, lived. The second rider tried a calmer walk, hands open. The wyvern growled and the man stopped ten paces out, face white, and backed away on his own. The third—Pellam himself—spoke formal binding words in the old tongue. The wyvern turned its head and spat a gout of heat that scorched the cobblestones at Pellam's feet into black glass. Pellam scrambled back. The collar nearly slipped from his hands.
A murmur moved through the watchers.
Vaunt's smile thinned. "Enough theater. The collar."
"No," Bram said.