Perrin considered this. "Uncle Cedric says giving things up is for people who can't keep them."
Elowen's face tightened. Bram spoke before she could. "Uncle Cedric is good at keeping things that don't belong to him. I'm learning to tell the difference."
The boy tilted his head. "Will the red wyvern live here?"
"If it wants," Bram said. "If it doesn't, we don't chain it into wanting."
Perrin looked at Elowen. "Is that the new rule?"
"It will be," she said softly, "if enough adults remember how to be brave without being cruel."
Afterward, in the corridor, Elowen murmured, "He likes you. That may become inconvenient."
"Most true things do," Bram said.
---
The Compact revision took six weeks of arguments that could have been shortened to six hours if pride were not a national resource.
Bram sat through them in a plain coat Yarrow had found him—court-adjacent, not court. He answered questions about the wyvern's rumble, the kneel, the refusal of the collar. He did not perform wonder. He described heat, smell, attention, the difference between a creature resting and a creature surrendering. Several lords hated him for making the distinction sound obvious.
Between sessions he trained.
Yarrow taught him the old keeper signals: palm angles, breath patterns, how to read wing tension the way a farrier reads a hoof. The crimson—Vharra, Yarrow said, was the name the eastern ridge folk had given it, meaning *bright hunger*—tolerated Bram's presence with something like preference. It allowed him to clean a wound on its foreleg where a pike-hook had caught. It refused a saddle for three days and accepted a light harness on the fourth only after Bram spent an hour sitting nearby doing nothing but existing without demand.
"Mara used to do that," Yarrow said, watching. "Sit. Wait. Let the animal decide the conversation had a second half. Most nobles talk first and call it leadership."