She looked at him across the tin cups, and for a moment the regent fell away enough to show the woman who had been eight and grieving an aunt who was not dead. "If you ever want Millcross more than this, say so. I will not chain you to a reform you already signed into being."
Bram glanced toward the yard, where Vharra slept with one eye occasionally opening to check the dark. "I want Millcross and this. I want to shoe a horse in the morning and fly in the afternoon and not pretend those are different worlds. Mara tried to choose one by erasing the other. I think that broke her in places she hid from us."
"Then don't hide," Elowen said. "It is irritatingly simple advice. I give it because I fail it weekly."
They finished the wine. She left. The loft held her absence like a chair still warm.
---
In early spring, Bram rode the west road with Orrin and an escort Morr trusted. Vharra followed at a height that made farmers point and children scream with delight rather than terror—progress measured in smaller panics.
Millcross looked the same and was not. News had arrived ahead of them in the way news does: distorted, vivid, half wrong. Some neighbors left bread at Mara's stone with a new understanding. Some avoided Orrin's forge for a week as if royal blood were contagious. The miller's wife asked Bram, blunt as river rock, whether he would tax them now.
"No," Bram said. "I signed a paper that says I won't. And I still owe you for the eggs your hens gave us the winter after Mara died."
She snorted, which in Millcross was acceptance.
At the stone, Bram knelt. Orrin stood beside him. The carved name—MARA HALE—caught moss in its letters. Bram placed bread and a sprig of rosemary from the castle gardens.
"They know who you were," he told the stone. "Not all of it. Enough. I didn't take the chair. I took the fight. If that isn't what you wanted, you should have left clearer instructions."
Wind moved the willow. It was not an answer. It was not nothing.
That night in the forge house, Orrin cooked stew that tasted like childhood. They ate in silence for a while, then talked about ordinary things: a cracked bellows, a neighbor's foal, the price of coal. Ordinary was a country Bram intended to visit often, even if he could no longer live there without papers and escorts and a sky that sometimes held wings.
"You'll go back," Orrin said. Not a question.