"I'll go back," Bram said. "And I'll come here. And I'll write. And when Vaunt tries again, I'll be someone who knows the difference between a crown and a responsibility."
Orrin raised his cup of weak ale. "To Mara, who ran so you could choose."
Bram raised his. "To choosing anyway."
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The weeks between Vaunt's petition and the final Compact vote taught Bram a quieter kind of danger.
Letters arrived at the keeper's loft with no seals and too much perfume, offering coin for "private counsel" about the crimson's habits. A baker in the lower town sold buns shaped like kneeling dragons and called them Hale-buns until Morr politely asked him to stop before someone used the joke as an excuse for a fight. Two of Vaunt's former riders drank too much at the Ox and Lantern and talked loudly about how collars had been good enough for their fathers. Tilda heard them, came back with hay in her hair and fury in her mouth, and only Yarrow's hand on her shoulder kept her from starting a war with a stool leg.
"Dignity," Yarrow told her, "is not the same as silence. Report them. Do not become the story."
Tilda reported them. Morr fined them for disorder. It was small. It still mattered.
Bram learned the castle's servant corridors the way he had once learned Millcross lanes—by walking them until they stopped feeling like someone else's house. He ate with the guards sometimes, listening more than talking. He learned that Captain Morr had a daughter who collected smooth stones from the Kell and named them after virtues. He learned that the wall guard who had tapped his spear after Morr's speech was called Dennet, and that Dennet's mother took in washing for the chapel. When Dennet asked, awkward, whether Bram thought common folk would be allowed to try for yearling bonds in earnest, Bram said, "If I have any say, yes. If I don't, I'll make noise until I do."
Dennet nodded as if that were a contract.
Elowen fought in rooms Bram was not invited into. He saw the effects anyway: a steward reassigned, a priest rebuked for a sermon about "polluted blood," a supply delay to Vaunt's border forts that was officially about flooded roads and unofficially about leverage. She did not narrate these moves to Bram. Once, meeting him by chance near the chapel, she said only, "Do not romanticize the machinery. It bruises everyone it touches, including me."
"I'm not romanticizing," Bram said. "I'm counting costs."
"Good," she said, and swept on.