Orrin returned to Millcross before the final vote because the forge could not wait forever and because his presence in the capital made him a softer target for anyone who wanted to hurt Bram sideways. Their parting at the west gate was brief and ungraceful in the way real love often is.
"Don't become a statue of yourself," Orrin said.
"Don't take less pay from people who suddenly think you're fancy," Bram answered.
Orrin snorted, hugged him, and went. Vharra watched the road until the escort was a smudge, then sneezed a spark that singed a patch of moss. Bram took it as commentary.
On the night before the final vote, Bram could not sleep. He went down to the yard with a blanket and sat against Vharra's foreleg as if the creature were a hillside. The wyvern tolerated it, then curled a wing just enough to cut the wind. In that shelter of membrane and bone, Bram spoke aloud the fear he had not given Elowen.
"What if the law passes and nothing changes except the paperwork? What if Millcross still bows wrong when tax riders come? What if Perrin grows up and decides cousins who refuse crowns are still threats?"
Vharra's rumble was slow, almost like a cat's, if a cat were made of storm fronts. It did not solve anything. It made the questions sitable.
Near midnight, Elowen appeared with a lantern shuttered low. She did not pretend she had been strolling.
"I thought I might find you here," she said. "May I sit, or will your ally object?"
Vharra sniffed the air, huffed, and left the wing where it was. Permission, of a kind.
Elowen sat on the cobbles in her black gown without fussing about dirt. For a while they listened to the castle settle—the distant cough of a sentry, the creak of the portcullis chains in the cold.
"My father," she said, "told me Mara was weak for leaving. He told it so often I mistook repetition for truth. Finding her letters felt like being unmade. Finding you felt like being handed a mirror that would not flatter. I pushed you into the yard because I needed the wyvern calm and because I needed to know if the mirror was real. Both motives can be true. I will not tidy them into one pretty reason."
Bram stared at the lantern's slit of light. "I used to think adults had single motives. Then I became almost adult."
"Almost," she said, dry. "How generous."