He almost smiled. "If the vote fails tomorrow—"
"It will not fail," Elowen said. "I have counted. Counting is not hope. It is arithmetic with human flaws included." She paused. "If it passes, people will still suffer under old habits. Your work will be to make the new habit cost less courage each year. That is not a ballad. It is a career."
"I can do a career," Bram said. "Ballads make me itch."
Elowen rose, brushed stone grit from her palm, and looked down at him with something that might, in a softer century, have been fondness. "Sleep, if you can. Tomorrow you will be asked to stand still while men argue about your existence as if you were a clause."
"I've had practice," Bram said.
After she left, he did sleep, wing-sheltered, and woke with dew on his hair and a crick in his neck and the odd peace of someone who had stopped waiting to be rescued from his own life.
---
One year after the courtyard, Highmere held a dull ceremony for the first open aptitude trial under the new Compact. No ballads. No confetti. A clerk, a ledger, three candidates from non-noble houses, and a brown wyvern adolescent with an attitude problem. One candidate succeeded by waiting. One failed by grabbing. One withdrew after honesty about fear, and Yarrow wrote *wisdom* in the margin instead of *cowardice*.
Bram watched from the side with Tilda, who now wore a keeper's badge and complained constantly about ink stains. Elowen stood on the dais in black without the fur cloak, reading the Compact's preamble in a voice that did not ask to be loved.
King Perrin, ten now, sat beside her and did not fidget much.
Afterward, Vaunt's representative signed the attendance sheet with a flourish that promised future trouble. Future trouble, Bram had learned, was the shape of peace that had to be maintained rather than declared.
Vharra found him on the wall walk at sunset. The crimson landed with a precision that still stole Bram's breath, folded its wings, and shoved its snout into Bram's chest hard enough to make him laugh and stagger.
"Yes," Bram said, hands on warm scales. "I'm here."
Elowen approached along the walk, alone, the wind worrying at her braid. She stopped a polite distance from the wyvern's tail.