"Council wants you titled," she said. "Keeper-Advocate or some other compound noun that makes them feel they invented you."
"I'll take the work," Bram said. "They can keep the noun until it means something I recognize."
Elowen nodded as if she had expected that. "Perrin asked if you would teach him to sit quietly near the yearlings. I said yes. I hope that was correct."
"It was correct."
They stood together while the sky went from pewter to rose to the first hard blue of evening stars. Below, soldiers changed watch with the unglamorous competence of people who wanted to go home to supper. In the lower town, lamps bloomed. Somewhere a dog barked in a rhythm that suggested play, not alarm.
"I still used you," Elowen said quietly.
"I still haven't forgiven that in the way stories prefer," Bram answered. "I trust you with some things. Not all. That will have to be enough for now."
"It is enough for now," she said.
Vharra rumbled, a long contented storm in a living throat. Bram felt it in his ribs, in the memory of a gate, in the moment a woman had hissed a warning that had saved his life and spent it differently than he had planned.
He had not been crowned.
No one had cheered him into a destiny that erased Millcross, Orrin's forge, Tilda's swearing, Morr's limited loyalty, or Mara's complicated flight.
He had been given, instead, a creature's attention, a law with teeth still growing in, a cousin on a throne too big for him, a regent who told ugly truths, and a name that was both cage and key—Hale and Ashvale, held in the same pair of calloused hands.
Bram rested his forehead briefly against Vharra's snout, the way one might greet a friend who could kill you and chose, daily, not to.
"Tomorrow," he told the wyvern, "we check the eastern ridge nests. And then I owe Orrin a letter that isn't only politics."