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They did not walk him through the main halls.
Elowen's fingers stayed hooked in his vest long enough to steer him toward a side door used by servants who carried laundry and messages that should not be overheard. Two wall guards started forward. She stopped them with a look that had governed a kingdom for four years and had learned, along the way, how to govern men who preferred orders shouted.
"Captain Morr," she said, without raising her voice. "Clear the yard. The wyvern is not to be approached. If Duke Vaunt's men ask what happened, tell them the beast tired itself. Nothing more."
Captain Brant Morr was a man of forty with a scar that crossed his left eyebrow like a misplaced question. He had the face of someone who understood that loyalty and truth were not always the same road. He nodded once. "Your Grace."
"And find Mistress Yarrow. Quietly."
Bram found his voice as the side corridor swallowed them. Cool stone. Narrow windows. The smell of beeswax and old wool. "I don't understand. I only—"
"You only did what I told you," Elowen said. "That does not make you safe. It makes me responsible."
She released his vest. He stumbled a step, then caught himself. In the dim light her crown braid looked less like ornament and more like armor woven from hair.
"Your Grace," he tried again, because manners were what Orrin had given him when money was thin. "If I offended—"
"You did not offend. You revealed." She opened a door into a small solar that overlooked the kitchen gardens rather than the parade grounds. A table. Two chairs. A pitcher of water that looked as if it had been waiting for a different conversation. "Sit."
He sat because standing felt like arguing with weather.
Elowen did not sit. She poured water, set a cup near his hand, and remained standing with her back to the shuttered light, a silhouette that still somehow managed to scrutinize.
"You will tell me, slowly, how a Hale from the river villages ends up in my courtyard when twenty riders failed."
Bram drank because his mouth was dust. "I came with a delivery. Farrier work. My father—Orrin Hale—shoes horses for the lower garrison when their own man is sick. He's sick. I brought the shoes. The stablemaster said I could wait by the gate until the tally was signed. Then the wyvern... happened. People ran. I didn't. Not because I'm brave. Because my legs forgot."