"So," she said, shutting the door with her heel. "You have Mara's mouth and Aldric's stubborn chin. Sit. If you faint I will not catch you."
Bram sat.
Yarrow opened the folio and turned it so he could see. Letters in a hand he knew—his mother's hand, younger, sharper, written on paper finer than Millcross ever used. The first line of the top page read: *If the Compact is signed as the dukes demand, we will teach every wyvern that humans come to conquer, and then we will pretend surprise when they burn us.*
Bram's eyes stung. He blinked hard. "She wrote this?"
"She wrote stacks," Yarrow said. "I was junior keeper then. I liked her because she asked the beasts questions instead of giving them speeches. When the council ordered her papers destroyed, I destroyed copies and kept originals. Regents who find such things later either promote you or hang you. Elowen promoted me. Barely."
"What happens if I leave?"
"Duke Vaunt's riders are already asking why the crimson went still for a boy in a leather vest. Rumors are faster than horses. If you leave without a story, Millcross gets a story written for it." Yarrow tapped the folio. "Elowen will offer you choices that feel like nooses with nicer rope. Listen anyway. She is not your friend. She is also not Vaunt."
Bram looked at the letter until the words blurred. "Did Mara want a throne?"
Yarrow snorted. "Mara wanted a law that treated consent as sacred—creature and rider both. Thrones were what other people kept trying to put under her so they could tell her where to sit."
After Yarrow left, Bram went to the window. In the last grey light he could see the courtyard edge and the darker bulk of the wyvern where it had settled near the far wall, chained loosely by old custom, head on its forelegs like a cat the size of a cottage. As if sensing him, it lifted its gaze. Yellow. Unblinking. Not owned.
Bram raised his hand, absurdly, the way one might greet a neighbor across a lane.
The wyvern rumbled once, low enough that the window glass trembled.
He did not know if that meant acceptance, warning, or simply: *I see you too.*
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