Bram's stomach turned. "And you want me there."
"I want you where the creature can see you," Elowen said. "Not as a claimant. As a witness Vaunt cannot easily remove without revealing why he fears you. And if the worst comes—if he orders the collar—you will have a choice to intervene that I, as regent, cannot make without handing him a story about royal weakness."
"So I am your knife that doesn't look like a knife."
"Yes," Elowen said. "If that offends you, good. Stay offended. Offended men notice when they are being used. Used men who feel flattered notice too late."
---
Orrin arrived near evening, escorted by two soldiers who looked more embarrassed than menacing. He wore his good coat, the one with patches that had become part of the design, and he smelled of the road and anxiety. When he saw Bram he crossed the guest room in three strides and pulled him into a hug that ignored every rule about castle posture.
"You're whole," Orrin muttered into his shoulder. "I heard 'wyvern' and 'boy' and my heart tried to leave my body."
"I'm whole," Bram said, and then, because secrets between them had always been a kind of disrespect, he told him everything—the kneeling, Mara's name, Elowen's three paths, Vaunt, the collar.
Orrin sat heavily on the bed. For a long time he said nothing. His hands—scarred, thick, kind—rested on his knees like tools waiting for a job.
"I knew she was running from something high," he said at last. "She had manners she tried to forget and nightmares she tried to laugh off. She made me promise that if the castle ever came looking, I would not sell you to it for gold or for pride." He looked up, eyes wet and angry. "I did not promise I would let it eat you while I watched."
"I'm not being eaten," Bram said. "I'm being... positioned."
"Same family of verbs." Orrin rubbed his face. "What do you want, Bram? Not what the princess wants. You."
Bram walked to the window again. The wyvern was a darker shape in dusk, and beyond it the first lamps of the lower town pricked the grey. "I want Millcross to stay a place where people leave bread at a stone because they remember a healer, not because they fear a bloodline. I want Perrin to grow up without a war named after me. I want the crimson not to be broken for a duke's campaign. And I want—" He exhaled. "I want to stop pretending I can go back to being only a farrier's son without lying to the part of me that felt that creature listen."
Orrin nodded slowly. "Then you take the third path, and you take it with your eyes open. You refuse the crown in public so no one can hang a civil war on your silence. You stand for the Compact change because that was Mara's fight, and if you're going to inherit anything, inherit the fight, not the chair." He stood, set a hand on Bram's shoulder. "And if they try to make you into a saint or a villain overnight, you remember you still have to sleep as a person."