Chapter 6.2 — The Gate That Listens

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Cael’s mouth did that fractional tilt again. Maren’s gaze snared his in the way a silversmith tests a chain for strength—quick, unromantic, satisfied.

“New friend?” she asked Seraphine.

“New ally,” Seraphine said. “Cael Ardentis, Lady Maren Voss.”

Maren extended a sugared hand. Cael hesitated precisely long enough to be polite about the powder, then took it. “Commander’s son?” Maren asked, eyes on the chevrons at his arm.

“Something like that,” Cael said.

“Which commander?” Alaric asked, curiosity nosing through caution.

Cael looked toward the river, where the blood moon skimmed the dark like a coin thrown and lost. “He didn’t leave a name that stays,” he said. “Just a lesson. Keep the water on your right when the land lies to you.”

“That’s a good lesson,” Elisana said, coming forward with Marcus. She looked at Cael the way she looks at a guest who arrives with a knife and a story. “And yours?”

“Don’t kneel unless you can get back up faster than the man who asks you to,” Cael said, with faint apology.

“Also good,” Marcus said, tired pride flickering like a candle that refuses to gutter. “Captain, take inventory. Priestess, seal what you can. Prince, sit when you’re told. Seraphine—”

“Don’t ask me to be safe,” she said, too gently to be defiance.

He didn’t. He put a hand to her shoulder—one beat, warm, father, not emperor—and let it fall. “Be true,” he said instead.

She nodded.

Cerys touched Seraphine’s wrist, light as a moth’s wing. “The Oracle wants you at first light,” she said. “She says she is tired of speaking in other people’s dreams.”

“First light?” Maren repeated, scandalized. “That’s two hours from now.”

“She is old,” Cerys said mildly. “Time has the manners to go slowly around her, but not to stop.”

“The Oracle?” Cael asked, attention sharpening. “In Velmora?”

“In Velmora,” Cerys confirmed. “And out of it. She keeps her chair where bells can find it.”

Cael glanced once at Seraphine, something like recognition tracing his expression. “Then I’ll be gone before sunrise.”

“Gone?” Seraphine asked, surprise pin-pricking her ribs. She disliked the sting more than she expected to.

“My cohort needs a spine,” he said. “They might settle for mine. You have captains and crowns. I have the Nareth ford.”

“You have a choice,” Maren said, bare as bone.

“We all do,” Cael said, not looking away from Seraphine. “That’s the inconvenient mercy of dusk.”

“Come back,” Seraphine said, because the worst thing a sovereign can do to a soldier is ask him to stay when his road is not hers. “By law, by rumor, or by accident. I don’t mind which.”

“I’ve always been fond of accidents,” Cael said. “They’re honest.”

He inclined his head—not courtly, not rough. True. Then he vanished into the spine of the wardens with the ease of a tide pulling back through reeds.

Alaric watched him go with an expression that would have been called jealousy if it had wanted to be smaller. “I don’t like him,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s keep him.”

Maren snorted. “You like every man who could kill you. It saves time.”

Seraphine smiled without meaning to. The night had stopped being thin. It was still night. That was enough.

“Highness,” Cerys said, and her eyes were tired in the kind way, “the Oracle truly wants you. There will be no riddles today. Only debts.”

“Debts?” Seraphine echoed.

“Prophecies are debts we swear on other people’s throats,” Cerys said. “She pays hers.”

Seraphine looked past the bridge to the temple where the Threnody Glass waited like a question not yet tired of being asked. She felt Kael Severin in the set of her shoulders—not heavy; present.

You will be offered a crown, he said quietly. Not the one your father wears. The other kind. The kind that names you the end of something that needed to end. Choose what you are ending.

“And what am I beginning?” she asked him, not in words.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The bells would.

Seraphine handed the honey-knot basket back to Maren and wiped sugar from her palms. She lifted her chin to the people at the bridge’s far end, to the wardens with tired legs and good spines, to the masked men kneeling with their hands on their heads because the god they wore hadn’t kept its promise tonight.

“Salastian,” she said, not loud, not small. The city stilled. “You stood. You listened. Keep doing both.”

A murmur rolled the crowd, not cheer, not prayer. Agreement. The rarest sound a sovereign gets to hear.

She turned toward Velmora. Alaric fell in beside her because that is what blood does when it remembers. Lioren shadowed her because that is what loyalty does when it breathes. Maren skipped two steps ahead because that is what friendship does when it thinks it can outpace destiny for a laugh. Marcus and Elisana walked behind because that is what love does when it has learned not to lead every step.

The river carried their reflections toward the sea and did not ask for payment.

Above, the blood moon began to pale at its edges.

Dawn would not come yet.

But when it did, the Gate would be listening.

And the Oracle would be waiting with her debt.