"Do you regret it?" I ask him one evening. "Saying it publicly. The way you did."
He looks up from the cup he's been turning in his hands. "No."
"The court is making trouble for you."
"The court was always going to make trouble for me. I chose that when I started the investigation." He sets the cup down. "Claiming you and the child in public was not what created the problem. The problem existed the moment I looked at Oxwood's ledgers." His eyes are steady on mine. "I regret nothing about you. Nothing about this child. I need you to understand that."
I study the forge fire for a moment.
"I've never thought past surviving," I say. "Day to day, week to week. How to get through the next bad season, the next tax collection, the next impossible month." I rest my hand on my stomach. "I don't want that for them. I don't want them growing up counting every copper piece and wondering if it's enough."
"They won't." He stands and crosses to where I'm sitting, and takes my face in both hands — the same gesture, the same careful hold he always uses. He presses his lips to my forehead. Then to the tip of my nose, which is so unexpectedly gentle that I almost laugh.
"What was that for?" I ask.
"You needed it." His thumbs rest against my cheekbones. "You don't smile enough."
I manage one, small and real, which he receives without comment.
Then his expression sobers slightly. "There are still obstacles. The noble retaliation is coming — Thalen is building something, I can feel it. The investigation will drag before it concludes." He strokes his thumb once along my jaw. "I want you prepared for a harder few months before this settles."
"I know." I cover his hands with mine briefly. "I've handled hard months before."
"Not alone this time," he says.
I hold that for a moment.
"Not alone," I agree.
36
NYRIUS
Thalen finds me in the corridor before the session opens.
He doesn't waste time on pleasantries. "You understand what you're doing to the entire council's standing."
"I understand what the council's standing has been built on." I keep walking. He matches my pace, which means he wants the conversation to happen before we're in a room with witnesses. "Every territory with a border settlement is going to face the same scrutiny. That's not something I'm doing to anyone — it's something the evidence requires."
"The evidence you collected," he says. "Through methods that weren't formally sanctioned."
"The methods were within regional authority." I stop at the chamber door. "And the council knows that, which is why no one has filed a formal objection to the investigation. They're waiting to see which way it goes before they commit to a position. That's not principle, Thalen. That's political survival."
"Maybe political survival is what keeps order."
"Political survival kept Malrec in office for twelve years." I push the door open. "Come inside."
The chamber holds twenty lords. Half of them were here two weeks ago when I walked out. The other half arrived after the Oxwood proceedings spread through the region — some curious, some hostile, a few who've sent private riders ahead with questions that suggest they're worried about their own records.
I stand at the table and lay out what we found. Not everything — that would take hours — but the shape of it. Malrec's arrangement as a pattern, not an isolated case. Six other territories showing similar financial discrepancies between levy assessments and actual collection figures. Three magistrates with traceable payments to the same type of trade accounts used in Oxwood. The correlation between these territories and the locations of rebel activity in the last four years.
I don't accuse the lords in the room directly. I don't need to. The maps do the work.
"The rebellion isn't ideological," I tell them. "It's economic. People arm themselves when they have nothing left to lose and no legal path to remedy. We have been creating those conditions systematically and then spending resources suppressing the consequences." I let that sit. "It's expensive, inefficient, and it doesn't work. The evidence is in this room."
Nobody disputes the evidence. That's the notable thing — nobody stands up and calls it fabricated or overstated. They sit with it, which means they've already seen enough in their own records to know it holds.
Fenrath speaks first, carefully. "The court agrees these findings warrant further review."
