The corridor splits. A Fae attendant appears from nowhere, expressionless, gesturing her toward the left passage.
She stops. Looks at me.
“Private audience,” Seraphina says from behind us. “Court of Stone protocols. Just you and him.”
Celeste’s shoulders square.
I take her hand.
“I’ll be fine,” I say.
“I know you will.”
She squeezes once. Lets go.
“I’ll be in the chamber.”
She turns down the left corridor. Doesn’t look back.
The bond stretches as the distance grows, thinning from full to functional.
The right passage drops. The stone spirals in long steep turns, the gold veins in the walls thinning as I go deeper, until the only light comes from the rock itself, a low amber glow that pulses at the rhythm I’ve been tracking since we entered the Lithenmere. The mountain’s heartbeat. Stronger here. Closer. The walls warm against my shoulders when the passage narrows, and the vibration sits in my teeth.
Deeper than the Heart Chamber. Deeper than the room they gave us. The rock here is older. The gold veins have stopped branching and started converging, running in thick parallel lines toward a single point below.
The passage opens.
The chamber is small. After the scale of the great hall, after the vaulted ceilings and the impossible clouds, this room is intentionally contained. Round. Perhaps thirty feet across. The walls smooth and undecorated. The ceiling low enough that I could reach it if I stood on my toes. A room stripped to its purpose.
A single stone table at the center.
Two chairs carved from the floor, growing out of it, seamless.
Lanthar is already seated.
Without the great hall behind him, without the gathered courts and a kingdom arranged around his composure, he is smaller. He carries the same height, the same density, the same patient assessment he leveled at me from across a room full of his people.
But in this space, the performance of kingship has been set aside.
What remains is a man at a table.
He gestures to the empty chair. I sit. The rock adjusts beneath me, conforming the way the bed did, reading my weight, my proportions. When it finishes, the fit is exact.
The chamber holds only silence.
Lanthar looks at me. The silver eyes don’t waver.
“I sealed the Veil myself. You need to understand why.”
His voice carries differently here than it did in the hall. Stripped down. Personal.
“Her name was Isolde. I met her in the Black Forest in the early decades of the fourteenth century. She was a witch of significant power and no political affiliation, the kind of woman who built her home at a thin place between the mortal world and the Veil because the boundary made her stronger and frightened her not at all. I was a wanderer. I gave her a name only my mother had used. I let her believe what she chose to believe.”
His hands are flat on the table. Bone-white at the knuckles.
“I was with her for three years. I have loved her every day since. I would have stayed forever. But Veyran sent word through the Lithenmere’s foundation stones. Syrenne had learned of her. Ember Court assassins were being prepared. I had a choice. Reveal myself, place her under the full protection of the High Throne, and mark her as the king’s weakness for every faction in Thessivane to exploit. Or leave. Disappear. Let her believe she had been loved and abandoned by a wanderer. The Court of Ember would have no reason to target a witch a king had discarded.”
His voice does not change.
