Page 162 of Zenith Court

The room stood on the Court’s water-side wall, narrow and plain: two cots pushed together, a third mattress on the floor, a coal brazier, and the chipped basin Caspian had filled before dawn. The shutter latch was still bent from another prisoner’s escape. Four pairs of boots dried beside the door. Delphine had brought a kettle and clean bandages sometime in the night, then gone back to help Aldric with the freed.

Kieran sat on the floor with his injured wrist unwrapped across one knee. The white burn had flattened overnight, though his fingers still resisted a full fist. Caspian stood by the window, folding a blanket that did not need folding. Jonah occupied the chair nearest the door. His gaze lifted the moment I opened my eyes.

I reached for the chord by habit.

Nothing answered. No green apple, cold marble, or worn leather. My wrist was bare above my pulse.

The absence still hurt, but it no longer frightened me in the same way. I could hear Kieran breathing. I could see Caspian’s reflection in the window and Jonah’s hand resting open on his thigh. They had stayed.

Nobody touched me first.

Caspian set the folded blanket aside. Kieran looked down at his bandage. Jonah waited.

I sat up slowly. My balance went once and returned. Every muscle in my arms protested the basin, and the scrape along my collarbone pulled when I reached for the cup beside the mattress.

My legs held when I put my feet on the floor. That was new since the night before. Hunger had returned too, quiet but definite, and the heel of bread on the windowsill smelled better than anything the Court’s kitchens had served us during the Conclave.

Kieran reached toward the cup, stopped, and lifted his eyebrows.

“Please,” I said.

He handed me the cup. The water tasted faintly of iron and coal smoke. I drank all of it.

Below us, voices crossed the Court in waves. Delphine and Aldric were identifying the freed, finding families, and separating the injured from the merely exhausted. Marrow had remained with the witnesses who wanted the suppression records explained. The work below could continue without me for a while.

I set the empty cup down and looked first at Caspian.

He stood at the window with his sleeves pushed above the bandages around both palms. The ancestral cuffs were gone. Magnus’s signet rested on the sill beside him, turned so the Ashford face lay against the wood.

He had worn the ancestral cuffs for the Conclave disguise. Now his wrists were uncovered by his own choice, marked only by shallow cuts from the lead anchors and the pale pressure lines left by bandages.

I crossed the room and stopped within reach. “May I take your hand?”

Caspian looked at my open palm before he placed his in it.

His pulse moved quickly beneath my thumb. No marble cold rose to meet me.

“I didn’t know the basin would take the line,” I said. “I would make the same choice again. But if it comes back, that choice belongs to both of us.”

His gaze lifted to mine.

“I don’t know whether it can return,” I continued. “But if it does, I need to know whether you want it.”

“You think the line was the part holding me here.”

“I think it made certainty easy.”

He turned his hand beneath mine until our palms met. “Nothing about you has ever been easy.”

I almost smiled. “That isn’t an answer.”

“If the line returns, I may feel things you haven’t put into words.”

Caspian considered. “I want it if it remains ours. Not evidence for a reader. Not proof for a family. Ours.”

“Even when you want privacy?”

“I tell you. You listen.”