Page 9 of Zenith Court

Both men seemed content to leave it there. At the porch, Kieran gave my father a shallow bow. “My lord. Third step’s loose. Keep left.”

My father stepped over the third stair without question. He had taken Kieran’s word about the boards. He had also come to ask rather than command.

Astra was at the table when we came in. She had spent the morning trying to aim the current at a bucket of springwater. She stood when my father entered, but she neither bowed nor challenged him. He noticed.

“Lord Ashford,” she said.

“Mistress Verita.” He did not call her fugitive or inmate. He used her name without qualification.

He put the writ on the table before he sat down and squared it to the edge. The seal was wax the color of dried blood, the Council’s device pressed deep into it.

Aldric had warned us three days ago: every lineage the Council still trusted had been summoned to Zenith Court to stand Conclave. Now the order lay under the Council seal, with the Ashford seat named in the second line.

“A Conclave,” my father said. “The full rolls. Every seated line answers in person or forfeits its seat. Eleven generations of Ashfords have answered. The Court expects the twelfth.”

“Eleven generations of Ashfords were not named on a Council decree,” I said. “The twelfth is.”

“That is the second matter.” He aligned the writ’s edge one degree truer. “The seat enters with its party. Blood and household, sworn under the seat’s surety.”

“And the basins?”

“The rolls record the party; the basins do not read it. The Court does not search a party once a seat has sworn it in. The privilege is eleven generations old. No one questions it.”

He had trained me to test a plan for its objective, access, and cost. The seat gave us access. I searched for the flaw and wanted to find one.

“It only works if I come as your son,” I said.

“It only works if you come as my heir.” No color entered his voice. “Publicly returned. Publicly corrected. The heir who was led astray by an Untethered girl and brought back to the line—that is the story the Conclave will want. We let them have it. You and the others would be through their doors before it finished making the rounds.”

Corrected. That word had lived in our house longer than I had.

“A performance,” I said.

“The most expensive one I have ever asked of anyone.” He took a breath before continuing. “You would know it was a performance every hour you wore it. That matters. I am not asking you to become that man again. I am asking you to counterfeit him long enough to walk five people through a sworn door.”

Then he brought out the box.

He had carried it under his coat the whole way—from the mill, from the last change of horses, from however far back this plan reached. The dark wood had gone round at the corners from handling, the grain worn low where generations of thumbs had worked the latch. He set it down with the hinges toward himself and the latch toward me. His hands had made the same arrangement across a longer table the year I turned fourteen, in a room where the fire had been lit for visitors we did not have.

He opened it.

The cuffs lay in their black velvet exactly as they had before the formal: dark leather, Ashford-silver fittings, the family line stamped inside each band. They smelled of oil and leather and the house where I had grown up.

I read a basin correctly at nine, on the first attempt. My father looked at the water, then at me, and gave me the only word of praise I ever heard from him. Good. I lived on it for five years. At fourteen, I received the cuffs.

The last time this box stood open in front of me, I left the cuffs inside and walked into the formal with my wrists bare. My father saw. So did every witness in the hall. My wrists had been bare in every room since, including the cells.

Astra had not looked at the cuffs. She watched my father instead—his careful hands, the effort behind his plain answers. I trusted her judgment more than my own.

“What does it cost you?” she asked him.

His jaw set, not at the question but at its accuracy. “If it fails, I lose the seat, the name, and whatever the Council decides my neck is worth after two provocations.”

Astra waited. “And if it succeeds?”

For the first time since the track, he hesitated. “I stand on the Conclave floor and watch my son wear the thing he refused in front of three hundred witnesses. Because I asked him to, knowing what it cost him to refuse me the first time.” His hands flattened on the table. “That.”

She looked at me, and I knew what the look meant. He means it. I believed her.