Page 71 of The Crown’s Temptation

Axar looked at him. The kind of look that did not need words behind it.

Teorin held it for a long moment. Then understanding moved across his face. He looked at me. "I will return."

And left, his Morraks following behind him.

The Pin

URALISH

He fucking hated throne rooms. But it was necessary.

He had come to Filar House because Colsar had asked him to help investigate and because finding her was easier than explaining why he had not. That was the kind of logic that had governed most of his decisions for forty years.

Syle walked beside him.

The servant who met them at the door looked at them the way servants looked at people they had been told to manage.

"Her Majesty is not receiving⁠—"

"Tell her King Regent Uralish of Alarna is here," he said. "Tell her it concerns the investigation into her daughter-in-law's death."

A pause. Then the servant disappeared.

He was admitted.

The air was wrong before he crossed the threshold. He had felt it once in Alarna when the undead moved beneath the mountain pass and the whole landscape carried it for days after. Same wrongness. Different house.

He followed the servant through the corridors. Another servant at the far end of the hall turned when he passed. Her fingers lingered before she pulled them from the doorframe.

Gray at the tips.

He kept walking.

Syle touched his arm once. He did not need Enovar to say it aloud.

"I see it," Uralish said.

Two more along the corridor. Both turned as he passed. Both with those gray-tipped fingers and that wrongness underneath the ordinary exterior of a servant going about their work.

She received him in the smaller dining room. Candlelit.

"King Regent Uralish." Her voice carried warmth it had not earned. "What a surprise."

He sat when she gestured and looked at her and she looked at him and he let her fill the silence because women like her always filled it and you learned more from what they chose to fill it with than from anything you asked directly.

She asked about Alarna. About the wards. About whether he found Veynar much changed. He answered what he answered and left the rest and watched her hands and her face and the way she ran the room.

A servant came in to fill the wine. Uralish watched his hands before the man withdrew them.

Gray at the tips.

He left his glass untouched.

Then he saw the pin at her temple and stopped looking at anything else.

He had seen it a hundred times. Across dinner tables and in corridors and in late Alarnan evenings when Jularin had forgotten to notice who was watching. He had asked her about it once, years ago, and she had touched it in exactly the way the Queen Dowager was touching it now.

There is only one, Jularin had told him. Found in the mines of Yorali. It was a gift.