Page 68 of Into Ember

“I can’t sit in this room anymore.” I’m already up. “Walk with me or don’t.”

He’s up before I finish the sentence. He was always going to come. Know somebody long enough and the invitation stops being a question.

The castle at dawn is quiet the way a barracks is quiet, which is to say full of people being quiet on purpose. Staff moving through side corridors with linens and firewood. Bread somewhere, already baking. We go down the grand ridiculous staircase like we own it, because the trick to being somewhere you shouldn’t is pretending you’re exactly where you belong. Nobody looks at us twice.

The ballroom doors are open.

Sweet mother of excess.

Gold. Gold columns. Gold ceiling. Gold leaf on the sconces, on the door handles, on things nobody will ever notice. A wall of mirrors. Chandeliers the size of wagons. Flowers climbing every column, white and violet, thousands of them. And an indoor fountain, because somebody looked at this room and decided what it needed was something a little extra.

At the far end, a dais. One chair on it, draped in white and violet.

One chair. For her.

Brock whistles, low.

“I’ve raided warlord compounds with less gold in them,” I say.

“The fountain’s my favorite.”

“The fountain is a crime.” I turn a slow circle and take the full inventory. The mirrors. The gold. The flowers. The fountain again. “Somebody planned this. Multiple somebodies. There were meetings.”

“Two weeks of them.”

“Think she’ll like it?”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Brock says.

And we’re gone. Cackling in an empty ballroom at dawn, because it’s true. She threatened to have me executed over a staircase. This room has a throne and a fountain. She is going to walk in here tonight in some gown three women bled over, and she is going to hate every square inch of this place. I am going to be standing exactly where I can see her face when it happens. Front row. I’ve earned it.

She’ll know exactly why I’m standing where I am.

“Ten gold says she threatens somebody’s life inside the first minute,” I say.

“No bet,” Brock says.

I’m laughing and he’s laughing, and somewhere in the middle of it he reaches over and knocks his knuckles against my sternum, twice, the way he always has, and the laugh dies in my chest right under his hand.

He doesn’t take the hand back.

I look down toward his hand, then at him. He’s stopped laughing too, and there’s a foot of air between us, and my mouth opens to fill the room with something, anything, volume, a fountain joke, a—

“Gunnar,” he says. Quiet.

No.

Nope. Not here. Not at dawn in a gold room with her chair on the—

Footsteps.

Both of us move without a word — old training kicking in before either of us does — behind the drapes at the windows, floor-length brocade heavy enough to stop light, and Brock pulls the edge flat and I do the thing they beat into us in a war nobody here remembers. Slow the breath. Then slow the heart. Dragons hear heartbeats before they hear footsteps, and any ears in this castle worth hiding from will find a hammering pulse behind a curtain long before they ever see it move. So we both go quiet all the way down, hearts dropping to a crawl, two dead men standing hidden.

Brock is an inch from me. His heart is a slow drum I can feel through the shared dark. Mine matches it.

That’s the training.

The footsteps come in unhurried. Two sets. One light and quick, one measured.