Elsewhere in the palace, silence wore a different shape.

The library was cloaked in it, vast, cold, lamps guttering against pillars of books. Dust and parchment thickened the air; old ink bit like a faint sting. Outside the windows, Eirden’s streets held thin ribbons of torchlight where hunger paced instead of sleeping.

Lord Corven sat at the long oak table with a goblet of dark wine he did not seem to want and then did. A second goblet waited near his elbow, an abandoned twin. Wine had bled across a parchment map, turning alleyways red. The shadows gathered at his boots and along the table’s underside, restless, as if they too had lost their discipline.

Eryndor Veyl watched from across the table, fingers steepled, face unreadable in the lamplight. Alchemist, physician, confidant—he smelled of dried sage and iron filings. When he finally spoke, he kept his voice low, as if sound itself might break something further.

“I’ve known you for fifteen years,” Eryndor said. “I have seen you wounded, and I have seen you win. But I have never seen you like this.”

Corven rolled the wine, watched it climb and fall. “Perhaps you were not looking.”

“I was,” Eryndor answered. “And you never let yourself slip. Until now.”

The shadows flicked at the table’s edge. Corven tipped the goblet, then drank too long, the sound wrong in the quiet. “I am tired,” he said, which wasn’t the answer and Eryndor did not press him for the real one.

A breath. Another.

“The Seer’s spiral,” Eryndor said, finally naming what had been stalking the room. “Two bound by silence. One of Light, one of Shadow.”

Corven’s jaw flexed. He set the goblet down too carefully. “Prophecies are a way to put a pretty frame around an execution.”

“And yet your shadows climb the shelves when she enters,” Eryndor said mildly. “And yet you are drinking.”

The faintest twist at Corven’s mouth. Not humor. Something smaller. He poured again, the red trembling at the rim, and spoke without looking up. “Do you ever tire of being right, Eryndor?”

“Often.”

Corven’s hand shook as he lowered the goblet. A line of wine slipped over his knuckles and fell to the map. “It does not matter what the Seer means,” he said, voice thinning. “It matters what the Queen will make of it, if she decides she believes. And I..” He cut the sentence off. “This is foolish. We are grown men whispering about threads and breath.”

Eryndor’s gaze flicked briefly to Corven’s hand, then his eyes returned to Corven’s face. “You could sleep,” he suggested. “Or pretend to.”

Corven’s laugh was a scrape. “Sleep is a door the shadows stand behind. They come through when it opens.” He lifted the goblet again. The shadows under the table rose with him, a tide tugged by a moon inside his chest.

“Enough,” Eryndor said softly.

Corven moved anyway, a small defiance in a life of larger obedience. The goblet struck the table, too hard, the sound sharp. The glass fractured under his hand and went to glitter. Red streaked his knuckles, jeweling the pale skin before dropping in fat, dark beads to the floor. The shadows snapped outward, swallowing half the lamplight in one breath before he pulled them back on instinct, jaw locked, breath rough.

Eryndor did not reach for him. He knew the cost of touching a breaking. He only said, in the same even tone, “Better you broken than her?”

Corven stilled as if the words had struck bone. He looked at his bleeding hand with a small, almost curious frown, as if surprised it was his. Then he curled the fingers into a fist and nodded once, sharp as a vow. “Yes.”

He rose too fast. The chair skidded, caught, toppled. Shadows flowed after him as he turned for the door. Eryndor’s mouth opened on his name and shut on prudence.

“Where are you going?” Eryndor asked, because someone had to ask.

“Not to her,” Corven said, which meant toward her.

He left with uneven steps and the shadows tried to smooth behind him.

Sleep would not come.

Myrren sat by her window long after the city lamps guttered out. The night breathed hunger and argument from the streets, thin sounds that carried farther in cold. Her room was too small for the thoughts inside it. She brewed camphor, counted heartbeats, told herself that wanting air did not mean wanting anything else. The room did not listen. At last she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and opened the door to the corridor, where the palace kept its own unease.

She told herself sternly not to think of him. That was the rule: you do not feed a thing you mean to starve. But rules were soft in the thin hours. Her thoughts found him anyway, the way his silence steadied a room and unsettled her spine, the night in the storm when he’d stepped between her and harm without asking for thanks, the thresholds where he lingered as if thresholds were kinder than crossings. They found smaller things that hurt more: the way he never met her eyes when she was tired, the careful spaces he made around her as if he were always stepping back from an edge no one else could see.

He does not care, she told herself. He does not care enough to-

A sound interrupted the thought. Not the even cadence of a guard. Not a servant’s light patter. This was the scrape of boots that did not trust the floor, the pause of a man remembering there was a wall to catch him.

She turned a corner and stopped.

Corven moved down the passage with one hand braced on stone, shadows leaking from him in thin, frayed threads that couldn’t decide whether to hold him up or pull him under. His hair was unbound; his shirt was unlaced at the throat. He did not look like the Lord of Shadows. He looked like someone had taken the shape from inside him and set him back on his feet anyway.

“Myrren.”

Her name left his mouth like a prayer he had learned too late. The tether under her breastbone answered before her mind did, hot, merciless, familiar. She crossed the space between them because her body already had. 

“You’re drunk,” she said, because it was true and because it was safer than everything else.

His mouth made a crooked line that might have been a smile on another night. “Drunk enough,” he said, breath warm and wrong, “to admit what I shouldn’t.”

“You should be in your room.” She shifted, took more of him, angled them toward the nearest turn. “Unless you prefer to collapse where the servants will have a story for a week.”

“They already have one.” His shoulder dipped as the floor tried to move. She caught him again. “They say I haunt the corridors at night.”

“You do.”

“They say you do too.”

“That’s because I cannot sleep,” she said, jaw set.

“Neither can I.” The words are thinned, softened, and dangerous for it. “Sometimes I hear your footsteps and think..” He cut the thought the way he cut threads with a blade: hard and neat. “The floor is uneven there,” he said instead, uselessly, because she had already guided him past it.

The shadows stirred at their feet, then slipped down the wall and pooled in a narrow ribbon ahead, like a darker path laid for them. 

“You’ve been watching me all this time,” he said, something like worn laughter mixed into the words, “and still don’t know where I sleep?”

Heat rose into her face. “I do not follow shadows to their den.”

“Pity.” His voice brushed the space behind her ear. “Shadows remember who walks near them.”

“Walk,” she said, because if she did not command something she would think about the way his breath felt against her skin.

“For you?” He almost smiled. “Always.”

His chamber had the hush of a room that had learned its occupant’s silences. Shadows moved along the walls and settled, waiting. She guided him to the bed and he sat with his elbows on his knees, head bowed; for a moment he looked not like a title or a weapon or a rumor, but like a man who had held himself upright a little too long.

“Lie back,” she said.

“Bossing me,” he murmured. “You do it well.”

“Someone must.”

He turned to obey and swayed instead. Instinct lifted her hand. He caught it, no harshness, just a hold, as if contact were the only steady thing in the room. She meant to pull away. She did not. The shadows licked the hem of her skirt like tethered flame.

“Myrren Vale,” he said, and her name broke in his throat as if it had cost him too much to carry it this far. “You are my tether. My scentmark. Even if you burn me, I will not let you go.”

The tether flared, a hot thread drawn tight through her bones. His face was close, his breath ghosting her mouth. The gravity of him was a wound and a want. For one heartbeat- one, the rule she lived by loosened. She leaned, barely. His lips touched hers, brief and impossible, the lightest press: a kiss that gave nothing and took everything.

Her breath shattered. She tore her hand free as if from heat and stepped back fast enough to jar the bedside table. The lamp clinked; the shadows flexed once and went still.

“You’re drunk,” she said, because she needed a fact to stand on. “You don’t mean—”

“I mean it most when I drown it.” His eyes were storm-gray and unguarded in a way they never were when the sun was watching.

“Stop.” She hated the plea in it. “Do not say what you cannot unsay.”

“Everything important refuses to be unsaid,” he whispered. He lifted his left hand as if noticing it only now—the knuckles blood-gleamed where the goblet had given way. He flexed once and let it fall. “I will not touch you again. If you tell me to walk into the sea, I will. If you tell me to forget, I will try until it unlearns me. Better me broken than you.”

Her throat closed. The room felt like a door that didn’t know whether it was opening or shutting. She could be so many versions of herself here: the one who forgave too easily, the one who chose ruin with both hands, the one who held the line until her palms bled. She had promised herself she would be the one who knew better.

She stepped back again, found the threshold with the heel of her shoe, and treated it like safety. “Rest,” she said. The word wanted to be kinder than she could afford. “Sleep, if you can. The morning will—” She stopped. It wouldn’t fix anything. “The morning will come.”

“It always does.” Something like wonder thinned his voice. “And it always shows what the night hid badly.”

She reached for the latch.

Behind her, his voice came low and even, a thread drawn through her spine.

“Fate gave me you,” he said. “And fate will take you away.”

The tether tugged so sharply she put her hand on the doorframe to keep from turning. The shadows at her feet stirred as if they, too, had heard a sentence. She did not look back.

Outside, the hall breathed its cold breath. Myrren put her palm flat to the wood and let the night count her inhalations until she could claim them as her own. When she finally walked, the palace listened like a house that knew how to keep secrets, and the silence followed her like a question she was not ready to answer.