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Through the connection comes a faint impression of sunlight crossing green leaves. Fiona’s pride is not part of the legal argument. It will not appear in the decree or the household records.

Yet I want her to know that her evidence changed more than one kitchen schedule. I want to feel her satisfaction when she sees the seal.

That private desire has no place in law. It matters anyway.

I press the house ring into the hot wax.

Chaos enters the metal beneath my hand. The Morwen’thir crest darkens at the center of the seal as my authority binds to it. The wax cools around the ring.

When I lift my hand, the mark remains sharp.

Sarveth signs beneath it.

I seal the revised contract form, the ration schedule, and the enforcement order. The clerks sand the ink and carry the originals toward the household archive.

Copies will reach every kitchen, stable, workshop, mine office, guard post, and storehouse before tomorrow’s evening meal. Overseers will read the changes aloud to workers who cannot read them for themselves. Sarveth will receive the first matching schedules seven days later.

The eighteen-hour shifts end.

Every worker receives the full ration assigned to the labor performed, with no race or caste consideration within my workforce.

Fiona’s evidence has become enforceable Morwen’thir house law.

19

FIONA

The dae-hide binding is soft with age, and the legend inside it is older still.

I have claimed the warmest corner of the solarium for reading, a nest of wool cloaks and moss over a heated stone, and Rhysandir has folded his considerable height into it beside me as though he belongs here. Two weeks ago I would not have believed it. Two weeks ago he sealed a labor decree into house law and pretended it was arithmetic, and I let him pretend, because I have learned that this is how he permits himself to be kind.

"Read that part again," he says. "The Chronicler."

I find the line. "'And the Chronicler kept every story that was ever told, and forgot none, though the tellers turned to dust and their names with them.'" I run my thumb along the margin, where some long-dead hand has inked a spiral. "Do you think there could be such a thing? A being that just holds all of it, untethered, watching the centuries go by?"

"No."

"That's very certain for a man who commands chaos and married a human out of spite."

"Out of strategy." His mouth curves. "The spite was Varrus's."

"You're avoiding the question."

"I am answering it." He takes the book from my hands, careful of the brittle pages, and sets it aside on the stone. "A thing that only keeps stories is not living. It is a ledger. Living means you choose which stories to carry and let the rest fall. Otherwise you are buried under everything that ever was."

"That's bleak."

"It's honest." His eyes hold mine in the amber light reflected from the nearby brazier. "Some histories are not meant for vellum. Some are meant to be kept in one body, and told to one person, and nowhere else."

There is a shift under his words, a current pulling somewhere deeper than the conversation. I feel it in my own chest before I understand it, that strange half-echo the bond gives me now, his intent brushing against mine, tentative but persistent.

"Rhysandir."

"Fiona."

"You're doing something."

"I'm talking to my wife in her garden." He traces the line of my collarbone with one finger, and the touch scatters every clever sentence I meant to say. "Is that forbidden?"