Silence settled.

  The buzzing under Roderic’s palms hadn’t faded; without their voices, it pressed harder—an undercurrent pulsing through the marble like a warning trying to reach him.

  “You held your ground,” Eryndor said from beside him, his tone almost conversational. “Could’ve gone worse.”

  “They’ll twist every word before they’re halfway home,” Roderic said.

  “Of course,” Eryndor said. “They didn’t come for truth. They came for something they can live with.”

  Roderic dropped into his chair at last. The carved map filled his view. His fingertips traced the jagged line of the North, down to the smooth curve of the Eastern coast, the forests of the Wildlands, then across the dotted ridges marking the desert’s oases, back to the Central shore.

  Five realms. Five pieces.

  “You spoke of one heart and five pieces,” he said. “That wasn’t just a song.”

  Eryndor’s shoulders rose and fell. “Depends on who you ask. The luminars call it heresy. The old chronicles call it history. I call it the only thing that makes sense of the mess we’re standing in.”

  Roderic looked up. “Are the relics really connected?”

  “Yes,” Eryndor said simply. “They’re all echoing the same strain of power. The more men have tried to use them to prop up their thrones, the worse the echoes get.”

  “And Elowen?” The name came before he could stop it. “Where does she fit?”

  Eryndor watched him for a moment, then looked away toward the nearest candle, its flame still trembling behind its small glass shield.

  “When the light was whole,” he said, “it was entrusted to a line that belonged to both sides of the first war. Human and fae. That line has been hunted, starved, forgotten. But blood remembers. Power remembers.” He glanced back at Roderic. “So does mercy.”

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  “That’s not an answer,” Roderic said.

  “It’s the only one I have that won’t get you killed if you repeat it in the wrong hall,” Eryndor said. “For now, all you need to know is this: whatever woke that shard in your vault yesterday responded to her, not your father’s crown. That should tell you where its loyalties lie.”

  Roderic’s stomach tightened. “If anyone else realizes that,” he said, “they’ll chew through her until she’s useful—and discard her the moment she isn’t.”

  “Mm,” Eryndor said. “Or lock her away very carefully and call it devotion.”

  “Which is what I just did,” Roderic said.

  Eryndor’s mouth twitched. “You did better than that. You refused to parade her. You refused to throw her into someone else’s storm or bind her tongue to someone else’s charter. You drew a line.”

  “I drew it around her,” Roderic said. “And if the Wall keeps…doing whatever it’s doing, that line becomes a target.”

  “Yes,” Eryndor said. “That’s the trap.”

  Roderic stared at the map under his hands until the lines blurred. Choice is the only real power, Nasim had said. Eryndor had agreed.

  Choice. In a world built on oaths and walls and orders from above.

  “If the fragments are waking,” he said quietly, “what happens next?”

  Eryndor considered his answer. “That depends,” he said, “on who they answer to. And whether that person is allowed to choose their own path, or has it chosen for them.”

  Roderic thought of Elowen at the dance, of the way she had flinched from his hand even as she took it. Of the way the wind had curved around her when she decided to stand at the parade.

  “She doesn’t owe this kingdom anything,” he said, more to himself than to Eryndor.

  “No,” Eryndor said. “She doesn’t.”

  Roderic drew his hands back from the table. The faint buzzing in the stone fell away. Without his touch, the map was just cold marble again.

  “You said power only holds if the heart chooses it,” he said.

  Eryndor gave a small nod. “I did.”

  “And if she chooses not to carry it?” Roderic asked. “Not to be what everyone seems to think she is?”

  “Then the world will keep shaking until someone else does,” Eryndor said. “Or it all comes down. There’s no gentle way to carry something like this. There’s only honest, or not.”

  Roderic stood. The chamber suddenly felt too tight, the air thick with wax and old stone and other men’s fear. He wanted open sky. He wanted to see the Wall itself, not scribbles on a report.

  What he had, for now, was a girl in a borrowed room, and a choice about how to speak to her.

  “They think I’m keeping her for myself,” he said.

  “They’re wrong,” Eryndor said. “You just haven’t decided who you’re willing to disappoint yet.”

  Roderic almost laughed. It didn’t quite make it out.

  He turned toward the door.

  Behind him, the candles burned with steady flames at last. The humming in the stone faded to something he could almost pretend he’d imagined. The world, for the moment, stayed where it was.

  For the moment.