Neil told her about the fights, keeping it straightforward, the way each one had gone and what he had noticed about each opponent.

She listened with the particular quality of attention that she gave to things about him specifically, which was complete and real and not at all passive, asking two or three questions at the right moments that showed she had been tracking everything he said and had thoughts about it.

He told her about the Eye of the Future.

She was quiet for a moment after that, her hands folded on the table, looking at him with an expression that moved through several things before settling. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

"How much did it help?" She asked.

"Some." He said honestly. "Not enough. But some is better than none."

She nodded slowly, processing that, not rushing to fill the space with reassurance before she had actually thought about it.

"We will find a better one." She said eventually. "There are other things that can help, we just need to find them. You are not someone who runs out of options, hubby, that is not the kind of person you are." She paused. "And you are not doing this alone."

He looked at her across the table for a moment.

"I know." He said.

She reached across and touched his hand briefly, just a light press of her fingers over his, and then sat back and asked him something about the settlement they had visited, genuinely curious, wanting to know what it had looked like and what kind of people had been there, and the conversation moved forward naturally into easier territory while he finished eating.

Several days passed.

Nothing significant happened in those days, which was itself a kind of luxury. The domain ran as it was supposed to, the officers did their work, the repairs finished completely, and Neil spent the time in the way he spent quiet periods, thinking through things that needed thinking through without the pressure of immediate problems pushing him from behind.

It was calm, and he let it be calm, because he knew from experience that calm had a tendency not to last very long.

Far away, in a settlement that was neither the snake kingdom nor anywhere near it, Jane stood near the window of a room she did not want to be in and looked at nothing in particular while her grandfather’s voice filled the space behind her like something with physical weight.

Tred was not a man who raised his voice often. He had long ago reached the kind of position where he did not need to, where quiet displeasure was sufficient to produce whatever effect he wanted from the people around him. Which was why the volume he was currently operating at was, in its own way, more alarming than if he had simply been someone who shouted regularly.

Robert stood in the center of the room and received it.

He was not a small man and he was not, in most circumstances, a man who accepted being spoken to in any particular tone without objecting to it. But Tred was the one person in the world in front of whom Robert became a different size, and right now he was very much that different size, standing with his shoulders inward and his face doing complicated things.

"Do you understand." Tred said, his voice dropping into something quieter and therefore worse, "what it is that you have done? Do you have even the basic comprehension of the situation that you have gone and made considerably more difficult with your complete inability to simply do nothing?"

Robert opened his mouth.

"That was not an invitation to speak." Tred said.

Robert closed his mouth.

Jane watched this from the window and felt nothing in particular about her father’s discomfort, which told her something about how far things had gone between them.

Tred straightened and looked at both of them in turn with the measured expression of someone about to say something that required the audience to be paying complete attention.

"The Shadow Empress contacted me." He said. "Not through intermediaries, not through messages passed along through three sets of hands. Directly." He let that sit for a moment. "She had two conditions. The first was that Neil be permitted to marry into this family. The second was that we protect him, actively and unconditionally, from anyone who might wish him harm." He paused. "In exchange, she offered the family one guaranteed act of assistance, of our choosing, at a time of our choosing. Do you have any understanding of what that means in practical terms?"

The room was very quiet.

Jane had turned from the window without realising she had moved.

"In exchange for those two conditions." Tred continued, his voice now carrying the particular flatness of someone suppressing something large, "she would do one thing for this family that we asked. One thing. From the Shadow Empress. Directly." He looked at Robert. "And you went and placed a bounty on the boy."

Robert’s face had passed through several colours in the last thirty seconds.

"I did not know—" He started.

"Of course you did not know, because you acted before knowing, which is the thing you always do, which is the thing that I have been trying to correct in you for your entire adult life and which clearly has not taken." Tred’s voice had gone very quiet now, which was its most dangerous register. "You have placed a bounty on a boy that the Shadow Empress herself has an interest in protecting. Think about what that means. Think about what happens if those assassins reach him before you cancel that order. Think about what she would do to this family if that were to occur."

The silence after that was complete.

Robert looked like something had been removed from him physically, the particular deflation of a man who had been operating on confidence and has just had the foundation pulled out from under it.

Jane stood near the window and felt something complicated moving through her that she did not immediately have words for.

The Shadow Empress. Neil. Two conditions, both of them centred on him.

She did not know what the Shadow Empress was to Neil or what Neil was to the Shadow Empress. She knew his parents had not been present in his life in any visible way, that he had built everything he had through his own effort without the support that most lords of his tier took for granted. She had never understood why, had never had enough information to understand why.

But someone of that level had an interest in him. Had reached out to protect him specifically.

’Is this his parents?’ She thought, the question arriving before she had made a decision to think it. ’Or something else entirely?’

She did not have an answer. The question just sat in her chest with the particular weight of things that mattered and had no resolution yet.

Tred looked at Robert with the expression of a man who had arrived at the part of the conversation that was about solutions rather than analysis.

"You will cancel the order immediately." He said. "Today, not tomorrow, not when it is convenient. Today. And then you will find a way to make sure no harm has already been sent in that direction, and if it has, you will deal with it before it reaches him." He paused. "And then you will come back to me and tell me exactly what you have done and how you have done it, and I will tell you what the next steps are." His eyes moved to Jane briefly. "You, at least, appear to have had some sense in this matter."

Jane said nothing. She turned back to the window and looked at the settlement outside and thought about a boy who apparently had someone very powerful watching over him from a considerable distance, and wondered if he knew, and suspected from everything she understood about him that he probably did not.

In a different room, in a different settlement, the atmosphere was considerably less structured.

The room Caleb was using was private and well appointed in the way that rooms assigned to wolf royalty tended to be, with heavy furniture and no unnecessary softness to it, the kind of space designed around the assumption that its occupant was someone who did not need to be made comfortable because they were already comfortable by nature.

Jackey was kneeling near the door.

Jackey was a werewolf of middling build and considerable experience at reading rooms, and everything he was reading in this particular room was telling him that remaining very still and very quiet was the correct approach for the foreseeable future.

Caleb stood near the window with his back to most of the room, and the set of his shoulders was the specific configuration that the people who knew him well had learned to identify as the one that meant something was happening inside him that he had not yet decided what to do with.

He had been standing there for some time.

"Jackey." He said, without turning.

"Yes, my lord." Jackey said immediately.

"Tell me again what you observed." Caleb said. "About where they were during the middle of the evening."

Jackey had already told him this twice. He told him again, keeping his voice even and his account precise, covering everything he had noticed about the timing of their absences, the fact that they had occurred in the same window, and the fact that neither of them had offered any accounting of where they had been.

❖❖❖

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