"The energy my witness described in the coliseum has no origin in any documented natural bond," Orion continued.

"What does have documented origin in the legends is the behavior of entities that need to disguise themselves to approach those who would not otherwise grant them access or confidence."

His voice still wasn’t accusatory. It seemed like the voice of someone sharing a concern they considered legitimate, the tone a person used when they wanted the audience to feel they were being trusted with something difficult.

Was the boy actually some strange entity in disguise?

"Things that genuinely help do not require that kind of approach. Things that do require it have ulterior reasons for doing so."

Was it not already a warning sign that something that powerful needed an innocent face?

Arturo spoke before Julius had finished formulating any powerful response that would clear the air.

"If we are discussing evidence and assumptions, what Lord Starweaver describes as evidence is also correlation, and the interpretation of a single biased witness," he said, with the contained voice of someone who has decided not to raise it because raising it would give Orion exactly the kind of reaction he was looking for.

"A tamer who has made documented, direct contributions to the defense of this city deserves considerably more than insinuations before his reputation is discussed in a formal session, and in his absence."

"These are not insinuations," said Orion. "They are questions the castle should have answered before we arrived here. Questions that anyone in this hall has the right to ask about exactly who they are protecting and why."

A pause.

"Such as this one: where is he?"

The hall went still.

"Where is tamer Patinder?" Orion repeated.

Not with urgency... With the calm of someone asking a question whose answer they already know and are patient enough to let the room supply. "This session includes the conferral of recognitions on the new adults of the fifth year. The first-place finisher should be present right? If his contributions are as extraordinary as we are told, if he is truly the young prodigy being presented to us... Why isn’t he here?"

"He is recovering from injuries sustained during the defense," said Julius.

"I understand." Orion nodded with the condescension of someone accepting an explanation they are not convinced by. "And these injuries are so severe he cannot appear in public after getting healer treatment by a healer even briefly?"

"The attack was intense and his contributions were considerable," said Arturo. "The protocol provides for representation in cases of justified absence."

"The protocol provides for many things." Orion turned toward the hall, not toward Arturo, the shift from addressing an individual to addressing a room again. "What it does not provide for is the first-place finisher receiving his lands, his titles, and his recognitions without being present to confirm that he accepts them and that he is in a condition to assume what they entail."

Another pause, placed to land where Orion wanted it to land.

"Unless the intention is to administer them on his behalf while the tamer who supposedly earned them never returns to public life. An experiment that went wrong. A boy who absorbed more darkness than he could manage and who can no longer be shown because what he would show would not be presentable."

He let that image settle into the room before continuing. "And in the meantime, the castle manages what he ’earned’ in his name, with the convenient advantage that the titleholder will never be in a position to claim anything."

"That is another accusation without basis," said Arturo.

"It is a proposal for the protection of the titleholder." Orion directed it toward the master of ceremonies, not toward Arturo, the deliberate choice of addressing the record rather than the argument.

"If tamer Patinder cannot present himself in person before this session concludes, I propose that his recognitions be suspended or ’delegated’ until he can confirm his acceptance directly." A brief pause. "For his own good."

The problem was serious.

Ren hadn’t woken... Despite every minute Julius had managed to extract from the ceremony’s margins, every procedural extension pushed as far as it could go without breaking the rules that were also their protection, the time they’d bought had run out without producing the one result they needed.

Julius counter-argued.

Arturo added context.

Objections were formulated that were designed to make the conversation last rather than to resolve anything, each one a measured response to a specific point, each one giving the clock a few more seconds to run while the gallery above remained silent.

The master of ceremonies managed the turns with the meticulousness of someone who understood that his function at this moment was to be the format that kept this in the official record. Every objection registered. Every counter registered. The room talked and he just held the structure around it.

Julius’s argument wasn’t weak... Arturo sustained it with the solidity of someone who believed what he was saying because he had real arguments to believe it, not just a position he’d been assigned to defend.

At several specific points Orion had extended his argument too far, past the place where the logic began to give under the weight of its own implications. The room noticed some of those moments. The people with enough context to evaluate them noticed all of them.

But the master of ceremonies had been doing this for fifty years.

And he knew the difference between winning an argument and planting a seed.

The people who had come to this hall knowing Ren Patinder personally would leave with their opinions intact.

But those people were not the majority...

Most of the room had arrived without that context, with only what they had seen in the coliseum, or what they had heard secondhand about a boy who did things that didn’t match his age or his declared bonds. Those people had something now that they hadn’t brought in with them.

A question.

And questions, as the master of ceremonies had known since the early years of his career, were considerably harder to remove from a room than any argument.

He still registered the exchange, noted the times and waited for the signal from Julius that the point had been developed as far as it was going to go.

But time was running out fast.