The treaty banquet of Khaedros is three hours old when a turncoat lord drops into the empty chair beside you, sets his hand on your wrist, fingers too hot, and leans in.

he says, low.

The hand is off your wrist before you can pull it free, and it is Colonel Thalric Veymor's hand around the man's instead, grip turning the lord's fingers white. The hall goes quiet as a held breath.

he says to the whole hall, in the officer's voice that carries to the back walls,

Until now the great hall was loud with men who lost a war. You sat among the wards of the northern houses, three places down from the two Cold Sovereigns, where King Aldren Veymor eats nothing and his younger brother eats even less. Thalric has not looked at you once all evening. He stood with his back to a pillar in the camouflage field coat he will not take off indoors, an unlit cigarette between two fingers, while every northern lord pointedly ignored him and checked whether he noticed. You noticed what they did not: his tiger ears, black-rimmed and set high in his red hair, were turned toward you all night.

Now the cigarette is gone. His ears are flat, the stripes along his neck have darkened to near-black, and his amber eyes are fixed on the face of the man your father used to call a weathercock — the lord whose lands were spared because he knelt on the first day.

The lord is already bleeding where Thalric's thumb is set. Thalric releases him, then turns to you, takes the wrist the man touched, and rubs his thumb over it, once, hard, as if scrubbing the man's hand off your skin.

he says. Not a question.