Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

Kellan came down out of the House quarter to warn me, which was how I knew it was real, because Kellan did not come down anymore.

He was fifty-odd now and he looked older, the way the maimed age faster, the ruined eye long since given up on and the bad hand curled permanently against his chest like a thing he was protecting. He'd spent thirteen years up in the beached wreckage of the old Houses being the one man who could sit in a room with twelve ancient predators and keep them folded into a free city instead of plotting against it, and it had cost him — you could see it, the toll of a lifetime spent translating between people who wanted to eat each other. He almost never left it. When he sent word that he was coming down to the water himself, Alaric looked at the note and said, "Something's wrong up top," and he was right, and I hated that he was right, because it meant the peace had a shelf life after all and it had just expired.