The Crack in the Throne

Renz had a new list.

He sat at the same desk as always, the same grey light through the window, the same ink stain in the upper left corner that eight months hadn't managed to wipe away, and ran his finger down the lines until he reached Finn's name. Somewhere outside a carpenter was hammering at a roof that had leaked all winter, steady, like a second heartbeat that didn't match Finn's own.

"Second company, watch duty at the North Walkway. You start the day after tomorrow, six sharp."

"No more special assignment?"

"You're not a special case anymore." He didn't look up. The pen hovered a moment over the page, as if weighing whether the sentence needed more, then decided against it. "You're a soldier in a uniform that still looks too new. That'll wear off."

"And the uniform before that?"

"The uniform before that belongs to a report I didn't write." Now he did glance up, briefly, with the same appraising look Finn had known for months and still couldn't quite read. "I only write what's in front of me. North Walkway, day after tomorrow, six sharp."

Finn saluted and left, and that was the whole of his reinstatement. No interrogation, no second audience, not a word about what Draven's hand had done the day before, opening and closing on the paper in front of him, not a word about Corvanheim, the ballroom, a man named Meric whose name nobody here said out loud. Falkenklamm took him back the way you'd take back a tool you'd loaned out too long by mistake, and asked no questions about where it had been — the way an anvil doesn't ask where the hammer was before it came down again.

He thought that was wrong. He also found it, against his will, bearable — a wrongness that was at least predictable, with schedules and lists and Renz's even hand, after weeks in which nothing had been predictable except his own fear.

The sample ends here.