He was younger than the carved faces on the walls wanted him to be. Handsome, at a glance. Soft, if you looked longer. A sallow sheen rode his skin, the kind you get from too much syrup you didn’t mean to drink. The pupils were slow. His mouth made shapes before it found sentences and then forgot halfway through that it had wanted one. Three men in very fine coats arranged themselves at angles that made him look taller. A priest kept just back of his shoulder as if it were his personal shadow.

  The first sound he made wasn’t a greeting. It was a snort, small and ugly, when his eyes finally caught the end of the line and understood the size of what waited there.

  “What,” he said, and then found more of the words, “is that doing in my hall?”

  Jannet lifted his head and kept his chin level. He didn’t crouch. He didn’t rear. He stood the way you stand when you’re already taller than the argument.

  “Your Majesty,” Leth said, voice smooth as a temple threshold. “We come to report a smuggling den under your walls, and to petition for a license to travel. There were lives at stake.

  The king’s gaze hung for a second on Leth’s face, trying to choose whether to listen. It slid off and found Jannet again, as if the rest of the party were props and the main show had been accidentally brought out early.

  “It smells,” he muttered, and dabbed his lip with silk. “You brought livestock to court?”

  Jannet said, “I’m not livestock.” No hiss. Clean consonants. Perfect pronunciation in the city’s manner. “I’ll answer questions like anyone else.”

  A murmur moved through the gallery. The sound wasn’t fear.

  “Your Majesty, he kept order in the coach-house. He stayed where we placed him, moved only when directed, and caused no disturbance.”

  The king dabbed his lip again, eyes tracking past her as if a more interesting idea were about to cross the floor.

  “I’m not a specimen, Your Majesty,” Jannet said respectfully. “We broke a smuggling ring in your market—iron cages etched with sigils, and one of their men carried a device that swallowed their stock whole. We’re here to report it—and to place a lawful request before you.”

  The king dabbed his lip and gave the smallest wince, as if the words were a draft under a door. “A Request….,” he echoed, already bored. His gaze slid off Leth and found Jannet again, the way a child’s eye finds the biggest shape in a room.

  Jannet kept his voice even. “I speak for Newscar. We’ve settled ground outside your borders and kept your roads clear where they cross ours. I ask for formal passage and recognition—simple terms, written and honored….

  He didn’t get to finish the list.

  From behind the blue standard, the woman from the warehouse drifted into view as if she’d always been meant to arrive on that beat. She went straight up the steps and took her place sideways on the throne, one arm over the back, her wrist almost brushing the king’s neck.

  “You kept me waiting,” she said, soft enough that the hall leaned in to hear it.

  “Little sparrow,” the king breathed, and brightened like a man who had just remembered his own name. Then, louder, for the room: “You see what they brought in?”

  Her glance slid down the line and came to rest on Jannet. No flinch. No shock. She looked at him as if pricing freight.

  “It’s calm,” she said. “And house-trained, by your captain’s account.”

  “Your Majesty,” Jannet said, not rising to it. “The request stands. Newscar asks only for safe conduct and clear rules. We’ll keep our own peace. We don’t need your grain or your coin.”

  “Bold,” the king murmured, smiling toward the scent that rose from the woman’s handkerchief when she touched it to her lips. His pupils went slow and wide. The smile stayed.

  Leth tried to steer the moment back to sense. “Majesty, grant the captain two squads and a sealed writ. Let her see the storehouse before the smugglers strip it. Then grant us license to depart. We’ll be out of your way before noon.”

  The priest stepped in neatly. “Or heed me and grant caution. That,” he nodded toward Jannet, “doesn’t belong inside Crown walls.”

  “No chains,” Leth said, steady. “He walked in. He walks out.”

  “Guild-registered?” the woman asked, eyes on Leth as if choosing the length of a hem.

  “Rowell Hall,” Leth said. “Our papers are in order.”

  “How tidy,” the woman said, and turned her head, not to the party but to the throne. “Darling, have them searched. Properly. Then you can be generous with facts, not flattery.”

  “Search,” the king repeated, pleased to find a word he could carry. “And this… animal—”

  “Magnus,” Jannet said.

  Her brow ticked, amused. “Names don’t make it fit for court,” she said lightly, and a ripple of mean little chuckles moved behind the priest.

  Torren didn’t raise his voice. “She was in the warehouse,” he said, eyes on the king. “She stood over the cages. She ordered the evacuation when we came in. I always remember a pretty face.

  The woman didn’t bother to look at him. “Love,” she said to the king, and the endearment found him cleanly, “I slept in your rooms till dawn. Half your servants can swear it. But if we let the Guild’s hirelings fling stories at your guests, we’ll never get through the morning meetings.”

  The king’s mouth opened and shut. The priest gave him a line to hold. “This is a court, not a tavern,” he said. His gaze tracked the bulge of the cloak at Fialla’s side. “Where is the creature you claim to have freed?”

  “Gone,” Jannet said. He didn’t bother to dress the word.

  “How convenient,” the priest said.

  “Majesty,” Leth pressed, “send your captain now. She’ll bring you evidence before the last bell.”

  “She might,” the woman agreed, cheerful. “And while she does, our friends can rest their wandering feet. Let proper men do proper work.”

  “Proper men,” the king echoed, grateful for the phrase.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The captain tried one last turn of the wheel. “Send me,” she said, crisp. “I’ll take two squads. But our guards just reported a mess.”

  “Do,” the woman said pleasantly. “And post notices, dear heart. The city sleeps better when it sees a diligent guard.”

  The king seized on that. “Yes. Notices.” He sat up straighter, newly certain. “As for this—Magnus—” He liked the weight of it. “Hear me. Magnus is proscribed in the Crownlands. If he is seen outside the watch’s custody, any officer may put him down. A bounty will be posted.”

  Leth’s breath left her in a single, quiet sound. Calis’s jaw went tight. Torren’s hands went still.

  “Majesty,” Jannet said, one last try, because he had come to use words and he would not leave them unsaid, “hear the petition. Newscar offers peace on paper. That’s all.”

  The priest lifted a hand. “We don’t parley with monsters,” he said. “Especially ones claiming to rule stolen lands.”

  “And we won’t have the city thinking a monster has a seat at my Gilded Hawk’s court.” the woman added, smiling as if it were a kindness.

  The king nodded, pleased to be finished. “You’ll leave by sundown,” he said. “If you’re seen within the second mile after that…” He let the threat hang.

  The herald’s staff struck the tiles three times. The hall accepted the sound and echoed it back.

  The room unbent around the decision. Courtiers found their voices again. The priest made a small sign on his own palm and looked satisfied. The woman adjusted the hang of her skirt, eyes half-lidded, as if she had been told a pleasant joke.

  They turned because there was nowhere else to turn. In the antechamber the clerk pretended not to stare when Jannet’s scales kissed the lintel. In the colonnade the ward-lanterns dimmed in honest daylight. A watch lieutenant strapped, and sleepless fell in ahead of them with two files.

  “Point the door in Southmarket,” he said. “Then you go straight to the South Gate. No detours. No speeches.”

  “Understood,” Leth answered.

  They crossed the yard. Stableboys remembered to be busy elsewhere. A dog thought better of introducing himself after last night. The watch formed up without fuss. Southmarket waited: proof or ash. Either way, the ink would dry.

  Behind them, in the cool shade, a handkerchief folded away a practiced cough, and a palace clerk set a fresh sheet on his board and wrote the first line with careful strokes:

  PROSCRIPTION — MONSTER, NAMED: MAGNUS.

  They thanked him as if they weren’t sure thanks belonged to him.

  Voices met him in the lane beyond the gate—breathless, ragged, full of the tremor that comes after not dying. A dozen catfolk militia ringed him and Raphael with spears couched low, not menacing, just not ready to trust their eyes yet.

  Others crowded the walls, whiskers slicked dark with sweat, bows still strung. Kittens peered between legs and barrels with eyes too round. A captain with torn ear–tips stepped forward and then stopped, caught between salute and flinch.

  “You’re… with us,” she said, as if testing a bridge. “Why?”

  “Because you were losing,” Michelangelo said. He didn’t dress it. He had no breath for explanations. His shoulder burned where Raphael’s weight dragged at him; his front legs shook and did not fail. “Where is your healer?”

  The torn-ear captain swallowed the question that wanted to be next and pointed. “Hall of Needles. This way.”

  The militia parted. Michelangelo drug Raphael down a lane of clay walls and woven reed roofs, past fires knocked over in the alarm and set upright again out of habit. The smell of singed flour sat above the blood. Cats touched their chests as he passed, some in blessing, some in fear. One old tom muttered a prayer to any god that would listen.

  The Hall of Needles was a long room with a ceiling hung in drying herbs and skeins of sinew. The air had a clean edge: alcohol, resin, crushed mint. An elder waited on a mat near the back, small and straight, her fur gone to winter silver along the muzzle and ears. Beads lay against her throat the way years lay against her bones.

  “Lifeweaver Seya,” the captain said, and didn’t try to hide the relief in the name. “We’ve brought them and one is dying.”

  Seya’s eyes flicked to Raphael, took him in the way old hands hold care for all young life. “Lay him here,” she said, patting a pallet reinforced with split bamboo.

  Michelangelo eased Raphael onto the pallet and braced his head so his great jaw wouldn’t sag into a choke. Raphael’s breath rasped but came. Blood slicked the scales along his ribs, darkening to brown where it had clotted under dust.

  Seya’s fingers moved. They pressed, listened, pressed again. She didn’t wince. She didn’t shake her head. She looked where she had to look and then put both palms flat over Raphael’s heart.

  “I can dull the pain,” she said. “I can set bones and close what can be closed. But I don’t have the strength to pull him back from this. If I try to give more, it will kill me, and he still probably won’t live.”

  Michelangelo stared at her hands as if watching them might force them to do more. “What do you need?”

  “Years,” she said. “And I have already spent most of mine.”

  A small shape peeled from the shadows near the herb wall—a goblin whelp, no higher than the lifeweaver’s shoulder seated, with a stitched ear and eyes too old for its face. It clutched a roll of clean bandage like a trophy.

  Seya touched the child’s head without looking. “Nib learned poultice and stitch from me after we found him wandering the wilds alone.” she said, as if explaining where a pot had come from. “From the raiders. From the thing with too many teeth. The goblins took what they could from weaker tribes like his.”

  Nib’s mouth pinched. Its gaze skittered to Raphael and then away. It thrust the bandage forward with both hands. Michelangelo took it with his tail without thinking and set it aside because there was nothing for bandage to do against a wound like this.

  Raphael stirred. His eyes cracked, the gold gone muddy but still there. He found Michelangelo by heat first, then shape. “Brother,” he breathed, and the word scraped. “You…are..still ugly.”

  “Stay angry with me, fight brother.” Michelangelo said. “Breathe.”

  Seya poured a measured draught from a clay bottle and tipped it between Raphael’s teeth. The line of his jaw fought once, then accepted. The raw edge of his breath eased; the drag of it did not.

  Michelangelo looked at the lifeweaver. “If you try—if you spend—”

  She shook her head once. “I would die. It would not be enough. Then we would have two bodies on the floor, and no hands to catch the third.” Her gaze went to the door, to the village, to the thin voices outside still gossiping. “I will not do that to them.”

  Raphael’s mouth moved. “Good,” he whispered. “Do not waste yourself on me… Use what you have on…others more deserving.”

  “No,” Michelangelo said. He had never been good at the word. “No.”

  “Shh,” Raphael said. It might have been a laugh if he had owned an extra breath. “You don’t get to decide all of it.”

  “You are not dying,” Michelangelo said, and felt the lie burn coming out.

  Seya’s hand covered Raphael’s claw. “Speak what you need said,” she told him “I will leave you be.”

  Raphael turned his head the half-inch it would go and found Michelangelo’s face again. “Listen,” he said. “Jannet—he was right. You know it. You have always known it better than I did. Take them.” His eyes tracked to Seya in the doorway, to the kittens clustered like burrs around their mothers’ legs. “All of them. Home.”

  Michelangelo shook his head, once, hard. “Newscar is not— we can leave here together.”

  “Home is where we carry it,” Raphael said. His jaw trembled.

  He went on. “You carry it well. Carry enough for two.”

  “You can’t ask—”

  “I can,” Raphael said, tired humor sitting for a heartbeat in the corner of his mouth. “I’m dying.”

  Michelangelo bent until his brow touched Raphael’s. Scales met scales with a little scrape. He didn’t trust his voice. He gave the throat sound they had learned when they were young, the one that meant I’m here; keep listening.

  Raphael’s eyes closed slowly, not in surrender, in agreement. His breath grew shallower, steadier, thin as the edge of a leaf.

  Outside, the battle noises had stopped entirely. The village took the silence carefully, like lifting a pot off a fire.

  When Raphael’s chest stopped moving, it did not lurch or jerk. It simply didn’t rise again.

  Michelangelo did not move for a long count. The hurt in him had nowhere to go. It sat where it was and made everything bright and far.

  The torn-ear captain hovered at the door and did not dare to step in. When Michelangelo lifted his head at last, she straightened.

  “Your walls will not hold another night,” Michelangelo said. His voice came out steady because nothing else in him was. “You know this.”

  She opened and closed her mouth and settled on honesty. “We do.”