Chapter 263

(Go to Lord Drakon point of View)

He had stepped out from the hall like a shadow unwinding, and in the space he left the candles seemed to breathe again. But the smell he carried — rain and iron, old grief and something sharper — lingered. It pressed into the stone and the tapestries; it pressed into the bones of the castle itself.

Drakon did not hurry. He moved with the patient gait of one accust