The Solar was a lie. Warmth barely lived here, even with the fire gnawing at logs as thick as Soren's thigh, a fire that, in theory, should have made the air hum like an angry hive.
Instead, it struggled to soften the edges of the high chamber's glass, the windows bowing so wide and clear they could have scalped the roofs off the city below.
The yard was a snow-smear now, a strip of white bordered in soot and the ant-logic of moving bodies: recruits, stewards, the mirror-polished threat of Velrane's own line.
Above it all, the Solar held its altitude, a retina flick of gold and blue that reminded Soren who owned the sun.
Veyr Velrane waited at the center table, a sheet of parchment spread under his palm. Every edge of the table was mapped and mapped again, ink lines, wax coins for towns, gem-shards glassed in after the borders moved, and the little bone chips the staff used to mark lost sons as if keeping score in a game.
The room's only luxury was a wall-to-wall map, a quilt stitched with the ambition and hindsight of four centuries.
Soren had seen the map once, after curfew, through the slit of a half-closed door. In the dark, the rivers looked like wounds, stitched and then unstitched into whatever shape the last war required.
He wasn't the focus today.
In fact, Veyr's eyes only darted to Soren's name once on the roster, a flick and a thumb-bracket, then back to the work.
Soren, two floors below, was a rumor in the pit, a shadow the others assumed was either a snitch or a test.
Veyr had moved his own name up the ledger. Soren's was underlined. Not a neat line, but a nervous one, done fast.
The doors clapped without warning.
Lord Callen Velrane arrived like a weather system, frost melting off his cloak in wet, angry drips.
The Lord was a suspension bridge held together by thirty years of war and two bad knees; when he moved, the coat flared out, and every eye learned to get out of the way.
He scanned the Solar once, saw Veyr at the table, and dismissed the geometry of the room as if it was for people with softer problems.
He didn't say a word. He just let the silence draft its own instructions.
Veyr did not look up at first; he inked a number next to a city…Eidengard?, then set the pen aside with both hands.
Even his movements had practice in them. "You asked for numbers. They're not good." Not a hint of apology. Just the fact, collapsed to a single node.
Callen didn't blink. "I told you to find a solution." His voice was rarefied, a thin strip of patience stretched tight. Soren had imagined, more than once, what it would take to cut it clean.
Veyr said, "I have one. But you won't like it."
That almost got a smile from the old man, almost. "If I wanted to like the solutions, I'd have hired the poets."
Veyr glanced at the roster, and though Soren wasn't there to see it, he could bet the motion: Soren's name, highlighted, close to the list's end. "Soren Thorne," Veyr said, low and careful. "I want him reserved as my blade."
A slow exhale from Callen. "He's gutter. Not even bannered."
"He's better than the banners," Veyr said. "He doesn't fight for you. Doesn't fight for himself. It's like he's seen the game but refuses to play until he can rewrite all the rules."
Callen grunted. "You're feeling sentimental. Hunger does that. One winter out of the city and suddenly every bastard seems like an orphaned prince."
"He's not a bastard," said Veyr. "He's a disaster. If he lives, he'll be more trouble than every cousin and every son your sisters spent half their dowries pushing through these rooms."
Callen shook his head. "I know the type. They shine young, burn out younger. You remember Ashgard's last gutter-prodigy? He died in two moves and left a city in flames."
"He won't die," Veyr said, and this time the certainty anchored the words. "Unless you let one of the others kill him for sport, and then we all lose."
Callen paced to the window, watching the yard. The snow made even the smallest movements hemorrhage color into the white. He traced something on the glass, just once, a finger sketching a narrow spiral, then gone.
"You want to put your name behind an orphan with no debt to the house. You want to make him your knight."
"When he's ready," said Veyr. "Or after you're dead, and I do it anyway."
A pause. A long, cold draft. The fire in the Solar gave up, popping a coal in protest.
"Your mother warned me you'd be insubordinate," Callen said. "But she didn't warn me you'd be clever enough to get away with it."
Veyr said nothing. His hands were folded on the map, like he was afraid anything looser would betray nerves.
Callen allowed the silence to ripple, then: "Fine. He's yours, if he doesn't die first." The Lord walked over to the table, put a hand on the edge, and leaned in, two wolves, always negotiating who got to use the teeth.
"But if you make a fool of the house because you want a better story, I'll cut him out myself. And you know I don't bluff."
Veyr said, soft, "No bluff. You never have."
Lord Callen turned, cloak snapping, and walked through the doors as if exiting a duel he'd finished before drawing the blade. The Solar held the cold long after he left.
Veyr let his fingers drum the map, slow and almost tender. He circled Soren's name again, this time with a steadier hand.
Down in the pit, Soren finished his drills and felt the afterburn of a decision being made, somewhere, on his behalf.
He did not know what had been promised. Only that the trajectory of his life, like so many before him, had just been bent by the orbit of someone else's need.
It felt right. Or as close to right as the world allowed.