Act V, Chapter 22: The Throne Room Fills — Everyone Arrives at Once

The candles in the throne room had been lit since dawn.

This was the first wrong thing — Aldric noted it as he crossed the outer corridor, his court shoes making the soft deliberate sound of a man with nowhere urgent to be. Candles at dawn meant preparation. Preparation meant the day had already been shaped by someone who knew its shape before it arrived. He adjusted nothing in his expression, only filed the observation in the precise interior cabinet where he had been filing such things for months, and walked on.

He had dressed with unusual care that morning. Not the dishevelment that suited his performance — collar slightly wrong, one sleeve pushed up — but something approaching his father's standard: the dark doublet with the Voss sigil worked small at the breast, the charcoal wool that his father had once said made a man look like he intended to still be standing at the end of whatever room he entered. He had stood before the mirror and looked at himself for a long time, longer than he had permitted himself since the morning of the execution, and what he had seen was not a young man feigning madness and not a young man consumed by grief but something that had been neither of those things for quite some time now and was only beginning to understand its own shape.