They reached Ashendell on the ninth day, the city's gates thrown wide in genuine welcome rather than the wary suspicion the whole party had braced for, and Corren met them at the palace steps himself, wearing his own true face openly for the first time any of them had seen since Blackmere, his shoulders looser and his stride more certain than Wrenna remembered from the lakehouse dock three weeks earlier.
"You're here," he said, and the words carried more relief than the simple fact of their arrival strictly explained, some part of him plainly having spent the whole nine days quietly dreading a raven that never came.
"We're here," Wrenna said, sliding down off her horse before anyone could offer a hand to help her, "and I would like it noted, once, that I did not wait at home this time."
"Noted," Corren said, something warm moving behind the word, and found, watching her cross the last few steps toward him with none of the old careful hesitation, that he'd missed the stubborn, familiar shape of her more than he'd let himself admit even to himself over the length of the ride south.
They gave the household a full day before any court business touched them, Corren's own quiet insistence, and spent most of it simply existing together in a guest wing considerably larger than the lakehouse's cramped rooms had ever allowed, Karma laughing for the first time in weeks at Elara's delighted shrieking over a window seat wide enough to crawl the length of, Aldric standing at the same window for a long while afterward simply watching a city he'd never once expected to see from this particular height. Corren found a quiet hour that evening to turn Rooke's small iron ring over between his fingers again, the metal gone warm from months of being carried, and told Wrenna, finally, the whole of what it had cost a man to tell one true thing to Duke Maravent's face.
"He's out there somewhere," Wrenna said, when Corren finished, "free, and it cost him everything he'd built to earn that freedom honestly."
She was quiet a moment, turning her own thoughts over.
"I hope, wherever he's settled, that it's turned out to be worth what he paid for it."
"So do I," Corren said.
"And Denrick's still inside Blackmere, playing whatever long game he's decided is worth the risk, and I haven't heard a single word from him since Aurelle passed his message along.
I think about that more than I let on.
I don't know if silence from him means he's safe, or means the opposite, and I've had to make a kind of peace with not knowing either answer yet."
He set the ring down on the windowsill beside him, watching lamplight from the city below catch its worn surface.
"Baris is somewhere in Fangmoor territory tonight too, with an arm that never came back all the way and a clan that still isn't speaking easily to the people who love him.
None of those threads have closed. I've stopped expecting them to close just because I've become someone with a crown coming.
I think that's probably the more honest way to carry a kingdom than pretending every debt gets settled the moment the title changes."
The feast preparations swallowed the palace whole over the following days, servants scrubbing marble that hadn't needed scrubbing and cooks arguing over menus grand enough to feed three factions at once, and it was in the relative quiet of a guest wing sitting room, three afternoons before the ceremony, that the conversation none of them had been willing to start finally found its own moment regardless of anyone's readiness for it.
Rain had moved in over the city that afternoon, a thin, persistent grey that turned the palace windows to running glass and kept most of the household indoors, and the sitting room's fire had been built up higher than the weather strictly demanded, the fussing of servants who'd clearly decided a princess's private conversation deserved better comfort than the actual temperature required. Elandrie arrived with tea nobody had asked for and a directness nobody in the room quite expected, setting the tray down and addressing Wrenna and Celeste both before she'd even taken a seat herself.
"I understand there's a shape to this that hasn't been discussed properly yet," she said.
"I'd rather we discuss it now, honestly, than let it curdle quietly under a wedding neither of you has actually agreed to be comfortable standing beside."
"There's nothing to discuss," Wrenna said, too fast, the old guilt already rising in her voice before she'd finished the sentence.
"You're marrying him.
You're going to be Queen.
I don't have a claim that outranks that, and I've never pretended otherwise."
"That's not the same as there being nothing to discuss," Elandrie said, gently enough that it didn't land like a correction, only like a fact.
"I'm not asking you to compete for a rank you never wanted.
I'm asking whether you want to stay near him at all, on whatever terms actually feel honest to you, or whether the kindest thing either of us can do is stop pretending an arrangement built on you swallowing your own feelings counts as generosity."
Wrenna's composure cracked at that, faster and further than she'd clearly intended it to.
"I don't know how to want something from him without feeling like I'm collecting on a debt he never actually asked me to hold," she said, the words coming out raw and fast now, three months of careful discipline finally giving way.
"Every single time I let myself feel something about Corren, some part of me is doing the arithmetic underneath it.
He saved my life at Blackmere. He's saved it a dozen times since. If I let myself love him and he loves me back, how do I ever know it's not just gratitude wearing a nicer word?
I don't want to be someone's consort because I owe him. I want it to be because I actually chose it, freely, the way Celeste chose to come to the lakehouse instead of staying safe with her own family.
And I don't currently know how to tell the difference between those two things inside my own chest, and I am tired, so tired, of pretending I do."