Aldous moved first, rage finally finding somewhere to spend itself, his blade coming down in a strike Maravent turned aside with an economy that made the fight look, for one sick moment, considerably more one-sided than any of them wanted to believe it was. Corren followed a half-second later, the corrected lightning chant already forming on his tongue, and felt the working leave him costing considerably more than it should have, his reserves already thinned past what a second real casting in one night could comfortably survive spending.
Maravent parried the bolt's edge with a blade that shouldn't have been able to, some ward worked into the metal itself scattering the current harmlessly into the floor, and retreated three steps toward the study's far window with the same unhurried calm he'd carried since the moment they'd entered.
"You're spent," he said, watching Corren's hands tremble with a drain that had nothing left to spare for a second attempt. "I can see it from here. I've watched enough men overdraw their own well to recognize the exact shade your face has gone." He stepped up onto the window's low sill, three of his own soldiers already covering the retreat from the corridor behind him, buying him a margin none of them, exhausted and thinned as they were, had anything left to close. "My army remains exactly where it's been for weeks, Corren, waiting on a signal I have not yet decided to give. Tonight was not that signal. Tonight was simply insurance, in case your little theft ever reached a courtroom I couldn't control the outcome of. I would advise you to enjoy whatever crown you're about to be handed. I don't believe either of us has finished with the other yet."
He dropped from the sill into the dark beyond it, his men peeling off after him a heartbeat later, and by the time Corren reached the window, chest heaving, hands still trembling with a debt he had no reserve left to pay any further tonight, there was nothing below but empty garden and the retreating sound of horses already too far gone to chase.
They laid King Ignacius out in the throne room before dawn, the hall's usual golden grandeur made strange and too large by grief, candlelight guttering against dragons painted across a ceiling that had watched considerably happier occasions than this one. Incense burned thick enough to catch at the back of Corren's throat, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable to anyone who'd fought through the corridors an hour earlier, the lingering bitterness of old smoke that no amount of open window could fully clear from the room yet. Corren stood with Voss on one side and Wrenna on the other, Karma arriving with Elara and Doss close behind once word reached them the fighting had ended, Elandrie kneeling at the bier's edge with a composure that had cost her, Corren could see plainly, everything she had left to spend on holding it. Nyla stood near the doorway with Doss, her sightless face turned toward the King's body with an expression Corren couldn't quite name, and when he caught her eye afterward she only said, quietly, that the room had felt considerably emptier the moment the King's heart actually stopped than it had while his body was simply lying still, as though something real had genuinely left rather than merely paused.
"I shall require help rooting the traitors from the King's Guard," Aldous said finally, his own composure fraying at the edges but holding, the shallow cut along his arm bound now, his voice carrying an authority Corren hadn't heard from him since the day his own arm had regrown under Corren's hands. "Nyla's gift, if she'll lend it. I intend to know precisely which of our own men let Maravent's soldiers through that western wall before this week is out."
"You'll have it," Corren said.
"The Kingdom needs a new ruler," Voss said, quiet, the words landing in the grieving room with the weight of something that had to be said regardless of how little anyone present wanted to be the one to say it. "Immediately. Stability now, before Maravent decides tonight's failure means he simply needs a bigger signal next time."
Every eye in the room turned, by slow, inevitable degrees, toward Aldous, and Aldous, to his credit, did not flinch from the weight of the attention even as he shook his head against it.
"I renounce my claim," he said, steady, the words carrying none of the bitterness that had once defined every sentence he spoke about his own worth. "I have spent the last month learning what it costs to actually change rather than simply declare it, and I don't believe the throne is where that change is asking to be spent. I would rather serve this Kingdom with a sword in my hand, as Commander of the Guard, than sit above it wearing a crown I'm not certain I've earned the right to test yet." His gaze found Elandrie's, something unspoken passing between them that only two people who'd shared a childhood could have fully read. "My sister isn't strong enough to rule alone either, by her own account, and I don't think either of us should pretend that admission is a weakness rather than an honest assessment."
"Then who," Wrenna asked, quiet, into a silence that had no easy answer waiting inside it.
It was Aldous who said it first, the suggestion arriving with a conviction that surprised even him, judging by the flicker of his own hesitation before he committed to the sentence fully. "If Elandrie married Corren," he said, "he could be crowned alongside her. He has strength, and wisdom he's earned rather than inherited, and a level head that survived Maravent's own network without breaking under it. I would trust this Kingdom to the two of them together considerably more readily than I'd trust it to either of them ruling alone."
Corren felt every eye in the room settle onto him at once, and found, standing in a hall still smelling of smoke and incense both, that the moment carried none of the easy shock a stranger hearing about it secondhand might expect. It carried, instead, the specific, heavy stillness of a man being asked to accept a debt he hadn't finished calculating the true size of yet.