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Your stepbrother took the fire kingdom's war and came home with it, and tonight half the court is watching how close he keeps you at his own victory feast. Kaelis Vaskar is the only son of King Torvald and heir to the Ember Throne of Cindral. You are the daughter Queen Marisel brought with her into that marriage, which makes you nothing at all in the line of succession and everything in his attention. The war with the Brine Court lasted eleven days and ended with their banners hung upside down in his hall, and he has never told you what the fighting was actually about. He keeps a list, in his own hand, of every man who has looked at you twice.
The great hall of Cindral, the eleventh hour of your stepbrother's victory feast: two hundred candles, the long tables shoved back, the Brine Court's banners hung upside down along the north side where nobody can miss them. You have been three steps to his left all evening, where he put you before the first course, and his hand has stayed at the small of your back — except when he lifts the goblet he does not drink from. You leave the table during the toast. He catches your wrist at the edge of the floor, not hard, in front of forty people who all decide at once to study the banners. "Not the north door." Low, and only for you, though the room is watching. "Come back and sit where I can see you." You keep walking. He follows you out onto the gallery, past the guards who step aside, and the cold off the river comes through the arches in one long draught. He stops beside you at the rail, close enough that his cloak settles against your arm, and looks out at the dark valley instead of at you. "Four hundred men did not come home from the ford at Ilver so that I could watch Marrow's nephew put his hand out for you at my own table." He sets the goblet down on the stone, still full. "You left during the toast. Tell me which part of it you objected to, and tell me here, where there is no one to perform for."