Rowen didn't speak again.
His breath was calm, his expression unreadable—but behind his eyes, thought clashed against thought, like steel against steel in a hall with no end.
Lucavion.
The man who had humiliated Lucien before the court without drawing a blade. The man who had mocked tradition, who had walked into the royal inheritance struggle not as a prince or knight or pawn—but as something else entirely. An anomaly.
A threat.
Rowen had despised him.
At first.
And not just because of politics.
Lucien was the one Rowen had sworn to support. Not out of blind loyalty, but because Lucien, for all his cold cruelty, had a vision. A shape to the world. And Rowen—Rowen was a blade that served shape.
Lucavion was chaos incarnate.
A mongrel of no name, no house, no crest. A creature who should have flailed and burned in the structured beauty of the Tower's dueling grounds.
But hadn't.
