Everly stepped down from the carriage with the sea wind catching the train of her crimson gown and turning it into a pennant of blood. Valemere's coast always smelled of salt and old promises; today the waves smelled of oiled leather and funerary smoke. Behind her, the carriage door thudded closed like a coffin lid. Ahead, the Ashford courtyard lay wrong—too large, too empty. Tables ran in long, neat rows toward the keep, three hundred of them, iron candles unlit, benches without anyone to claim them. Flowers had been set in place and left to wait. The banners bore the Ashford hawk, but there was no music. No laughter. Edmund West stood by the main stair, wearing the black-and-ash livery of the house, one hand on the hilt of a pocket knife he never used in public. He had the look of a man who'd been living with loss so long it had hardened into a second skin. He bowed when Everly came up the steps with her chin up, not like pity but like a man offering the last polite thing he could find. "Lady Everly," he said. "Welcome to Ashford. Forgive—this is not as the council imagined." "I did not come for a celebration," Everly said. She let the gown rustle; it made people notice her even when there were no people to notice. The crimson was the color her mother had loved—brash against the gray of war and mourning. "Only