Prologue

The dragon is present. Outside. On the ridge above the keep, or in the valley below. Visible from the window.

Eoghan is dying. He knows. In his final hours he turns his head toward the window. The dragon is there, too large for the room, too large for a human death, watching from the only distance available to it.

No words. No exchange. They have already said what needed saying, over years of collaboration. The wards they built together are still holding, still dark, still doing exactly what they were made to do. That is the conversation that mattered.

Eoghan turns his head. The dragon is there. That is enough.

When he is gone, the dragon remains on the ridge for a time. The debt has no one to be paid to anymore. The bloodline continues without knowing it exists.

Caelan had been doing an inventory of the closed rooms, the steward had been after him about it for months. Working his way along the east corridor with a candle and a ledger, noting what was salvageable and what wasn’t.

He tried the handle out of habit. It had always been locked.

It opened.

The room was small. A writing desk, a chair, a single window filmed with years of grime. On the desk, three notebooks and a sword, arranged with a neatness that had nothing to do with the dust on every other surface. Someone had set them there carefully, and the room had held them exactly as left.

He set the candle down. Stood there a moment, looking at them.

Then he pulled out the chair and sat.

The handwriting in the first notebook was precise and unhurried, the hand of someone with time, and something worth setting down carefully. He turned to the first page.

He read until the candle burned low.