Turn 3 of 6

Let go of the crown before I answer

Your hand lifts. The contact breaks like a held breath released, and the question is gone — not answered, not refused, just absent, a room that was lit and now is not. Your palm is cold and damp where the metal touched it, and you stand there looking at the greenish corrosion that has left a faint print on your skin. The crown does nothing. It sits on its plinth, inert, a thing that might be sold for scrap. The absence of its attention is total and immediate, like walking out of a room where someone was speaking and finding silence.

Maeve's hand catches your arm. Her fingers dig in hard enough to leave marks, and she spins you a quarter-turn to face her. Her face is grey in the candlelight, the lines around her mouth cut deep, and her eyes are searching yours with something that is not quite anger.

"You let go," she says. Her voice is flat.

"Fourteen people touched that crown and not one of them let go before it finished. Not one." She is gripping your arm like she thinks you might fall, or run, or both.

"He's still breathing," the Salt-Warden says from the doorway. His voice is gravel and salt, and he sounds almost disappointed. He holds the lantern at arm's length, the flame steady, and he is watching you with the careful blankness of a man who has learned not to invest in outcomes.

"Fourteen weren't, when I pulled them off. Two were breathing but not speaking. One was speaking but not breathing, if you understand me." He pauses.

"This one just let go."

The silence that follows is the kind that has texture. You can feel the vault thinking around you — the seepage in the cracks, the candle bending its flame sideways, the tide somewhere below working at the foundations. Maeve has not released your arm. Her grip has shifted from urgent to assessing, the way a woman holds something she is trying to price.

"What did it ask you," she says, and it is not a question. It is an interrogation compressed into five words, delivered by a woman who has forged a dead king's name four hundred times and is running out of room.

The Salt-Warden shifts his weight. "Let him breathe, Corr," he says. "The tide's turning. We've got three hours before this room is under water, and I'll not be dragging anyone out in the dark." He looks at you, and beneath the beard and the weathered suspicion there is something else — curiosity, maybe, or the faintest edge of respect.

"You let go," he says again, quieter this time, as if repeating it might help him understand what he just saw.