The Weight of Zero
The Grand Hall of House Veyron smelled of lilac oil and old stone, a fragrance the servants burned each year to mask what everyone privately understood the ceremony to be: not a celebration, but an execution performed in slow motion, once annually, upon the same condemned boy.
Kael knelt on the cold marble at the center of the chamber, his knees pressed into a groove worn smooth by four previous years of kneeling in the exact same spot. Above him, three tiers of balconies rose toward a vaulted ceiling painted with the ascension of the first Veyron patriarch, a man depicted mid-transformation, wings of golden light bursting from his spine. Kael had memorized every brushstroke of that mural over the years, mostly because it gave him somewhere to look that wasn't a face.
The hall was full. It always was, on this day. Cousins and second cousins, minor lords sworn to the Veyron banner, merchants who'd purchased minor titles and wanted to be seen among the nobility — all of them arranged along the balconies like crows on a fence, waiting.
"Kael Veyron," intoned the Rank-Keeper, an ancient man named Orwin whose voice had the dry rasp of parchment. He held aloft a scroll sealed with…
