There was a tense moment between Sonder and the man-eaters.
The scene looked almost peaceful, with none moving or speaking, but the air was electric.
Invisible powers were between them, fighting against one another.
But before the fight could be concluded, the ceiling suddenly came down.
Not all of it, but a section in the center, collapsing inward.
There was a cloud of dust and a sound that swallowed everything else.
No one moved to see what it had been.
There was no concern or shock.
In the middle of the debris, something larger shifted and righted itself.
Everyone in the throne room knew that shape.
His wings were folded back against his back, looking impractical indoors.
He shook dust from his shoulders.
The king looked at him the way fathers look at sons who have just broken something.
Not alarmed. Not even particularly surprised.
The others in the room had largely resumed their prior positions, glancing at the hole in the ceiling once and then away, as though collapsed masonry were an inconvenience they had learned to absorb.
"Well," the queen said quietly to no one in particular.
The king waited until the last of the dust had finished falling.
"Son," he said. Not very welcoming or glad to see him.
His son straightened. He was still breathing harder than a man-eater would normally, something labored in it, and there was something to his movements that suggested he had been running on less than he needed for some time.
"Father," he said. "I wanted to come back. I was on a ship."
"And?"
"But there was a sorceress," he panted, as he was struggling with his words, but there was a particular flatness to it, of someone recounting an embarrassment they haven't fully processed yet. "She stopped me," he paused. "With her there, I couldn't eat for days. I was imprisoned with her as guard. When I thought the time was right, I took a chance, but I had just enough left to break out of the cell they put me in and fly here."
The king said nothing.
His son looked around the room then, properly, for the first time since he had come through the ceiling.
His gaze moved across the assembled faces, the hole in the floor where the rug had bunched and split, and the throne on its raised platform.
It stopped.
The silence that followed was a different kind than the one before.
He looked at Sonder.
Sonder looked back at him with the same easy, settled expression she had worn since sitting down.
"Her," he said.
"Yes," said the king.
His son stared at her for a long moment. Something worked its way across his face that wasn't quite any one thing or another.
"She was already here," he said. Less a question than a fact he was reluctantly assembling.
"She let herself in," the king said. "And then she sat down."