Halveth left before the capital had finished deciding what it thought about last night.
That was the point.
He walked to The Crestfall's main quarter in the capital with the bearing of someone who had decided exactly what this morning was going to be and was making it that before anyone else could make it something different. Not the step-son of an influential noble. Not the lowest peer in a room that had decided he didn't matter. Not the one who wasn't invited.
The head of his household.
The Crestfall's capital quarter was already humming when he arrived — the specific hum of a room that has received incomplete information and is in the process of completing it through collective speculation. The sound of last night had traveled through the noble district since the broken windows, and by morning it had arrived here in the form of fragments and questions and the particular energy of people who know something significant happened and don't yet know what it means for them.
