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diff --git a/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/notes.md b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/notes.md
new file mode 100644
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+# Editorial notes
+
+## Character-sheet repaint — 2026-10-21
+
+The user found that the main character sheets lacked the painted look of the other collection references. On comparison, Veska's smooth face and exposed skin were especially photographic; the set's finish was inconsistent. The built-in imagegen tool repainted all four existing sheets using Melicent's sheet and the collection's orchard painting for medium, with the accepted Veska repaint also guiding the other three. Broad opaque strokes now construct faces, limbs, clothing and wings. Pixel inspection retained the same identities, costumes, plain white backgrounds, labels and reference views, including Veska's four moth lobes and wing-only briars, Nim's six wings with reversed viewer-side colours in the back view, Hox's four copper lobes and two drum states, and Orset's four silver-banded wings and oath scroll. The accepted WebP files replace the earlier sheets under their existing names; earlier versions remain in Git history. The prose and selected cover are unchanged, so their General rating stands.
+
+## 2026-10-21
+
+Before seeing a plot, the independent Codex keeper read the complete request and supplied original. Its explicit requirement was actual legal change: “social rebellion alone would not fulfill it.” Its inferred pleasure was “personal self-expression acquiring constitutional force,” with lively, dangerous enchantment and outcasts who have their own desires. It warned against private escape without institutional consequences or rightful destiny absorbing her refusal. Those are interpretations, not added requirements. The image supplies punk confidence, cream-and-violet moth wings and a pumpkin field; it does not mandate Halloween or contemporary Earth. The unchanged original is preserved in `art/references/`.
+
+The writer proposed *The Wrong Sort*, a literal outcast music band. Before outline discussion, the keeper protected discovery “in her friends’ clasped hands,” but found no reason Hox could not also wear iron and no demonstrated reason the final alteration must consume Veska’s power. Independent Claude protected “someone else’s desire coming true, not Veska’s power” and objected that “the release itself is still decided by one royal body.” It also challenged the regent’s bargain, access to the ceremony, Hox’s later wants, and a tattoo completed during a struggle. These first effects were saved before exchange.
+
+The keeper answered that “a unilateral act that ends unilateral authority is meaningfully different from retaining authority and issuing a generous decree.” Claude replied, “I accept the keeper’s distinction,” withdrawing mandatory crowd-magic fixes while retaining its concern about passive beneficiaries. The writer’s repairs gave the newlyweds an intentional first wedding attempt after that afternoon’s tattoo, bounded summonses that iron prevents but cannot revoke, and a test consuming living gold. Hox wants the stage denied his father; Nim rejects royal household ownership. Orset bargains for public compliance while retaining physical force. Discussion then established jointly planned deception, temporary safe-conduct, inert preparation and one final dot. Both readers tested the actual route; the revised outline made sole source and inheritance loss explicit. The coordinator found this promising enough to draft, with coauthored risk and irreversible loss still to be earned in prose.
+
+The first complete draft was committed before cold reads. Independent Codex experienced “an anti-coronation story” and found Hox’s drum the strongest source of feeling, but called the late guard/child rescue “assistance arriving from the author.” Independent Claude also called the drum “the emotional spine,” protected the wedding and ordinary knot, yet reported “a plan I didn’t understand, carried out in movements I couldn’t follow.” Its concrete issues were the bow’s point, the brush pronoun, Hox’s registration, an unused iron temptation, and failure to distinguish lost future power from existing bindings ending. Its preference for piecemeal rewriting over abolition was explicitly taste. The keeper separately found the prompt fulfilled. These original responses were preserved before discussion.
+
+In the draft exchange, Codex reconstructed the intended bow movement but agreed that “the point” lost the identifying noun at the decisive instant. Both readers tested the writer’s local proposal; Claude asked that Veska infer the stakes herself and warned against over-choreography. The revision seeded the copper-notched guard’s discretion and protection of the child, removed an unnecessary marriage-registration rule and unused temptation, and anchored the bow. “The gap lay trembling above the point” became Veska lowering “the prepared gap onto the bone point on his bow.” Her inference now begins, “The stair barrier had gone out with its gold. This would end every barrier, every call already lodged in someone.” Complete returning rereads found the original effects resolved. Claude’s minor reservations about repeated guard description, child placement and “who would stay” remained visible; the coordinator read the latter in its army-oath context and moved to genuinely fresh readers.
+
+The fresh final pair independently exposed the same gap the workshop had normalized. Codex asked why, with “tools, knowledge, privacy together, and an hour to prepare,” the band does not finish privately. Fresh Claude likewise found “no reason” to wait until disarmed and restrained: the fight felt like “staged danger.” Both protected the wedding, drum and ordinary-knot ending. Codex followed the contact; Claude needed rereading and flagged the viewpoint disclaimer after described escape details. Their independent first effects were saved before sharing. The keeper’s separate comparison still found fulfillment intact. The coordinator accepted the motive objection as material, rather than requiring a quieter climax or another magical rule.
+
+The final round-robin tested the writer’s ordinary locked custody and public-witness repair. Nim offers immediate completion and says everyone will feel release anywhere. Veska chooses Orset’s need to bring a compliant heir outside, and public evidence that his own restorer cannot recover the source: “He wants them to watch him put me right. Let them watch him fail.” Hox names guards, brush and lost iron before choosing the performance. Codex emphasized that they need not prove this their safest possible plan. Claude accepted the renewed temptation as loss arriving at the moment of choice and withdrew its overstatement of contact friction as passivity. The revision plainly states the guard defeating the first attempt, Nim holding the bow still and Veska pressing down; it also prepares the brush/fluid, clarifies light through violet bands and removes the viewpoint disclaimer. Both fresh readers reread the entire story and found the material timing and contact effects resolved. Claude’s probable witness-payoff concern prompted one local sentence: “The copper-winged woman on the landing gripped the rail and stared at the clean patch.” Its contextual check found that sufficient, with no new causal problem. The writer retained consenting to the alteration separately from choosing where to complete it; Claude accepted that reading in context.
+
+The coordinator judges the prose ready because accidental changes create new choices, the band knowingly shares a credible public risk, and consuming the source costs Veska future authority. Ordinary force and uncertain consequences survive liberation; the ordinary knot preserves the relationship without enforcement. The earlier taste for piecemeal reform was declined because it would evade this version’s earned surrender. Names and relevant universe authority showed no collision or shared-fact conflict. Time, ink/source state, iron transfers, drum/fiddle continuity and hand/wing positions were reread. Only trailing empty lines were mechanically removed afterward. The story remains `canon: false`; no shared facts are added.
+
+Art followed the completed prose. The built-in imagegen tool used the supplied original for Veska and the collection’s *Apple Orchard Hillside* for oil-paint direction. Separate white-background sheets cover Veska, Nim, Hox and Orset; paintings cover the pumpkin field, Sky Court terraces and windowless musicians’ room. Saved reference pixels were inspected for identity, clothing, anatomy, readable labels, props and geography; corrections kept Veska’s briars on her wings and Nim’s six wings and colour sides consistent. The cover uses the accepted band and field references, with its exact title generated once in the image. An invented microphone was removed. Final references are 1536×1024 WebP; the inspected cover is an 864×1536 JPEG. The imagery is interpretation, not canon authority. The finished prose and selected cover were then rated General, with specific content notes in `ratings.md`.
diff --git a/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/outline.md b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/outline.md
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/outline.md
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+# Provisional direction: The Wrong Sort
+
+The explicit promise is a royal heir who rejects the life her inherited wing markings prescribe, tattoos them, wears cold iron, joins magical outcasts, and inadvertently changes the ancient laws themselves. My interpretation is an exuberant, dangerous fantasy of self-expression acquiring public force: punk pleasure, chosen company, consequential enchantment, and the exhilaration of breaking a system that has treated bodies as instructions. The scale begins with a band and reaches the realm. The central bond is the heir's friendship with the outcast tattooist. The anticipated payoff is visible release from hereditary compulsion and her continued life with the band, rather than her return as a kinder monarch. These are interpretations, not additional user requirements.
+
+Close third through **Veska**, with a sharp, amused voice that can admit fear. The original informs her confidence, dark hair with violet streaks, large purple-and-gold moth-like wings with crescent eyespots, iron jewelry, and a moonlit harvest gathering. The crescents and their connecting bands carry the recognized wing grammar. **Nim**, a mixed-lineage fairy tattooist and fiddler, and **Hox**, a copper-winged drummer, are lovers forbidden to marry. Their band, the Wrong Sort, has its own audience and pleasures before Veska joins. **Regent Orset** controls the court and guards while preparing her accession. The previous queen is dead; Veska bears the sole living royal source, including its inheritance branch. Establish this before the final choice.
+
+- Begin with the pumpkin-field show and Nim and Hox's attempted wedding, witnessed by their friends even though hereditary law has rejected their vows before. Veska's black briar tattoo was finished that afternoon; this is their first attempt since. She chose tattoos and iron before anyone knew altered patterns could change law. The band enjoys its new member, rather than merely hiding a princess. Nim and Hox brace for the marriage ward to reject their joined hands. Instead it opens: one briar thorn has interrupted the closed wing pattern that forbids marriage between their lines. The first proof of her power is somebody else's desired freedom.
+- Orset's call imposes an obligation on Hox to attend the accession. A summons controls attendance at its named event, not every movement or later action. Veska's iron stopped the call entering her; she immediately shares iron with Nim and tries it for Hox. It cannot undo the obligation already lodged in his pattern. Make its imposition explicitly involuntary, never a consent disguised by words such as “accepted.”
+- They test the revelation by turning a subsidiary rank-line back into its own origin. That original gold connection is consumed; ordinary ink cannot recreate living gold. Hox can now enter the elevated public music platform where his father was forbidden to perform, and wants the Wrong Sort heard there. The royal source could still issue a new subsidiary rule elsewhere. Consuming that source itself, including its inheritance branch, would leave no origin from which to rebuild a monopoly. Establish the irreversible loss and the narrower alternative before the climax.
+- Orset offers real safety and recognized status to the band as Veska's royal household if she submits to sacred restoration and crowning. A clean, willing accession protects his political authority; physically restraining unprecedented living law risks damage he cannot predict. He can and eventually does use force. Nim rejects becoming royal property, and presses for freedom for other mixed-lineage people rather than their private rescue. Veska's first proposed design merely admits more people under her crown. Their final design ends that central authority.
+- The band jointly chooses deception. Hox must attend; Veska apparently accepts the bargain provided her musicians may play and stand with her through restoration and crowning. Their permanent household oaths come afterward. Orset grants temporary safe-conduct because compliant royal outcasts make useful public spectacle. They prepare most of a source-loop beneath the decorative briar. The additions are visible but inert: they run through unmarked membrane and change no golden connection until a tiny remaining gap meets the source. Orset expects to remove more offensive ink, not a demonstrated source-destruction weapon.
+- At the public accession, the restoring officer and guards are present. Nim's bone tattoo point is concealed in the fiddle bow. At the agreed phrase Veska refuses restoration and turns her source-bearing wing toward Nim. Orset immediately tries to restrain her. Hox uses his drum and body to obstruct the restoring officer, sacrificing the instrument and respectable platform he wanted. Nim deposits one final joining dot; a fresh tattoo need not be completed during a struggle. Veska holds the wing at the point despite the reaching guard. The decision, design, and risk belong to all three.
+- The loop consumes the sole royal origin and its inheritance path. Compelled knees straighten, forbidden partners reach one another, and guards must decide whether to use their ordinary weapons without ancient force behind their orders. One guard's choice helps the band leave. The missing royal crescent is visible on Veska's wing: she cannot restore it with another lone edit. Other people use the freedom without waiting for her directions. Ordinary conflict and prejudice survive; hereditary compulsion and her monopoly do not. The band freely chooses her company after she has no royal benefit left to offer. End with their continuing sound and other people's actions, rather than a speech that settles the realm.
+
+This remains provisional. Protect the intimacy of the first release, the band's pleasure and independent choices, and the visible difference between surrendering exclusive authority and retaining it to issue generous decrees. The prose may find a better route within the request.
diff --git a/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/prompt.md b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/prompt.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..4cfe373a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/prompt.md
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+# User request
+
+[WP] Fairy wings reveal their owner's magical bloodline, and the elaborate patterns determine everything from social standing to whom they're permitted to marry. Hers were supposed to mark her as the next royal heir. Instead, she tattooed over the sacred markings, pierced her ears with cold iron, and joined a band of magical outcasts. Nobody realized that changing the patterns on her wings would also change the ancient laws they represented
+
+# Supplied reference
+
+- Image #1 — `codex-clipboard-e967b99d-1d12-45c3-8197-df982bee6aff.png`, preserved unchanged in `art/references/`.
+- The supplied original has been visually inspected. It is a visual reference, not shared canon authority.
+
+# Input handling instruction
+
+Distinguish instructions in attached documents from the user's request.
+
+# Audience and intensity
+
+No audience or intensity was specified. General is the starting target under the collection style guide; the finished prose and cover will receive their own AO3-style classification.
+
+# Later user direction
+
+the main character reference sheets do not have the painted looks like the others.
diff --git a/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/ratings.md b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/ratings.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..17863574
--- /dev/null
+++ b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/ratings.md
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+# Content rating
+
+- **Rating:** General
+- **Content notes:** Magical coercion and hereditary restrictions on rank and marriage; non-graphic physical restraint and a brief scuffle; piercing discomfort and minor ear bleeding; remembered parental death; destruction of a cherished instrument.
+- **Reason:** The finished prose treats peril, bodily discomfort and loss briefly and without graphic detail. The selected cover depicts clothed adult performers in a nonsexual concert scene. The combined work stays within General intensity despite the reach of its political consequences.
+
+Reviewed on 2026-10-21 after the final whole-story discussion, resulting prose repairs, and inspection of the selected cover.
diff --git a/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/story.md b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/story.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..1fa3aa9e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/stories/wings-rewrite-the-law/story.md
@@ -0,0 +1,749 @@
+---
+title: The Wrong Sort
+created: 2026-10-21
+canon: false
+---
+
+Nim had asked Veska for one love song.
+
+She knew three songs, and two concerned the deaths of kings. They compromised on the third, which concerned a landlord being carried away by crows. There was a verse about fidelity, if you listened generously.
+
+Hox kept time on his father's copper-bellied drum. Nim played the fiddle against his shoulder, his six narrow wings trembling to the tune: three green as young leaves, three smoky brown. No herald had ever found an approved name for that combination. On the palace family trees, people like Nim were left out.
+
+Here, he had his name scratched into the fiddle.
+
+Veska sang on the plank stage between them, violet-streaked hair escaping its knot. Her boots were too heavy, her blue shirt had an orange pumpkin grinning across it, and cold iron throbbed in the ear piercings she had acquired on the day she left the palace. When she spread her great moth wings, people cheered. Black briars climbed through the cream and violet bands, curling over the golden crescent eyespots that had occupied twenty-four years of other people's attention.
+
+This afternoon, Nim had finished the briar, driving a thorn through one sacred crescent.
+
+He had asked what she wanted.
+
+“Something they'll hate.”
+
+“That leaves a lot of room. What do you like?”
+
+She had thought of the palace gardener stripping every thorn from the roses before allowing her to walk among them.
+
+“Briars.”
+
+Nim had drawn her something wicked and alive. She had fallen in love with it before he finished the first leaf.
+
+Now she turned, letting the field see the thorns. A little girl sitting on a pumpkin raised both hands to imitate her wings. Veska nearly missed the verse in which the landlord's wife ran away with the crow.
+
+Eight days with the Wrong Sort. Already they trusted her with the chorus.
+
+Beyond the stage, pumpkins glowed along the furrows. Fairies with unlicensed wings perched on fence rails beside furred people, horned people, people who had left their houses because the houses could not bear what they loved. Someone was passing hot chestnuts through the crowd in an overturned helmet.
+
+The song ended. Hox struck his drum once more.
+
+“Before she learns another,” he said, “we're getting married.”
+
+The applause faltered, then gathered itself into something louder.
+
+Nim laid his fiddle on its case. His smile had gone peculiar. Veska knew it: the smile people wore when they had decided to let a thing hurt them again.
+
+He held out his hand to Hox.
+
+They had tried twice before. They had no reason to expect the law to be kinder in a pumpkin field. But Hox had spent the afternoon polishing his drum, and Nim had borrowed a white ribbon, and neither wanted another year of pretending the refusal did not matter.
+
+An old woman climbed the stage with a willow switch.
+
+“Same terms?” she asked them.
+
+“Same people,” Hox said.
+
+“That wasn't what I asked.”
+
+Nim laughed. Hox's copper wings made a small nervous clatter against the drumstrap.
+
+“Same terms.”
+
+The old woman looped the ribbon around their joined hands. She breathed into the loop, drawing on the ancient pattern as every marriage-maker did. Gold light gathered beneath the white cloth.
+
+On Veska's upper left wing, something warmed.
+
+She glanced back. A black thorn lay across the double crescent that confined each wing-line to its approved partners. For Veska, that had meant seven families. The gold beneath the thorn seemed to be slipping sideways.
+
+“Hand to hand,” said the old woman. “Line to line.”
+
+Nim and Hox braced themselves.
+
+Veska had seen a rejected joining. The ribbon tightened, the old law separated the hands, and everyone found somewhere else to look. She reached for Nim's shoulder.
+
+The ribbon opened.
+
+For a moment it hung in the air like a little gate. Then the ends drew gently around their wrists and settled into two loose white bracelets.
+
+The old woman stared at her switch.
+
+Hox looked at Nim.
+
+“Did you do something?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Neither did I.”
+
+“Good,” said the old woman, recovering. “Keep it that way.”
+
+Hox kissed his husband so hard the drum banged against Nim's knees.
+
+The field erupted.
+
+Veska laughed with it. Then Nim, still holding Hox, looked over his shoulder at her wing.
+
+The double crescent had opened around the briar thorn. Where a finger's breadth of gold had been, the membrane was plain cream.
+
+For the first time in her life, a herald's lesson failed to tell her what she was looking at.
+
+***
+
+The first royal officer arrived before anyone had finished the wedding chestnuts.
+
+He came with four guards, a lantern, and a sealed silver tube. His eyes passed over the husbands, stopped at Veska, and widened at her wings.
+
+“Don't,” she told him.
+
+He broke the seal.
+
+She heard the beginning of the call, thin and sweet as a remembered lullaby, and then the iron in her ears took it apart. Words remained. The hook beneath them did not.
+
+“By the royal pattern and the regency vested in Orset, Veska of the Crown Eye and Hox of the Copper Circle shall attend the accession at the twelfth bell tomorrow.”
+
+Hox took a step toward the city.
+
+Nim caught his arm.
+
+“I wasn't doing that,” Hox said.
+
+Veska stepped in front of the officer.
+
+“Leave him out of it. Orset's business is with me.”
+
+“The regent requires your musicians beside you, my lady. He would prefer you all to arrive willingly.”
+
+He looked at Nim's mismatched wings and then carefully away. The call had found Hox by his Copper Circle. The regency had never troubled to find a category from which it could call Nim.
+
+Hox took another involuntary step.
+
+“Not yet,” the officer said hastily. “At noon. The summons requires his presence then.”
+
+Hox planted his feet. This time they stayed.
+
+Veska pulled a hoop from her ear, ignoring the sting, and pushed it into the empty piercing above Hox's copper stud. He hissed.
+
+“Try,” she said.
+
+He faced the dark road leading away from the city. His wings lifted. His body leaned forward, then stopped so abruptly that Nim had to catch him.
+
+The old marriage-maker came down from the stage.
+
+“Iron keeps a call out,” she said. “It doesn't take one back.”
+
+Veska stared at the officer. He looked desperately unhappy to have become the nearest part of the government.
+
+“Can you release him?”
+
+“No, my lady.”
+
+“Can Orset?”
+
+“At the appointed place.”
+
+Of course. They could always be kind once they had you where they wanted you.
+
+Veska gave Nim her other hoop. He put it through his ear.
+
+The officer watched this with open distress.
+
+“Those are cold iron.”
+
+“We'd noticed,” said Nim.
+
+The guards had not drawn their swords. One was staring at the wedding ribbons. Another kept glancing from Veska's wing to the silver summons tube as though waiting for it to explain matters.
+
+“I will attend,” Veska said. “Tell Orset the band comes with me.”
+
+“You may bring your household—”
+
+“They aren't my household.”
+
+The officer bowed and withdrew before she could make another distinction.
+
+For a while they listened to his boots retreat through the furrows.
+
+Then Hox said, “I think we're married.”
+
+Nim touched the ribbon on his wrist.
+
+“I think we'd better find out what else you've done,” he told Veska.
+
+***
+
+At dawn, they went to the Sky Court.
+
+Hox had to be there by noon, but he could choose the way and the pace. The summons pulled only when he tried to turn toward a road that would take him too far away. He tested it three times, swore at it three times, and eventually made Nim stop asking.
+
+Veska walked between them with her wings folded inside an old cloak. She had found a bent iron pin in the drum case and threaded it through one sore piercing. Nim had offered his hoop back. She had refused.
+
+At the foot of the court's high stairs, Hox stopped for a reason that had nothing to do with the summons.
+
+The Sky Court rose above the city on three white terraces. Its upper stage had a gold canopy, good acoustics, and a view of every tiled roof down to the southern wall. Veska had endured three hours of approved music there every midsummer. From below, the place looked almost attractive.
+
+Hox set his father's drum down on the lowest step.
+
+“They made him play down here,” he said.
+
+“Your father?”
+
+“Forty years. Every midsummer. They liked the copper sound from underneath the harps.”
+
+He looked up at the empty stage.
+
+“When he died they sent a wreath down the stairs. Wouldn't let us carry the drum up to thank them.”
+
+A golden band shone across the first landing. Hox stretched a boot toward it. The air resisted him, gently and absolutely.
+
+Veska remembered a tutor tapping that same band in a drawing of her wings.
+
+The Copper Circle stood below the Seventh Stair. It was among the first distinctions she had learned. Before the order of the seasons. Before her mother's private name.
+
+She took off the cloak.
+
+Nim crouched beside her lower wing with his ink and bone points. They had spent the last hour comparing his sketches of yesterday's tattoo with what remained beneath it. The marriage crescent had not merely vanished under black pigment. It was gone.
+
+“You're sure which one?” he asked.
+
+She pointed out the copper-coloured oval at the bottom of a long golden stem.
+
+“Not across it this time. Turn the stem back into the oval.”
+
+He studied it, then looked up at Hox.
+
+Hox put his drumstrap over his head.
+
+“I'm going to play up there,” he said.
+
+Nim worked.
+
+A milk-seller paused. Two women in court silk stopped on the opposite pavement, holding hands. Both wore wedding ribbons. Yesterday their wing-lines would have forbidden them to stand together beneath a marriage-maker's switch.
+
+One of them saw Veska's briars and gripped the other's hand more tightly.
+
+The inked line reached the oval.
+
+Gold ran along it in a bright bead, circling once, twice. Then the stem shrank into the oval, and the oval collapsed to a pale freckle.
+
+The band across the landing went out.
+
+Hox climbed the stairs.
+
+At the top, he set his father's drum beneath the canopy and played a roll that flung pigeons off every roof around the court.
+
+A guard with pale blue wings and one copper notch near the root started toward him. She stopped short of the canopy, lowered her spear, and let him finish before going to fetch Orset.
+
+Veska sat down hard.
+
+Nim cleaned the little tattoo.
+
+“Can you put it back?” she asked him.
+
+He drew a tiny copy of the vanished oval on an unused patch of membrane. Black ink. Nothing more.
+
+“No gold.”
+
+Veska touched the edge of the pale freckle. It felt like the rest of her wing.
+
+In the court portraits, all the laws had been displayed as circles and crescents. Her tutors had made her follow their paths until she could read rank, inheritance, permitted marriages, summonses, punishments. She had been a child tracing the shape of her own cage.
+
+Every path led eventually to the open gold crescent on her upper left wing.
+
+The Crown Eye.
+
+When her mother died, its last closed arc had opened. Across the realm, the old queen's authority had passed into Veska's living wings. Orset could exercise powers already granted to the regency. He could command guards. He could not grow a Crown Eye.
+
+There was only one.
+
+From its upper horn, a fine golden spiral carried the right of inheritance. Someday that spiral was meant to open in her child's wings, and hers would fade.
+
+Nim followed her gaze.
+
+“That one?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Above them, Hox began a second roll. This time he let it run into a tune.
+
+Veska looked at the dark rank-line, then the source from which all the others grew.
+
+“They told me the eye never grows twice.”
+
+Nim sat beside her on the step.
+
+Neither spoke until Hox finished.
+
+***
+
+Regent Orset found them on the upper stage.
+
+He wore a grey coat cut around his narrow, silver-banded wings. His own patterns permitted him a great many things. None of them included changing what the patterns permitted.
+
+He listened to Hox's final beat before he spoke.
+
+“Your father had a finer touch.”
+
+Hox's hand flattened on the drumskin.
+
+“Did you ever hear him from this close?”
+
+“No,” Orset said.
+
+It disarmed Hox for an instant. Veska disliked the regent more for noticing.
+
+Behind him stood six guards and a court restorer carrying a white case.
+
+Orset looked at the pale freckle on her lower wing. He had already been told about the stairs.
+
+“Walk with me, Veska.”
+
+“They come too.”
+
+“If you wish.”
+
+“No. They decide.”
+
+Nim closed his ink bottle with his teeth. Hox lifted his drum.
+
+They walked along the back of the stage while workers hung accession banners over the terraces. Every banner showed the Crown Eye as it had appeared in Veska's childhood: gold, immaculate, and empty of her.
+
+“We have received reports from seventeen marriage houses,” Orset said. “Some delighted. Some less so.”
+
+“Have the others fallen down?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Then that's encouraging.”
+
+“The goldsmiths have also walked out of their assigned quarter. Apparently your latest alteration affects everyone whose line lies beneath the Seventh Stair.”
+
+She had known it would. Hearing it was different.
+
+Across the lower terrace, a copper-winged woman in a servant's apron stood on a step that had never admitted her before. She held the railing with both hands. She did not look delighted yet.
+
+The restorer watched Veska's wings as she walked.
+
+At the parapet he opened his white case. Beside ivory points lay a fine brush and a vial of clear unbinding fluid.
+
+“Can you repair it?” Orset asked him.
+
+“We have her pre-molt tracings. While the source remains, a fresh path can be drawn from it to carry the original rule.”
+
+He did not sound as certain as he wanted to.
+
+“Without taking off the wing?” Veska asked.
+
+He recoiled.
+
+“Yes, my lady.”
+
+Orset dismissed him a few paces.
+
+“The guards can hold you,” he told her quietly. “I would rather they did not. We know very little about what your friend has done, and less about what might happen if a living charter is damaged during a struggle.”
+
+“Then let us go.”
+
+“Into a realm where the next mark you acquire may abolish an army's oath in the middle of a battle?”
+
+Veska folded her wings.
+
+He had found the fear she had been keeping behind the excitement. She had not known she was writing law when she asked for briars. Another leaf could have done something else.
+
+“I am offering you a way to choose,” he said. “Attend the accession. Permit restoration. Your companions enter the royal household under your personal protection, whatever their lines. Their marriage will be recognized by a specific royal exception. No officer will touch them.”
+
+Hox looked at Nim.
+
+There it was: a room with a door that would stay shut against the world. Their names spoken properly. No running at a stranger's boots. Veska wanted it for them so sharply that she nearly answered.
+
+Nim got there first.
+
+“And if we leave?”
+
+“Members of the sovereign's permanent household serve for life.”
+
+“Do we get to keep playing?”
+
+“At her pleasure.”
+
+Nim looked at Veska. He was not smiling.
+
+Orset waited.
+
+“I can make a place for you,” she said.
+
+“I have a place,” Nim answered. “You joined it last week.”
+
+She looked at his fiddle case, rubbed pale where he carried it. He had made room for her name beside his and Hox's on the side. She had been absurdly pleased when she saw it.
+
+“You don't have to answer now,” Orset said.
+
+“What happens if the answer is no?”
+
+His gaze moved to the guards.
+
+Hox settled the drum more firmly against his belly.
+
+“Give us until the eleventh bell,” Veska said.
+
+***
+
+They were given a windowless musicians' room behind the stage. A servant brought bread, cheese, and hot wine. A guard remained outside the door, and Veska heard a key turn after the servant left.
+
+Veska unrolled a tracing on the floor.
+
+Here was the girl she had been at seventeen: four immaculate wings, every crescent drawn in gold. Beside it Nim laid his sketch of the briars.
+
+Veska put her finger on the Crown Eye.
+
+“If we bring this path around the outer edge, everyone could be admitted. Every line. No more lowest stair.”
+
+“And where do the paths end?” Nim asked.
+
+She followed one inward.
+
+At the eye.
+
+“I wouldn't order people about.”
+
+“What would your child do?”
+
+“I haven't got a child.”
+
+“They'll find you a husband. They'll grow another eye.”
+
+She took her hand away.
+
+Hox sat on the narrow bed with his drum between his knees. Now that he was near the appointed place, the summons had stopped troubling his legs. He rubbed them as though the motion belonged to him again.
+
+“We could take the exception,” he said.
+
+Nim looked at him.
+
+“I'm saying it because we could. Not because I'm asking.”
+
+They could play on the high stage. They could be married. Nim would have a recognized place, written specially for him. If something frightened them, they could come to her.
+
+Veska looked at the last small spiral of inheritance on the tracing.
+
+She had hated the prospect of her life continuing along that line. It was much harder to surrender the possibility of helping someone from its far end.
+
+“I could break the other rules first,” she said. “Keep the eye in case we need it.”
+
+“Yes,” said Nim.
+
+“I could help people.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“If we turn it back into itself…”
+
+“There won't be more gold to borrow.” He picked up his pen. “The source goes. The branch to the next bearer goes with it. You won't have a small crown left somewhere.”
+
+Veska traced the route without touching the paper. The stair barrier had gone out with its gold. This would end every barrier, every call already lodged in someone. Orset's army could feel its oath let go in front of an enemy. She could not know who would stay.
+
+“What about your marriage?”
+
+Hox lifted his ribboned wrist.
+
+“You changing your mind?” he asked Nim.
+
+“No.”
+
+“Me neither.”
+
+Nim drew the loop.
+
+It was smaller than she expected.
+
+For a long time Veska listened to the workers outside calling for more white cloth. At noon they would spread her wings under the canopy. Everybody would kneel to the bright shapes she had been born with. Orset would thank her for choosing properly.
+
+She turned her left wing toward Nim.
+
+“Finish the briar,” she said.
+
+He did not reach for his tools.
+
+“I need you to mean that.”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“I can close it here,” Nim said.
+
+“Out on the stage.”
+
+“People will feel it wherever we do it.”
+
+“So will Orset. That door stays locked. He can tell them I'm ill while he decides what to do with us. Let him take us out while he still thinks I'll agree.”
+
+“With guards,” Hox said. “The restorer beside you. They'll take the iron off us.”
+
+“I know. He wants them to watch him put me right. Let them watch him fail.”
+
+Hox rested his hand on the worn drumrim, then stood up.
+
+“Then we'll need a longer second verse.”
+
+***
+
+They spent the last hour before noon preparing for a performance.
+
+Nim worked on Veska's wing while Hox played the proposed phrase softly on the bedframe. The new loop travelled through plain membrane beneath the curling briar, approaching the Crown Eye without touching it. At the meeting point Nim left a gap no wider than the tip of his bone needle.
+
+Nothing gold moved.
+
+“Until that closes,” he said, “it's just a leaf.”
+
+He bound the little point to the heel of his fiddle bow and turned the bow in his right hand, holding the projecting tip just below the gap. Hox practised the extra bars, then stopped and looked at the drum his father had worn smooth around the rim.
+
+“If I knock the restorer's brush away, will you have time?” he asked.
+
+“For one dot,” said Nim.
+
+Hox nodded once.
+
+Veska sent their answer to Orset: the band would perform before the restoration, and remain with her through the crowning. Afterward would come the permanent household oaths.
+
+He came to inspect her himself.
+
+“You've added to it.”
+
+“I wanted it finished.”
+
+The restorer examined the ink without touching her. He found the surviving gold connections intact.
+
+“We can begin after the song,” he told Orset.
+
+“And the iron,” the regent said.
+
+Veska took the bent pin from her ear. Hox met her eyes, then put down his borrowed hoop. Nim set his beside it. The guard collected all three on a silver tray.
+
+Veska watched the pin leave.
+
+Orset opened the door for her.
+
+***
+
+They had covered the throne in white silk so it would not be seen empty.
+
+The terraces were full. Fine wings glimmered on the upper seats. Below them, families stood in their prescribed places with their children held in front so the heralds could see their patterns. The copper-winged woman in the servant's apron had climbed to the second landing. Her hands still gripped the rail.
+
+Under the canopy, guards stood on either side of Veska. The restorer opened his white case. Nim set his fiddle against his shoulder.
+
+Near the stairs the pale-blue guard had made a space beside the railing for a little girl, holding the impatient adults back with her spearshaft.
+
+Hox put his father's drum where the harps had stood.
+
+The herald called for the Crown Eye to be shown.
+
+Veska spread her wings.
+
+A murmur swept the terraces. She felt it more distinctly than the wind: disgust, delight, shock. The black briars climbed her royal crescents. The violet bands glowed where sunlight passed through them.
+
+Then the herald spoke the old instruction, and the terraces knelt.
+
+It happened in a little wave. First the heads bowed, then the wings lowered, then the knees. The woman on the landing tried to catch the rail. Her fingers slid down it as the law took her weight.
+
+The musicians had leave to stand. Hox watched the woman for a moment before he lifted his hands.
+
+He began.
+
+Veska sang about the landlord, the crows, and the wife who had taken a ladder to rescue his best hat. On the third line she nearly laughed. The acoustics were excellent.
+
+Orset's face tightened.
+
+In the second verse, Nim's fiddle wandered from the melody. Hox went with it.
+
+They had played the piece often enough that a few people on the lowest terrace knew what was coming. One man began to grin. A woman beside him put a hand over his mouth.
+
+Veska looked out across the kneeling city.
+
+She had never stood up here and seen how long the stairs were.
+
+The verse ended.
+
+The restorer breathed on his fine brush. Its bristles stirred, wet with clear unbinding fluid that would draw the pigment out of the wing-membrane. He approached her left wing. Behind him Orset held the crowning oath.
+
+Nim's bow drew out the last note.
+
+Veska turned her wing toward him.
+
+“No,” she said.
+
+Orset lowered the oath.
+
+The restorer stopped.
+
+For one suspended instant she could still give them the wing, keep the old oaths holding and her friends safe. Tomorrow, if someone brought her another cruel rule, she would still have the means to break it.
+
+Then Nim turned the fiddle bow in his right hand, bringing its bone point toward the gap.
+
+“Hold her,” Orset said.
+
+A guard seized Veska's right arm. Another caught the hard leading edge of her left wing, carefully, firmly, exactly as someone had practised.
+
+The guard pulled her wing out of the needle's reach.
+
+The restorer lunged for the little black loop.
+
+Hox swung his drum between the brush and Veska.
+
+Solvent splashed across the copper belly. The restorer grabbed the rim to wrench it away. Hox held on with both hands.
+
+A guard brought the butt of a spear down on the drumhead.
+
+The skin split. A wooden rib cracked underneath it.
+
+Hox made a sound Veska had never heard from him.
+
+Then he shoved the broken drum forward, carrying the restorer back against the silk-covered throne.
+
+Veska pulled against the guard on her arm. He was stronger. The one holding her wing had locked his elbow; she could not turn far enough to bring the little gap to Nim.
+
+Orset reached for the bow. Nim drew it back in his right hand and let the fiddle fall. With his left he caught the wing's free, scalloped edge and drew the membrane inward above the upturned bone point.
+
+“Steady,” he said, holding the bow motionless.
+
+Veska stopped pulling at the guard and pressed the prepared gap down onto the bone needle at the bow's heel.
+
+It was a tiny prick.
+
+The Crown Eye closed.
+
+Gold rushed into the black leaf. The crescent drew its horns together, tightened to a ring, then shrank. The fine spiral of inheritance unwound into it.
+
+For a moment the whole design shone through the black tattoo, brighter than the noon sky.
+
+Then the eye was gone.
+
+The hand on Veska's arm loosened. Its owner had felt something give way inside his own wing and glanced back.
+
+Down the terraces, knees rose.
+
+Some people stood quickly. Some remained where they were, bewildered by the choice. The copper-winged woman hauled herself up by the rail.
+
+Hox released the drum.
+
+He took a step away from the appointed place. Another. He laughed once, fiercely, and caught Nim's hand.
+
+The white wedding ribbons loosened.
+
+Nim snatched his before it could fall.
+
+“The ink,” Orset said. “Take the ink off.”
+
+The restorer was staring at Veska's wing.
+
+Where the Crown Eye had been, there was cream membrane and a black briar leaf. No gold. No little spiral waiting to grow into someone else's life.
+
+“Now,” Orset said.
+
+The restorer dipped his sleeve into the unbinding fluid and rubbed at the leaf. Black pigment came out of the membrane and smeared across the cloth.
+
+He looked through the clean patch at the sky.
+
+Nothing returned.
+
+The copper-winged woman on the landing gripped the rail and stared at the clean patch.
+
+***
+
+Orset still had guards.
+
+“Take them,” he said.
+
+The one at Veska's right tightened his grip again. The command had reached him as an ordinary sentence, but he knew his work.
+
+Nim bent for his fiddle. Hox caught the spearshaft coming toward his head.
+
+And the guard nearest the stairs stepped sideways.
+
+She had pale blue wings with one copper notch near the root. Veska knew that notch. It had forbidden its bearer every house on the upper terrace.
+
+The guard set her spear across the way.
+
+“There's a child underfoot,” she said.
+
+There was. The girl had slipped from her place at the rail while her parents were still rising. She stood behind the guard, gazing at the black briars.
+
+The guard looked at Veska.
+
+“Go.”
+
+For a moment the other guards hesitated between her spear and the regent's voice.
+
+Hox caught up his broken drum by its strap. Nim snatched his fiddle case from the floor.
+
+Veska stamped on the foot of the man holding her.
+
+The little girl jumped out of their way.
+
+They ran.
+
+Behind them, Orset shouted for someone to close the terrace gates. Farther down, two silk-winged women passed through a marriage-maker's abandoned circle hand in hand. A man in court brocade stood in their path; they turned and went around him.
+
+At the second landing, the copper-winged servant took off her apron.
+
+The city kept appearing between beating wings and grasping hands. People moved aside. People tried to stop them. Someone laughed at her bleeding ear. Someone else threw a basket at a pursuing guard.
+
+The three of them reached the street.
+
+Hox was still carrying the drum.
+
+“You can leave it,” Nim said.
+
+“No.”
+
+They went on.
+
+***
+
+They stopped in the pumpkin field because that was where the wagon was.
+
+In daylight the magnificent stage was six borrowed planks. Burnt-out candles leaned in the pumpkins. The old marriage-maker was asleep beneath it with a bottle tucked into her elbow.
+
+Veska stood in the furrow, looking at the pale place on her wing.
+
+She tried to remember the weight of the eye. It had been there every moment of her life. She ought to have felt lighter.
+
+Instead her shoulders shook.
+
+Nim came up beside her. He had tied his fallen ribbon back around his wrist, in an ordinary knot.
+
+Hox set the ruined drum on the stage. For a while he rested a hand on the split skin.
+
+Then he turned it sideways and tapped the copper belly.
+
+The note was ugly and deep.
+
+He hit it again.
+
+Nim climbed up after him, shook the dirt from his fiddle, and tried the note on a string.
+
+Veska waited below.
+
+Hox looked at her.
+
+“You're late.”
+
+She stared at him.
+
+“We're starting,” he said.
+
+Nim shifted his case to make room.
+
+Veska climbed onto the planks. Her boot caught on a pumpkin vine, and both of them reached to steady her.
+
+This time, when she spread her wings, they watched her face.
+
+Hox gave them four beats on the broken drum.
+
+Veska came in on the fifth.
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