POV: Sylra
I broke the seal at the gate.
Mira's hand — small, compressed, all consonants. The dispatch was short. It told me four things and offered no comfort with any of them.
Maelric had a sister. She was alive. She lived in a forest settlement near the eastern border, in a country that did not show on the palace maps as inhabited. She had been there for years. She knew who I was. She had not sought contact.
I read it twice. I walked back across the courtyard with the page folded against my chest. The cold was still on my face from the wall.
The line sat behind my sternum like a stone. My father's sister had known I existed and had stayed in a forest. I was angry about that and I was grieved about it and I did not let myself stop on either, because the dispatch had given me one operational thing and I needed to do it before the rest of the morning began.
I went to my office. I did not call a clerk. I lit the small lamp myself.
I wrote the retrieval order in my own hand. Two operatives, names I trusted. Routes that did not cross Caelen and Kael's. Clear instructions: bring the woman to the palace willingly if she will come, with respect if she will not, do not present her with my name on a page until you are at the gates. Sealed. My mark.
I did not tell anyone. Not Ithara. Not the steward. The reasons were not all reasons I wanted to look at. Some of them were strategy and some of them were not. I gave the order to the courier who slept at the office door and watched him go.
Then I went back to Vedran.
Ithara was at the bedside when I came in. She had her sleeves up. She looked up when I came through the door and spoke without standing.
"Morning numbers," she said. "Stable. No improvement. No acceleration. He is at the same floor. The compound has not advanced. The antidote has not gained ground. I want him this way for the stretch of time it will take Caelen and Kael to get back. I cannot promise the compound the courtesy."
I lowered myself into the chair. My legs were unsteady at the knees in the way legs are when a body has been on its feet too long.
"Has he surfaced again?" I asked. I kept my voice level, but the question had a shape underneath it I could not flatten — the shape of a woman who had watched a man say stay and then watched him go back under.
Ithara shook her head. "He is breathing the way he was when I left at second bell. Nothing else. No twitch. No swallow. The compound is holding him at the floor and the floor is holding."
She did not leave. She closed her case and stayed in her chair across from mine. I knew her face. She was deciding what shape of question she was going to ask me.
"When did you last sleep more than the small stretches you have been taking in the chair?" she said. The tone was not a question. It was the opening move of a conversation she had already decided to have.
"I have slept some," I said, and I heard how thin it sounded the moment it left my mouth.
"That was not the question, Sylra." She did not raise her voice. She had my name in her mouth like a pin and she placed it exactly where it would hold.
I looked at my hands. There was a scratch across the left knuckle from the gate latch I did not remember catching.
"Before the garden," I said. "Before Kael came across the lawn."
Ithara let the silence sit. I felt her counting the days in her head the way I had been refusing to count them in mine.
"That is several days," she said, and the fact arrived without decoration, carrying its own weight.
She did not push. She set her hands on her knees and spoke at the same flat register she used for any other clinical observation.
"A body under chronic sleep deprivation starts making errors before the mind registers them. The mind is the last thing to know. The hands go first, then the eyes, then the judgment. This is not the moment in your life for errors. I am telling you as the woman who works with your body, not as the friend you would like me to be right now."
The friend you would like me to be right now landed at the center of me harder than the rest of it. I swallowed and the swallow was difficult.
"I will sleep," I said. I needed to give her something that sounded like compliance, and the only tool I had was a task I had already completed. "After I send the dispatch from Mira."
The retrieval order was already past the third bend. The lie was small and it was a lie and I told it because I was not ready to be managed into a bed while Vedran was on a pallet and the aunt Maelry was somewhere in a forest not knowing I had sent for her.
Ithara held my eyes for a beat. Whatever she saw in them, she did not call out.
"Eat first," she said. She stood and gathered her notebook. "The kitchen is set. I will be there in a quarter of the hour."
I stayed with Vedran after she left. I held the back of my hand at his cheek for warmth. I told him with my body that the aunt was on her way, even though he did not have the registers open to receive. I left my hand there until it was no longer warm enough to be doing his cheek any good.
Then I went down to breakfast.
Ithara was already at the small table. She had set a plate at my place — bread, still warm. Her notebook was open at her elbow. She looked at my face when I sat down and did not comment on what she saw there. She pushed the bread toward me across the table.
I ate. I had not realized how hungry I was until the first bite. Ithara worked beside me. She did not look up.
I set the cup down and waited until the food had settled enough for my voice to come out steady.
"Keep working through the founding records," I said. "The cross-reference. The fourth section. Whatever else is in that hand. I want everything you can read out of it before Kael gets back."
"I already am," Ithara said, without lifting her pen. Then she set it down. She placed her hands flat on the table and looked at me with the face she wore when she was about to give me something heavy and wanted me seated for it.
"I was waiting to tell you until you had eaten. I have been working since I left you in the corridor last night. I came down to the kitchen because I needed to tell you over a table where you would sit and listen."
My chest went cold. I set the cup down.
"I found the founding record," she said. "The fourth section is intact. There is a full suppression ritual described — the one performed on the third-generation queen. Step by step. The hand is the same hand as the marginal note you found." She paused — not for effect, but because what came next changed the weight of everything in the room. "The handwriting is the founding queen's."
She held my eyes.
"And there is a second hand at the foot of the page. A different hand. Younger." She closed her notebook. "A marginal note about reversal."