POV Selene
Screaming tore the morning open.
I lurched upright, heart already pounding. The sound rose from the courtyard—high, panicked, multiplying as doors banged and feet hammered stone. I dragged on my dress without bothering to lace it, shoved my feet into boots, and ran.
The corridor had erupted: servants with white faces, a steward trying and failing to impose order, nobles clutching robes. I followed the current down the stairs and out into the cold.
The crowd had formed a ragged ring: nightclothes and velvet shaken loose, guards with blades bare, breath steaming in the dawn.
Lord Daveth Corwen lay broken on the cobbles.
Limbs bent at wrong angles, eyes fixed in a glassy astonishment. A thread of dried blood marked his nose and ears, the telltale bloom at the nails. His hands were clawed, as if he had tried to hold on to life and it slipped through his fingers.
The physician knelt. “Blackroot,” he pronounced, voice flat. “Fast-acting. Dead since midnight.”
My stomach pitched. Corwen—the steady young man who had pressed a wrapped parcel into my hands and whispered that this court had teeth—was already past help before the screaming began. I tasted metal and swallowed it down.
“Where was he found?” Lord Kestrel cut through the ring. He looked like a man who slept in his clothes.
“In his chambers,” a guard answered, trying to stand straighter. “A servant found him with the morning tray.”
“Last witnesses?” Kestrel’s gaze skimmed the court, searching for a place to land.
“Around the tenth bell,” a courtier offered. “He left the lower tables early.”
Kestrel’s eyes anchored on me. He did not need to raise his voice. “Envoy Selene—you were near him at the feast, were you not?”
Every head turned. There was nowhere to stand that was not a stage. “Yes.” The word felt like stepping onto thin ice.
“Conversation?”
Briefly, I hesitated. The fissure opened. “He asked how I was settling into court.”
“Curious,” Kestrel murmured as he moved closer. The crowd parted as if trained to do it. “Several witnesses observed him pass you a package.”
Fear moved through me like cold water. “He gave me nothing.” The lie came too smoothly; I heard it betray me.
“Are you certain?” He stopped within reach. “Lying reads poorly against a corpse.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Then your rooms will be in perfect order.” Queen Isolde appeared at his shoulder, pale blue silk whispering around her as if the morning had dressed to match her. The smile she offered me was the kind placed just before a trap is sprung.
Hands closed on my arms. They marched me back through the doors, up the stairs, a procession with my shame at its head. The half-court followed in a hush bright with appetite.
They upended my life in minutes. Dresses flung to the floor, hems I had mended unpicked by strange hands. The trunk yawned; my books tumbled; the locket skittered and stopped face-down. A guard pried at the false bottom I had crafted with such care. It gave with a splintering crack.
Glass rolled in every direction, catching light. A guard trapped one with his boot and lifted it, reading the label aloud. “Vials—concentrated clotting factors. Trace dragonblood essence.”
“Expensive,” Kestrel observed, satisfaction flickering like a knife in lamplight. “For what purpose, Princess?”
I kept my mouth closed. He did not need my voice to conclude his performance; he had enough props.
His fingers found paper among the splinters. I had burned the instructions, not the note. Stupid.
“So,” Kestrel said lightly, turning the blade so it caught every eye. “Private deliveries. Medical supplies. A royal hand.” He let the silence drink every implication. “And now the courier is dead. Poisoned.”
Heat shot through my body, thin and useless. “I didn’t poison him.”
“Then who did?” His attention sharpened until it stung. “Someone disliked the exposure that note represents. Someone who benefits if the chain breaks.” He took a step that felt like ownership. “Someone who would do anything to keep a secret.”
Isolde’s voice slid in, sweet and cold. “My husband discreetly provides for you through intermediaries. The intermediary dies, and you stand surrounded by our kindness. How convenient. No witnesses to your arrangement—unless the dead speak.”
“That’s madness,” I said, and heard the crack in it. “Why kill the only person helping me?”
“Perhaps help required a price you refused,” Kestrel offered, as if he regretted the possibility for my sake. “Perhaps he threatened to reveal your—connection—with the king.”
They locked me in. The key turned, final as a bell.
I stood and listened to the scrape of boots recede. Then I pressed my palms to my eyes. Corwen was dead. The vials were exposed. The note was in Isolde’s keeping. Across the city, my son needed medicine I could not carry to him. Ari required steadiness at dawn and dusk; I sat caged while the sun climbed, then slid.
In the evening, the lock turned again.
Casimir entered alone. He shut the door and leaned his back to it, holding it closed as if the room were trying to escape, or he was.
“Tell me you didn’t do this.” His voice was roughened down to the grain.
Silence filled the small room until I heard the candles wick down. He crossed to the window and looked out at the garden blackening into a mirror of itself. I stared at the broad line of his back and willed him to turn.
“I didn’t kill him,” I said into that distance. “Whatever they strip from me, they do not get that.”
“I know,” he said finally. Relief broke me in a place I didn’t know was still whole. “But knowledge won’t hold in court. I need proof.”
His hand flicked toward the latch; duty wrestled impulse and won. “Hold,” he said, which was no comfort. Then he was gone, and the lock swallowed the last of him.
I sat on the bed and stared at the seam of the door until it blurred. The ribbon under my sleeve pressed a cool line into my wrist. I pressed back, as if I could find the shape of another night through the fabric and the years, the one I had wrapped around myself to survive.
The garden. Heat thick in summer air. The stone warmed under the ruined fountain. His hand around mine, callus and heat and certainty. The masks that made us brave.
The world was a single point of balance where our knees touched. Music drifted from the distant ballroom in faint threads, enough for him to claim. He drew me up, set one hand at my waist, and held my other with a care that felt like reverence. We moved hardly at all, a slow sway in the darkness that made a room of our bodies.
He cupped my face as if to learn it without sight, thumb tracing along my cheekbone, lingering where pulse leapt at my throat. I could feel his gaze even through the mask: intent, almost hungry, more honest than anything daylight permitted.
He bowed his forehead to mine. Our breath came back to us warmed by the other’s mouth. He asked for a promise, and I gave it because I was already inside it: that I would remember this, that I would carry it into whatever future waited with its ledger and its laws.
He touched his wrist, untied a narrow silver ribbon, and knotted it around mine—once, twice, a third time like a spell. I answered with my own strip of emerald silk, binding it to him with the old words my grandmother had threaded through lullabies: Mira tenebris, fidem teneo.
In the dark, I keep my vow.
He repeated it back, solemn as any oath taken under crown and banner, and for a moment the night held us like a secret it intended to keep.