We're escorted through rows of soldiers who watch Kaan with wary respect. They know exactly who he is. What he's capable of. Good. Let them remember.
At the pavilion entrance stand General Altin and Elder Mira, both familiar faces from my childhood. Their attention is fixed on Kaan.
"Lord Kaan," the General says formally. "Welcome to neutral ground. I trust you'll remember, no magic, no violence, no threats."
Kaan's smile is all teeth. "How disappointing. I suppose I'll settle for merely intimidating conversation."
Elder Mira's hand drifts to her crystal pendant. "Lord Taren is eager to see his daughter."
Not eager to negotiate. Not eager to discuss terms. Eager to see me, as if this is about family rather than politics.
The thought should comfort me. It doesn't.
I think about what waits inside that pavilion. No measured deflection will serve me here. No careful half-truths, no armor of polite words. Whatever I feel will spill from my lips whether I want it to or not.
The thought terrifies me.
Inside, the pavilion is a throne room transported to a battlefield, white silk walls embroidered with golden thread, rich carpets, elegant furniture. At the far end on a makeshift dais, my father waits.
Lord Taren looks exactly as I remember him, still playing the perfect Light Court lord, though he's merely one of seven faction leaders, not their supreme ruler. The same golden hair, now threaded with silver at the temples. The same calculating eyes that used to watch me practice sword forms and tell me I could do better. He handed me over to the Shadow Court without hesitation when the alternative was losing Zoran, and now he stands here in pristine white robes as if he has any right to judge anyone.
He looks like what he is: a man who follows orders from those more powerful, dressed up in regalia he hasn't earned.
But standing beside him?—
My feet slow without my permission.
I knew she would be here. I knew it. We came here partly to meet her, to see the sister we'd been told was dead. I thought I was prepared. I thought knowing would make it easier.
I was wrong.
Because knowing that your dead sister is alive is one thing. Seeing her is something else entirely.
She's real.
The thought crashes through me with physical force. Not a rumor. Not a political revelation. Not words on a page or whispers in a war council. She's standing twenty feet away from me, breathing, blinking, alive, and she looks so much like Mother that my heart seizes in my chest.
Golden hair that falls in perfect waves, the exact shade mother's was before grief turned it silver. Features that echo mine but softer, more delicate, the face I used to imagine when I was a little girl, dreaming about the sister I'd never met. Eyes thesame shade as the ones that stare back at me from mirrors, the ones mother always said came from her side of the family.
She's real.
My throat closes. My eyes burn with tears I refuse to shed. Not here. Not in front of Father.
But gods, she looks so much like mother.
Beside me, Zoran has gone still. Not the tactful stillness he uses in negotiations, something rawer. When I glance at him, I see his jaw tight, his throat working as he swallows hard. His eyes are fixed on Solene with an intensity that borders on pain.
"She has mother's face," he says quietly. Just that. But his voice is rough in a way I've rarely heard from him.
I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
All those years of believing she never drew breath, of wondering what she might have become. And now she's standing in front of me, a grown woman with our mother's face and a lifetime of experiences I know nothing about.
She was raised here. By him. While Zoran and I believed her gone, while we built our lives around an absence that was never real—she was here, in some hidden corner of the Light Court, becoming this poised, perfect stranger.
She watches us approach, and I see uncertainty flicker beneath her composure. Whatever Father told her about us, whatever stories she's been fed, I don't think any of it prepared her for this moment either.
We're strangers who share blood. Sisters who've never met. And the weight of everything we've lost—every birthday, every secret, every ordinary moment of growing up together—presses down on my chest until I can barely breathe.
