He only shrugged. “I have a sister.”
That had nearly broken her again.
Thalen.
She stared past the rim of the cup at the fire hissing quietly in the grate, and pretended that warmth was something she could still feel without flinching. Night still draped the windows in black velvet. Torches burned dimly along the carved panels of the castle’s war room.
Thalen was gone.
He had died in her arms, and her mind refused to release it—the moment it happened, looping endlessly, as if she deserved to be haunted by it. She hadn’t acted in time. Her stupid body froze. Not a sister—
A coward.
A girl in a blood-soaked nightgown, staring as her little brother’s life was stolen.
She should have intervened. Should have screamed sooner, run harder, thrown her body between him and death.
Anything.Anything.
But she didn’t.
She hadusedmagic instead. To kill instead of save.
It was instinct. A raw, furious anger. A thread snapping and turning into a power. A whisper curling around her spine that hissed to the mercenary:you pay for this.
She’d felt it in her bones. In her breath. She had seen it in the wide, stunned eyes of the man who deserved it.
Alaric steadied her hands when they trembled too hard to hold the teacup. Maybe he was still trying to process it. Maybe he was pretending it hadn’t happened, for her sake or his. Or maybe he was calculating what it meant—to witness a future empress unravel the laws of the world with her bare will.
She will be executed.
Not formally, of course. There would be no ceremony. Just cause of death no one dared question. Poison. Sudden illness. Atragic accident involving horses or stairs. That was how magic was punished in Edrathen. With forgetfulness.
Alaric wrapped his arm around her shoulders in a gesture so natural that she barely registered it until the quiet weight of him settled there. He was injured too. Small cuts on his face, arms and a big wound on his side.
Across the room, Vesena was tending to Cedric, wrapping a fresh strip of linen around his forearm. Cedric, for his part, didn’t look at the wound. He watched her face instead—steady, intent, and impossibly cold in its grief.
Everyone was here.
The entire Council had been summoned. The High Chancellor, robes half-wrinkled in his haste. The Lord Justiciar, grim and expressionless. The Master of Coin, already calculating the cost of the disaster. The Grand Marshal, even the High Preceptor with a mask of pious concern on his face. There were also the Magistrates, soldiers and a few Adjudicants of Orvath standing closer to them than to the table.
And, of course, her father seated at the head of it, his face carved from cold stone.
Halwen had been captured. What remained of the mercenaries were either dead or imprisoned. Thalen had been carried by the soldiers who had watched him grow up. Someone had thought to place him in his chambers. His favorite books were still stacked by the bedside. His boots sat neatly by the hearth. She hadn’t returned to see him. Couldn’t. Not until she figured out how to survive the first breath it would cost her to step through that door.
But she knew he was there. She sensed it—
Knew he lay small and unmoving beneath a white linen shroud, one arm resting beside him, curled gently, as though he’d drifted off mid-story. Knew Ysara was there too, seated at his side, wrecked by sobs.
And here the Council was debating. Drawing up plans to control the narrative before it bled out beyond the castle walls.
Evelyne listened quietly, her tea cooling in her hands.
“What's going to happen to it?” Alaric asked suddenly.
All heads turned.
“To the book,” he added, gesturing toward the object. “We’re not just going to let it sit here gathering dust? Or worse, let the Assembly sweep it into their vaults?”
