The council voted six to one in favor. I signed the order that afternoon. The rune behind my ear pulsed once, warm.
Sarp found me that evening in the corridor outside my chambers. The slouch was the same as always. The eyes were not. Hard. Watchful. Measuring the distance between us like he wasn't sure I was safe anymore.
"The Shadow Testing," he said.
"A security measure."
"The last time the Light Court ran shadow tests, three hundred people were dragged from their homes and purified. Children, Hakan."
"That was four hundred years ago. The protocols are different now."
"Are they?" He pushed off the wall. "Because it looks like you just handed Serkan a list of every vulnerable person in this court."
A surge ofwho are you to question merose up from somewhere deep and ugly, and my shadows stirred beneath my skin, pressing outward. I held them. Barely.
"I'm doing what needs to be done. You don't have to agree. You just have to trust me."
"Trust you." He studied my face—searching for the person he knew. I watched him search and fail. Something about that failure should have broken my heart.
It didn't.
"I'll trust you," he said slowly, "when you start acting like someone worth trusting."
He walked away. I adjusted my collar—the rune had grown, three lines of angular script creeping down the side of my neck now—and went back to work.
The days that followed had a rhythm. Wake before Ada. Council chambers by dawn. Review reports. Issue orders.
I stopped eating dinner with Ada. Told her the workload was impossible. She nodded each time with that particularexpression—patient on the surface, crumbling underneath—that I noticed and filed away and did nothing about.
The rune grew. Four lines now. Five. I stopped checking the mirror.
I snapped at her over nothing—she'd moved documents on my desk, rearranged papers I'd left in a specific order—and the rage that erupted was volcanic.
"Don't touch my things," I said.
She reached for my face. "More important than the fact that you've slept in this study three nights in a row?"
"I said don't touch me."
The words came out hard. Final. The kind of words that leave bruises you can't see. Ada's hand froze. Her eyes went wide—not with anger, but with the slow, devastating recognition of someone watching the person they love become someone else.
She turned. Left the room.
I went back to my documents.
That was the week Serkan came with the proposal. He appeared at my study door late one evening, settling into the chair without being invited.
"The test results have identified several high-risk individuals. Servants with shadow affinity above fifteen percent. The traditional threshold, as you know." He laid a leather folder on my desk. "Formal detention, pending review. Standard security protocol under the measures you yourself authorized."
I opened the folder. Six names. Six photographs. Six lives reduced to percentages and intercepted correspondence.
The third name was Demir Arslan.
Academy scholarship student. One of the brightest in his year. He'd been at our engagement celebration, had given a toast that made Ada cry with laughter. His shadow affinity: seventeen percent. His grandmother's blood—a woman from across the border who'd married into a light family two generations ago. His crime: letters from his grandmother. Medicine for his younger sister, who had a blood condition only shadow healers could treat. The least dangerous correspondence imaginable.
The real Hakan—the one buried beneath five lines of angular script—looked at Demir's name and screamed. I heard him. Distantly. The way you hear thunder from inside a sealed room.
"Approved," I said, and signed the order. Serkan collected the folder with steady hands.
