“Yes.”
Elara looked at her with something between admiration and fear. “If they find it, Serast will call it theft of sacred material.”
“Then he had better not find it.”
Lysa crossed to Sabine and lowered her voice. “What do you do with it?”
Sabine looked at the scattered ash in the lamp tray. At the ledgers. At the scrape-marked record where someone had written fever over refusal.
Then she looked at Isolde’s remaining letters.
“I carry it,” she said. “Until I can use it.”
Elric closed the chapel ledger. “Use it how?”
“To break the Tenth Vow before it consumes me the way it consumed her.”
No one answered.
Outside the old reading room, the palace continued moving above them. Bells. distant doors. footsteps. The ordinary sounds of a machine pretending it was only a home.
Sabine felt the hidden letter against her ribs.
Isolde’s voice, folded against her skin.
Sabine returned to her chamber alone.
The hearth was cold and empty now.
The gap behind the stonework had been closed again, but she could still see the faint disturbance in the soot where her hand had gone searching. Proof that something had been buried there. Proof that women before her had known how to hide inside the palace’s blind spots.
She locked the door.
Then she crossed to the mirror and loosened her bodice.
The hidden letter slid free.
Sabine unfolded it carefully.
The ink had faded in places, but the central line remained clear.
“The final vow does not crown a woman. It consumes the portion of her that might refuse.”
Sabine read it once.
Then again.
The mark on her arm pulsed beneath the lamplight, dark lines climbing higher now, as if the bond understood what the palace intended and was answering in the only language it had.
She folded the letter and hid it inside the false lining of her travel case beside Cassian’s letter and the strip of music from the Blackwater.
Three proofs.
Cassian’s letter: the crown had turned family into leash.
Isolde’s music: she had known she was part of a pattern.
Isolde’s hidden testimony: the Tenth Vow was not marriage. It was erasure.
