“I need to dress for supper.”
Lysa’s mouth shifted, not quite a smile, but acknowledgment that Sabine had chosen the right instinct. “Yes. And you need to be ready for what the room will look like when you enter it.”
The letters from home arrived while Lysa laid out the evening gown.
Three folded pages, each bearing a different hand, all delivered together under palace review. Sabine recognized the clerk’s notation at the edge,reviewed and released, which meant someone had read them before she ever touched them.
Cassian’s came first.
His script remained steady, careful, nothing like the sprawling impatience of his childhood letters. He wrote about ordinary estate business: orchard pruning schedules, tenant repairs approved, spring planting delayed by late frost. All of it neutral. All of it designed to pass review without giving the palace leverage.
But Sabine read the gaps between the lines.
The orchard crew had been cut again. Two tenant families had left without formal release because there was no coin to make it official. The spring delay was not weather, it was seed shortage because last season’s crop had been sold at loss to cover interest.
Near the end, one line broke the careful tone:
Mother asks that I tell you she prays for your safety and success. I have told her prayer is admirable but that you have always preferred arithmetic.
Sabine’s throat constricted.
Cassian was telling her he knew why she had entered. That he understood the bargain. That he was sorry it had come to this, but he was phrasing it in language the palace clerks would read as sibling affection rather than political desperation.
Junor’s letter was shorter, written in the crabbed hand of a man whose fingers had stiffened over decades of estate management.
The crown’s administrative interest continues. Inspector arrived third week. Reviewed accounts, tenant rolls, and maintenance schedules. Asked specifically about succession planning and collateral security. I gave him tea and numbers. He gave me a date: fourteenth of next month. If circumstances have not shifted by then, protective measures will be considered.
Fourteen days.
Less than a fortnight before the crown could begin dismantling Corvyr under the polite fiction of administrative oversight.
Mirelle’s letter came last, and it was the hardest to read.
She did not plead. Did not ask Sabine to succeed or warn her to be careful. She simply wrote about the roses in the east garden, how they had started blooming despite the drought, how she had cut several and placed them in the music room because the light there seemed kinder than elsewhere in the house.
Then, at the end:
Whatever happens, you have already done more than any daughter should be asked to bear. That the kingdom expects it does not make it just. Remember that, even when remembering hurts.
Sabine folded the letters carefully and placed them in the writing desk drawer.
Lysa waited until the drawer closed before speaking. “Bad news?”
“Corvyr has two weeks before crown administration begins.”
“Then you need to survive long enough to become too valuable to let your house collapse.” Lysa lifted the evening gown, deep sapphire silk, darker than the trial dress, cut to suggest elevation without celebration. “The court needs to see you looking like someone the prince’s intervention makes sense for. Not desperate. Not fragile. Chosen.”
Sabine stood and let Lysa dress her.
The communal supper room felt different the moment Sabine stepped through the threshold.
The table had been rearranged.
Not dramatically. The overall shape remained the same, the candles still burned in silver holders, the flowers still bloomed white and scentless in crystal vases. But the place cards had shifted.
Sabine’s seat had moved five positions closer to the head of the table, past two river daughters, past House Deren, past one of Yselle’s distant cousins. Her card now sat in the upper quarter, separated from the lesser chosen by enough space to make the distinction unmistakable.
Yselle’s card had not moved.
