Sabine met her eyes. “I want to know whether Lucien intervened for Isolde the way he did for me today. And if he did, what happened to her afterward.”
Lysa folded the mending carefully and set it aside. “That is a dangerous question, my lady.”
“I know.”
“Asking it will mark you as someone the palace needs to watch more carefully.”
“I am already being watched. At this point, I would prefer to understand why.”
Lysa stood and crossed to the door. Before opening it, she turned back. “I will try. But if I find someone willing to speak, you must be prepared for answers that make everything worse instead of better.”
“I am prepared.”
Lysa’s mouth shifted into something that was not quite a smile. “No, my lady. You are not. But you will be soon enough.”
She left.
Sabine sat alone in the firelight, marked hand resting on the desk, the carved fox still watching from the mantel.
The palace bells rang the late hour. Somewhere in the royal apartments, Lucien was either asleep or awake, either unaware of the chaos his intervention had caused or fully conscious of it and moving pieces Sabine could not yet see.
She did not know which option frightened her more.
What she did know was this:
She had entered the Trials as a desperate daughter from a dying house.
She had been chosen first and marked publicly.
She had survived the Trial of Bearing only because a prince had stepped down from the dais to stop a man from touching her.
And now the entire court was watching to see whether that intervention had been rescue or the first step toward the same destruction that had swallowed his first bride.
Sabine opened her hidden notebook and stared at the blank page.
Then she wrote:
The court no longer sees me as a bride. They see me as a story they are hungry to shape. Lucien’s intervention was not a moment. It was a reclassification. I am now the woman the prince protects, which means I am now the woman everyone else will test.
She paused, pen hovering.
Yselle revealed Marrow’s collapse. We are both collateral. Both desperate. Both here because families chose daughters over dissolution. That knowledge has not made us allies. It has made the rivalry exact. She will come for me harder now because she understands what I am.
Another pause.
Lysa says servants are betting on whether Lucien saves or destroys me. I do not yet know which he intends. I am not certain he knows either.
She closed the notebook and slid it back into its hiding place.
Then she extinguished the lamps, climbed into bed, and lay in the dark with the mark pulsing beneath her skin and the weight of the court’s attention pressing against her chest like a physical hand.
Sleep came slowly.
And when it did, she dreamed of a causeway that stretched forever, and a man’s voice sayingcontinuewhile the galleries watched and waited for her to break.
Eleven
The Garden of Breath
