Thicker than water, and warmer, with the copper taste of blood and wrongness. The darkness pressed in from all directions, patient and hungry, and somewhere in the distance she could hear her own heartbeat slowing like a clock winding down.
She pushed.
The darkness resisted, then yielded, and Laila found herself standing in her garden.
The paths wound according to geometries that made perfect sense if you happened to be fey, and absolutely none if you had the misfortune of relying on Euclidean expectations. The trees wore autumn in perpetuity, their canopy a cathedral of copper and amber and burnished gold. Hedgerows of bramble and briar marked boundaries that were more suggestion than barrier, and the light of eternal golden hour. The orb of Agony had found the view agreeable and simply stayed.
The Autumn Court had never acknowledged the existence of other seasons, and Laila had always admired their commitment to the principle. Spring, Summer, and Winter were welcome to exist elsewhere; they were simply requested not to track their temporal instability across the carpets.
Frost crept across a bramble leaf. White crystals where white had never been permitted.
Laila knelt. Brushed the frost away with her fingers. The leaf flushed copper again.
“Not yet,” she told it. The leaf, sensibly, did not argue.
She rose. Her fingers were wrong. Wavering at the edges, blurring into the golden air. The poison, still working, even here.
Hold. Hold the shape of it.
At the far end of the garden, where the bramble hedge met a stone wall she did not remember building, a portrait hung.
Gilt-framed. Life-sized. Facing away from her.
Laila walked toward it. The path was longer than it should have been. She walked faster. The path stretched.
When she finally reached the wall, the portrait still showed only the back of his head. The careful brushstrokes of dark hair. The collar of his formal coat.
She stepped to the left. The portrait remained turned.
She stepped to the right. The gilt frame caught the amber light, but the face stayed hidden.
Still keeping secrets, Alexios?
The portrait offered no answer. Portraits rarely do, though this one’s silence felt pointed.
A shadow fell across the path.
Laila spun. The figure stood where no figure had been, impossible and uninvited, her silhouette stretching across the labyrinth like spilled ink finding cracks in parchment. From her hands hung strings, thin as spider-silk, trailing downward to something that preferred not to be seen.
Elizabeth.
The Warlock smiled, and the garden shuddered.
“Neither awake nor truly asleep, are we?” Elizabeth’s voice was soft, mocking. “I assumed you’d retreat here.” She gestured at the garden, the marionette strings twitching as she moved. “Your little sanctuary. Though it seems less... stable than usual.”
Frost spilled across the path where her shadow touched. The copper leaves edged with white.
“Elizabeth.” Laila’s voice came out steadier than she felt. “You’re standing in my mind. If you insist on being an uninvited guest, let us forgo riddles and trade insults instead. Quicker, and far more satisfying.”
“Insults?” Elizabeth’s smirk widened.
“You’re a shadow, Elizabeth. Flitting about on the edges, but never in the spotlight where the real power lies.”
The Warlock laughed, and somewhere in the garden a flower wilted. “A shadow, am I? Perhaps. But at least I’m not the one so easily fooled.”
“She read every letter,” Elizabeth murmured. “Every signal to your allies. Every secret you thought you were keeping.” A pause, savoured. “Three years of morning coffee, and you never tasted the difference.”
Laila’s hands worked at the hedge, stripping frost-blackened leaves. “Yes, I had rather gathered that from the needle in my neck. And yet.” She brushed soil from her fingers with deliberate calm. “Here you are. In my garden. In my place of power. You haven’t made a social call, Elizabeth. You’ve come to watch me die.”
The frost crept closer. Laila ignored it.
“Which means you’re afraid.” She tilted her head, studying the Warlock the way one might examine an interesting but ultimately disappointing vintage. “Tell me, what price have you paid to dangle on Aeloria’s strings?” She stamped out a creep of frost until it was umber. “I earned my power through work. You have none of your own.”
If this had any impact on Elizabeth, Laila couldn’t tell. Her face was frozen.
“Laila, you are so used to sitting at a web of your own strings that you cannot even see when a wasp hovers over you ready to sting.”
“Speak plainly or leave.”
“Why, Laila dear, your husband...” Elizabeth lingered on the word, beginning to darken like a swelling shadow herself. “Was unfaithful. In more ways than one.”
Behind Laila, the portrait’s gilt frame creaked.
The pruning stopped. Laila turned the secateurs toward the intruder.
“It is time you leave.”
For a moment the billowing shadow stopped, and then a wind caught it and it fragmented into drifting autumn leaves.
Asterday, 28th of Blotember, 1788
Laila fell.
Mirembe caught her. The needle glinted in Phaedra’s hand as she stepped backward into a portal that hadn’t been there a moment before. It sealed behind her without a sound.
Below, in the entry hall, the larger portal still shimmered. Elizabeth was already stepping through.
Maximilian vaulted the landing rail. Flames wreathed his hands. Isabella cleared it a moment later, blade drawn.
Wylan reached for a vial.
Lambert watched from the landing as they filed through with the orderly haste of professionals who understood that dramatic last stands were for people who hadn’t planned their exits. The blackguard. The halfling with the painted grin. A hooded figure he hadn’t catalogued.
Maximilian’s fire scorched marble. Isabella’s blade caught air.
The portal sealed.
Wylan’s vial shattered against tiles that were no longer there.
Silence.
On the landing, Laila lay unconscious in Mirembe’s arms. Greta had pressed herself against the wall, hands over her mouth. Below, in the entry hall, his siblings stood frozen mid-strike, weapons drawn against an enemy who had simply declined to remain.
Lambert looked at the space where Phaedra’s portal had been. Then at Laila. Then at the nursery door, slightly ajar.
He crossed to it. Inside, the elf they had bound earlier lay slumped against the wall, a red mark on his neck.
Phaedra was a professional, if nothing else.
Lambert politely closed the door.
When he returned to the landing, Wylan was already there, kneeling beside Laila, uncorking a vial of something that smelled aggressively medicinal. He tilted her head back, administered the antivenom with the practised efficiency of someone who had prepared for exactly this sort of evening, and checked her pulse.
“She’s alive,” he said. “Barely. The poison was meant to kill, but something’s fighting it. Her pulse is weak but steady.”
“Meant to incapacitate,” Lambert said. “Keep her down while they extracted.”
“Except they didn’t extract her.” Isabella had climbed back up, her eyes tracking corners and shadows. “They had her. Elizabeth’s people were right there. Why take Phaedra and leave Laila?”
“A good question,” Lambert said. “I’m collecting those.”
“We need to secure the house,” he said. “Full sweep. Assume nothing is safe until we’ve checked it.”
“Aurora’s in the parlour with Ursula, Elariana, and Divina.” Isabella jerked her chin toward the stairs. “They barricaded themselves in when the fighting started. Wylan’s elemental is with them.”
“The staff?”
“Cedric took most of them to help at the d’Amboise estate. They should be returning soon.” A pause. “Probably with casualties.”
Lambert nodded. The household was stretched thin. The household would manage. Households always managed, through the simple expedient of finding work to do and doing it, which left considerably less time for contemplating how thoroughly everything had gone wrong.
“I need to examine Phaedra’s quarters,” he said.
Isabella’s gaze sharpened. “You think she left something?”
“I think she prepared for extraction. Which means she had time to clean up.” He glanced at Laila’s motionless form. “But even professionals make mistakes. And she didn’t expect to be leaving tonight.”
“She didn’t?”
“The attack on Madame d’Amboise’s estate. The assault on our house. The bomb.” Lambert ticked them off on his fingers. “This was a coordinated operation. Multiple teams, multiple objectives. And when all of it failed, Phaedra chose to reveal herself.”
“Chose?”
“She’s been embedded here for over ten years. Ten years of access, intelligence, trust. That’s not something you throw away lightly.” The logic was taking shape. “If I had to guess, Aeloria wanted Aurora. Elizabeth was supposed to take her. When that failed, Phaedra had a choice: maintain her cover and try again later, or strike now and lose the position entirely.”
“She chose to strike.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“They’re acting more brazenly now. Madame d’Amboise said it herself, before the fire. No longer operating from the shadows.” He looked at the space where Phaedra’s portal had been. “Whatever’s changed, it’s made them willing to burn assets they’ve cultivated for a decade. But ten years of preparation don’t vanish in a night. She’ll have left traces.”
Isabella considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Go. I’ll stay with Laila. Wylan—”
“Already synthesising the antidote,” Wylan said, not looking up from his work. His fingers moved with the methodical precision of someone who had catalogued most known poisons by the age of fourteen. “Multiple compounds, designed to work in concert. Sophisticated. Expensive.” He uncorked a vial, sniffed it, added three drops of something amber. “She’ll be fine by morning.”
“Do what you can.” Lambert touched his brother’s shoulder briefly as he passed. “I’ll be in the servants’ wing.”
Phaedra’s quarters were small, tidy, and utterly devoid of personality.
Lambert stood in the doorway.
The bed was made with military precision. The wardrobe contained practical clothing in muted colours, garments that could pass unremarked in a drawing room or a servants’ corridor with equal ease. The writing desk held paper, ink, blotter, and nothing else. The room had been lived in the way a hotel room is lived in: temporarily, and with no intention of leaving a mark.
Which means everything else has been removed.
The single window offered a clear view of the kitchen entrance and the servants’ gate.
Useful sight lines.
Lambert stepped inside. The floorboards didn’t creak.
Laila had trusted her spymaster, and the rest of them had trusted Laila’s judgment.
In hindsight, that should not have excluded her from scrutiny.
The wardrobe contained only dust and the outline of what had been removed recently. The desk drawers yielded spare nibs. The floorboards were solid.
Lambert sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress was thin.
What am I looking for?
His eye fell on the small bookshelf.
Six volumes. A prayer book. Folk tales. A household manual. Two romantic novels, soft with handling. And a slim volume titled Meditations on Duty, attributed to no author.
The prayer book was standard issue. The household manual, professional necessity. The folk tales and romantic novels were left visible for anyone who might glance through the door, evidence of humble tastes and modest leisure.
Camouflage.
The Meditations on Duty had no author because it had no contents.
The pages were blank. Not entirely. Faint indentations, ghost-pressure of writing on pages now removed. A shell. Whatever had been hidden here was gone, carried through a portal to wherever traitors went when their work was finished.
Lambert turned the book in his hands anyway. The binding was expensive, which suggested the book’s anonymity was deliberate rather than a constraint.
A small tin sat beside the inkwell. Unremarkable. A container for loose tea, which was precisely what it appeared to contain when Lambert lifted the lid.
He paused.
No cups. No kettle. No stained rings on the wood where hot drinks had rested over the years. A spymaster who kept tea but never drank it would be an oddity. A spymaster who kept something that looked like tea but served an entirely different purpose would be something else.
Lambert raised the tin to his nose.
Not tea. The scent was wrong, herbal and faintly acrid beneath the camouflage of dried leaves. Alchemical. A blend Wylan would recognise in an instant, and Lambert could only identify as not what it claimed to be.
Phaedra always brought Laila her morning tea. Every day. Never delegated it to the kitchen staff, never let anyone else handle the tray.
At the time, it had seemed like devotion. Professional pride. The spymaster ensuring her mistress’s routine remained secure.
She has been complaining about sleepless nights of late.
Solday, 29th of Blotember, 1788
Dawn came eventually, indifferent to those who had spent the night awake.
Wylan had worked through the night. By the time grey light seeped through the curtains, Laila’s breathing had eased, her colour improved.
“She’ll wake soon,” Wylan said, gathering his equipment. “The poison’s neutralised, but there’s something else. Longer-term exposure. Her system’s been compromised for a while.”
“The tea,” Lambert said. “Phaedra brought her morning tea. Every day.”
Wylan went still. Then his hands balled into fists. “The compounds I found aren’t just incapacitating. They’re designed to interfere with concentration. With clarity. With magic.”
An Enchanter’s magic depends on mental clarity.
They looked at each other, and Lambert saw in Wylan’s eyes the same cold fury he felt in his own chest.
“If you’ll do me a kindness,” Lambert said, “and provide me a report when you’ve finished your analysis?”
Wylan nodded and left, his footsteps quick with purpose.
Lambert remained by the bedside, watching Laila breathe. The chair was uncomfortable in the specific way that sickroom chairs always are, designed by someone who believed that comfort might encourage the healthy to linger when they ought to be doing something useful elsewhere.
A commotion drifted up from the entry hall. Raised voices, the shuffle of many feet, Cedric’s measured tones cutting through the chaos with the practised authority of a man who had managed crises before and fully expected to manage several more before breakfast.
Lambert rose. Laila’s breathing remained steady. She would keep.
He found them in the entry hall: the staff returned from the d’Amboise estate, and with them, Madame d’Amboise herself. They had recovered her from the ruins in dire health, burns and smoke marking her body.
She looked smaller than he remembered, her silver hair dishevelled, her face streaked with soot and tears. She leaned heavily on Cedric’s arm, murmuring fragments that might have been warnings or might have been grief.
Leadership tends to land on people who look like they know what they’re doing. In this case, that meant the people who weren’t panicking, fainting, or loudly declaring the fire to be a portent of doom. With Laila unconscious, that duty fell to Lambert.
? Lambert always looked like he knew what he was doing. Certainty, after all, was simply momentum that hadn’t yet encountered an obstacle.
“The guest chamber,” Lambert said. “I’ll see to her.”
Between prayers and Wylan’s salves, she would recover.
Before she lost consciousness, she managed a few words: they were acting more brazenly now. No longer operating from the shadows.
Lambert filed this away with the other questions he was collecting.
They moved Laila to her own chambers, where she lay in proper linens rather than on a landing floor. Both Madames settled for the night, one poisoned, one burned out of her home. The de Vaillant household had become a hospice of sorts, tending wounds that had been inflicted with coordinated precision.
Laila had sent the staff to help their ally, which seemed obvious at the time.
Unfortunately, Laila and the de Vaillants had been outplayed.
He took the chair beside Laila’s bed and watched her sleep.
When she finally woke, Lambert was there. Her eyes opened slowly, struggling to focus, and he watched recognition dawn by degrees.
“Lambert?” Her voice was a rasp, her throat raw.
“I’m here.” He took her hand, felt her fingers tighten weakly around his. “You’re safe. Aurora’s safe. Everyone’s accounted for.”
“Phaedra—”
“Gone. Through a warp. We don’t know where.”
Laila closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the grief had been filed somewhere it wouldn’t get in the way.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
And Lambert, who had spent the night cataloguing betrayals and unearthing secrets, began to speak.
The parlour greeted the de Vaillants and their conspiracies like an old friend.
Mirembe had attended enough of these gatherings to recognise the pattern. The drawn curtains. The fire’s pointed cheer. The servants maintaining order through sheer professional will.
Aurora was upstairs with Greta and Ursula. Maximilian stood by the parlour door protectively. The others had arranged themselves around the room with care, trying very hard not to take up space.
At the centre stood Laila.
Mirembe watched her mother-in-law’s hands. They moved constantly. Adjusting a candlestick. Smoothing her skirt. Touching the back of a chair.
Laila de Vaillant did not fidget.
The woman before her was coming apart, and everyone else in the room was carefully not seeing it.
“The tea,” she said, and her voice had edges where edges should not be. “Phaedra served it personally to me every day. I thought it was a subtle act of respect, affection even.”
No one spoke.
“Her intelligence reports.” Laila’s pacing carried her past the window, back toward the fireplace, around again. “Every piece of information about the dragon cult that crossed my desk. She saw it first. She decided what reached me and what didn’t.”
“My own correspondence.” The word came out serrated. “Every letter I sent to my contacts, coded as they were. Every signal. Every—” She stopped, her hand closing on the mantelpiece hard enough that her knuckles paled to white against lavender.
No one spoke.
Laila turned, and her eyes had the fever-bright quality of someone who had stopped sleeping long before the poisoned tea made it mandatory.
“How do I know,” she said, very quietly, “that it ends with her?”
“Mother—” Isabella began.
“How do I know?” Laila’s voice climbed. “Phaedra was with us for over a decade. Ten years of morning coffee and evening reports and ‘trust, but verify’.” The laugh that escaped her had no humour in it.
Her hand went to her pocket, and when it emerged, it held a knife.
It was small, ornate, the sort of blade that existed primarily for opening letters and looking decorative on writing desks. In Laila’s grip, catching the firelight, it looked like neither.
“I need assurances,” she said. Her voice had gone brittle, bright, wrong. “A demonstration. Of trust. Of loyalty.”
The family exchanged glances.
“Each of you,” Laila continued, holding up the knife, “will take this blade. And you will prove yourselves to me.”
No one spoke.
Isabella stepped forward without hesitation and took the knife from Laila. Mirembe had noted how she would frequently step blithely into danger.
Blood welled up bright against the bluish tinge where scales gave way to soft flesh.
“There.” She held up her hand. “Happy?”
Laila’s nod was stiff, mechanical. Whatever she was looking for, she hadn’t found it.
Lambert went next, taking the knife with the thoughtful appraisal of a man examining unfamiliar liturgical equipment. “Decent craftsmanship,” he observed mildly, then made a quick, clean cut. He dabbed at it with a handkerchief produced from somewhere in his vestments, his expression suggesting this was beneath everyone’s dignity.
Wylan sighed comprehensively. He fished a small bottle of sterilising alcohol from his coat.
“If we’re doing this,” he said, wiping down the blade with pointed deliberation, “we’re at least doing it hygienically.”
He sanitised his palm, made a careful incision, and held up the result with the expression of a student presenting work beneath his capabilities. “Loyal and sterile. You’re welcome.”
Divina stepped forward without comment, her artificer’s hands steady as she took the blade and opened a thin line across her palm. Elariana followed, elven grace making the motion look almost elegant. Neither spoke. Neither needed to.
The knife made its way back to Laila, bloodied and waiting.
She held it for a moment, staring at the red on the blade, and her expression suggested she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d expected this to prove.
Mirembe stepped into the space between Laila and the rest of the family, and her movement cut through the room’s fever like cold water.
“And now that we have all painted the carpet red, how exactly does this establish trust?”
Laila’s head snapped toward her, eyes wild. “Trust?” The word came out savage.
“I trusted Alexios—trusted him—and he lied to me. For decades. About everything that mattered.”
Her voice climbed, gathering momentum. “I trusted Phaedra, and she’s been reading my letters for a decade and poisoning my tea. She stabbed me with a needle while telling me there was a traitor in my house!”
She waved the knife. It stopped being theatrical.
“Elizabeth walked into my mind, Mirembe. Into my garden. And she told me—” Laila’s voice cracked. “She knew things. About Alexios. About what he really was. And I didn’t. I never—”
“Laila—”
“How do I know who to trust now?” The words poured out faster, hotter. “What if the next person to betray me is standing in this room? What if it’s already happening and I can’t see it because I never see it? I didn’t see Phaedra. I didn’t see what Alexios was hiding. I didn’t see any of it until it was—”
Mirembe’s hand closed around Laila’s wrist.
Not gently. Not roughly. With absolute certainty.
“Are you not,” Mirembe said, with a voice of stone, “a mistress of the heart and mind?”
Laila’s breath came sharp.
“I thought I was.” The words tore out of her, ragged and raw. “But what does that even mean when all my close allies can work their way around magic, and around loyalty? I didn’t see it coming—” Her free hand clenched into a fist. “What does it mean if I can’t even—”
“It means,” Mirembe cut across her, and the interruption itself was a small violence, “that you have been refusing to use the very power that would answer your questions.”
Laila stared at her, chest heaving. “You’re asking me to—”
“I am asking you to lead.” Mirembe’s grip on her wrist remained steady. “If you wish to know who to trust, then look. You are an Enchanter. Dreams and minds are your domain. Look into ours, and see.”
“That’s not—” Laila’s voice cracked. “That’s a violation. I can’t just—”
“You cannot, or you will not?” Mirembe’s voice didn’t rise, but it sharpened. “Because the woman waving a knife at her family and demanding blood has already crossed lines that matter far more.”
Laila flinched, as though the observation had physical weight.
“More blood will not help you,” Mirembe continued, relentless. “More rituals will not rebuild what has broken. If you need certainty, take it. We are offering. But this—” She glanced at the knife, at the bloodied hands around the room, at the whole sorry tableau. “This is fear wearing the mask of leadership. And you are better than this.”
The fire popped. A log settled, sending up a brief flurry of sparks.
Laila’s hand trembled. The knife trembled with it.
“I’m not,” she whispered. “I’m not better than this. I’m tired, and I’m scared, and I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
“Then let us help you.” Mirembe’s voice softened, just slightly. Just enough. “Not because we must prove ourselves to you. Because we are your family, and that is what family does.”
Laila broke. The way ice breaks before it shifts, making space for what’s underneath.
The knife lowered.
Mirembe released her wrist but didn’t step back.
And for a while, no one spoke.
Lambert broke the peace.
“We don’t have answers,” he said. “Not yet. But the de Vaillants have a Dungeon in this house, sealed with a family ring, and whatever he was hiding—whatever he was really doing—the answers are down there.” He paused. “Not running away from the questions. Running toward them.”
“The weapon.” Lambert met Laila’s eyes. “If Aeloria and the dragon cult are coming for us, and they will, what we need is in that Dungeon. Father thought it was important enough to hide. Important enough to die for. Let’s find out why.”
Laila looked at them. Mirembe held her gaze when it reached her. Neither of them looked away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. The words came out with great effort. “I let my fear—” She stopped. Tried again. “You deserved better than this.”
“Yes,” Mirembe agreed, without heat. “We did. Now: what do we do about it?”
Laila took a breath. Then another. The breaths of someone stepping back from a ledge.
“We go into the Dungeon,” she said. “And we find out what Alexios was hiding.” Her voice steadied, finding the ghost of authority, learning to walk again. “Today, we will have to ourselves. We’ll need supplies, rest, preparation. But tomorrow, we go down.”