The city could not agree on what it had seen.
The Champ de Soleil had happened. That much was certain. A man had stood before the city and the sun had answered, or appeared to, or had been made to appear to by means that varied depending on who was telling the story and how much they had been drinking. The theological implications were being debated in every tavern, bakery, and barbershop in the city. The political implications, in rather fewer places, and rather more quietly.
Rumours moved through the streets like weather, and with about as much regard for accuracy. A statue of Valère in the artisan quarter had wept tears of molten gold, which promptly disappeared when touched.
? The disappearance was later attributed to opportunistic parishioners armed with jars, spoons, and no qualms about divine retribution.
A baker in the Faubourg Saint-Denis was selling sun-shaped loaves that allegedly glowed at dawn, though whether this constituted miracle or marketing remained, like the loaves themselves, half-baked.
Graffiti had appeared on the walls of the noble quarter overnight, slogans scrawled in hurried strokes. The messages ranged from the stirring (The Dawn is Coming!) to the vaguely specific (Down with Lucian!) to the utterly baffling (Bring Back the Owls!). Nobles spent the better part of the morning debating whether this last one was a metaphor, a threat, or merely the work of a particularly eccentric bird enthusiast.
The de Vaillants, naturally, featured in the gossip. One account had Valère visiting the estate to personally bless the household. Another described golden light emanating from the family chapel. A third suggested, with apparent sincerity, that the Duchess had become a giant and glowed faintly in moonlight.
None of this was true, but truth had never been a prerequisite for gossip and was unlikely to start now.
Beneath the rumours, though, the city was quiet in the way that mattered. Shops opened late or not at all. Contracts were suspended pending review. Pending review, in Pharelle, meant someone hoped the problem would solve itself before the paperwork did.
The cathedral chapter had cancelled its standing orders with half a dozen suppliers, and those suppliers had cancelled their orders with half a dozen more, and by the time the uncertainty reached the chandler’s apprentice and the laundress with three children, it was no longer uncertainty. It was the cupboard.
The powerful were deciding what the spectacle meant. The rest of Pharelle was deciding what to do for dinner.
Notre Reine had been cold before. Cathedrals were not built for warmth; they were built for acoustics, for light, and for the quiet authority of stone that has been watching you disappoint it for centuries. But the cold that met Lambert in the nave this morning had an edge to it, a draught that pulled at cassock hems and candle flames and had no business being indoors.
He found the source soon enough. The north transept wall held a hole the shape of a window, bordered by lead framing that clung to a few coloured fragments like teeth left in a jaw. The rest lay across the flagstones in a glittering debris field that extended halfway to the altar.
A sacristan was replacing candles around the edge of it, stepping carefully. No one had declared the debris someone’s problem yet.
The cold came through the gap honestly, grey Frostember light replacing what had been there before. Lambert could not remember a time the window had not been there. He could remember what it had depicted, though only in the way one remembers furniture: it had been part of the architecture, as permanent as the columns, and now there was sky where it had been and frost forming on the inner sill.
A junior priest crossed the nave with freshly copied documents, heading for the scriptorium before anyone could change their mind. Another knelt near the debris, head bowed toward the empty frame.
A third was explaining something to a cluster of parishioners with the steady confidence of a man who had been trained to sound like answers were forthcoming.
Lambert’s collar sat against his throat. He touched it once, a gesture of verification rather than comfort, and let his hand fall.
He had come to pray. The nave was full of people who had managed it.
The woman by the south transept had been here since before dawn, judging by the candle stubs around her; she prayed with the focused determination of someone conducting a siege. Two men near the ambulatory argued in whispers that carried further than they intended, one gesturing at the empty window, the other at the newly posted pronouncements on the chapter house door.
A child sat on a pew, kicked her legs, and watched the adults. She had been told to sit and was doing an admirable job of it.
Glass crunched somewhere behind him. Lambert did not turn around.
He stood for a while longer in the nave, among people who were praying and people who were arguing and people who were sweeping up, and then he left.
The doors of Notre Reine opened onto a morning that did not care about cathedrals or the men who stood in them. The frost had thickened overnight and settled in. It furred the railings and silvered the steps and turned his breath into brief, precise clouds that the wind took apart before they could amount to anything.
Someone had written The Dawn is Coming on the wall of the chapterhouse in white paint. The letters were uneven. The exclamation mark was optimistic.
He walked.
“How bad is it?”
The kitchen of St. Dreven’s was doing what kitchens do: producing noise, heat, and the organised chaos that only looks like disaster from the outside. It had opinions about efficiency and expressed them through steam. A volunteer Laila didn’t recognise was stirring a pot large enough to bathe in. Another was slicing loaves with the mechanical efficiency of someone on their second hour of it.
Carina set down a stack of bowls. She didn’t answer immediately.
“Different,” she said. “It was bad last week. Bad I understand. This morning I’ve got faces in the queue I’ve never seen before.”
She moved along the counter, checking portions. Her hands didn’t stop while she talked.
“The chandler on the Rue des Forges closed his shop this morning. Didn’t open, didn’t explain, just shuttered. His apprentice was in the queue by seventh bell. Still had flour on his sleeves.”
“The chandler had a contract with the cathedral chapter,” Laila said. “That contract is presumably under review along with everything else.”
“Under review.” Carina’s hands stopped moving. “Dukes and bishops are running around playing politics and the people who get hurt are the ones in my kitchen. The apprentice doesn’t care whose review it’s under. He cares that he had work last week and doesn’t today.”
She straightened a stack of bread. “The laundress from the Quai district brought her children. She’s never brought her children before.” She wiped her hands on a cloth. “The coal situation hasn’t changed, in case you were going to ask.”
“I was.”
“Still half of what was promised. I’ve stopped expecting the other half and started planning without it. We’ll manage the week. Beyond that I’ll need to start making choices I don’t want to make.”
“I’ll get the coal moving,” Laila said.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I know you will.” Carina folded the cloth and set it on the counter. Then she looked at Laila directly. “Madame la Duchesse. I will not be shy in saying your funding has saved lives.”
Laila waited. There was a ‘but’ coming. Carina’s ‘buts’ arrived on schedule.
“However. I cannot help but feel that funding has come only because you are personally invested in this place. Your nephew works here. Yes, I know he’s your nephew. You’ve got an emotional connection. You come, you see the work, you open the household accounts.” She picked up a knife and began portioning the next loaf. “But that was luck. If not for that happenstance, we’d not have funding at all.”
“I’m a Hero, Carina. Happenstance is how the Fates line things up.” She adjusted her gloves. “A chance encounter with my nephew, and now I have a connection to this place. Now I am in contact with you. I would even dare say I’ve come to see you on familiar and friendly terms.”
Carina scoffed. Not dismissively. At an easy statement that cost nothing to make. “The Fates. What do they care about little lives? This is a house of St. Dreven, and there is no place for Anatropy nor Onetropy. Only Entropy would visit here, and then it wouldn’t be welcome.”
“You can name him Death. You don’t need to be euphemistic about it.”
“You mistake me. I am not trying to be euphemistic. Just pragmatic.” The knife portioned another loaf. “The Fates care about Heroes, not ordinary people. When a Hero dies, they are visited by Death, they are ushered off with a psychopomp into the next life.” She set the knife down. “What happens here are just little deaths. They’re numbers.”
“You’ve said that before, but I don’t think you mean it.”
“Sometimes they have to be numbers, Laila.” Carina’s voice was quiet. Not soft. Quiet. “Because my head is filled with names that only I will remember in a year.”
The kitchen clattered on around them, steam and bowls and the queue moving as it always did.
“Then perhaps that’s why we’ve been brought together,” Laila said. “You take care of remembering the names. And I, with House de Vaillant, will take care of the numbers.”
The book was called Crimson Surrender.
The cover featured a woman in a state of architectural improbability, draped across the arms of a figure whose shirt had been lost in what must have been a very specific emergency. Wylan had found it in a box of penny romances at the Quai des Philosophes and purchased it with the same clinical detachment he applied to acquiring reagents.
He was on chapter eleven. Chapter eleven was where things happened.
He stood in front of the mirror, book open in one hand, and read aloud.
“‘I have waited centuries for this.’” He dropped his voice half a register. Tried again. “‘I have waited centuries for this.’”
Too much. He sounded like Lambert giving a sermon, so he adjusted.
“‘I have waited centuries for this.’” Flatter. More like it was obvious. More like Augustine would have said it, as though the centuries were a minor administrative inconvenience and the ‘this’ was the only part that mattered.
He glanced at the cover again. The woman’s pose looked like it required either supernatural flexibility or a fundamental misunderstanding of the human spine. He tried it anyway, one arm draped over the back of the chair, head tilted, book held aloft. The chair shifted. He caught the dresser, righted himself, and decided that architectural improbability was best left to professionals.
He turned from the mirror and paced to the window. The book’s hero (Valdric, which was a ridiculous name even by the standards of the genre) had just cornered the alchemist’s apprentice in a moonlit conservatory. The apprentice was described as ‘slight of frame but fierce of intellect.’ Wylan appreciated the effort.
“‘Then take what you came for, Valdric,’” he read. Paused. Went back.
“‘Then take what you came for, Augustine.’”
His voice caught on the last word, not from embarrassment but from something underneath it, a warmth that started at his collarbones and moved.
He read the next line silently, then again, then aloud, barely above a whisper.
“‘You have no idea what you do to me.’”
The room was very quiet. He sat on the edge of the bed and read the passage again from the top, slower this time. The hero’s hand on the apprentice’s jaw. The apprentice not pulling away. The sentence that ran on too long and used the word ‘hunger’ in a way that had nothing to do with food.
Wylan closed his eyes. Let the image assemble. Not Valdric. Augustine. Not the apprentice. Him. The conservatory became the wine cellar. The moonlight became lamplight. The hand on the jaw became specific, remembered, real.
He stayed there for a while, the book open on his knee, his body warm, until the corridor outside produced footsteps and a door closed somewhere in the house. He closed the book, slid it beneath a stack of alchemical journals where no one would think to look, and crossed to the washstand. Cold water. Face. Hands.
The pipe was on the dresser. He picked it up, considered it, set it in the corner of his mouth without lighting it. Tilted his chin at the mirror. Adjusted the angle.
Not bad.
He left the room. By the time he reached the landing, his voice had settled into its new register, half a tone lower than it had been a month ago, and his posture had acquired the studied carelessness of someone who was definitely not thinking about chapter twelve.
The letters had started arriving before dawn.
Maximilian sorted them into three piles. The first: sincere enquiries from houses that had maintained their relationship with the de Vaillants through the vendetta, the excommunication, and the trial. These were few.
The second: transparent attempts to curry favour from houses that had kept a careful distance until yesterday, when standing near the de Vaillants suddenly became advantageous. These were many. The second pile was always the largest. It had been the largest after Alexios’s death, the largest after the excommunication, and the largest now. Only the signatures changed.
The third pile was invitations to events he would not attend, from people he did not like, celebrating things that had not yet been decided.
He was halfway through the second pile when Gawain spoke from somewhere behind him.
“Your Grace.”
Maximilian did not flinch. He had been raised in a house with animated statues, a grandmother who was a vampire, and a brother who conducted alchemical experiments at unreasonable hours. Disembodied voices were a feature of the property.
He turned. Gawain stood near the window, which had been closed when Maximilian last checked and remained closed now. The window offered no explanation. The man wore a dark cloak that matched every shadow in the room. Presumably the point.
“You drove our carriage two days ago,” Maximilian said. “You might have introduced yourself then.”
“Introducing myself to the family I’ve spent a decade avoiding being seen near would have defeated the purpose.”
Maximilian leaned back in his chair. He had never spoken to Gawain directly. He knew the shape of the man only through what others had told him: Percival’s father, Eclipse Society operative, the most elusive of Alexios’s network. A man who placed his son in a duke’s household and then disappeared for years.
“Why are you here?” Maximilian asked.
“I’m afraid it concerns Isabella.” A pause. “She has been captured. She’s being held at a place called Undertow Keep.”
A log shifted in the fireplace. Maximilian’s hand moved to the letter he had been writing, set the pen across it with care, and then did nothing for several seconds.
“How long?” Maximilian asked.
“Days. Sometime in the last week. The intelligence only reached me last night.”
His hand closed on the edge of the desk. He held it the way he held most things when the alternative was setting them on fire. “Does my mother know?”
“She will when you tell her.”
He processed that, then asked, “What do you know about the Keep?”
“It’s underwater. Near the Black Trench, off the coast of Fairhaven.”
“Why do I know that name?”
“Because Fairhaven was the last known destination of the dragon egg. I believe your family is considering going after it shortly.”
“Are you sure?”
“I saw the ship depart with Captain Navarro and the egg myself. I planned the manifest.”
Maximilian was quiet for a moment. “A coincidence?”
“You know there are no such things for Heroes.” Gawain’s voice carried the ghost of humour. Nothing more. “Probably just an attempt at comedy or cruelty by the Fates.”
Gawain reached into his cloak and set a letter on the desk. The seal was alchemical, intricate, pressed in wax the colour of verdigris. Max did not recognise the symbol.
“This is from Soraya, for Wylan. His eyes only.” Gawain withdrew his hand. “I’d suggest he reads it before you sail.”
Max looked at the letter but didn’t touch it. It was the kind of thing Wylan would spend an hour admiring before he got around to opening it. Another piece of a puzzle he didn’t have the edges for yet. It sat on the desk alongside the morning’s correspondence, except this one had Wylan’s name on it and a missing woman’s handwriting.
The house stirred around them. Percy, probably. Percy’s footsteps had a particular quality: efficient, unhurried, precise. A man who knew where everything was and how long it took to get there.
Gawain would have heard them too.
“I’ll tell the family this morning,” Maximilian said. “We’ll move the timeline forward.”
“Good.”
A silence that should have been the end of the conversation.
“One more thing.” Gawain had not moved from his position. “Your Grace.”
Maximilian waited.
“Percival is my son. You know this.”
“I do.”
“He took a blade for you once. I expect you remember.”
“I am unlikely to forget.”
“No.” Gawain’s voice had not changed in tone or volume. It had simply become the only thing in the room. “But I want to be clear about something. You are the Duke of Pharelle. He is your valet. That distance protects him as long as it holds, and it destroys him the moment it doesn’t.”
Maximilian turned from the window.
“Mirembe left. Politics will require you to marry again. The court will expect it. The name demands it. What happens to Percival then? When the Duke takes a new wife and the valet becomes inconvenient?”
“I have Aurora.”
“You have one heir. The pressure will be to produce more.”
“That is not—”
“Scandal lands on the servant, Your Grace. Always. The Duke is forgiven. The valet is dismissed. And whatever promises were made in private rooms become the kind of thing that never happened.” He paused. “I have watched this from a distance for some time. I have no intention of intervening in my son’s choices. But I am asking you, clearly, what you intend to do. Because Percival will not ask. He is too loyal, and too in love, and too convinced that your answer would be the right one.”
The courtyard outside was very still. Even the frost was listening.
“I don’t have an answer,” Maximilian said. Quietly.
“Then find one,” Gawain said. “Before someone else decides for you.”
When Maximilian turned back to the room, the window was still closed and Gawain was gone.