Lambert arrived just after dawn, still carrying the cold from Notre Reine on his coat. The snow had come in earnest overnight, and it had found the breach in Maximilian’s study; the draught moved through the estate with the persistence of an uninvited relative, despite the oilcloth the servants had hung over the gap.
He found them in the council room, which had the advantage of four intact walls. They were all awake, which was unusual; Lambert was accustomed to being the only member of this family who considered dawn a reasonable hour for anything. Maximilian sat at the head. The room felt a little warmer than it should have, given the winter chill. Laila occupied her usual seat, hands folded. Isabella sat opposite Wylan. Wylan had his coffee.
The chair where Mirembe had sat was empty. Nobody had moved it. Nobody had sat in it.
“Tribune has been formally invoked,” Lambert said. He set his satchel on the table. “The evidence was accepted. The obsidian statuette alone would have been sufficient, but the mercenary records and the financial documentation from d’Aubigne’s estate sealed it. Countess d’Aubigne will answer before an ecclesiastical court.”
Wylan exhaled. Isabella’s shoulders shifted a fraction. Maximilian’s fingers flexed once.
“However,” Lambert said.
“The matter has been designated high priority. I filed the invocation at first light. The hearing has been scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.”
“Tomorrow,” Maximilian said.
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“We’re not ready.”
“No.” Lambert removed his gloves and folded them precisely. “Tribune invocations typically require days to process. Witness lists, preliminary review, assignment of a presiding Legate. This one met no resistance at any stage. Someone wanted it heard immediately.” He paused. “They’ve tacked it onto the end of tomorrow’s existing docket. Last hearing of the day.”
“Before we could prepare,” Laila said. “And at an hour when everyone is tired and wants to go home.”
“That was my first thought.”
“Can we object to the scheduling?” Isabella asked.
“On what grounds? Fast-tracking is unusual, not illegal. The Church can prioritise as it sees fit.” Lambert sat down. “But the scheduling is not the problem. Or rather, it is not the only problem. The presiding Legate assigned to the hearing is Darius.”
Wylan frowned, searching for the connection. Laila’s hands unfolded. Isabella straightened in her chair.
Maximilian said, “Explain.”
“Legate Darius presided over Julius’s trial.”
“That’s not fair!” Isabella’s voice rang out.
“No.”
“So someone is still moving behind the scenes,” Wylan said. “A countermove then? Fast-tracked the date, and ensured a hostile Legate presides?”
“That is a reasonable assessment.”
Maximilian’s fingers had resumed their drumming.
“Can we challenge him?” Maximilian asked. “The assignment.”
“There is a formal mechanism,” Lambert said. “An objection on grounds of judicial misconduct. I have Julius’s case file. The fabricated witness statements alone would be sufficient. But filing through proper channels takes days. The hearing is tomorrow.”
“Then we don’t file through proper channels,” Laila said.
Lambert looked at her. He knew this tone. He’d last heard it before the green pigment, the borrowed face, and the salon.
“Darius has a reputation,” Laila continued. “He’s built a career on the appearance of judicial propriety. If word reaches the right people before the hearing that his conduct in Julius’s case is about to become very public, very uncomfortable, and very much a matter of record, he will recuse himself. Not because he’s honourable. Because the alternative is worse.”
“That is dangerously close to blackmail,” Lambert said.
“It is dangerously close to the truth. There is a difference.”
“Not one the Church is likely to appreciate.”
“The Church appreciates discretion. I’m offering Darius a great deal of it. He can step aside quietly, or I can make the case in the court of public opinion. I think the Church might not want to be seen meddling in a conflict that is one step away from the King and the Duke of Pharelle.”
Lambert opened his mouth to object, then closed it. Not today. Not with Laila, who would win.
Max looked at Lambert and then at Laila. He had stopped drumming his fingers.
“How long do we have?”
“Just today.”
“Do it.”
Laila’s eyebrows rose a fraction.
“Give Darius the chance to step aside. If he takes it, we avoid the spectacle. If he doesn’t, Lambert puts it out in public. What else do we need to know?”
“This is not a trial by peers,” Lambert said. “This is the Church mediating. I invoked Tribune specifically to override the vendetta, and I framed it narrowly: an examination of the Countess’s conduct. Not a dispute between houses. That distinction is our best protection, and everything we do today needs to preserve it.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” Isabella asked.
“Meaning we keep the focus on d’Aubigne. Her conspiracy. Her cult connections. Her mercenaries. Every piece of testimony should point toward what she did, not toward what we are.” He paused. “If we control the narrative, we control the questions.”
“And if the Church asks questions we’d rather not answer?” Wylan had crossed his legs, coffee in hand, mind already running calculations.
“Under theurgic compulsion, every word will be truth.”
“So the strategy is to make sure nobody asks us about Seraphina,” Wylan said.
“The strategy is to make d’Aubigne so obviously guilty that the Legate has no reason to turn her attention to us. That’s what yesterday was about. The obsidian statuette, the mercenary records, the financial trail. We didn’t gather that evidence to be thorough. We gathered it to be overwhelming.”
Lambert looked around the table. “Witnesses. Isabella, you present the financial records and the Rogue’s Gallery evidence. You found it. You’re the most credible voice for it. Wylan, first-hand account of the assassination attempt: the bomb, Aurora’s rescue, the mercenaries in the estate. Laila, you tie the narrative together. The pattern of attacks, the escalation, and your own account of your discovery of her and her conduct. I provide the ecclesiastical framework.”
“And me?” Maximilian said.
“You don’t stand.”
“I’m head of this house,” Max said. “This is my fight.”
“Which is precisely why.” Lambert kept his voice level. “I framed Tribune as an examination of the Countess’s actions. Not a dispute between the Duke and the Count’s household. Count d’Aubigne isn’t standing. This is about his wife’s conduct, not his office. The moment the Duke of Pharelle takes the testimony chair, we invite the Church to treat this as a matter between the crown and the city, and the scope widens.”
“Lambert is right,” Laila said quietly. “The Tribune’s scope is narrow because we made it narrow. You taking the stand undoes that.”
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Maximilian looked at his mother. Then at Lambert.
“Fine,” he said.
“And Max,” Lambert said. “You can’t be seen at the hearing either. If the Duke is observed, it changes the tenor of the entire proceeding.”
Max stood. His chair scraped back.
“I’m going to go and cool off,” he said. He left the council room, and the temperature settled behind him.
“And Mirembe?” Laila asked.
“We wrote to House Ankhara requesting her availability. There has been no reply.” He paused. “Even if we could summon her, I’m not sure she’d speak favourably.”
The empty chair said nothing.
“So we’re gambling,” Wylan said.
“That’s what this has been from the beginning,” Lambert said. “A wager on the truth.”
Laila had had enough of walls.
She needed air and the space to move in. More importantly, she needed to find Sadriel. If there was anyone who could speak to this family’s character before a court, it was him. A good reason, but not the only one. She pulled on her cloak and stepped out into the snow.
It had been falling since before dawn, and by the time Laila reached the market district the city had been remade. The familiar stalls were mounded white shapes. The landmarks she navigated by had been softened into anonymity.
She kept walking. The snow made the transition from wealthy to poor harder to read. The buildings all looked equal under their white covering. The change was in the people. Fewer of them. Then none.
She should have reached the turning for St. Dreven’s by now. The street she expected to take was either somewhere behind her in the white or had been blocked by a drift. She kept south, looking for a landmark, and the streets narrowed, and the buildings pressed closer, and the snow on the ground was no longer fresh but grey and packed and hard.
The grotto opened before her like something the city had been hiding.
A hollow in the heart of the poor quarter, half-forgotten and wholly abandoned, except by those with nowhere else to turn.
An abandoned cart leaned against a crumbling wall, its broken frame sheltering a family beneath threadbare blankets. Crates, rusted tools, and tarps had been made into homes with the terrible ingenuity of people who had no other option.
At the centre stood a Yule tree, small and crooked, its branches hung with scraps of ribbon and shards of coloured glass. Magic clung faintly to the tree, holding it against the winter. A frail, shimmering defiance.
The figures in the grotto were spriggans.
Blue-grey skin blending into the icy shadows. Silvery hair beneath patched scarves. Amber eyes that flickered with wariness and weariness in equal measure. Children stared at her from behind their mothers’ legs.
They were fey, as she was fey. The same amber eyes. But diminished. Laila stood in her good cloak and felt the distance between her life and theirs.
She had brought nothing. She had come to find Sadriel, not to distribute charity. Her hands were empty.
She gave what she had. Coins from her purse. The bread roll she had taken from the kitchen and forgotten about. Words, when they were welcome, which was not always. A woman clutching a child took the bread with thanks murmured through chattering teeth, and the gratitude in her eyes was worse than accusation because accusation Laila could have answered.
Her purse emptied. The faces kept coming.
Her breath quickened. The cold pressed in. She needed a moment, just a moment, to steady herself, and she slipped from the grotto into an alley where the snow had drifted against the walls and the air bit at her lungs.
She was not alone.
The shawl she noticed first. A tattered thing, barely enough to keep anything at bay, wrapped around a small, hunched figure sitting against the wall. A spriggan woman. Hands resting in her lap. Posture eerily still.
Laila stepped closer. The details sharpened with each step. The frost clinging to the woman’s shoulders. The unnatural stillness of her limbs. The glassy sheen over her amber eyes.
The realisation came slowly, and then all at once.
The woman was not sitting in quiet reflection. She was not hiding from the cold. She was frozen solid, and had been for some time, and nobody had noticed, and nobody had come, and the snow had covered her shoulders and her shawl and the hands resting in her lap with the same white courtesy it had laid over the scorch marks on the de Vaillant estate that morning.
Laila stepped back. The woman’s face stayed in her vision even when she closed her eyes.
She turned and walked, and then walked faster.
Streets she didn’t recognise. A bridge she must have crossed because the river was behind her now. The snow kept falling, covering her footprints as quickly as she made them, and for a while she was simply moving without direction, the city white and strange around her.
Her feet found St. Dreven’s before her mind did. The route was in her body, and it carried her through the snow while the rest of her was still in the alley.
The cloister was warm and loud. Steam, clatter, voices. Carina was at the centre of it, sleeves rolled.
She saw Laila and paused. Whatever she read in Laila’s face, she didn’t remark on it. She just nodded toward the kitchen. “We’re behind.”
Laila picked up a ladle. She was a patron of this place, not a volunteer, but her hands needed something to do, and the soup was thin but hot and ready. The queue was long, and so she served.
When the queue had thinned, Carina came to stand beside her. She picked up a cloth and began wiping the counter, which was already clean. It was the kind of thing you did when you wanted to be near someone without making it a thing.
“Talk to me,” Carina said.
“There was a woman,” Laila said. “In an alley near a grotto in the poor quarter. Frozen.”
Carina didn’t stop wiping the counter. “Spriggan?”
“Yes.”
“We lost three last week. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.” She wrung out the cloth. “You saw her?”
“I couldn’t do anything.”
“No. You couldn’t. That’s the hardest part of this work. Not the ones you help. The ones you find too late.” Carina looked at her properly for the first time. “You’re here now. That counts.”
Sadriel found her before she found him. He came from the back of the cloister carrying a crate of firewood, and he stopped when he saw her, and for a moment they simply looked at each other.
“I was hoping you’d come,” he said.
“I need to ask you something.”
He set the crate down. They sat at one of the long tables, the kitchen noise around them, the smell of soup and woodsmoke.
“Lambert has invoked Tribune,” Laila said. “The Church will hear our case against d’Aubigne tomorrow. I came to ask if you would testify.”
Sadriel took that in. He was quiet for a long time.
“I want to,” he said. “You know I want to.”
“But.”
“But I’m not supposed to be here, Laila. The moment I take the stand, the first question establishes that.”
“We could argue the conviction was unjust. Lambert has the case file.”
“And under theurgic compulsion, every question I answer will be the complete truth. Not Lambert’s careful truth. Not your considered truth. Mine.” He looked at his hands. “You know I’m not built for that.”
“And I’m a de Vaillant cousin. That’s not the independent voice you need.”
“So you can’t help us.”
“Not in that room.” He met her eyes. “But I can help here. I can keep doing what I’m doing. And when it’s over, whatever happens, I’ll still be here.”
Carina called something sharp to a volunteer who was stacking bowls wrong.
“Thank you,” Laila said. “For being honest.”
“It’s all I have,” Sadriel said.
Isabella went to the library.
Her father’s library had high shelves and old leather and a quiet that discouraged hurrying. Alexios had kept his maps on the lower shelves and his ambitions on the upper ones, and Isabella had spent her childhood climbing both.
The Merovian Accords lay in the second drawer of his desk, rolled in a leather case that had softened with age. She drew it out and spread it across the desk. The parchment crackled. It always crackled. The thing was younger than she was, and considerably more certain of its purpose.
Her father’s signature sat near the bottom of the first page, bold and self-assured. Beside it, smaller but no less deliberate: King Auberon. She had not seen him since she was four years old.
She barely remembered his face. A height. A warmth. The impression of someone kneeling to meet her eyes, though she could no longer be certain whether that was memory or invention. There had been no letters since. No overtures of family. Just silence, and a signature on a treaty that had determined the course of her life.
Did he ever think of her? She pushed the thought down, as she always did.
That other Isabella, the one who’d grown up in the Court, was a ghost of a possibility. She might have found happiness amidst its twilight revelries, or she might have been just as out of place, decorating a different gilded cage.
The treaty resisted her. Clauses nested inside subclauses. Amendments referenced amendments. The language coiled around itself as though the authors had wanted to ensure no one could read it quickly enough to object.
? Treaty drafters were paid by the clause. This explained everything.
She knew what she was looking for. If they denounce his name, what happens to the Accords? What happens to me?
The treaty had made her a de Vaillant. But it had also made her a guarantee.
Ondine Marinelle. That was the name on the treaty. Not Isabella. Ondine. The name Laila had replaced when Isabella was twelve, kneeling in candlelight, offering a new name like a gift: Isabella. A name that means you belong to us.
But the treaty still said Ondine. The law wouldn’t care what Laila had called her fourteen years ago.
She scanned the clauses again until she found the one she half-remembered, buried in the fourth subclause of the seventh amendment in language so deliberately vague it could mean almost anything: obligations pertaining to lineage, duties of the exchanged party, provisions in the event of material change to the standing of either signatory house.
Material change. Such as the Church stripping Alexios’s name from the record.
If the Accords dissolved, her adoption dissolved with them. She would be Ondine Marinelle again.
And tomorrow I sit in that chair and state my name for the court.
She stared at the clause until the words blurred. “There must be something more here,” she muttered.
Wylan found her in the library, pretending he hadn’t come to check on her.
“You look like you’re trying to decode something that couldn’t decide between lasagne and legalese,” he said.
“It’s the Merovian Accords.” She didn’t look up. “I’m trying to understand what happens if things fall apart.”
“Fall apart how?” Wylan crossed the room and pulled up a chair beside her. “Like you’d be sent back? Or worse?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
He leaned his elbows on the desk and peered at the parchment. “Legal jargon isn’t really your thing, is it?”
“I need to understand it myself. It’s important.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, you’ve always had an instinct for cutting through diplomacy like a Gordian Knot. Even if it’s written in Ancient Bureaucratese.”
? Linguists classified Ancient Bureaucratese as a dead language. Lawyers classified it as a living expense.
Her lips twitched despite herself. “That’s not helpful.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.” He bumped her shoulder with his. “Seriously, Issy. You’re not in this alone.”
“Thanks, Wylie.”
They sat together for a moment.
Isabella rolled up the document and returned it to its leather case. She would not find what she needed here. She would find it tomorrow, in a testimony chair, when the Legate asked her to state her name.
She put the Accords back in the drawer and closed it with more care than was strictly necessary.
“Come on,” she said. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”