The queue had started before dawn.
Sadriel had learned to read a queue. This morning’s was longer than yesterday’s and quieter, which meant the cold had deepened overnight and the people at the back had been standing in it for some time.
He ladled soup. Fill, hand over, next. The pot was vast, dented, and had outlived several of its handles, not to mention attendants. The contents tasted of whatever had been donated and flavoured by the stubbornness of its cooks.
A halfling woman in a shawl held out a bowl with both hands, and Sadriel filled it. She nodded. The child beside her did not have a bowl, and so Sadriel found one, and filled that too.
The cloister of St. Dreven was warm enough. Stone walls, kitchen fires, priests and clerics moving through the space with steady competence. The building had long since stopped being surprised by need.
? St. Dreven’s operated on the charitable principle that no one should go hungry, and the practical principle that they should queue. The two had never been in conflict.
At the centre of it was Carina.
Silver-streaked hair tied back, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and voice pitched to carry across stone. She moved through the cloister like a breaking storm that had learned to delegate.
“You.” She pointed at a young monk who had stopped to adjust his sandals. “Those bowls won’t wash themselves, and I’m running out of miracles. Move.”
He moved, as they all did when Carina pointed.
Sadriel’s station was near the end of the serving line, where the soup met the bread. The bread was yesterday’s, donated from a bakery on the Rue St. Maarten. Hard enough to require commitment, but it was bread.
The queue thinned, the pots emptied, and the morning rush gave way to the midday lull. The kitchen belonged to washing rather than crisis.
Sadriel wiped down the counter. The cloister was quiet now, or as quiet as a building could be when it contained Carina, who was informing a crate of turnips that they would be soup by evening whether they cooperated or not.
The cloister did not require his history. It required his hands and his time. This I can provide.
The door opened and the cold came in first. Laila followed.
She was dressed for the weather, not for display. Practical cloak, practical boots. She paused in the doorway, taking in the cloister the way she took in everything: quickly, and with judgement. Her gaze found the serving line, the stacked bowls, the flour dust on the counter, and finally Sadriel behind it, cloth in hand. She took a moment longer than usual before speaking.
“Sadriel.”
“Laila.” He set the cloth down but did not move from behind the counter. “Have you come for the soup? I should warn you, it’s an acquired taste.”
“I’ve had your mother’s cooking. I’ll manage.”
He smiled at that, which was rare enough to notice. “You’ve been busy. We heard the bells from here when the Pontifex died. And then we heard the rest.”
“The trial.”
“The trial, the excommunication, the vendetta, and several more things I expect will reach me in due course. News is slow in the monastery but never idle.”
He folded the cloth and placed it on the counter with the care of someone putting away a tool he’d need again shortly. “This cloister serves about two hundred people a day, and they bring with them tidings of the city. The women who run the kitchen deal out soup and trade it for gossip. I suggest they know more of Pharelle than most salons.”
“And what opinion has arrived about us?”
“That House de Vaillant was treated badly by people who could afford to be unkind. The specifics vary but the sympathy remains. It’s rather like soup for the masses.”
Carina passed behind them with an armload of clean bowls stacked with architectural ambition. She glanced at Laila and inclined her head. Laila returned it.
“The Church moves at the pace it chooses,” Sadriel said. “I know this rather personally.”
“You’re comparing our situation to yours?”
“I’m observing that the mechanism hasn’t changed. Different names on the warrants. Same hand turning the crank.” He picked up a bowl that needed washing and began washing it, as his hands preferred to be occupied. “How is Lambert taking it?”
“Like Lambert takes everything. Personally, theologically, and with intensity.”
“And Wylan?”
“Wylan has been erratic. More so than usual.”
“And you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Sadriel rinsed the bowl and set it on the rack. The kitchen noise filled the space around them: the clatter of crockery, a volunteer arguing with Carina and losing.
“There’s a reason I’ve come,” Laila said.
“There usually is, with you. The duchess does not visit the street without purpose, and given the tidings of late I wonder which one brings you to me.”
“There is a delicate matter involving Isabella at the Autumn Embassy and we are going there. It could potentially cause a diplomatic incident, possibly even war.” She paused, and the pause was the point.
“Is that supposed to move me? Poverty is its own kind of war, and with its own kind of statistics.”
“Ah, but this time it’s personal.”
“War and poverty never are.”
“Isadora will be there.”
Sadriel’s hands stopped washing of their own accord. She’d been a young woman when he last saw her. He found himself trying to assemble her face from twelve years ago and discovering the details had softened, gone uncertain at the edges.
“How is she?” he said.
“I think political life suits her. She seems to have done well for herself, given the circumstances.”
“Not unlike yourself, it seems.”
“Indeed. I suppose you might call her a princess. Nereus is a prince, after all.”
“And you became a duchess. Just more symmetry between Beaumonts and de Vaillants, Aunt Laila.”
“It was her who wrote.” Laila’s voice had softened. “Here.”
A folded and fragrant piece of paper was thrust before him in open fashion. With his hands still wet it wasn’t like he was going to be able to fold it away. And so he resigned himself and read the missive.
After a moment he set the bowl on the rack and dried his hands on his apron.
“When?”
Such a simple question. He wished he could take it back.
“Lambert and Wylan are in the carriage down the street on the main road. We can come to collect you en route.”
He untied the apron and set it on the hook. Carina materialised at his shoulder with soft pressure about her.
“Another family matter, Sadriel? I thought you’d retired from that particular line of work.”
“It’s hard to escape your past when it keeps coming over to visit. Don’t worry, I’ll be back this evening.”
“See that you are. Families take everything you give them and come back for the ladle. But I suppose even gardens need tending between harvests.” She looked at Laila. “Bring him back in one piece. He’s finally learned where I keep the good stock.”
She was already walking away before Laila could respond, calling instructions to a volunteer who had committed the unforgivable sin of placing bread in the wrong crate.
“She’s something,” Laila said.
“She’s the reason this place works.”
At the door, he paused.
“You could have sent a message.”
“I could have.”
“But you came in person.”
“It was on the way.”
“The Autumn Embassy is in the opposite direction.”
Laila smiled, and they stepped out into the cold, which had been waiting patiently.
The Autumn Embassy occupied the centre of a town square that wanted nothing to do with it.
Barriers marked off the approach, the polite municipal distance reserved for construction sites and unexploded ordnance.
? The Pharelle Municipal Authority classified the Autumn Embassy as a ‘permanent temporary structure.’ This allowed it to exist without planning permission, and the city to pretend it wasn’t there.
The structure itself was a single arch of painted porcelain, amber and russet and gold, holding aloft a polished disc that shifted between silver and bronze in the grey light. It reflected the square in distorted ripples. The world it showed was not quite the same as the one surrounding it.
Laila, Lambert, Wylan, and Sadriel stood before it. Sadriel still smelled of woodsmoke and soup. Nobody mentioned it.
Laila presented Isadora’s letter and the formal invitation. A court attendant stepped from beneath the arch, examined both at a pace that suggested the cold was someone else’s problem, and motioned them forward.
The polished surface of the disc was not a door. There was no handle, no threshold, no hinge. There was only the surface, and then the surface was behind them, and the square was gone.
The cold vanished. Warmth, sudden and total, like stepping into a room where someone had been running a bath for several hours. The air smelled of moss, crisp apples, and fallen leaves.
The ground was soft underfoot, which was normal enough. The shadows fell in two directions at once, which was not. A path wound ahead through towering trees, but the path curved in a way that suggested it had opinions about its destination and no obligation to share them. The portal they had walked through was no longer behind them. It was to the left. Or possibly above.
“The shadows do that here,” Laila said, without breaking stride. “Don’t worry about it.”
Wylan stopped walking and looked at a tree. The tree had bark the colour of tarnished bronze and leaves of hammered gold, and it was growing at an angle that owed nothing to wind and everything to geometry having taken the afternoon off.
“Fascinating,” he said, and reached for his notebook.
“Don’t touch anything,” Laila said. “Don’t measure anything either. If you measure that tree, you’ll get a different answer every time, and eventually it will notice.”
Sadriel looked at the path, then at the trees, then at the sky, which was the colour of a bruised sunset and showed no sign of having a sun in it. “Does it get less unsettling?”
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“You stop noticing,” Laila said. “Which is not the same thing.”
Lambert said nothing. His hand had found his prayer beads, and his fingers moving in steady recitation.
As they walked, the strangeness shifted. The off-kilter geometry remained, but colour crept in: reds, golds, deepening violets. The leaves underfoot grew thick enough to muffle their steps. A wind arrived carrying faint music.
“This part is the Court,” Laila said. “The Widderslainte on its own is just... unfinished. The Autumn Court shaped this stretch to suit them. Everything from here is their territory imposed on neutral ground.”
Lambert’s fingers did not stop moving. But he nodded, once.
She walked through it like a language she hadn’t spoken in years. The grammar came back before the fluency did. She knew where to step, what not to touch, which path would hold its course. Not home, not anymore. But familiar enough to navigate without thinking.
The Embassy emerged from the trees, and Laila slowed.
It had changed. The facade was still golden stone veined in bronze, the windows still streaked with crimson glass, but someone had added wrought-iron spires that hadn’t been there when she was young. They held orbs that captured the light of an eternal sunset. The bronze doors were the same. The columns carved with acorns and ferns were the same. She had traced those ferns with her fingers as a child, waiting for her mother to finish conversations that never seemed to end.
“Through here,” she said, and pushed the doors open herself.
The Audience Chamber was smaller than she remembered. That was always the way. The amber glass dome still caught the light and scattered it in shifting patterns across the floor. The fountains still ran, scattering droplets that shimmered like liquid fire. Wylan was already studying the mechanism. She let him. They had larger concerns.
At the chamber’s heart, Nereus. She had last seen him when he was barely of age, all angles and careful manners. Both had sharpened. He sat on a throne woven from bronze branches and studded with gemstones, and he wore it well, which most people on thrones cannot claim.
Beside him, Isadora. Twenty-four years. Isadora had been a child when Laila had left, a sharp-eyed girl who watched everything and said little. The sharp eyes remained. The silence had become something more formidable. She had learned to wait, and to choose her moments.
Nereus rose. He did not need to. The formality was deliberate: he was receiving them as family.
“Welcome,” he said. “If you’ll follow me. I think we would all be more comfortable somewhere less formal.”
The private chamber was smaller, warmer, lit by orbs rather than the dome’s filtered light. No throne. A round table, low chairs, a decanter already waiting. Nereus closed the doors himself and dismissed the attendants with a look.
He poured. The wine was golden and tasted of something Wylan would spend the rest of the evening trying to identify.
“Your mother sends her regards, Laila. She asks after you more often than I suspect you’d like.”
“That’s kind of her,” Laila said. “I hope she’s well.”
“She persists,” Nereus said, and left it there.
“Isabella arrived here three days ago. She presented herself as Ondine Marinelle and asked for sanctuary.”
“I have not granted it. Formally, she is my guest. Informally, she is my wife’s cousin, and I am fond enough of her to want this resolved without the Court’s involvement.” He looked at Isadora, then back to Laila. “You understand, I hope, what it means that she is here at all.”
“Isabella is a guarantee under the Merovian Accords,” Laila said. “She was exchanged as a child. Auberon honoured the peace in part because his niece was held in good faith by our family. If she returns to the Court voluntarily, the terms of the exchange are broken.”
“And if I harbour her,” Nereus said, “the Court becomes complicit. Yes.” He turned his glass but did not drink. “I mention this not because I require gratitude, but because I would prefer we both understood the ground we’re standing on.”
Isadora had asked. He had done it. Neither of them would name the cost in front of guests.
“We do,” she said. “And I will not forget it.”
He inclined his head.
“She is a de Vaillant,” Laila said. “She took the name Isabella because she became my daughter.”
“And yet,” Nereus said, “she presented herself to me as Ondine. She did not ask for the de Vaillants. She asked for the Court.”
Laila held his gaze. The strike landed.
Isadora spoke. “Isabella has always struggled with the weight of other people’s expectations. I understand your frustration, Laila, but it might be worth asking why she felt she had to leave before you ask why she came here.”
“I know why she left. And I know what it cost her.” She held Isadora’s gaze. “But her feelings and the stability of the Accords are not separate things. If this becomes political, the Court will decide for her.”
“That’s not rebellion, Laila. It’s desperation.”
“It’s both,” Laila said. “I’ve raised enough young people to know the difference, and I’ve raised enough to know it doesn’t matter. Desperation and rebellion look the same when they’re walking out the door.”
Nereus raised a hand. “I am not here to adjudicate your family. I am here to tell you that she is willing to speak with some of you, and not others.” He looked at Laila. If there was sympathy in it, he didn’t let it settle. “She has asked not to see you.”
“She’s willing to speak to family,” Isadora said, gently. “But right now, her definition of family is... narrower than yours.”
Laila’s hands had not moved from her lap.
“I see,” she said. “Then Wylan should go. She trusts Wylan.”
Wylan nodded and stood.
“Wylie.” He turned. “Be yourself. That’s enough.”
The harp was not cooperating.
Isabella had been at it for an hour, and the damp autumn air had done something spiteful to the strings. Every note came out slightly wrong, just enough to remind her that she was playing an instrument that belonged to someone else, in a room that belonged to someone else, in a world that was not quite hers either.
She heard the footsteps before the knock. Wylan walked the way he thought: quickly, with occasional pauses where he got distracted by something on the wall.
“That sounds like a familiar knock,” she said without looking up.
“We were looking for you.” He was in the doorway, hands in his pockets. “Lambert and Mother came. Sadriel’s here too, I guess.”
Mother. Wylan still said it so easily.
“She thinks of me as Ondine. You heard her in court.”
“That was a legal technicality. She thought she had to use your legal name. It was careless, but she was put on the spot.”
“Still hurts.” Isabella’s fingers found the harp string and pressed it flat. No sound. “Having a name that feels like a dead part of me pulled up. Like all this time I got to play act at being a de Vaillant, and then legally I’m not.”
She could not even be angry properly. The anger had nowhere clean to land.
“I don’t know. It just felt like she was fighting for her family, but when it came to my name, that’s where things had to give.”
Wylan was quiet for a moment. “I’m not good at this,” he admitted. “Lambert would know what to say, but it wouldn’t be the right thing to say. Something about reason or forgiveness, probably. But—” He seemed to lose his words before rallying. “She came here for you, under the threat of politics, but to ask for Isabella, not Ondine. That has to count for something.”
It did. She hated that it did.
“Will you come back? Just to the room. You don’t have to say anything to her yet.”
She looked at the harp, which had nothing further to offer on the subject. Then at Wylan, who had come all this way to say things he wasn’t good at saying.
“All right,” she said. “Not for her though. Not yet.”
They walked back through the amber corridor together. The silence held, and Wylan let it.
The private chamber was not what she had expected to walk back into.
The de Vaillants and the Marinelles were seated around a round table as though this were a family dinner, which in some fractured way, it was. Nereus was pouring wine. Lambert was examining the table’s inlay with the focused interest of a man avoiding eye contact.
And Sadriel was standing near Isadora.
Isabella stopped in the doorway. They were already talking. She caught the tail end of something — Isadora’s voice, lighter than it had been during the audience, saying something about a name.
“—suits you better. Julius always sounded like someone else’s idea.” A pause. “You look well. Thinner than I’d like. Are they feeding you?”
“I work in a soup kitchen. I eat better than a lot of people on the street.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He smiled, the same smile she remembered, rare and warm when it arrived. “I’m fed, Isadora. I promise.”
“Mother’s running a ballroom now, did you know?” Isadora said. “The Amber Ballroom. Famed halfway across the continent. She finally got what she always wanted.”
“She always dreamed of hosting grand parties,” Sadriel said.
“Now it’s real. She reinvented herself. Left the de Vaillant estate behind, all of it.” Isadora’s voice carried something complicated. “Father still smuggles. Some things don’t change.”
“And you?”
“I married a prince and learned to sit very still in rooms full of people who don’t entirely trust me.” She smiled. “It’s not so different from childhood, really.”
Sadriel opened his mouth to say something careful. He didn’t get the chance. Isadora pulled him into a hug that had nothing noble or composed about it. Her face crumpled. His arms came up around her, stiff at first, then not.
Nereus looked at his wine. Lambert looked at the ceiling. Laila looked at her hands.
When Isadora pulled back, her eyes were wet and her composure was in ruins, and she did not seem to care.
“Twelve years,” she said. “Don’t you dare make it twelve more.”
“I won’t,” Sadriel said, and his voice was not entirely steady either.
They make it look so easy, she thought. Maybe for some people it is.
Nereus rose from his chair.
“Ondine. Your position is untenable. You have three days to choose. Remain, and you embrace the Autumn Court entirely. Sever all ties to the de Vaillants. Return to them, and you forfeit any claim to your titles here.”
Isabella looked at him. Then at the table, where the wine sat untouched and the round arrangement of chairs made everyone equal and nobody comfortable.
“Can I go—” The word caught. She had to push it out. “Can I go home and think about it?”
Home. The word had come out before she could stop it.
“You may,” Nereus said. “But understand: no decision is still a decision.”
“I’ll let you know,” Isabella said.
The cold of Pharelle was waiting for them on the other side of the portal. The square was nearly empty. The carriage stood where they had left it, the driver stamping his feet and breathing into his hands.
Isadora had come through with them to see them off, her arm through Sadriel’s.
“Don’t let it be so long this time,” she said at the carriage.
“I won’t.”
“I mean it, Julius. Sadriel. Whatever you’re calling yourself this decade.” She straightened the collar of his coat, which did not need straightening. “Have you seen Mother and Father?”
Sadriel’s expression tightened. A flicker, quickly managed, but Isabella saw it.
“No,” he said.
Isadora looked at him for a moment, then at Laila. “Perhaps you might speak to them on his behalf.”
Laila inclined her head. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Lambert spoke from behind them. “I think perhaps we will visit. We have a few things we need to discuss with Guillaume in any case.”
Isadora looked at him, then at Laila, and chose not to ask.
Isadora embraced Sadriel once more, briefly, fiercely. Then she stepped back.
“Safe travels,” she said. “All of you.”
Laila climbed in first, then Isabella, then Wylan. Lambert followed. Sadriel hesitated at the step, glanced back toward Isadora standing in the cold square, and got in.
The wheels began their clatter against the cobblestones. Nobody spoke. Isabella sat with her hands in her lap, looking at nothing. Laila sat beside her, close enough to matter. Sadriel was somewhere far away, his gaze unfocused.
Lambert broke the silence first. “I suppose I was going to have to speak to the Beaumonts sooner or later, and Sadriel is as good a reason as any. Probably more so.”
Sadriel looked up. “What do you intend to say?”
“What would you like me to say? Do you intend to join us?”
“I think one family reunion will do me this decade.”
The carriage settled into its rhythm, doing its best to pretend nothing was wrong. The city moved past them in the dark: lamplight, cobblestone, the occasional figure hunched against the cold. It was, for a brief stretch, almost ordinary.
Then Laila went still.
Lambert saw it in her posture before he understood why. She was looking at the far corner of the cab, where the shadows gathered and the lamplight did not quite reach.
He followed her gaze.
The realisation arrived with the inevitability of a dropped glass meeting a stone floor. He had been there the entire time. Sitting perfectly still, perfectly patient, so entirely suited to the darkness that the eye had simply passed over him the way it passes over furniture.
Espérant. The man who had shown a little too much interest in Wylan’s workshop.
Wylan moved first. His hand went to Diplomacy at his belt, half-drawn before Lambert got his arm across the boy’s chest. The carriage swayed. Sadriel pressed himself back against the seat with the controlled stillness of the cloister.
Espérant regarded the pistol with the mild interest of a man being shown a moderately clever card trick. “If you need to, absolutely. Though I believe it was about time we had a bit of a chat.”
“You’ve been sitting in our carriage,” Laila said.
“I apologise for the intrusion. I had need to speak with you discreetly, and this seemed the only way to do so without interruption.”
Lambert’s hand rested on the head of his cane. “You are no mere attaché. Who are you?”
“We have met. You may call me Espérant.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Lambert saw Laila’s hand move to her sleeve. Her fingers found the pouch of pigment she kept there and traced a line along the inside of her wrist. Lambert felt the faint pressure of the enchantment settle over the carriage like a change in air pressure before a storm.
Espérant’s expression flickered. There and gone. He let the magic settle around him. Whatever truth came next would be exactly as much as the man intended to give.
“Are you here on Vaziri’s behalf?” Lambert said.
“Perhaps I am choosing to say and to not say certain things,” Espérant said, “as you might understand.”
“What are her interests?” Laila pressed.
“She is concerned with the well-being of the kingdom and the Church.”
Carefully true. Deliberately insufficient.
“Does she serve the Dragon Queen?” Lambert said.
“She stands for her own principles.”
Sadriel stirred. “That is an answer designed to satisfy without informing.” His voice was quiet but precise.
Espérant’s gaze moved to Sadriel and moved on. The assessment was so swift it was almost courteous.
“I am not here to discuss Vaziri.” His tone did not sharpen. It simply closed. “I am here to negotiate.”
“On her behalf?” Lambert said.
“On my own.”
“I believe you are in possession of an old sword,” Espérant said. “One of some considerable vintage.”
Nobody spoke.
“And what makes you think that?” Laila said.
“Perhaps we need not worry too much about how I came to apply this knowledge.” He had not moved since they’d noticed him. “I am not going to pretend, and you are not going to pretend, that you do not have it.”
“Suppose we do,” Laila said. “What do you want with it?”
“A fair exchange. You have something of value to me. I have knowledge of certain remedies.” His gaze settled on Laila. “Your granddaughter, I believe, suffered something unfortunate during her Emberlight. A particular affliction from the Dragon Queen.”
“You’re saying you can lift her curse,” Laila said.
“I have that knowledge.”
“The sword came into our possession through the will of Invictus,” Lambert said. “It is His decree that it remain with us, not with you or your masters.”
“My master is Invictus.”
“As is mine. Yet the Caliburn came to us, not to you. Providence has deemed it so.”
“I question whether you are truly chosen,” Espérant said.
Laila spoke before the silence could harden. “You claim knowledge of Aurora’s curse. The Church offers no such power. If you can do what you claim, then you serve something other than Invictus.”
Something moved behind his eyes that was older than the composure. “The Church offers no such power because the Church serves Aeloria. I do not.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Aeloria is a force of nature. A means to an end. Nothing more.”
Lambert looked at Laila. Aeloria is a means to an end. Not here. Not now.
“To suggest you stand above Aeloria herself,” Lambert said.
“Coming from the chosen of Invictus, that is an interesting objection.” Respect flickered across Espérant’s face, or something near it. “My conviction is as certain as yours.”
“You’ve made your offer,” Laila said. “When do you expect an answer?”
“You have three days. I came to you out of courtesy. If you decline, I have every means and intention of acquiring the sword regardless.” He paused. “Invictus wills it.”
Sadriel stirred. “Three days,” he said quietly. “That’s two ultimatums on the same clock.”
“And yet you don’t have it,” Laila said. “If Invictus willed it, one would think He’d have been more direct.”
Espérant’s smile reached his eyes for the first time. There was nothing warm in it. “Allow me to offer a final piece of advice. If the curse remains, Aurora will not survive to see her sixteenth year.”
“You’ve made your point,” Laila said quietly.
“Then I shall see myself out, if you would ask the driver to stop.”
The carriage halted. The door opened. Espérant stepped out into the lamplight and was simply no longer there. No footsteps. No retreating figure. Just the open door, and the cold air, and the absence of him.
Nobody spoke for a very long time.