Isabella woke before the Pendulum’s light reached the window.
She did not need it. The room was hers the way a body is yours: known without looking. Her hand found the edge of the nightstand without reaching. Her feet found the floorboards’ one cold spot and stepped around it.
The wardrobe catch still stuck on the left side, and she opened it with the same half-twist she had used since she was twelve. The hunting bow was on the wall. The ink stain was on the desk. The curtains were Laila’s heavy green velvet, chosen when Isabella was too young to have opinions about curtains and old enough to have opinions about everything else.
Inside the wardrobe, beside her own clothes, hung a dress she did not recognise. New, dark green, well-cut. A peace offering. She left it on the hanger.
What remained smelled of cedar and unworn staleness. A dark blouse. Trousers. Boots that knew the shape of her feet. The hunting leathers were too much of a statement. Today required something quieter.
She crossed to the washstand and looked in the mirror.
A siren looked back.
There you are.
Iridescent scales traced her jaw and temples, prismatic flecks of green and silver catching the thin light. Kelp-dark hair fell past her shoulders, heavy, the texture that made strangers reach out and touch it without asking.
Today, the scales were loud. They had always been there, faintly luminous in certain light, a fact of her body she had stopped noticing years ago. But this morning she saw them the way a stranger might.
Alien. Beautiful. Other.
She thought of Lambert’s face. Wylan’s. Maximilian’s. Human faces, all of them. You would never know what ran in their veins. They carry it beneath the skin. I carry it on the outside.
The de Vaillant children had all become Heroes without a crucible. Lambert’s thaumaturgy. Wylan’s alchemy. Maximilian’s sorcery. Gifts that emerged because they had been designed to. Isabella’s Heroism had come through training, through will, through years of Elariana’s drills until her muscles learned what her blood could not teach her.
I earned this. Every part of it.
The resentment was new, and unwelcome, like finding a crack in a wall you had always believed was solid.
Her travelling bag sat on the floor where she had dropped it last night. Unpacking would have been a decision.
The house was stirring below her. Measured footsteps down the hall; at this hour, that would be Cedric. A deep percussion from the depths of the house; Ursula firing up the kitchen. A door opening and closing too carefully. Lambert. Already up for hours.
Footsteps on the stairs. Not the house’s rhythm. Isabella was on her feet before she’d decided to move, weight shifting to the balls of her feet, hands finding nothing because her weapons were in the wardrobe and she was standing in her bedroom in a blouse.
Laila. She knew the gait before the knock came. Soft, precise.
She let her hands unclench. Most of the way.
Isabella opened it. Laila stood in the corridor with a breakfast tray balanced on one arm, already dressed, already composed. Tea, toast, a small pot of preserves.
“I thought you might prefer—” Laila began.
“You thought you’d manage this, too.”
Good. Let her hear it.
Laila stopped. The tray remained perfectly steady. Whatever she saw in Isabella’s face made her pause.
“I see,” Laila said quietly. “I may have been too hasty.”
Not hostile. Careful.
“I’m going to leave you with your breakfast,” Laila said. She set the tray on the hallway table. “But before I do. You weren’t here for the second day of the trial.”
Isabella waited.
“Mirembe has left the estate. She has... she sees Aurora as tainted. Corrupted by the curse.” A pause. “She fought to go. Maximilian did not stop her.”
And what kind of mother leaves?
Laila held her gaze, and Isabella caught herself staring. She was waiting for a response.
“You can call me Isabella,” Isabella said. “I came home. That’s the decision I made. But don’t mistake it for forgiveness.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Laila said. Just for a moment: something careful and bruised beneath the composure.
Isabella picked up the tray. “I’ll eat in my room. Then I’ll come down.”
“Take your time.”
“I won’t,” Isabella said. “There’s too much to do.”
Lambert had been in the parlour since the third hour. The books were not cooperating.
The parlour had become a repository for family secrets lately, accumulating them the way other parlours accumulated dust, all under the watchful eye of his father’s portrait. Lambert tried not to look at it. The resemblance was a conversation he did not want to have this morning.
Three volumes of Old Gallic etymology. One Church genealogy cross-referenced against two secular registers. The answer was in here somewhere. He could feel it the way he felt a sermon taking shape: the pieces assembling beneath conscious thought.
Wylan had claimed the side table, doing something to a brass instrument with very small screwdrivers and quiet swearing. Lambert had stopped asking what these projects were. The answers only raised further questions.
? Wylan’s relationship with his instruments was, by any reasonable measure, reciprocal. He dismantled them. They occasionally dismantled parts of the house.
The door opened. Isabella. She took the chair nearest the door. Close enough to participate. Far enough to leave.
She came back. That’s what matters.
Wylan looked up from his screwdriver. “There’s tea,” he said, nodding toward the sideboard. “Ursula made the strong one.”
“The one that could strip varnish?”
“That’s the one.”
Isabella poured herself a cup and settled back into the chair. Lambert watched her take a sip, grimace, and take another. Something in the room eased. Not forgiveness, not resolution, just the small domestic fact of someone choosing to sit down and drink terrible tea with her family.
Nobody spoke about last night immediately, which said plenty.
Laila settled into her chair. “What did you find out about Espérant?”
Lambert set down the book he had been pretending to read. “Enough to lose sleep over.”
Wylan set down the screwdriver. “Did anyone manage to sleep? I had to resort to Mother’s enchantment and even that barely took.”
“She offered it to me,” Lambert said. “I declined.”
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“Of course you did.”
“Right.” Wylan pulled up a chair. “So let’s be clear about what we know. A man who is not an attaché appeared in our carriage, knew about Caliburn without being told, offered to cure Aurora’s curse, claimed to serve Invictus while telling us the Church serves Aeloria, and then vanished like smoke.” He paused. “Not only that, when he was here, he was drawn toward my workshop. Given his interest in Caliburn, I have to think he could sense where it was. Who or what are we dealing with?”
“That,” Lambert said, “is what I’ve been trying to determine.” He closed the book and reached for the one beneath it. The marked page. He had found it at dawn and spent the hours since trying to disprove it. “Something has been troubling me since Seraphina’s court. The scroll Isabella found — the surname of Valère.”
“Prospère,” Isabella said.
“Indeed.” Lambert turned to the marked page. “It doesn’t appear in any genealogy. No family line, no noble register, not even a passing mention in the Church’s records.”
He opened the book. Old Gallic, the script dense and angular. “Le royaume prospère. A fortunate and flourishing kingdom. Prospère isn’t a surname. It’s an archaic form of ‘prosperous.’ A word, not a name.”
Wylan’s screwdriver had stopped moving. “And Espérant means...”
“Hopeful,” Laila said quietly. “Prosperous and hopeful.”
I’m glad the connection isn’t just obvious to me.
“Two sides of the same idea,” Lambert said. “Two names that aren’t names. And when you pressed him with magic, he gave the name Espérant. He wasn’t lying. He told us something technically true and dodged the rest.”
The room was very quiet. Lambert let it be. Some conclusions need silence to land.
“So we are dealing with Valère,” Isabella said.
“If he is Valère, that gives credibility to his claim he can help Aurora,” Laila said. “And he wants Caliburn for it.”
“But that’s just it,” Wylan said. “We had our hands on two legendary artefacts, and we bartered the Sang-gréal to Seraphina for a shaky alliance. And now we’re proposing to hand over the only weapon we think might hurt Aeloria to a man who is, let me remind everyone, potentially her dragonborn.”
“Aurora’s life is worth more than a sword,” Laila said.
Lambert looked at her.
“I mean it,” Laila said. “If Valère can lift the curse, then we should at least consider the trade. With the curse gone, Aurora is safe. And if Aurora is safe, we may not even need to worry about Aeloria. She loses her leverage over this family entirely.”
“And if he’s lying?” Isabella said.
“Then we’ve lost a sword. If he’s telling the truth, we’ve saved a child.” Laila’s voice was steady. “I know which side of that I’d rather be wrong on.”
Lambert raised a hand. “You’re both right. He did say he doesn’t serve Aeloria, under truthful compulsion. But we’ve already seen he’s capable of giving technically true but misleading answers. His resistance to magic is unknown. It would be prudent not to take him at his literal word.”
“And I haven’t even had a chance to examine Caliburn properly,” Wylan said. “We should at least understand what it can do before we trade it away. We don’t even know what we’d be giving up.”
Isabella had drawn her feet up onto the chair. “Everyone wants something from us, even in trade. Seraphina wants to restore R?zvan with the Sang-gréal. Valère wants Caliburn.” She paused. “And each time we lose something that disarms us.”
Lambert looked at her. “Are you proposing we refuse Valère’s offer?”
“No. I’m saying we’ve spent the last two weeks reacting to everyone else’s agenda. Seraphina summons us, we go. Valère appears, we deliberate. The Church puts us on trial, we defend ourselves.” She looked around the table. “I’m suggesting we go find the one thing nobody seems to be asking for, but has the greatest leverage. Especially over Aeloria. Her egg. The one that mysteriously sailed off the coast of Gallia ten years ago with Captain Navarro. It’s the one lead we’ve ignored because everything else kept being urgent.” She set her feet on the floor. “I think it’s time we took action instead of reacting to everyone else.”
The hunter’s instinct. Lambert caught himself drumming his fingers on the table. “There is wisdom in that. We know Esteban commissioned its second theft. We know Freight Expectations handled the logistics and that Navarro took it aboard the Salvation’s Promise and out to sea. We have a point of departure but no destination.”
“We have Guillaume,” Isabella said. “It’s his company. And we have pretext enough to visit quietly.”
Lambert stilled his fingers. “I think we follow the hunter’s instincts on this one. It’s a cold trail, but it’s a trail.”
Isabella was on her feet before the sentence was finished, clearly looking for an excuse to get out of the manor. “When do we leave?”
Freight Expectations occupied a handsome building in the merchant quarter, an establishment that looked both respectable and discreet. This required either excellent taste or excellent lawyers. Guillaume had both.
Laila, Lambert, Wylan, and Isabella were shown upstairs by a secretary whose suit was crisp enough to cut paper. The office smelled of money, citrus, and oddly enough, brine. Behind a mahogany desk sat Guillaume, who rose with a smile that had not changed in twenty years. His waistcoat was immaculate. A coin turned between his fingers with absent dexterity. He had aged well, and knew it.
Beside him, Saffron occupied the window frame the way she occupied most spaces — completely. The flowing orange silks were deliberate. The cigar was theatre. But the eyes tracking the room as they entered were her mother’s, and those were not theatre at all.
“Madame de Vaillant,” Guillaume said, his arms wide, as if they were a gift he’d been hoping for. “And family.” Almost an afterthought.
Laila returned the embrace. She had always been fond of Guillaume. At least Saffy is in good hands.
The coin turned, the smile held, and he waited.
Lambert spoke first. They had agreed in the carriage. “Before we begin, I think it would interest you and Madame Beaumont to know that your son Julius is in Pharelle.”
Saffron’s cigar paused halfway to her lips. “I beg your pardon?”
“He’s been in the city for some time, it seems. We only became aware recently.” Lambert kept his voice even. “He goes by a monastic name now, which he asked us not to share.”
“A monastic name,” Saffron repeated. She brought the cigar the rest of the way to her lips and drew on it slowly. “And is he well?”
“Changed, but well,” Laila said. “We thought you should hear it from us.”
“Is he happy?” Saffron asked.
“I believe so. He’s found a cloister in the poor quarter. He serves the community there.”
The coin between Guillaume’s fingers stopped. It was the first time Laila had seen it do so. He held it between thumb and forefinger, perfectly still, and his expression shifted from warm calculation to something more complicated.
“Charity,” Guillaume said. The word landed with the particular weight of a man who had built an empire and could not quite fathom why someone would choose not to.
“He seems to have found his vocation,” Lambert said.
“His vocation.” Guillaume turned the word over the way he turned the coin. “A Beaumont, serving soup.”
“But he’s no longer a Beaumont,” Lambert said quietly. “He hasn’t been since he was sent away.”
Guillaume regarded him for a moment. The coin resumed its turning. “True, true. And you say monastic life suits him?”
“Indeed. He’s become a Monk.”
“A bona fide Monk?” Guillaume’s eyebrows rose. “Well, that’s two Heroes in the Beaumont children. Not quite the three in the de Vaillants.”
“Four,” Isabella said.
“Oh yes, pardon me. Four.”
Saffron held the smoke a moment longer than necessary. Then she exhaled. “Is there anything else you’re willing to tell us about our son, or shall we move on to whatever it is you’ve actually come to discuss?”
“Since you are clearly unwilling to share his new name or his whereabouts,” Guillaume said, “I cannot believe he is the reason for your visit.”
“No,” Laila said. “It isn’t.”
Guillaume tilted his head. “If Julius has returned, perhaps I can intuit some of the things you are wishing to discuss.”
The invitation to show their hand. Laila recognised it. She’d used it herself.
“We have reason to believe,” she said carefully, “that your company handled logistics connected to the movement of the dragon egg. The second theft, specifically.”
Guillaume’s expression did not change. The same warm attention. The coin turned once, twice.
“What is it that you know,” he said, “and what is it you suppose?”
Lambert spoke. “Alexios kept papers. Dock routes for the Bassin-de-Marne, dated 1778. Freight Expectations stationery. A ship called the Salvation’s Promise, captained by a man named Alarico Navarro, contracted through your company.” He let that settle. “And a connection to Prelate Esteban Ramirez, who we believe commissioned the theft.”
Guillaume was quiet for a moment. The coin turned. Laila could almost hear the ledger balancing.
“I notice,” he said, “that you have presented this as a matter of family interest rather than legal inquiry. Which suggests you are not here to accuse me of anything.”
“We’re here because we need to find the egg,” Lambert said. “Your involvement is a thread, not a charge.”
“Well then.” Guillaume glanced at Saffron. “Darling, could we have a moment?”
Saffron drew on her cigar. The ember flared, and the room shifted. Not physically. The walls did not move, the desk stayed where it was. But the space between them and the door thickened. The light from the windows dimmed to amber. The sounds of the building below fell away as if swallowed. The shadows in the corners of the office deepened and leaned inward, attentive.
“A few minutes,” Saffron said. “No more.”
Guillaume pocketed the coin.
“I received my instructions and my payment from Father Ramirez,” he said. The performance was gone. What remained was a man recounting a transaction, precise and unapologetic. “He had knowledge of the egg’s location within the Sanctum beneath Notre Reine. My company provided the logistics for its removal.”
“You moved a dragon egg through a Church sanctum,” Isabella said.
“I moved cargo from one location to another. What the cargo was, and where it came from, were details I was paid handsomely not to dwell on.” Guillaume folded his hands on the desk. “I met Captain Navarro on the docks, who was accompanied by a man in a green cloak who didn’t show his face. They both gave correct and different passwords, so I discharged the cargo to him.”
“Sounds like Captain Navarro and Gawain,” Lambert said.
“Captain Alarico Navarro,” Guillaume confirmed. “Who set sail and, to my knowledge, never returned to Gallian waters.”
“And the egg?” Laila said. “Where was it bound?”
The coin reappeared. Guillaume turned it once, twice. “That,” he said, “is a conversation for somewhere more private than a place of business.” He reached for a piece of paper, wrote an address in unhurried script, and passed it across the desk. “Join us this evening. There are people who may be able to help trace Navarro’s route. People my wife and I have stayed in contact with despite certain... familial complications.”
He smiled. The warmth was back, and entirely genuine, and Laila still couldn’t tell if it was strategic. “Anything for family. And for good relations with the ducal house of Pharelle.”
Saffron turned her attention to Wylan. “Sweetie, darling. Do make sure you wear something contemporary. It will not do to be seen wearing court fashion.” Her gaze assessed the group. “Welcome to the other side of the city.”
The card was simple and elegant. Black rectangle, gold lettering: The Amber Ballroom.