Chapter 13
Two hours. Two full hours of Lord Maltrun discussing lumber yield charts as if Evelyne might one day be crowned Queen of Pine Resin.
She had nodded politely but by the time he reached his family's ancestral bark extraction techniques, she was wondering, not for the first time, whether boredom could be fatal.
Now, mercifully alone, she slipped into her father’s solar—a chamber usually off-limits, but temporarily permitted for her “royal practical studies.” A generous term for homework, Evelyne supposed, though she was far more content here than enduring one more symposium on tree bark.
The air inside was cool, dust floated lazily through angled sunlight, the faintest whisper of pipe smoke curled in her lungs. The furniture was edrathenian, built for strategy not comfort, but that suited this kingdom just fine.
She crossed the stone floor and settled at the long writing table by the arched window. A dozen scrolls were spread before her. Border reports, supply tallies, trade projections between Edrathen and Varantia, each with margins lined in fine ink.
Evelyne ran her fingertips lightly along the edge of one scroll.
The parchment was thick, rough-grained. There was a comfort in it.
She hadn’t expected to find anything interesting in the stack of reports.
That wasn’t the point. It gave her hands something to do and her mind a boundary to pace within.
She flipped through the pages. Her cousin Hadrian had sent the latest report from Nyvaron. Confirmation of departures, coded notes on Zhareshian behavior, followed by the usual post-wedding debris. All accounted for and inspected by the Grand Marshal’s ever-paranoid eye.
There was also one report from Calveran. That got her interested.
Field Report: Calveran — Current Status
To: Grand Marshal Ravik
Per your request, this is a situational summary of Calveran post-Maroon Slaughter.
Calveran remains under provisional rule following the full elimination of the Dvorenic line. Tsar’s brother returned from Rhuhn’Fjel and assumed interim leadership.
City experiencing widespread unrest. Guard divisions overstretched. Supply lines are functional but under threat from looting and trade disruption. Other states openly questioned Calveran’s neutrality. Southern and western borders show signs of militarized buildup.
The Vaults remain hidden. Publicly confirmed holdings include precious metals, ledgers, and cultural artifacts. Unverified reports persist of classified contents beyond standard inventory.
Recommend limited engagement. Surveillance ongoing. No entry authorized without Assembly sanction. The situation is volatile. Further escalation likely.
End report.
Evelyne set the page down, her fingertips lingering against the parchment a moment longer than necessary.
She hadn’t returned to Calveran since the massacre; she had only heard rumors, each one duller and more detached than the truth deserved.
The city she had once been meant to call home, the place she had imagined for nearly ten years as her future, was now nothing more than a ledger entry under containment.
She folded the report and set it aside, but the weight of it stayed. To read of Calveran this way, stripped to numbers and losses, knowing what had led to that ruin—Gods, it made her feel hollow.
She almost skipped the next report.
It was tucked into the corner, barely there. Half-faded ink, as if someone had once pressed it lightly and then thought better of making it bold. A symbol.
Three vertical lines, enclosed in a circle.
Parted lips that would never close. The lilies.
Her stomach dropped before her mind could catch up. The world tilted, and it took every bit of discipline not to tear the page out and burn it on the spot. Instead, she stared. And the longer she stared, the more certain she became.
It was the same mark. The same sigil carved into Dasmon’s mouth. The one they all pretended not to recognize. The one no one had dared to speak of since the Maroon Slaughter.
Her heart began to pound, fast and heavy. She blinked, forcing her gaze across the page again, scanning for a mistake, a context, anything.
Ravik’s handwriting. Crisp, efficient. It was definitely his.
But it wasn’t like him to leave something like this out in the open. Not without comment. This wasn’t an investigation report.
So why was it here? What does that mean?
The questions flared all at once, piling over each other before she could catch a single one.
She swallowed, the motion dry and deliberate.
The official word, back then, was that the symbol was meaningless.
After all, it had only been found on Dasmon’s lips.
One sigil, one body. Easy to say it was a delusion.
Better that than admit they had no idea what it meant.
But she had seen it. To this day, like an afterimage on her eyelids long after she closed them.
Convenient, that no one had to be punished.
After all, who wanted to dig through a graveyard looking for answers no one wanted to find?
And now it resurfaced, tucked into a corner of dry logistics.
Had Ravik placed it there?
He was many things. Unyielding, direct, strategically merciless, but not sentimental. He didn't linger in history. He had drilled that into her since she could stand: you carry the past as a lesson, not a weight.
Evelyne’s foot bobbed beneath the desk, an unconscious tremor she tried to still with her hand.
She thought back to the hushed conversation she had overheard between Ravik and the High Preceptor.
At the time, she had told herself it was nothing more than politics, words lifted out of context.
But with the symbol appearing again, coincidence felt thinner.
However, it was natural they spoke of such things—they held power, they knew more than she did. Perhaps the investigation had never been closed. That was likely. That had to be likely. Calm down.
Ravik had never been lenient with her. She remembered him once lifting her onto a horse when she was too young to mount, holding the reins steady until she found her balance.
Officially, she was meant to ride sidesaddle, as a woman should, but he’d sat her astride.
Because when there’s danger, you don’t have time for the ceremony.
Isildeth, watching from the edge of the yard, had touched her lips and then her chest in Rhyssa’s sign of warding.
She remembered, too, how the lines of his stern face had broken when his gentle wife died, how he had stood in the courtyard long after the mourners left, his armor unfastened.
No. He couldn’t be responsible.
Maybe he knows what the symbol means. He probably saw it and believed it was important. Just like me.
She could ask him. She should—
The latch turned.
Evelyne moved before she could think. Her hand darted to the parchment, sliding it beneath the stack as smoothly as if she’d rehearsed it. Which, in a way, she had. This kingdom trained its daughters in the art of concealment long before it taught them to speak.
The door opened.
Ravik stepped in, as precise as ever. The room always felt colder when he entered, like he carried the frost in with him on his boots.
His armor was worn, dull at the edges from real use.
He looked like a man carved from old stone.
His face, stern and deeply lined, bore a long scar across one cheek.
Stretching from the mustache to the right eyebrow.
Short trimmed hair, broad shoulders. Dark eyes contrasted with his pale grey skin and held no softness, only the cold clarity of someone who had spent a lifetime making hard decisions.
She met his gaze, nodding once. Her palms trembled and she hid them into folds of her gown hoping he didn’t notice.
“Marshal Ravik,” she said.
He returned it with a short incline of his head. “Your Highness,” he said, tone clipped and toneless. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
Evelyne didn’t lift her gaze from the scroll she wasn’t reading. “I’m taking a break,” she replied smoothly. “Surely even future empresses are allowed those.”
A neutral truth. She wasn’t lying. Just omitting the part where she was also trying to understand whether her kingdom was quietly rotting from the inside.
Ravik’s boots clicked softly against the stone as he crossed the room. “Not usually in the king’s solar.”
She smiled—barely. “I wasn’t aware you’d begun monitoring my study schedule.”
He moved across the chamber with that same efficiency she’d known since childhood.
Precise, unreadable, and without a hint of indulgence.
He carried a silver tray stacked with fresh reports and placed it on the carved stand near her father’s chair.
That was the ritual. That tray was his altar.
Anything Ravik deemed worthy of the king’s eyes was placed there, without exception.
“I monitor everything that passes through this room. Including who lingers in it.”
Her eyes flicked toward the tray. “Then you know I’m here to study.”
She could feel him behind her, not close, but present. Like a shadow cast from a colder sun. His attention was on her, sharp and assessing.
“Do you intend to study the king’s reports before he’s read them?”
“If I were to read them, Marshal, I assure you it would be with the full intent of better understanding the matters of this realm.”
“Understanding,” Ravik echoed. “An admirable goal. Provided one is prepared for what that understanding might cost.”
“I’m always prepared to pay the cost.”
Ravik inclined his head, his gaze lingered on the scroll stack she just shuffled. “Then I trust you’ll know when to be patient. And when not to overstep.”
Evelyne smiled again though her palm trembled. “Of course.”
She stood and crossed the room. At the threshold, she paused, her hand resting lightly on the doorframe.
“Thank you for the use of the solar, Marshal,” she said, voice smooth, each syllable carefully measured. “Your diligence in keeping it so well ordered is reassuring.”
“I’m glad it meets Your Highness’s expectations,” he replied evenly. “Do let me know if I ever fall short of them.”
“I’m sure you won’t.”
With that, she stepped out, the door closing behind her with a soft, decisive click.
Outside, she exhaled. Slow, shallow, and strained. Her pulse thudded at the base of her skull. She walked quickly. One foot after the other. But beneath the poise, beneath the practiced calm, something in her still throbbed.
A phantom echo of blood on marble.
Of a sigil carved in flesh.
She pressed a hand to her ribs as if to cage it in, but it pulsed anyway—her body remembering what her mind refused to say aloud:
You saw it again.
And you are not safe.