Chapter 75
The tea tasted bitter.
Evelyne cradled the cup between both hands, staring ahead at nothing in particular. A thick blanket was wrapped around her shoulders, the stitches in her wrists, legs, and face ached with every movement. Bruises bloomed across her ribs like slow, ugly flowers.
Everything after the ritual had blurred into half-memories and lightless noise.
She remembered the sound of voices echoing through the broken arches of the Ivory Bastion, the hiss of flame.
The rest of the Silwerwards stormed in, too late to stop what had already begun, but not too late to witness its end.
News spread before she understood it herself. The Heir is dead. The Princess had survived. Her father appeared in the chaos like thunder after silence. She barely registered his presence except for the way he stared at her brother.
Evelyne didn't remember when he had been taken from her arms. She had held him so tightly. She only knew that one moment she was there, the next, she was in her chambers.
They were all seen by the court physicians.
The scent of blood and poultices lingered in the halls like incense long after the bodies had been removed.
Isildeth had cleaned her carefully. She hadn’t spoken once, only wrung out a fresh cloth, helped Evelyne into a simple linen shift, and tucked the blanket around her shoulders.
And then, sometime after in the Council room, Alaric had taken a seat behind her, his fingers gently untangling the knots in her damp hair. He’d braided it carefully, as though weaving the pieces of her back together. Evelyne looked up at him with silent confusion and wet lashes.
He only shrugged. “I have a sister.”
That had nearly broken her again.
Thalen.
She stared past the rim of the cup at the fire hissing quietly in the grate, and pretended that warmth was something she could still feel without flinching. Night still draped the windows in black velvet. Torches burned dimly along the carved panels of the castle’s war room.
Thalen was gone.
He had died in her arms, and her mind refused to release it—the moment it happened, looping endlessly, as if she deserved to be haunted by it. She hadn’t acted in time. Her stupid body froze. Not a sister—
A coward.
A girl in a blood-soaked nightgown, staring as her little brother’s life was stolen.
She should have intervened. Should have screamed sooner, run harder, thrown her body between him and death.
Anything. Anything.
But she didn’t.
She had used magic instead. To kill instead of save.
It was instinct. A raw, furious anger. A thread snapping and turning into a power. A whisper curling around her spine that hissed to the mercenary: you pay for this.
She’d felt it in her bones. In her breath. She had seen it in the wide, stunned eyes of the man who deserved it.
Alaric steadied her hands when they trembled too hard to hold the teacup. Maybe he was still trying to process it. Maybe he was pretending it hadn’t happened, for her sake or his. Or maybe he was calculating what it meant—to witness a future empress unravel the laws of the world with her bare will.
She will be executed.
Not formally, of course. There would be no ceremony. Just cause of death no one dared question. Poison. Sudden illness. A tragic accident involving horses or stairs. That was how magic was punished in Edrathen. With forgetfulness.
Alaric wrapped his arm around her shoulders in a gesture so natural that she barely registered it until the quiet weight of him settled there. He was injured too. Small cuts on his face, arms and a big wound on his side.
Across the room, Vesena was tending to Cedric, wrapping a fresh strip of linen around his forearm. Cedric, for his part, didn’t look at the wound. He watched her face instead—steady, intent, and impossibly cold in its grief.
Everyone was here.
The entire Council had been summoned. The High Chancellor, robes half-wrinkled in his haste.
The Lord Justiciar, grim and expressionless.
The Master of Coin, already calculating the cost of the disaster.
The Grand Marshal, even the High Preceptor with a mask of pious concern on his face.
There were also the Magistrates, soldiers and a few Adjudicants of Orvath standing closer to them than to the table.
And, of course, her father seated at the head of it, his face carved from cold stone.
Halwen had been captured. What remained of the mercenaries were either dead or imprisoned.
Thalen had been carried by the soldiers who had watched him grow up.
Someone had thought to place him in his chambers.
His favorite books were still stacked by the bedside.
His boots sat neatly by the hearth. She hadn’t returned to see him.
Couldn’t. Not until she figured out how to survive the first breath it would cost her to step through that door.
But she knew he was there. She sensed it—
Knew he lay small and unmoving beneath a white linen shroud, one arm resting beside him, curled gently, as though he’d drifted off mid-story. Knew Ysara was there too, seated at his side, wrecked by sobs.
And here the Council was debating. Drawing up plans to control the narrative before it bled out beyond the castle walls.
Evelyne listened quietly, her tea cooling in her hands.
“What's going to happen to it?” Alaric asked suddenly.
All heads turned.
“To the book,” he added, gesturing toward the object. “We’re not just going to let it sit here gathering dust? Or worse, let the Assembly sweep it into their vaults?”
Her gaze drifted from the blur of lords, sharpening on the book.
It sat in the center of the heavy oak table, thick and ancient.
Halwen’s book. The one he had clung to like a dying man grasping a relic of salvation.
The pages were closed now, bound tight by a heavy clasp, but Evelyne could feel it humming.
Her fingers itched for it.
Because the answers were there. In that book. Not in the way the High Chancellor insisted on referring to the ritual as a “political provocation.”
The Lord Justiciar shifted uncomfortably. “It’ll be sealed,” he explained. “Until the Assembly renders a judgment.”
“Of course it will,” Alaric muttered, loud enough to be heard.
Evelyne’s eyes flicked to him. She didn’t like it either.
That the Celestial Assembly had already been to the ritual site.
That they had seen the bodies. That their white-robed delegates had drifted like carrion birds through the ash and ruin, and no one had dared stop them from claiming what they wanted.
She didn’t like it one bit.
The doors opened without announcement. Just the slow, deliberate creak of ancient hinges and the soft rustle of robes against stone. A chill gust followed them in, the silence that accompanied them was worse than noise.
And then they came, cloaked in authority. The Celestial Assembly.
The Sanctoral of Vellesmere walked first—tall, draped in white robe with a high collar that rose behind his head.
He was the governor of the capital’s Hall of Vigilance, and his gaze alone was enough to silence even the most boastful councilors.
Beside him came his Eclipsants. Two figures garbed in the same stark white, their lips visibly sewn shut with black thread.
The council straightened.
No one spoke.
The Sanctoral's voice, when it came, was deep and oddly resonant. “The object is under ecclesiastical custody,” he said, gesturing at the book. “It will be transported to the central archives for examination.”
“By whose authority?” Alaric asked, his arms now crossed.
Sanctoral's bright blue eyes turned toward him. “By the authority of the Treaty of Ashenfell. And the judgment of the Threnarch.”
A colder hush followed.
The Threnarch. The supreme head of the Celestial Assembly. Spiritual and logistical commander of all branches. No one had ever seen him. His stronghold’s location was known only to inner Assembly members. But every order and cleansing began with his seal.
The Sanctoral continued. “The artifact in question bears signs of enchantment. Whether forged or residual, it is not for mortal courts to determine. The Assembly will decide whether it is to be destroyed or contained.”
“Destroyed?” Alaric repeated. “Without even discussing what it might be?”
“This is the discussion,” the Sanctoral cut in.
The Eclipsants’s heads turned, slowly toward the book. Their bodies remained still, but Evelyne felt it. The weight of their attention.
Evelyne wondered if they had felt her too.
The Sanctoral took few steps forward, and this time, she took him in fully. He was tall, his skin was dark and his head cleanly shaven. But it was his eyes Evelyne couldn’t look away from—blue and bright. Almost unnatural.
“The object will be taken to the central archives and the rite place will be burned,” the Sanctoral repeated. “Have any suspects been captured?”
Alaric opened his mouth again, but before he could speak, the High Chancellor leaned forward.
“If I may, Sanctoral,” the Chancellor began, “we were hoping the Assembly might share… any insight gathered at the site. Concerning the nature of the ritual. Its origins, perhaps? There are rumors—”
“You will not address rumors,” the Sanctoral interrupted. “And the Assembly does not speculate. It renders verdicts.”
The Chancellor hesitated. “But surely, as this took place within Edrathen’s borders, and the ritual—”
“The ritual was profane,” the Sanctoral retorted. “The symbols desecrated sacred ground. The specifics are irrelevant.”
Irrelevant.
Evelyne clenched her jaw. Thalen's death was not irrelevant.
Slowly, the man turned his gaze—measured, glacial—toward the king.
“What we can say with certainty,” he said, “is that had the Eclipsants not been exiled from the castle grounds, this tragedy might have been prevented.”
The room stilled.