Chapter 20
They entered Stralas before midday with the first wave of Yule Ball workers.
For three days, the capital had been swallowing deliveries, hired hands, musicians, cooks, decorators, visiting household staff, and temporary servants faster than the palace could properly account for them.
Ellisar’s people had secured two servant uniforms and the names of workers expected with one of the larger floral deliveries.
That got Imani and Esa to the palace service entrance. Glamour handled the rest.
Imani had covered her crown first, then altered the features most likely to betray her: silver hair darkened to an ordinary brown, the shape of her face softened, the silver freckles erased.
Esa did the same, muting the unusual brightness of her hair and disguising the features that would make a High Sprite easier to remember.
Neither glamour needed to survive close inspection by a Master Witch.
It only needed to make two exhausted servants look as forgettable as the hundreds already passing through the gates during the Yule Ball.
Wagons backed up along the service road.
Kitchen workers shouted over one another.
Guards checked deliveries, badges, and assigned entrances more carefully than faces.
Florists carried armfuls of greenery through doors held open for entire groups.
Two women in the right uniforms, carrying the right trays, and moving with everyone else barely earned a glance.
Imani kept her magic signature tight as they passed the final checkpoint. A Master Witch could recognize it beneath the glamour just as Tanyl’s had in the Moorlands. Fortunately, no one powerful enough to do so appeared interested in inspecting servants one by one.
When the palace doors closed behind them, their greatest protection was the sheer number of people who belonged there tonight.
Imani tilted her head in the atrium, taking in the splendor.
The palace had transformed for the Yule Ball.
Its vast corridors were draped in winter greenery threaded with white blooms and silver garlands that caught the light from chandeliers overhead.
The spectacle of it stopped them in their tracks.
It was bright and decadent, with every surface polished to reflect the opulence, every space expanded by design to feel larger than it was.
Servants moved constantly through the hallways, carrying even more florals and hurrying to perfect every detail.
No one looked twice at the elf and the pixie, which was exactly the point.
Imani and Esa blended seamlessly into the flow of servants weaving through the palace halls, trays in hand, heads lowered just enough to avoid attention.
They wore the same muted uniforms as the rest: soft gray dresses fitted for work rather than display, aprons tied cleanly at the waist, sleeves rolled and pinned for ease of movement, hair pulled back into simple, functional styles that erased distinction.
Imani breezed through the halls, hoping not to draw attention, trying to make her movements blend into the rhythm of the staff. She adjusted course with small shifts in case anyone was following them—an angle taken here, a turn made there—never doubling back.
As the High Sentinel, Ellisar came to the ball and positioned himself elsewhere in the palace. People would see him when needed and overlook him when they didn’t. His part of the plan would come later.
She wiped sweat from her brow and angled herself toward Tanyl’s rooms without breaking pace.
Playing her role, Imani guided her and Eas as if it were just another servant’s task among many.
The route came back to her easily—the intersections, the narrow passages, the way the corridors folded into one another.
She’d walked these halls before during her trials, and the memories flooded back.
The ballroom sat two levels below and toward the palace’s eastern face, its music carrying faintly through the stone whenever a door opened along the main corridor.
Tanyl’s rooms occupied a quieter stretch above it, with a narrow servant’s stair tucked behind a paneled door at the last intersection and a service passage running west toward the kitchens and lower courtyards.
Imani fixed both routes in her mind as they approached; if they were discovered, she would cut west, take the servant’s stair down, and disappear into the palace’s working heart before anyone thought to look there.
At his door, she paused and took a deep breath. Esa straightened her apron and stole a glance down the hall. No one was watching.
Whipping out her wand, Imani let her shadows free. Here, no wounded Draswood lay beneath her feet to protect from them. The danger came from Imani herself.
As long as she kept her emotions contained, the shadows remained narrow and obedient, answering the exact command she gave them.
Fear, fury, or panic could make them answer faster than thought, spreading beyond what she intended.
She had already seen what too much unstable magic could do to the Fabric.
So she gave them one small task.
Unlock it.
They slithered outward and up the wood until they reached the knob, wrapped around it, and slipped into the lock.
With a shudder, it gave beneath her shadows, rattling slightly. The door eased open just enough for her to slip inside.
Imani stuttered to a stop.
Inside, the room beyond appeared completely empty. The entrance opened near one corner of the chamber, leaving most of the room exposed at once.
A stripped bedframe stood against the opposite wall beneath two tall windows overlooking the inner palace grounds, while an empty writing desk and an overturned chair sat between them.
To Imani’s right, a narrow adjoining door led into what had once been a dressing chamber or private study, and bare shelves lined the left wall where books, weapons, or personal effects should have been.
Nothing remained large enough to hide behind except the bedframe itself.
They left the surfaces bare, cleared the shelves, and stripped the bed down to its frame. It seemed as if someone had deliberately removed every personal item rather than leaving it behind. Even the suffocatingly warm air had stripped away any pretense of presence.
Eyes slamming shut, Imani bit back a curse.
“What do we do now?” Esa asked.
“His mother’s rooms. I bet he’s there,” Imani muttered. Slipping her wand back into the folds of her dress, Imani turned back toward the corridor, the decision forming before the thought fully materialized. Of course, he had moved into the monarch’s old rooms. They should have anticipated he would.
Esa moved with her immediately, their pace steady but edged with urgency, each step controlled as they cut a more direct path through the palace.
The second room offered the same answer. His mother’s chambers were entirely empty, seemingly deliberately cleared. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Tanyl had moved, and he had done it with purpose.
Had Kiran warned him that they might come? Did Tanyl already know? Or had he simply anticipated an attempt on the Drasil?
Her mind reeled with questions, and doubt crept in. Their plan might be a trap. Imani bit her nails, thinking. It wasn’t failure yet, but it was instability, the kind that forced every next step to be chosen more carefully than the last.
Where would Tanyl be now, at this very moment? She wasn’t sure.
“We need to keep moving,” Esa hissed.
Imani nodded, and they swept from the late monarch’s rooms.
“He’s not using any of the spaces predicted,” Imani said, her voice low enough to carry only to Esa as they hastened down the corridor.
“He’s gone deeper into the palace—somewhere with more fortification, probably, where he doesn’t expect to be found.
” She tracked the passage ahead, already mapping where he might have moved.
They left the visible flow of the palace servants behind, slipping through a service door into a narrower passage where the noise of the ball fell away to a distant hush.
It became cooler as stone closed in, and the light thinned to tight strips along the plainer walls.
Soon, the hallways became merely bare stone.
Stripped of the greenery and silver that filled the upper levels, the air was quieter without the constant movement of servants and guests.
No decor softened the space—only function.
And beneath that, Imani sensed a magical presence familiar enough to make her slow. What was Tanyl hiding?
Imani rubbed her brow as an image that did not belong to her flashed behind her eyes: dirty glass, a narrow bed, a hand gripping carved wood.
Then it vanished.
She stopped mid-step.
Such intrusions weren’t new. Since the Divination spell bound her to Meira, memories and perceptions occasionally crossed between them unbidden. Usually, they came with no warning and disappeared before she could make sense of them.
But this one had come from somewhere nearby.
The corridor grew more pressurized as they moved deeper into the castle.
Fewer doors lined the walls, and fire sconces lit them, causing their shadows to dance erratically.
Imani slowed as something in the air changed, a pressure that didn’t belong to the corridor itself.
It felt like a magic signature. A powerful one.
Esa felt it too, her posture stiffening beside Imani as she squinted in the dark at a closed door at the end of the passage.
Imani swallowed and approached the door.
She tried the handle. It jiggled in her hand but didn’t open.
Pressing her palm to the wood, she felt a burning sensation on her skin and let out a small yelp.
“Stop wasting time,” Esa muttered. “Use the shadows.”