12 #3
Maevra stood in the bedchamber doorway. She wore her garnet velvet gown reserved for formal occasions, her sleeves turned back, carrying a three-branched bronze candelabrum in her right hand.
The candle flames lit her hollow face, carving deep shadows beneath her cheekbones and setting her eyes ablaze with an Alpha ferocity she made no effort to conceal.
She pushed the door shut behind her with the heel of her shoe, threw the iron bolt, and stepped into the center of the room.
“I expected you to be cleverer, Liora,” she said, setting the candelabrum onto the side table with a hard thump. “Then again, I suppose the blood of that western scum always crawls back to the filth it came from.”
I met her gaze, clenching my jaw so my teeth wouldn’t chatter.
“That document doesn’t belong to you, Maevra. My mother wrote it for me.”
Maevra let out a short, humorless laugh and took another step toward me.
“Your mother was an outlawed rebel who fled the cliffs with a heavy belly and hid on this estate so Crown courts wouldn’t hang a noose around her neck.
If this sheet comes to light—if a single bailiff from Asteria reads what’s written in this ink—you won’t merely lose the estate.
You’ll be arrested for high treason and hanged on the market gallows as the get of a line of murderers. ”
Her left hand shot out with astonishing speed, snatching the parchment from between my fingers before I could close my fist.
She stepped toward the fireplace, dangling the appendix directly over the incandescent embers.
The heat curled the parchment’s edges, releasing the faint smell of scorched leather that turned my blood to ice.
“Do you know why I didn’t burn it before?
” Maevra asked, looking down at me with unvarnished contempt.
“Because I needed the seal intact to prove to the Council that Elayne’s line was legally extinct once you died of fevers in the attic.
But now… now the sovereign’s guard is two miles from my door, hunting for a creature that tore the Solstice apart with an outlawed formula. ”
She surveyed me from head to foot, and for the first time I saw a terrible flicker of suspicion kindle in her eyes—a realization clicking into place within her twisted mind.
“That scent you carry… that sour stench that won’t fade…”
She stepped closer, the vellum suspended three inches above the coals.
“Tell me what you did in Asteria on Solstice night, Liora.”
The air seemed to turn to ice around me.
If I confessed, if I let the word *Gala* pass my lips, Maevra would drop the vellum into the embers that very instant and summon the stable hands to beat me into submission before handing me over to Thorne’s guard.
I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, and met her stare with all the hatred six years of servitude had forged in me.
“I went to the woods to dig willow root so I wouldn’t die of pain while you drank wine in the halls of court,” I lied, my voice so cold and level that her hand wavered over the coals.
“Burn it if you like, Maevra. Burn it right now. But if you burn it, you won’t have a shred of proof to show Master Barel that you have any right to sell the land.
And when the Crown Guard arrives tomorrow to inspect the registers, I’ll tell the captain you hid outlawed documents in your bedchamber to extort the western clans. ”
Maevra stared at me through five endless seconds.
The silence in the room hung so thick that nothing sounded save the crackle of wood on the hearth and the north wind battering the leaded panes of the window.
Slowly, with venomous deliberation, Maevra drew the parchment back from the coals.
She folded the sheet with a sharp flick, slipped it into the inner pocket of her bodice, and pointed a bony forefinger toward the door.
“Get out of my sight,” she said, her voice trembling with suppressed fury.
“Go back to your attic and pray snow buries the highway before dawn. Because if the guard steps into this house and I find a single speck on your apron, I swear on the blood of my ancestors you will watch this vellum turn to ash before the soldiers drag you screaming to the salt mines.”
I gave no answer.
I walked to the door with my back straight, brushed past her without dropping my gaze, and threw back the iron bolt.
I slipped into the darkened corridor and crept down the service stairs barefoot, the freezing wood stinging the soles of my feet as my heart hammered in my throat like a battering ram.
I hadn’t secured the appendix. I was trapped in a cage that narrowed with every passing hour, watched by a stepmother eager to destroy me, with my own body betraying me in blind silence.
Yet as I reached my attic and dropped to my knees beside the pallet to touch the clause sewn into the straw, the distant winding of guard horns echoed across the snowy rises of the highway.
Three long, low, resonant blasts.
The Crown Guard had reached the parish boundary.
Darian Corven’s men were less than an hour’s ride from my door. I had no way of knowing whether he rode with that vanguard, but the shadow hunt had just crossed the threshold of my home.