The rest of the court went on breathing as though nothing had happened. But I knew the silence in my body was not peace—it was the stillness before something vast began to move.
And Dorian’s whisper, as he leaned down, only made it worse.
“Whatever spell you’ve cast on him,” he said softly, venom hidden beneath sweetness, “end it. Or I’ll end it for you.”
The great hall thinned slowly, like a tide drawing back. The worst of the noise—boots on marble, layered conversations, the herald’s formal announcements—faded into a softer hum of bodies moving and silk whispering past stone.
Dorian’s hand stayed heavy on my arm a heartbeat longer than necessary. Then a steward approached him with a bow, murmuring something about the Crown Prince’s council needing his presence.
Dorian’s jaw shifted. He flicked a glance toward me, as if weighing whether to drag me along like a dog on a chain. In the end, duty—or pride—won.
“Stay here,” he said under his breath. “Do not wander. Do not talk to anyone unless they speak to you first. Especially not him.”
“Him?” I asked, though I knew exactly who he meant.
His smile was all teeth. “You are not stupid, Alora. Don’t start pretending to be now.”
He left before I could answer, swept along in the stream of lords and lesser officials heading toward the council chamber. For a moment, I stood at the edge of the hall, breathing in air that felt too thin and too rich at once.
Then I saw the side gallery.
It spilled off the main hall like a river of pale stone—a long corridor lined with high windows, each inset with glass so clear it made the grey sky beyond look almost silver. Tapestries hung between them, depicting Theros’s victories in stern, muted colors: twin serpents coiled around a sword, ships in stormy seas, a crowned figure raising a blade to the sky. The light there was colder, less forgiving, but quieter.
I slipped toward it like a shadow no one had ordered.
The marble underfoot was veined with faint blue, the pattern running like frozen water beneath my shoes. With each step, the voices behind me grew softer. At the gallery’s midpoint, I stopped, placing my fingers lightly against the stone of the window frame. The glass was cool. Beyond it, the courtyard spread out in a neat geometry of flags and worn cobblestones, the banners still sagging under the weight of the mist.
My heart had almost steaded when the mark flared again.
It was smaller this time—less like a blade, more like a match—just enough to send a wash of warmth across my collarbone and up my throat. I pressed my hand there, fingers curling, willing it to be still. For a moment, everything in me sharpened: the thud of my pulse, the faint scratch of distant quills in some neighboring chamber, the echo of my own shallow breath.
Alora…
The whisper brushed the inside of my skull like a fingertip gliding over glass. Not as loud as before, but insistent. I closed my eyes, teeth sinking into the inside of my cheek.
Not now, I thought, as if I could negotiate with whatever lived in my bones. Please, not here.
The warmth subsided reluctantly, like a petulant tide. My shoulders loosened by a fraction.
“You’re unwell.”
The words were so close, and spoken so evenly, that my eyes flew open before I’d even drawn a gasp.
He stood a few paces away, just far enough not to be accused of impropriety. The gallery’s pale light suited him in a way that felt almost deliberate; it made his hair whiter, his coat darker, the fine edges of his face more severe. Up close, Prince Caelen did not look like marble—marble has flaws, little fractures and veins. He looked like something crafted to be flawless, then emptied.
Stillness clung to him. Not the stiff, performative stillness of courtiers, but the quiet of someone who had long ago forgotten how to fidget.
I dropped my hand from my collarbone slowly. “I’m fine, Your Highness.”
His gaze flicked once to the place where my fingers had been, then back to my face. “You’re pale,” he said. Not concern. Statement. “And you were unsteady in the hall.”
“I… the light was overwhelming,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I was at court.”
That much, at least, was true.
For a heartbeat he said nothing. His eyes were unnerving—translucent violet ringed faintly with a thin corona of silver, like frost around the edge of a mirror. It felt less like being looked at and more like being recorded. Filed.
“I remember you,” he said.
The air caught in my throat. “From… the bookstore?”
He inclined his head a fraction. “And from the den beneath the tavern.”
Shame and anger surged together—at Dorian, at myself, at the way my knees had nearly given out in front of strangers. “That was not my choice.”
“I assumed as much,” he said.
Silence stretched between us, thin and taut. I could still hear faint echoes from the great hall, distant voices and the measured tread of boots, but here in the gallery they sounded far away, muffled by thick stone and whatever strange gravity this man carried with him.
I cleared my throat. “I never thanked you, for that night. For… intervening.”
“A woman was being drugged,” he replied. “It required correction.”
His tone didn’t change—not a single note of warmth or irritation. But he did not look away. If anything, his attention sharpened, as though my gratitude were an anomaly he needed to catalogue carefully.
“I—” I hesitated, fingers twisting in the fabric of my skirt. “Your coat… I still have it. I meant to return it and then…”
And then my father had ordered me into the carriage with no time, no thought for anything but obedience.
“…and then you came without it,” he finished for me.
Heat licked up my neck. “Yes.”
He regarded me for a long moment. Something flickered in his eyes, too quick and too slight to name. The closest word I could find for it was amusement, but the idea felt strange—like assigning color to starlight.
“Keep it,” he said at last. “For now.”
“I shouldn’t,” I protested. “It’s too fine. And it’s yours.”
“A coat is a replaceable object,” he replied. “You are not.”
The words landed in my chest like a stone dropped into deep water. No inflection. No charm. If Dorian had said them, they would have sounded like a line from a play, polished and calculated. Coming from Caelen, they sounded like a conclusion reached after examining evidence.
Still, my heart stuttered. The Moonbrand gave a small answering throb, as if some distant part of me agreed.
He noticed the way my hand flinched toward my collar again. His head tilted almost imperceptibly. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said too quickly.
His eyes narrowed a fraction. “You lied earlier. Don’t do it twice.”
The corner of my mouth twitched despite the situation. “Do princes of Drakenvyre always keep count?”
“Yes.”
The honesty of it startled a soft, foolish laugh out of me. It escaped before I could stop it, and for an instant something shifted in his gaze—as if the sound had brushed across a surface inside him that hadn’t been touched in a long time.
“If you’re going to collapse in visions,” he said, very almost dry, “it would be better to do so somewhere less public.”
My breath caught. “How did you—”
He regarded me calmly. “Your pupils altered in the hall. Your breathing changed. You lost focus while the rest of the court stared. It is not difficult to infer.”
“Oh.”
His lack of reaction should have been comforting. Somehow it wasn’t.
“I have… spells,” I admitted quietly. “They pass.”
“Until they don’t,” he replied. Again, not unkind. Simply sharp.
I looked away, focusing on the nearest tapestry—a depiction of some ancient victory, a king of Theros driving his blade into a serpent whose coils faded into storm clouds. The stitched eyes of the serpent glittered with silver thread, unsettlingly like the ring in Caelen’s own gaze.
“What do they show you?” he asked.
The question startled me enough that my head snapped back toward him. He stood as he had before—hands clasped loosely behind his back, posture relaxed but never truly at ease—waiting.
“Nothing clear,” I said, which was true enough. “Fragments. Lights. Echoes. Dreams that aren’t mine.”
He considered that. “And Dorian knows?”
My lips pressed together. “He knows what he wants to know.”
Something like distaste rippled across his expression—not heavy enough to be emotion, but enough to suggest he recognized the pattern.
“You received my note,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I swallowed. “I did.”
“And you came with him again.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said, the words coming out sharper than I intended. “My father—” I stopped. Talking about my family to a foreign prince in a gallery full of listening walls was a kind of stupidity even I understood.
Caelen studied me quietly. “Choice is rarely a pure thing,” he said. “But I have yet to see a cage whose door did not move, however slightly, when pushed often enough.”
“I have been pushing,” I said softly. “It tends to hurt more than it helps.”
He regarded me for another long moment. The hall outside the gallery shifted; I could hear the herald beginning to call for the afternoon’s adjournment. Soon, people would start spilling into this corridor, and whatever this was would dissolve into court politeness and distance.
“Tomorrow,” he said finally, “at dawn. The Crown Gallery. There are fewer eyes there. Bring the coat. If you faint, at least only stone will see you.”
My brows lifted. “Why?”
“I dislike unfinished business,” he said.
It was such a simple answer that for a heartbeat I forgot to mistrust it. Then footsteps echoed at the end of the gallery. Voices.
Dorian.
I saw him before he saw us—moving briskly, his expression composed for public view, a faint sheen of irritation still clinging to the line of his shoulders. Behind him, two minor officials murmured to one another, their eyes already sweeping the corridor.
Caelen’s gaze flicked past me, measuring distance and time like a battlefield. When he looked back at me, his expression had smoothed completely.
“Do not drink anything he gives you,” Caelen said quietly. “Anywhere. Ever.”
My breath hitched. “I—”
He inclined his head in a gesture that was not quite a bow. “Lady Everthorn.”
Then he stepped back, the distance between us widening with each unhurried pace until he seemed once more like a part of the architecture—an expensive carving someone had forgotten to hang higher. His attendant, who had been waiting a discreet distance away, fell into step beside him.
“Your Highness,” the man murmured.
Caelen didn’t answer, but his head turned slightly toward the windows, as if checking the light’s angle, calculating dawn.
“Alora,” Dorian’s voice snapped, too bright. “There you are.”
I turned. His smile was in place again, practiced and charming, but his eyes went briefly, murderously cold when they flicked past me to where Caelen’s figure retreated down the gallery.
“You seem to enjoy wandering,” Dorian said, coming to stand very close. His hand brushed my sleeve, as if reminding both of us who had the right to occupy that space. “I do hope you haven’t been… lost.”
“No,” I said. My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “I know exactly where I am.”
His gaze searched my face, looking for cracks. Finding none, he leaned in, his breath warm and faintly scented with wine.
“Good,” he said softly. “I’d hate to think anyone else was trying to guide you.”
Over his shoulder, far down the gallery, Caelen did not look back. But the echo of his words remained like a hand on the small of my back.
Tomorrow. At dawn.
The Moonbrand warmed once beneath my palm, steady and sure, as if some old part of me had already decided that the path had shifted, whether I agreed or not.
The ride home felt longer than the ride there.
Father said nothing. He sat opposite me in the carriage, arms folded, gaze fixed on the rain-streaked glass as though the city outside were a ledger he needed to memorize. Every time we passed a lantern, the light cut across his face in harsh slices—cheekbone, jaw, the tight line of his mouth.
I kept my hands folded in my lap, fingers buried in the folds of my skirt so he wouldn’t see them tremble. My thoughts kept slipping back to the gallery: Caelen’s steady eyes, the soft command in his voice—Tomorrow. At dawn.—and the way my mark had flared like an open wound under so many watching eyes.
“You went pale in the hall,” my father said at last, without looking at me.
I swallowed. “The light was strong, Father. I’m not used to…”
“To anything,” he finished, voice flat.
He finally turned his head, those grey eyes—so like the winter sky over Theros—pinning me in place. “Whatever faintness you entertain, you will learn to master it. The court is not an infirmary. The prince is not interested in your nerves.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” He leaned forward a fraction, enough that I could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, carved by years of not sleeping enough. “Because if you ever embarrass this house like that again—if you ever draw attention to yourself in that way—there will be nowhere in this kingdom I can hide you. Do you understand that?”
The words sat between us like a stone.
I nodded. “Yes, Father.”
He watched me another long moment, as if listening for a lie hidden in my breath. Then he sat back, gaze returning to the window. “Good.”
He didn’t speak again until the carriage rattled through the Everthorn gates and the manor loomed up, its familiar silhouette a darker shadow against the fog. The lamps along the drive glowed honey-gold in the wet air. Servants hurried out like ghosts in muted livery, bows ready, faces carefully blank.
Father stepped out first. He didn’t offer a hand this time. I followed, gathering my skirt in one hand to keep them from dragging in the damp. The stone steps were slick under my slippers.
“Go to your room,” he said, already turning away. “We have done what was required today. Try not to undo it by existing where people can see you.”
The words were not shouted. They didn’t need to be.
“Yes, Father,” I murmured.
He was already speaking to the steward by the time I crossed the threshold. The familiar smell of the entrance hall—polished wood, old stone, faint traces of wax and smoke—wrapped itself around me like a memory I wasn’t sure I wanted.
“Lady Alora,” one of the maids said, appearing at my elbow with the soft suddenness of someone who had been waiting just out of sight. “Shall I bring you tea? Or a bath?”
“No. Thank you.” My voice sounded far away in my own ears. “Just… light a fire in my room.”
“Yes, my lady.”
I climbed the narrow servants’ staircase instead of the main one. It was habit more than choice; the smaller stairway felt less like a stage. My hand trailed along the cold stone of the wall, the roughness biting through the thin leather of my gloves. Each step echoed up the spine of the house.
My room waited where it always did—tucked off a secondary corridor, the door plain, unadorned. Smaller than Emerson’s, smaller than the guest rooms. Nearly the size allotted to a favored maid. That had once cut me. Now it simply felt true.
I slipped inside and shut the door.
The maid had already been there; a small fire crackled in the grate, throwing a flickering glow across the bare stone and the modest bed with its neatly made covers. My dresses hung on their hooks like empty people. The single window was beaded with rain, the view a blurred sketch of dark trees and paler sky.
In the quiet, my ears rang with the echo of the court: herald’s voices, the scrape of boots, Dorian’s too-smooth laugh, Caelen’s level tone, Evander’s cool pronouncements. It all felt like a play I’d been shoved into, with everyone else holding a script I’d never read.
I crossed to the narrow chest at the foot of my bed and lifted the lid. The coat lay where I’d left it, folded with embarrassingly careful hands—dark wool, silver-threaded trim, inside lined with something so soft my fingers sank into it. When I lifted it, the faint scent of cedar and cold air rose up like a breath from another world.
Tomorrow at dawn. Crown Gallery.
I laid the coat on the bed, smoothing it once, twice. My fingertips brushed the inner pocket. The scrap of coarse paper was still there, folded crisp despite how many times I’d re-read it.
Do not return with him.
I set the note beside the coat and sat on the edge of the mattress, my hands in my lap.
It had begun subtle, I realized. The wrongness. The visions. Little things at first—dreams that tasted like someone else’s memory, flashes of light behind my eyes when I closed them. A shadow at the corner of mirrors that vanished when I turned. I’d told myself it was nothing. I’d had to.
Because I knew, even if no one had ever said it to my face, what had happened to Seraphine.
She’d been “unwell,” the whispers said. “Overcome.” My mother had called it an illness—softly, the way people talk about storms far out at sea. The servants called it something else when they thought I was too far away to hear: touched. Marked. Mad.
Once, when I was small and standing outside my father’s study at the wrong moment, I’d heard him say to a visiting lord, voice raw and low, “I will not watch another Everthorn tear herself apart. I will not.”
I’d known even then they were talking about my aunt. About the mark she’d borne.
The same mark I carried now.
My chest tightened. I pressed a hand over my heart, over the place where the Moonbrand lay hidden, the skin there still hot from its flare at the palace. “You will be quiet,” I whispered, as if that might work. “You will be nothing.”
For a breath, it obeyed.
Then the floor dropped out from under me.
It began with a sound—a thin, high chime like glass struck in a cold room. It seemed to come from everywhere at once: the walls, the mirror, the fire, my own teeth. My vision blurred at the edges, then sharpened too much, colors too bright, shadows too deep. The fire surged, every flame carving itself into the shape of a crescent, over and over and over.
I tried to stand. My knees didn’t listen. The room twisted sideways, the narrow bed becoming a horizon line that refused to stay still. I clutched at the bedpost with one hand, the other flying to my collarbone as if I could hold the mark in place through fabric and bone and will alone.
The first wave hit.
Light—silver, impossible, poured through my skull. My eyes slammed shut, but it didn’t matter; the world behind my lids was brighter than the one outside. I saw water, endless and black, shot through with a trail of pale fire—like a path across a sea at night. A woman stood at the end of it, tall and straight, hair like molten moonlight pouring down her back. Her eyes were a green I knew like my own and did not know at all.
“Us,” she said—or maybe self, or maybe Maerial. Her mouth moved, and the word tore through me like a scream whispering. “Remember.”
The light shattered.
Now there were four thrones, carved from four different things: obsidian, bone, ashwood, ice. Four kings rose from them without faces, their crowns melted together into a single, jagged halo. Blood dripped from their hands and turned into rivers that cut the land into quarters. The rivers ran red, then black, then clear as glass.
Then there was Seraphine.
I knew it was her even though I had never truly seen her grown. Only a faded portrait in a back hall, half-obscured by dust. But the woman in front of me had her profile, the curve of her jaw, the arch of her neck. The same mark burned over her heart, brilliant and merciless, silver-white light cracking her skin like porcelain crazed in a kiln.
Her eyes—my eyes—were wild.
“Make it stop,” she sobbed, though her mouth didn’t move. The sound poured straight into my bones. Her hands clawed at her chest as if she could dig the crescent out. “Make it stop, make it stop—”
Fire. Screaming. Hands holding her down. My father’s face, young and horrified, splashed in shadow and blood and torchlight.
I stumbled back, crashing against the wall. My head hit stone; pain shot through my skull but did nothing to crack the vision.
Now the room was full of whispers. They slithered along the walls, invisible mouths pressed against my ears. Words in a language I knew like a song from childhood and did not understand at all. Snatches rose clearer than others: betrayal—four kingdoms—bloodline—unbind—devour—
I couldn’t breathe.
“No,” I rasped, but the sound came out as a dry, broken scrap. “No. I’m not—”
The woman—Seraphine—turned toward me fully. For a dizzy, wrenching moment, her face was mine. Not just similar—mine. Same eyes, same mouth, even the same small scar along the brow from when I’d fallen as a child. Our features slid over each other like two reflections trying to claim the same mirror.
“You will burn us all,” she whispered. “Unless you remember.”
“I don’t want to remember,” I choked.
The vision cracked. The light fractured into a thousand thin lines that ran across the walls, the ceiling, the floor—veins of silver in stone, pulsing, pulsing, pulsing. My mark seared, pain so sharp I thought my skin might split.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
The light snapped back into the fire in the hearth. The lines vanished from the walls. The whispers went out like candle flames pinched between fingers.
I was left kneeling beside my bed, nails digging into the quilt, breath sawing in and out of my chest like I’d been running for miles. My hair clung to my face. Sweat cooled on the back of my neck.
For a long time, I didn’t move. Every small sound of the house seemed too loud—the pop of sap in the fire, the distant clank of dishes in the kitchens below, a door closing somewhere down the corridor.
Slowly, my hand crept back to my collarbone. The skin there was hot, tender. If I dared to loosen the neckline of my dress, I knew I’d see it: the Moonbrand glowing faintly beneath my skin, like moonlight trapped in glass.
Seraphine’s face lingered behind my eyes. My father’s voice followed it, cold and distant in memory: I will not watch another Everthorn tear herself apart.
If he knew.
If he even suspected.
He had killed Seraphine. For the good of the house. For the safety of the realm. For whatever reason he told himself in the dark.
He would do it again.
I forced myself to stand, gripping the bedpost until the room stopped swaying. My legs shook. My heart felt bruised. But I crossed to the small washbasin in the corner and splashed cold water on my face until the girl in the warped metal pitcher looked only tired instead of haunted.
In the dim reflection, my eyes seemed too bright. Too old.
“You will tell no one,” I whispered to that girl. My voice sounded steadier now, shaped into something like resolve. “Not Father. Not Mother. Not Dorian. No one.”
The Moonbrand throbbed once under my palm—a slow, stubborn beat, like disagreement.
I straightened my shoulders. “You will be quiet,” I repeated.
The fire popped. Somewhere outside, a raven shrieked once and then went silent.
On the bed, Caelen’s coat lay where I’d left it, dark and solid against my plain covers. The note beside it looked small and sharp as a blade.
Tomorrow, at the Crown Gallery, I would stand before the Hollow Prince of Drakenvyre with a goddess’s mark burning under my skin and the memory of my aunt’s madness fresh in my mind.