A Vow of Steel and Shadow

The chandeliers dripped fire over the marble, each crystal catching the candlelight and flinging it back in fractured spears. Natalie stood where she always stood—half-shadowed by a column whose gilt had been applied two centuries earlier to flatter a long-dead duchess’s vanity. From here she could see every entrance, every exit, every throat bared by laughter or by jewels. The court moved below her like a single organism: silk scales, perfume breath, the wet flash of teeth when someone risked a joke about the Queen’s health.

She watched her brother.

Alistair was easy to find even in that crush; the crowd rearranged itself around him the way water parts for a swan’s prow. He was twenty-two, newly broad in the shoulders, still stupidly kind. A woman in silver lamé had his arm and was speaking into the shell of his ear; he bent to her politely, but his gaze drifted over her coiffure as if he had already forgotten what she looked like. When he straightened he found Natalie across the room. The smile he gave her was small, almost apologetic, the one they had used as children to acknowledge that the tutor was drunk again. It did not reach his eyes. His eyes said: get me out.

She could not, of course. A princess did not cross a ballroom to rescue the heir; the heir was supposed to rescue her. So she lifted her champagne—untouched, flat—and tilted it in ironic salute. He answered with the same, and for a moment the noise of violins and gossip collapsed into the old private silence they had shared before crowns became relevant. Then Mauricio stepped between them.

Uncle Mauricio moved like a man who had memorised the choreography but cared nothing for the music. Tailored black velvet, no orders or medals, only the single ruby stick-pin that had belonged to their father. The candlelight loved his cheekbones; the court loved his anecdotes. He touched Alistair’s elbow with two fingers, exactly the pressure required to remind a prince that protocol demanded he greet the ambassador from Valmont. Alistair’s spine straightened. The woman in lamé melted backward, already replaced.

Natalie saw the way Mauricio’s thumb brushed the inside of her brother’s wrist as he steered him—an intimacy too brief to be accidental, too proprietary to be paternal. She had seen that same thumb rest on the neck of a falcon the day before the bird was found hooded and limp, its heart stopped by something no one bothered to diagnose.

She set the champagne on a servant’s tray and started a slow circuit of the mezzanine, skirts whispering against the balustrade. Below, Mauricio had installed Alistair before the Valmont delegation. The ambassador bowed; Mauricio bowed deeper, the loyal uncle facilitating. Yet his shoulders were angled so that only Alistair could see his face, and what Alistair saw made his own expression stiffen. Mauricio’s lips moved—three words, maybe four. Whatever they were, they drained the colour from the prince’s cheeks. The ambassador straightened, confused; the moment passed; Mauricio’s smile returned, warm as mulled wine, poisonous as lead.

Natalie felt the bird-shaped weight in her pocket—the little cedar carving Alistair had pressed into her hand that afternoon. Keep an eye on the snakes. She had laughed then, because snakes were obvious: they hissed, they coiled, they announced themselves. Mauricio did not hiss. He stood absolutely still when he was not moving, and that stillness was what frightened her most, because it suggested the calculation had already finished and the strike was simply waiting for the music to swell.

A couple stumbled past her, drunk on brandy and each other. The woman’s laughter caught on a chandelier and shattered into high, bright shards. Natalie used the distraction to descend the curved staircase. She did not hurry; haste drew eyes. She simply placed one foot after another until the parquet received her heels and the smell of beeswax and sweat replaced the cooler scent of stone. By the time she reached the circle of light where her brother stood, Mauricio had vanished—into the crowd, into the walls, wherever predators went when they were done measuring the distance to the jugular.

Alistair felt her approach without turning. He extended a hand, palm up, the way he had when they were seven and nine and crossing a stream. She slid her fingers across his. His skin was damp.

“Dance,” he murmured, already pulling her into the set forming for a polonaise. It was not a request; it was camouflage. They stepped apart, came together, stepped apart. The violins sawed a cheerful lie.

“How long?” she asked when the figure brought them shoulder to shoulder.

“Tomorrow,” he breathed. “He says I’ll thank him later.”

The dance separated them before she could ask what “it” was. She marked time, turned, advanced. Her smile was automatic, the one painted on every princess from birth. Inside, she was counting windows, doors, guards. She was measuring the distance between Mauricio’s ruby pin and the artery it hovered over every time he bowed.

The library doors shut behind them with the soft finality of a vault. Outside, the ballroom’s roar dulled to a seashell murmur; inside, the air tasted of dust and vellum and the ghost of their father’s pipe. Alistair crossed to the nearest shelf and pressed his forehead against the cracked leather spines as if they could absorb whatever poison Mauricio had poured into him. Natalie stayed by the door, hand still on the bronze latch, counting the seconds until the latch cooled—proof that no one had followed.

“He wants me to name him Lord Protector at the coronation oath,” Alistair said without turning. “Publicly. Before the altar and the relics and every camera in the capital.” His voice was steady, but the candle-flame on the lectern shivered when he exhaled. “Says it will reassure the council that my youth has ‘prudent scaffolding.’ His phrase.”

Natalie walked the central aisle, skirts brushing parchment wrappers that had waited decades for a sovereign’s signature. “You could refuse.”

“I could die,” he answered, matter-of-fact. “He reminded me that Uncle Reynard died of ‘summer flux’ the year I turned ten. And that cousin Leander’s hunting accident was ‘such a pity.’” Alistair pivoted, letting the shelf support his weight. “He didn’t threaten me, Nat. He simply recalled events. The way a historian recalls dates.”

She reached him. At this distance she saw the tremor he hid from the ballroom: a minute twitch at the corner of his left eye, the same twitch that had appeared the night their father’s physicians announced there was nothing more to be done. She lifted her hand, hesitated, then placed it over the pulse hammering beneath his collar. The skin was hot, damp with ballroom sweat, but the beat was rabbit-fast and afraid.

“I keep dreaming the crown is too heavy for my neck,” he whispered. “In the dream it snaps the vertebrae one by one—click, click, click—while the organ plays. I wake up tasting iron.”

“You’re twenty-two,” she said. “Your neck is fine.”

“Is it?” He caught her wrist, not roughly, and guided her fingers to the base of his skull. There was a tiny scar, no wider than a needle, still pink and fresh. “I found it this morning. No idea how it got there. Maybe a spider. Maybe a splinter from the ceremonial robe fitting. Maybe something that rides in Uncle’s pocket.”

Natalie’s stomach folded in on itself. She thought of the pin Mauricio had presented at dinner—ruby head, needle point, the way he had angled it so the candlelight slid off the metal like oil. She withdrew her hand, resisting the urge to wipe it on her skirt.

Alistair reached into his waistcoat and produced the cedar bird. It was smaller than she remembered, the wing-tips rounded by childhood handling, the grain darkened where their palms had once clutched it during thunderstorms. He set it in her open hand and closed her fingers over it. “Keep an eye on the snakes,” he said, repeating words he’d carved into the wood with a penknife the day they buried their father. “If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing will.”

“—give that to the Lord Regent. Tell him it’s evidence. Tell him Uncle keeps poison in stick-pins. Tell him whatever you have to, but make him listen.”

She stared at the bird’s beak, sharp as a blade despite the years. “I could go to the guard tonight. Captain Harrow owes our line—”

“Harrow kneels to whoever signs the payroll,” Alistair cut in. “Right now that signature is Mauricio’s.” He stepped back, straightening shoulders that would carry a kingdom tomorrow. “I need you alive, Nat. Not heroic. Alive and watching.”

The candles guttered; a draft slipped under the door, carrying the faint scent of rosewater and gunpowder from the ballroom. Somewhere a clock chimed the quarter. Alistair smoothed a stray lock of hair from her temple, the gesture tender and final. “One more dance, then bed. Tomorrow we wear armour nobody can see.”

He turned toward the door. Natalie stayed a moment longer, rolling the wooden bird between her palms, feeling the grain bite softly into skin that had never known calluses. When she followed, she left the latch unlatched—just enough for a draft, just enough to hear footsteps that had no business being there.

The banquet hall smelled of roasted peacock and melted wax. Twenty-four branch candelabra threw gold across the long table, glinting off crystal and the polished breastplates of the ceremonial guard. Natalie sat between the Duchess of Lyre and an under-secretary whose name she had already forgotten; her spine held the same perfect angle it had held since childhood, but inside she was counting heartbeats. Alistair was directly opposite, the high collar of his doubleter forcing his chin up, the candlelight catching the faint sheen of perspiration at his temple. Between them, salt cellars and epergnes rose like small fortifications.

Mauricio waited until the second course—truffled teal—had been cleared. He rose without scraping his chair, a trick Natalie had never mastered, and lifted a small velvet box from his pocket. The court quieted in layers, conversation falling away from the head of the table downward until the only sound was the fire snapping in the marble hearth. He did not speak at once; he let the silence stretch until it became its own form of address.

“Tomorrow,” he said, voice carrying the easy cadence of a man who had never needed to shout, “our prince will swear the ancient oath. A coronation is a chain of moments, each link forged by loyalty.” He opened the lid. Inside, on a bed of black satin, lay a pin: a single ruby-headed falcon, wings folded, gold beak pointed like a dart. “This clasp once fastened the cloak of King Edmund the Steadfast before he rode against the northern rebels. I offer it to my nephew, that the same steadfastness attend him.”

Polite applause rippled outward. Mauricio circled the table. The ruby caught every flame and threw it back in splinters of red. When he reached Alistair, he did not simply hand the box; he lifted the pin between thumb and forefinger, holding it so the needle point angled directly at the prince’s throat. A servant stepped forward with the crimson mantle that would be buckled tomorrow. Mauricio’s fingers hovered, letting the moment stretch.

Natalie saw it then: the micro-movement at the corner of Mauricio’s mouth, a twitch so brief it might have been a trick of light—except his eyes held the same stillness she had seen in the falconer’s yard the day the hood came off and the bird did not move, already broken. Triumph, cold and absolute, flickered there and vanished behind the mourner’s mask he wore for the court.

Alistair lowered his head the required inch. The pin slid through velvet and skin alike; Natalie watched the gold shaft vanish into the fold of the mantle, watched her brother’s throat contract as the point pricked the hollow above his collarbone. A single bead of blood appeared, black in the candlelight, absorbed at once by the wool. Mauricio’s thumb pressed the clasp shut, sealing fabric to flesh, gift to wound.

“May it serve you long,” Mauricio said, stepping back. The court applauded more loudly this time; knives struck goblets in approval. Alistair lifted his wine with the hand that did not tremble, toasted his uncle, drank. The droplet of blood had already dried, but Natalie could not stop staring at the place where metal met skin, the way the ruby sat directly over the pulse she had felt racing the night before.

Servants swept in with syllabub and candied orange. Conversation resumed, bright and brittle. Across the table Alistair smiled at some compliment, the expression stretching too wide, like cloth pulled to tearing. The pin winked at his throat, a second mouth, red and closed for now. Natalie tasted iron under the sugar on her tongue.

She set her spoon down. The duchess beside her spoke of tomorrow’s procession route, how the balconies had been reinforced for flower girls. Natalie nodded at intervals, but her mind followed the invisible path of the pin: through wool, through skin, into blood, into heart. She pictured the hollow shaft she had once seen in an apothecary’s drawer, the kind that could be filled with a drop of essence of nightshade, sealed with wax the colour of garnets. She pictured Mauricio’s thumb pressing the release, the wax cracking, the poison entering her brother with the same ease that courtesy entered conversation.

The knot in her stomach cinched tighter, pulling grief and fury into a single hard core. She smiled at the duchess, excused herself, and walked the length of the hall beneath music and laughter, feeling the wooden bird knock softly against her thigh through the pocket of her skirt. Tomorrow Alistair would wear the pin again beneath the crown. Tomorrow the chain of moments Mauricio spoke of would close around his neck. And she would be watching, alive, ready to break the link before it snapped shut.

The corridors were colder at night, the torches burned lower, and the stone seemed to breathe. Natalie moved barefoot, her soles registering every ridge of mortar, every draft that slipped beneath tapestries. She had left the bird on the pillow; its weight had begun to feel accusatory, as if it might crack the feathers open and scream. The palace clock had struck two when she abandoned her bed. Sleep was a country whose border guards had turned her away.

She passed the gallery of ancestral portraits. Candle-glow slid across varnished faces, making the old kings blink. Halfway down the length she heard voices—male, measured, the cadence of men who believed themselves alone. Instinct dropped her into a crouch behind a plinth that supported a marble Diana. The cold nudged her spine through the linen of her nightgown.

“—say the physicians are ready with the statement,” came the first voice. Lord Pemberton, she thought, Keeper of the Seal. “Sudden fever, weakness of the heart. All very tidy.”

A dry chuckle answered. Chancellor Haverford. “And if the boy surprises us? Grows a spine?”

“Then we remind Mauricio that accidents attend surprises.” Pemberton’s tone was mild, as though discussing crop rotation. “Either way the transition is served. A month, six at most, and the regency council becomes the crown council.”

Natalie’s knees began to ache but she did not shift. The word transition hung in the air like incense, thick, cloying, impossible to wave away.

Haverford again: “The prince’s father lasted longer than expected. We cannot afford another twenty-year reign.”

“Mauricio understands patience. A pinprick here, a whisper there. The lad will falter; they always do when the room smells of fresh paint and old blood.”

Footsteps resumed, soft slippered scuffs on stone. She risked a look. The two councillors walked shoulder to shoulder, robes hitched over their arms, gray heads inclined like conspirators in a chapel. Their shadows merged on the floor, one elongated shape that swallowed Diana’s marble feet.

She waited until the sound died, then stood. Her pulse beat so hard the collar of her nightgown fluttered. She thought of Alistair’s twitching eye, the bead of blood absorbed by wool, the way Mauricio’s thumb had lingered on the clasp. The corridor seemed narrower now, ceiling pressing down, air thinned to ribbon.

Back in her chambers she barred the door with the back of a chair. The bird waited where she had left it, beak pointing at the window. She climbed into bed still standing, knees drawn up, covers over her head like a child hiding from thunder. In that cocoon she rehearsed sentences she would speak to Alistair at dawn: You are in danger. They have already buried you in their minds. We must go to the guard together, must—

But even as she shaped the words she felt them crumble. Harrow’s face appeared, apologetic and immovable: Hysterical accusations, Your Highness. She saw the council’s polite smiles, the way they would close ranks like a wall of silk.

She pressed the wooden bird against her sternum until the wing edges dented her skin. Tomorrow the crown would touch her brother’s head; tomorrow the pin would pierce him again. She could not let the link close. She would not.

The candle drowned in its own wax sometime before first light, and Natalie remained awake, counting heartbeats, planning a language that had no words yet, only the taste of iron and the shape of a link snapping open.

She sat on the window-seat until the sky paled, knees tucked under the linen shift, bird cupped in both palms. The carved wingtips pressed half-moons into her skin; she shifted them, let the pain sharpen, then eased off, a private metronome of penance. When the palace bells tolled six she was still there, nightgown damp with dew that had condensed on the glass, hair sticking to her cheek like wet silk.

Alistair’s face kept superimposing itself over the courtyard below: the way his brows had lifted when the pin went in, the small indrawn breath only a sister would notice. She rehearsed the warning she would deliver, trimming it shorter each time, stripping away adjectives, away anything that sounded like fear. Fear would make him kind; kindness would kill him.

She washed in cold water, dressed without summoning her maid, laced the stays herself, tighter than usual, until her ribs took on the hard curve of armor. The bird went into the pocket of her skirt, a weight that swung against her thigh as she walked the servants’ corridor to avoid the early courtiers. She would catch him before prayers, before Mauricio could appear with another helpful suggestion, before the council assembled their patient smiles.

The prince’s antechamber smelled of beeswax and orange rind. A page blinked at her, startled by the hour, but she lifted two fingers—wait—and he stepped aside. The inner door stood ajar; she saw Alistair’s reflection in the standing mirror, shirt open, candle in hand, examining the puncture on his collarbone. A bruise had bloomed around it, purple-brown, the size of a copper coin. He touched the swelling, winced, then touched it again, as if proof of pain were necessary.

She pushed the door without knocking. “You need a physician.”

He startled, turned. “Nat. God, you’re pale.”

“You need a physician,” she repeated. “And you need to listen to me.”

He set the candle down, began fastening the shirt with shaking fingers. “I’m listening.”

She closed the door, leaned back against it. Words backed up in her throat, thick, bitter. She chose the simplest. “The pin was poisoned. Mauricio meant it. Last night I heard Pemberton and Haverford planning your—” She stopped herself before transition could leave her mouth. “Planning an accident. The physicians are bribed. The guard won’t help. You have to flee. Tonight.”

He stared, eyes bloodshot, and for a moment she saw the boy who had once hidden with her inside the draperies during thunderstorms. Then the prince-mask slid down. “Slowly,” he said. “Start again.”

She told him, voice low, everything except the tremor in her knees. She omitted only Easton’s future existence, the guild, the impossible geography of revenge still unmapped. When she finished the room was silent except for the candle guttering.

He rubbed the bruise, looked at his fingers as if expecting color to come off. “If I run, I forfeit the line. Mauricio becomes regent by law. Half the council wants it.”

“Better a regent than a corpse.”

“And you?” His gaze sharpened. “He’ll marry you off within the week, some border baron who smells of sheep. I won’t leave you to that.”

“I’d rather a husband who smells of sheep than a brother who smells of embalming oil.” The sentence cracked out harder than intended; she saw him flinch.

He walked to the window, shoulders drawn. Outside, the first banners were being hung for the procession, crimson streamers snapping like fresh blood. “Give me proof,” he said. “Bring me the pin, a vial, a signed confession. Something I can show the Privy Chamber. Without it I’m a frightened boy seeing ghosts.”

“You’re a boy who’ll be a ghost by dusk.”

“Then fetch me armour, Nat. Not smoke.”

She felt the conversation slipping, the way small boats slide from moorings. “I will get proof,” she said. “But you will wear a steel gorget under your collar tomorrow. Promise me.”

He turned, managed a tired smile. “I promise.”

She stepped closer, took the candle, tipped it so wax pooled on the tabletop, then pressed the wooden bird upright into the soft mound. It cooled instantly, bird perched like a sentinel. “Keep it in sight,” she said. “When the wax cracks, remember that I’m cracking too.”

He touched her shoulder, thumb tracing the bone. “We’ll survive this day. Then we’ll survive the next.”

She wanted to stay, to bar the door with her body, but time was already thinning. She left him dressing for chapel, the bird watching him from its wax pedestal. In the corridor she pressed her forehead to cool stone, whispered the rest of the promise she had not spoken aloud: If I cannot save you, I will avenge you. And then nothing.

The pounding started before the sky had turned silver, fists on oak like a drumbeat calling the palace to war. Natalie came awake with the bird still in her fist, fingernails carved into its breast. For a moment she thought the sound was inside her skull, then the door shook again and a guard’s voice cracked through the panels.

“Your Highness—open—by order of the Crown—”

She crossed the rug in three strides, unhooked the chair she had wedged beneath the handle. The moment the latch lifted the door burst inward and a page boy tumbled through, cheeks striped with tears. Behind him the corridor boiled: liveried servants clutching candle stubs, guards buckling sword-belts over nightshirts, a woman’s high keening bouncing off stone.

“The prince,” the boy gasped. “He’s—they say—”

She didn’t wait for the noun. The bird dropped from her hand, bounced once, and lay on its side. She ran barefoot, hair unbound, soles slapping the chill flags. The hallway narrowed into a tunnel of torch-smoke and bodies. Someone tried to catch her elbow; she tore free. Ahead, Alistair’s door stood open, a rectangle of gold light cut into the dark, guards forming a loose half-circle as if to hold back the night itself.

The royal physician blocked the threshold, spectacles askew, shirt collar riding up on one side. “Your Highness, you cannot—”

She shoved past. The antechamber smelled of wax and iron, the metallic note so thick it coated the tongue. Two chamberlains hovered by the bed, faces bleached. Alistair lay as she had left him hours earlier, only the sheet had been pulled to his sternum and the candle had burned to a nub. His skin was the color of old tallow, lips parted as if mid-sentence. The bruise around the pinprick had blossomed into a violet halo no larger than a fingerprint, positioned exactly where a gorget would not have reached.

She heard her own voice from far away: “When.”

“An hour, perhaps less,” the physician answered behind her. “A fever that stopped the heart. I have seen it in infants, never in a man so young, but the rigor—”

“Liar.” The word left her mouth flat, almost polite. She stepped closer, touched the inside of Alistair’s wrist. The flesh was already cooling, the joint stiff. On the bedside table the wooden bird stood in its puddle of wax; the wax had cracked clean through.

Footsteps entered. Mauricio’s voice, velvet over gravel: “Natalie, child, come away.”

She turned. He wore mourning black though dawn had not yet broken, jacket buttoned with military precision. His eyes were red-rimmed, glassy, but the pupils glittered like wet stone. When he opened his arms the candlelight slid across the ruby signet he had taken from their father’s corpse. Over his shoulder she saw their mother crumpled against a guard, face hidden in lace that shook with each sob.

Mauricio stepped between Natalie and the bed, blocking her view of Alistair as if claiming territory. “We must spare your mother further anguish,” he murmured, low enough that only she could hear. “Grief is unbecoming when witnessed.”

She stared at the pulse beating steady beneath his cravat. The distance from his sternum to her dagger hand was the length of a heartbeat. She felt the weight of every guard, every law, every thread of dynasty holding her wrist at her side. Her tongue moved behind her teeth, shaping the accusation, tasting the poison’s name—nightshade, bitter almond—but the air thickened, pressing the syllables back into her throat.

Behind Mauricio the physician began folding the sheet over Alistair’s face. The linen lifted, paused, descended like a curtain. In the second before it settled she saw her brother’s profile flattened into a stranger’s, the nose too sharp, the lashes too dark, as if death itself had sketched him in crude charcoal. Then the cloth met skin and the room tilted; she locked her knees so she would not fall at Mauricio’s feet.

He reached for her elbow, fingers closing just above the bruises he had given her yesterday with the ceremonial embrace. “We will endure this together,” he said, and the pressure of his thumb promised her every second of the life he now controlled. And then nothing.

The physician caught her sleeve. “Highness, the humors—”

She wrenched free, shoulder knocking his ribs. The door swung inward on hinges recently oiled for coronation pageantry, and the smell rolled over her: candle smoke, stale sweat, the copper tang she now associated with almond kernels. Alistair lay exactly as she had pictured during the sprint down the corridor, flat on his back as if pinned by an invisible weight. The sheet reached his waist; someone had folded the linen in a perfect hospital corner, the crease sharp enough to cut. His chest did not move.

She crossed the rug in three strides and pressed two fingers beneath his jaw. The skin was cool, the stubble stiff, the pulse absent. A grey film already dulled the gold of his hair. She had seen corpses before—state funerals, plague pits outside the walls—but never one that wore her childhood in the shape of its ears.

Her gaze snagged on the neck. A single red bead glinted at the hinge of his jaw, no wider than a needle’s eye, the surrounding flesh blossomed into a bruise whose petals exactly matched the circumference of Mauricio’s ceremonial pin. She touched it; the blood had not yet dried. When she lifted her fingertip a thread of scarlet stretched, thin as silk, then broke, spotting the sheet with a mark no larger than a grain of millet.

Behind her the physician spoke in the measured cadence reserved for women and foreigners. “A congenital weakness of the heart, exacerbated by night vapours. We can only surmise that the excitement of tomorrow—”

“Excitement didn’t punch a hole in his vein.” Her voice sounded like someone else’s, calm, almost curious. She drew the sheet lower. No other wound, no froth at the lips, only the waxen hue climbing from his chest toward the throat that had laughed at her jokes only hours earlier. She pressed an ear to his ribs. Silence answered, vast and arrogant.

Boots entered: guards, chamberlains, the rustle of parchment as someone began inventorying the prince’s effects. A hand lighted on her shoulder—Mauricio’s, she would know the weight anywhere—but she shrugged it off and straightened. The wooden bird had rolled beneath the bedside table; its beak pointed at the door as if recommending flight.

She turned. The physician had retreated a step, spectacles fogged. “You will note the absence of convulsion,” he offered, voice trembling. “Consistent with cardiac failure.”

“I note the absence of rigor in the jaw,” she answered. “Consistent with death within the hour. Who found him?”

“The page. The prince failed to respond to the dawn bell.”

“And the page called you before calling family?”

The man’s throat bobbed. “Protocol—”

“Protocol is a shroud you wrap around murder.” She spoke quietly, but the room hushed as if she had screamed. Even the Queen’s distant sobs paused. Mauricio’s reflection appeared in the mirror above the washstand: eyes flat, mouth soft with rehearsed sorrow, handkerchief already unfolded. Their gazes met in the glass; he gave the tiniest shake of the head, a tutor correcting an incorrect sum.

She looked back at Alistair. The pinprick had begun to purple, a miniature coronation orb swelling under the skin. She imagined the poison entering him—drop by drop, while the wax bird watched, helpless, from its cooling pool. Her fingers curled around the dagger she was not wearing. And then nothing.

Mauricio stepped between her and the mirror, blocking the corpse from view as if it were a stage curtain he could draw at will. His arms opened, black sleeves swallowing light. “Mother needs you,” he whispered, voice cracked exactly along the seam where sorrow meets authority. Over his shoulder the Queen’s face was a blot of salt and rouge, mouth working without sound. Natalie smelled the bergamot he used to mask tobacco, the same scent that had clung to Alistair’s pin the night it was presented.

She did not move. Mauricio’s left hand settled on the Queen’s trembling back; his right extended toward Natalie, palm up, fingers curled in invitation—or command. The skin at the base of his thumb bore a fresh half-moon scab, small and neat, the kind made by a ring pressed hard against flesh. She stared at it until the scab became a dark sun around which the room tilted.

“Come, child,” he said again, softer, the way one calls a dog before the leash tightens. The Queen sagged against him, grief rendering her weightless, and Mauricio absorbed it without shifting his feet. His eyes, over the powdered frizz of his sister-in-law’s hair, locked on Natalie’s. The irises were winter river: grey, unbroken, reflecting nothing. In them she saw no question, no appeal for comfort—only acknowledgment. A ledger balanced. The pin had entered Alistair; the knowledge had entered her; the account was squared.

She felt her own pulse bang against her teeth. Every lesson in court decorum urged her to place her hand in his, to allow herself to be folded against her mother’s sobbing breast while he orchestrated the next scene. Instead she let her arms hang at her sides, fingers open so the blood on her fingertip could dry in the air. A single flake loosened and drifted to the rug, vanishing against the crimson weave.

Mauricio’s gaze flicked to the spot, then back. The corner of his mouth twitched—not quite a smile, more the muscular memory of one. It lasted less than a heartbeat, but it was enough to confirm the circumference of the trap. He knew she would not speak here; he knew she would not kneel; he knew she would run. The knowledge passed between them like a coin sliding across felt, silent, weighty, final.

Behind him the physician cleared his throat. “We must seal the chamber, Your Grace. The humors—”

“Of course.” Mauricio lowered his arm, the invitation withdrawn. “Her Highness wishes a moment alone with her brother. See that she has it. Then escort her to the council antechamber.” The instruction was delivered with perfect civility, yet it placed guards between her and every exit. He turned the Queen gently, guiding her toward the door. Over the collapsing slope of her mother’s shoulder his eyes found Natalie once more: a cold, appraising glance that measured her height, her reach, the width of her wrist inside the linen cuff. Inventory. Property reclaimed.

The entourage shuffled out, boots muffled by rug, sobs absorbed by tapestry. A guard stationed himself inside the threshold, gaze fixed on the middle distance, hand on pommel. The door did not quite latch; a finger-width of corridor torchlight speared the dimness and lay across Alistair’s sheet like a brand.

Natalie waited until the last footstep faded. She lifted the wooden bird from the floor, thumb fitting into the groove her fingernail had carved earlier that night. The wax had splintered its wing; the beak was sharp enough to prick. She pressed the point into the pad of her index finger until blood pearled, then touched the bead to the bruise on Alistair’s neck. Red on purple, a second crown blooming. A promise, a signature, a map drawn in miniature.

She slipped the bird inside her sleeve, against the pulse that still hammered. The guard watched, but protocol forbade him from interfering with royal ritual; grief was theater, and theater had rules. She bent, kissed her brother’s cooling forehead, tasted salt and iron. “I will not speak their lines,” she whispered against his skin. “I will write new ones.”

When she straightened the room was already shrinking, walls inching inward under the weight of forthcoming silence. She walked toward the guard, past the table where the physician’s satchel gaped open to reveal vials, needles, a leather strap for restraining convulsing limbs. One vial lay on its side, a faint oily ring drying at the lip. She did not touch it; evidence was useless now. The only useful thing was the living body that carried memory out of this room.

The guard stepped aside. As she crossed the threshold she felt Mauricio’s gaze waiting in the corridor like a tripwire, but she did not look up. She kept her eyes on the stone ahead, on the draft that smelled of rain and torches and the almond-sweet residue of victory. And then nothing.

The council chamber smelled of beeswax and wet wool. Rain lashed the high windows; each drop struck the stained glass like a thrown pebble. They had seated her at the foot of the oval table, the traditional place for the youngest prince during a regency vote, never for a princess with blood on her sleeve. The fabric had dried rust-brown, stiff against her wrist, a semaphore she could not lower.

Lord Regent Alden cleared his throat. “We convene to establish the sequence of this morning’s tragedy and to preserve the stability of the realm.” His voice carried the same measured cadence he used to announce harvest festivals, as if death were merely another date on the calendar. “The royal physician will summarize.”

The physician rose, parchment trembling. “Sudden cardiac failure, likely congenital. No contusions, no effusions. The body presented classic pallor and—”

“And a puncture wound,” Natalie said. The words left her mouth flat, almost bored, as though she were correcting a dance step.

Alden’s eyelids lowered a fraction. “Your Highness will elaborate after the findings are read.”

She placed both palms on the table. “The wound is on the right jugular, one millimetre in diameter. It bled fresh when I touched it. That is not congenital.”

Murmurs rippled, silk on silk. Mauricio sat at Alden’s left, hands folded, expression arranged in courteous grief. He had changed his doublet; the black velvet absorbed the candlelight so completely it seemed a hole cut into the wood. His ring—the one with the sharp bezel—caught a stray beam and threw it back like a wink.

Alden sighed. “Grief distorts perception. We have all felt the sting of today’s loss. Yet we must not allow feminine fancy to cloud—”

“Fetch a looking glass,” Natalie interrupted. “I will show you the distortion.”

The Chancellor of Coin, old Berridge, clicked his tongue. “Girl, decorum—”

“Decorum murdered my brother.” She stood. The chair scraped like a drawn blade. “You all smelt it: bitter almond. Check the vial in the physician’s pouch. Tilt it and see the oil bead on the rim. That is not night vapour; that is Osirian nightshade, expensive, traceable, and presently on the person who bought it.”

Mauricio lifted one eyebrow, the movement slow, almost weary. “Dear niece accuses the very hand that comforted her mother.” His voice was soft, a lullaby containing arsenic. “Such fevered imaginings wound us all.”

Alden raised a palm. “Enough. The council records will reflect: death by natural failure. Any public speculation will be punished as sedition.” He turned to Natalie, eyes moist with paternal kindness that did not reach the rest of his face. “You are excused to your apartments. A draught of valerian will be sent.”

She felt the room tilt, the floorboards rolling like ship planks. “You would bury the truth with him.”

“We bury a king,” Alden corrected, tone sharpening. “And we bury him intact. A realm cannot crown a corpse while chasing shadows.”

Mauricio’s fingers drummed once, a single victorious beat, then stilled. The gesture was minute, but Natalie caught it; she had been trained from childhood to read the tempo of courtly hands during treaty negotiations. Morse code for victory.

She looked from face to face: the Lord Admiral staring at the rain, the High Priest pinching the bridge of his nose, the Master of Laws already sealing the ink with sand. None would meet her eye. Their silence was a velvet gag, soft and absolute.

“Then record this as well,” she said, voice stripped of all inflection. “Princess Natalie Elara Valoris disputes the findings and reserves the right to pursue inquiry under ancestral law, Article Seven, Blood Mandate.” The archaic clause tasted of iron; she had memorised it as a child to impress tutors who thought girls should stick to embroidery.

Alden’s jaw flexed. “Article Seven is superseded by regency necessity. Sit down, child.”

She remained standing. “I will sit when the murderer does.”

Mauricio sighed, the sound almost compassionate. “Grief has unmoored her.” He rose, the movement fluid, and moved behind her chair. “Allow me to escort Her Highness to her rooms.” His hand settled on her shoulder, thumb finding the nerve cluster Easton would later teach her to exploit. Pressure promised bruises beneath velvet.

She shrugged free, but the motion cost her; the room saw only a hysterical girl recoiling from kindly guidance. Alden nodded permission. “See that she rests. The funeral cortege assembles at dusk.”

Mauricio’s fingers returned, firmer. She felt the heat of his skin through the linen, the same hand that had signed the requisition, that had patted her mother’s trembling back, that had perhaps held the needle. The touch marched her toward the door. Councillors averted their gaze, as if grief were contagious and shame invisible.

At the threshold she paused, meeting Alden’s eyes one last time. “When the poison seeps into your own blood,” she said, “remember that I offered the antidote.”

Alden’s quill scratched on, recording stability, recording natural causes, recording nothing of the girl who carried a wooden bird inside her sleeve and a vow beneath her tongue. Mauricio’s hand tightened, propelling her into the corridor where guards snapped to attention, faces blank as unmarked graves.

The door shut. Beeswax and wool were replaced by cold stone and torch smoke. She walked between the soldiers, footfalls echoing like a countdown, the bird’s broken wing digging a red half-moon into her wrist with every step. And then nothing.

They left her at the bronze doors of the throne room, two guards swinging them shut with the soft finality of a breath held underwater. The latch clicked; the sound carried the length of the hall and died against the vaulted ceiling painted with winged victories that had never seen a battlefield.

Natalie walked forward. Her slippers whispered over porphyry inlay, each step a syllable of a language no one had taught her: alone, alone, alone. The torches were unlit; dawn light crawled through the high windows in thin, colourless blades that cut across the empty dais and laid themselves across the seat where her father had once let her balance on his knee while petitioners droned. The gold leaf on the throne back looked dull, thumb-printed, as though already handled by the next claimant.

She stopped at the base of the three steps and unclenched her fist. The wooden bird dropped to the marble with a sound too small for the space. One wing had split; a sliver of pale wood protruded like bone. She crouched, set it upright, and pressed the broken wing against the stone until the splinter pierced her palm again. Blood welled, beaded, ran into the carving’s grain. A gift demands blood, she thought, and straightened.

The silence pressed against her eardrums until she could hear her own pulse translated into a distant drum. It told her the precise dimensions of her helplessness: the hall was forty-seven strides long, the dais three steps up, the throne fixed to the floor by iron bolts that had survived three dynasties. She could walk every inch and still be nowhere. She could scream and the stone would absorb the sound and give back only the smell of cold dust.

She climbed the steps. The seat was wider than her outstretched arms; the red silk cushion had faded where generations of royal thighs had rested. She sat. The wood was ice against her spine. From here she could see the entire hall, the narrow galleries where councillors stood during audiences, the brass grill behind which musicians once hid their trumpets. Every line of sight ended in a door she could not open alone.

Her grief arrived without sound. It was not the tearing thing she had expected; it was a weight dropped from the ceiling, a lead apron that settled over her lungs and pressed the air out in a slow, controlled leak. Under its weight the images lined up like evidence: Alistair’s grey skin, Mauricio’s thumb on her shoulder, the physician’s vial tilting in candlelight. Each picture carried a temperature—cold, colder, coldest—until she felt her own heart stutter in sympathy.

She lifted her bleeding hand and watched the drop hang, darken, fall. It struck the armrest and spread into a perfect circle no larger than a coin. A small, red kingdom. She traced it with the tip of her finger, smearing the edges into a crude crown.

Vengeance unfolded inside her the way a blade opens in a practiced hand: first the cold flat against the bone, then the edge finding the pulse. It was simple, lighter than grief, easier to carry. It required only two things: a target and a body prepared to strike. The target was already chosen; the body would have to be built from whatever walked out of this room.

She stood. The throne did not protest; it had seen too many departures. She left the wooden bird where it stood, a tiny, maimed sentinel guarding nothing. At the door she paused, palm against the bronze. The metal carried the chill of the corridor beyond, the promise of corridors that led to stables, gates, streets, rivers, anywhere that was not here.

She would not return through these doors until she had traded the lead apron for armour, until her pulse drummed a different tally: his heart, her hand, the space between measured in millimetres. She drew a breath that tasted of stone and iron and pushed. The door swung outward without a sound, as though it, too, had been waiting. And then nothing.