Eryndel woke before the first bell and lay still a moment, breathing the familiar cool of the palace groves. The lattice of heartwood around her window exhaled a faint resin scent. A pale band of light through the living shutters marked the progress of dawn across the eastern boughs. She rose and dressed in quiet order: linen tunic, green sash, hair braided, hands washed and dried. She fastened the bone hook that held her keyring and checked each key by touch—the aviary, the ledger closet, the seed vault. The small routine steadied her the way a low drone steadied a choir.

  She crossed the passage that linked the royal suites to the aviary, a covered bridge grown out of two converging branches. Dew had gilded the banister. Far below, the river cut through the roots of Fenrialis like a pale blade. Watchfires on the outer platforms still winked where the fog clung. Somewhere in the upper canopies, a griffin loosed a single hoarse call before settling again; the beast-masters’ ledges sat two stacks above her domain, and she had learned to listen without flinching.

  “Good morning, Princess,” said the gate-warden, his eyes still swollen from sleep.

  “Good morning, Ardas,” she said, and the gate curled itself open at her key’s touch.

  The aviary breathed to greet her. The domed canopy was a network of living branches coaxed into a lattice, the leaves thinned so a soft, even light pooled over every perch. Water trickled along carved grooves into a ring of shallow basins. The birds’ voices swelled and then steadied to a chorus. It was ordered sound: coos, trills, clicks, no shrieking. She moved from row to row, greeting the pear-brown pair in the eastern alcove, the mottled blue cocks in the northern aisle, the small white hen that had taken three seasons to accept a ring on her leg. Eryndel lifted the ledger from its slot and entered counts with a charcoaled stylus. Grain remaining: one barrel. Eggs due: four. Breach in netting: none.

  “Everyone’s where they should be,” she murmured.

  She had just uncapped the seed jar when a low scuff sounded behind her, followed by a slow clap.

  “Morning patrol in the realm of feathered disorder,” said Vaelis.

  Eryndel let the measure of seed finish its arc before she turned. Vaelis leaned in the entryway, a ribbon of light threading her hair. She had come with the easy speed of a huntress who didn’t need to hurry. A sleeveless leather jerkin hugged her shoulders. A pair of soft boots hung loose in one hand—she had padded here barefoot and carried the boots to tease, Eryndel thought, to signal that rules could be lifted and replaced when it pleased her.

  “These creatures are well-bred,” Eryndel said, and filled the trough for the brown pair, tapping the rim twice to call them down.

  “Feathered disorder,” Vaelis repeated, smiling small. “They drop feathers everywhere. They peck at everyone but you. You train them to carry notes when any hawk with sense would carry a message faster.”

  “They carry notes because they are reliable,” Eryndel said. “Hawks obey only the one who feeds them, and most hawks prefer mice to paper.”

  Vaelis dangled one boot on a single finger. “Soft habits breed soft hands.”

  Eryndel did not look up. “Soft is not the same as careless.”

  “A distinction you cherish.” Vaelis pushed off the doorframe and wandered along the inner rail. “I only came to remind you that you owe me a practice duel after council. Father says we spar like weather—unpredictable and brief.”

  “We have council at second bell. I have a private audience before,” Eryndel said. “Afterward, if you like, I will spare twenty minutes.”

  “Spare them for yourself. Your soft hands could use a taste of wood.” Vaelis walked out along one of the narrow perches where only keepers went, balancing on the toes of one foot and then the other. Her hair brushed the low leaves. A blue cock on a branch beside her froze, then took a cautious step away. Vaelis chuckled and reached for it. Eryndel stilled.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  Vaelis turned, innocent. “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t frighten him off the rail. He will panic and strike a wing.”

  “What would you do if a wing broke?” Vaelis asked lightly and stretched out one finger. The bird snapped at her nail and she snatched her hand back fast enough to hide the flinch. Some part of Eryndel noted the score in her head and disliked herself for it.

  “I would bind it and keep him company until it mended.” Eryndel moved to Vaelis and, without touching, set herself in the way. “Do not use their fear to feed your morning.”

  “My morning feeds itself,” Vaelis said, but she came back to the main aisle with a careless pivot, and in passing she let her shoulder brush Eryndel with the weight of someone who knew where another’s balance sat. It was not a shove, not anything that could be named cleanly. Eryndel, steady from habit, took half a step and recovered. Seed skittered along the floor in pale grains.

  “Careful,” Vaelis said softly. “Disorder.”

  Eryndel replaced the lid on the seed jar and set her stylus down with care. The aviary’s gentle air warmed around her face. “You are welcome to go,” she said.

  “I belong here as much as you,” Vaelis said, but she was already walking away, spinning one boot by the heel like a child’s toy. “After council, then. Bring salve for your hands.”

  When she was gone, Eryndel stood among the birds until her breath matched theirs again. The routine repaired itself: refill basins, check ledgers, collect a lost feather that had fallen into the narrow channel where water ran. She turned the feather in her fingers, white tipped with a bruise of blue, and laid it in her pocket. She thought of Vaelis’s shoulder and filed the memory away without annotation.

  By first bell, the palace groves woke. The kitchen terraces lit braziers; the scent of porridge and forest mushrooms rose. Ground couriers and leaf-couriers checked routes: down through the trunk paths, out along the outer bridges, across the river to the western approach. Eryndel moved among them with a thin strip of bread in hand and nodded greetings. She did not linger. Council would be raw today, with spring trade bargaining ahead and a delegation rumored from Coalkeep. She washed the seed dust from her palms and went to the private door that led to the king’s study.

  Haelindor’s chamber had no chairs. He stood by a wide opening in the heartwood, the view a lattice of old branches and newer scaffoldings. Light fell across him like careful ink. He had arranged scrolls on the wall shelves and a single long table along the inner curve of the room. He had never liked clutter. Neither had Eryndel.

  “You asked for me,” she said. She did not bow; in private he preferred to strip the movements down to what meant something.

  “I did.” Haelindor looked at the view, not at her. His voice bore the quiet that made courtiers stop speaking. “You and Vaelis are at a pass.”

  “We have always been at passes,” Eryndel said. “We cross, we glare, we continue.”

  “Your mother would say I let you continue too long.” He turned then. His eyes were unreadable, but tired lines made a lattice at their corners. “I will put it plain. Your rivalry endangers the court when it spills from words into the hands of people who watch your hands for orders. You are both watched. Your trainings, your habits, your small dislikes—they become signals. Signals become choices. I won’t have counsel shaped by guessing which of my daughters is angrier today.”

  Eryndel listened without interrupting. He had taught her to do so; he would see the courtesy and he would press into it.

  “I want you to tell me, directly and without delay, about any misconduct she commits,” he said. “No circles. No willing to solve it in the corridors. Your discretion, which I value, becomes a wall between me and matters I must know.”

  Eryndel considered the water running a level below the balcony where Vaelis liked to lean. She thought of ordered lines on a ledger and the neatness of a day contained by routine. “I understand,” she said.

  “Do not simply understand, Eryndel,” he said gently. “Do it. When she tests your patience, do not build a small fortress around pride and call it dignity. Walk to my door and speak.”

  She met his eyes. “I will manage matters discreetly.” She felt the choice form in her mouth and did not reshape it as it left.

  Something passed, quick and small. It wasn’t anger. His face did not often show anger. “As you wish,” he said finally, though the words did not bless. “Council calls. Walk with me.”

  They moved down the inner spiral where the light came and went in increments. Council was a censer of voices and parchment. Trade keepers from the western underpass complained of bandit skirmishes skirting the bounds of the Fallen Kingdom of Amberveil; a caravan master from Bramblecross had sent a note by pigeon that two wagons laden with dried plums were stalled at Moonwillow. Scribes compared tariffs on iron tools from the Forgewall Highlands and salt from the Copperbell Isle. Eryndel’s notes were clean and discreet: no lines crossed out, no anger in ink. Vaelis spoke when she chose, quick and incisive: send three patrols along the West Road and publicize it; fine late caravans; invite Coalkeep to formalize their escort offers rather than accept them unbound. Haelindor nodded or did not nod. When he glanced at his daughters, it was careful and evenly spaced.

  After council, Vaelis brushed past Eryndel without a word. The promised duel evaporated, as most of Vaelis’s promises did when something brighter caught her. Eryndel felt no heat. She had work, and work cured many small fevers.

  The day went to its slope. Eryndel indexed seed stores and checked cordage on carrier harnesses. She spent an hour in the scriptorium copying three short notes from the king to the steward of Serelion, her script small and legible. She watched a pair of apprentices feed a brood that had hatched two days past. She held a fragile body in her palm, marked the perfect architecture of the folded wing. The quiet burrowed into her bone and thickened there like a helpful weight.

  Near dusk, she returned to the aviary for the evening count. The dome held a lavender light, and the rip of wings sounded like a low streamer pulled through air. The first step into the inner row caught a sourness—not the normal musk of birds in a closed space, not the clean bite of fresh water. It rose from the center trough, a bitter rot that made the back of her throat twitch. Eryndel paused, belly tightening, and then moved.

  Three birds lay along the rim and in the trough itself, bodies slack, necks extended in unnatural ways. Their feet were still warm when she touched them, but their eyes had rolled open and dulled. She lifted the smallest, a white hen with the faintest blue blush across her back, and pressed her ear to its chest out of habit. No sound. The sourness now pressed at her tongue. She dropped the hen back into her palm and smelled the wet of her feathers. It scorched.

  She did not cry out. The trained part of her mind, the one that had learned to cut panic into steps, went forward. She snapped the lid off the trough and lifted it aside with the cloth kept there precisely for this task. She slid the dead birds onto a length of canvas and tied it shut. She decanted the remaining water into a sealed glass vial and labeled it for the healers. She opened the seed vault and checked the sacks flanking the shelves. The seal on the main jar for this row bore no scratch. She still broke it and tested a grain on the bitterleaf strip kept for such checks. Pure, sweet, clean. She spat it and washed her mouth.

  She followed smell with patience. The center trough made from a carved length of heartwood was rimmed with vine. On one of the inner lip’s knots, just inside the cover’s normal rest, something slicked. She scraped it with a nail. The smear was oily. The cloth she used to clean the trough darkened where it touched the lip. When she rinsed and smelled the cloth, she jerked back. A low burn climbed the back of her nose, sharp and bitter.

  There were poisons that lived in the Bonecandle Swamps, old resinous distillations that traveled in glass-stoppered bottles wrapped in padded cloth, passed from hand to hand by men who watched the ground. Some left a telltale ring on wood. Some did not. This one had leached into the inner lip where only the lip touched water and birds. It had been brushed there with care.

  For a long heartbeat, she did nothing. Then she said, “No,” aloud to the empty air, and the word steadied her better than breath.

  She tied the canvas with the bodies and sealed the trough again and sealed the aviary. On the way to the door she stopped and looked back once at the rows and the grid of perches and told herself to count later, to list and to clean, to replace this trough with one in storage. She put the anger where her steps could keep up.

  The palace felt different with the dusk rising. Watchfires on the outer platforms bled into life, and the bells for the first night watch sounded with a low measured call. She found herself moving faster than she usually allowed. In that speed she saw appointments she could have kept: she could have gone first to her father with the canvas and the cloth and the thin sick smell still in her throat. He had asked for that. He had made a simple rule. Her hand touched the small feather in her pocket and brushed it smooth. Discretion had kept the world clean for years; it would keep it clean now. She would give their feud no audience in his chamber. She would make her sister look at her, not at him.

  The high tree terrace crowned the eastern side of the palace, a long sweep of planks that curved around the old tree’s girth. It was a place for evening air and private words. The lichen there stayed damp with mist even when day was clear. The rail, lower than the new standards dictated, had been grown in her grandfather’s time. A narrow stair ran into a darker level below, to a network of roots that formed a web above the river drop. Eryndel had walked here often, counting her steps when she needed to count something that wasn’t a ledger.

  Vaelis stood at the outer edge, her body lean against the rail, her hair a dark rope down her back. She had changed from leather to a loose shirt and trousers, easy to move in. Two guards were posted at a respectful distance on the far side; they looked anywhere but at the sisters. Eryndel let them look away.

  “Vaelis,” she called.

  Vaelis did not turn immediately. “You didn’t bring salve. I guessed you wouldn’t.”

  “Three birds are dead,” Eryndel said. She walked up until the old boards creaked and stopped two arm-lengths away. She had meant to shape her words into questions. She heard them come out flat. “Their trough smelled of something that did not belong. There is residue at the lip. You were in the aviary this morning.”

  Vaelis half-smiled without humor. “I often am.”

  “Did you poison my pigeons?” Eryndel asked.

  “They’re not your pigeons,” Vaelis said, then sure, some sharpness. “And I didn’t poison anything. They poison themselves with droppings. They make the place stink.”

  “The place does not stink,” Eryndel said, and heard how small it sounded. “They carry our messages. They have legs that know routes better than half our couriers. They are living things I have raised since they broke shell.”

  Vaelis pushed back from the rail and turned to face her. The light was low and flat, and it picked out the line beneath Vaelis’s eyes, the small tiredness that lived there when no one looked. “You always turn living things into ledgers,” she said. “Feed. Part. Route. Breed. Count. To you a creature matters when it balances in a book.”

  “And to you a creature matters when it bleeds for sport,” Eryndel said before she could stop.

  Vaelis’s jaw flexed. “I’ve never had patience for soft habits. These birds are useless. Hawks are faster. Runners are honest. Your birds coo and poop and take your time.”

  “I don’t want your opinion about utility,” Eryndel said, but she had lost the rhythm. She had meant to ask, to gather, to hold a line until she could make a choice that would please duty. The sourness in her nose bent her into a different shape. “You were there. You taunted them. You taunted me. There is an oily smear on the lip where only someone who knows the trough would place it.”

  “Then you should go tell Father,” Vaelis said, and spread her hands as if to offer herself. “Run to him with your canvas and your careful cloth. Tell him what you think I did and make him fix it, because you cannot bring yourself to do anything but keep a room neat.”

  Eryndel saw her own hand, raised without knowing it. “I came to ask you,” she said. “To ask for the truth.”

  “Here is a truth, princess of perches,” Vaelis said, and each word slid into the next like forged parts. “You hide behind neatness because you have nothing else. You are afraid to make a mess you cannot count. And those birds? If I had poisoned three, I would have done you a kindness. They are eggs with wings. They breed disorder. They distract you from real duties and real dangers.”

  “Don’t call them that,” Eryndel said.

  “What?” Vaelis stepped closer. “Eggs with wings?”

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  “Useless.”

  “They are,” Vaelis said, and smiled in a way that said she knew what she was doing.

  The restraint Eryndel had trained into a habit broke. It did not shatter; it bent and then sprang the wrong direction. She raised her hand and struck Vaelis across the face, not brutally but with clear intention. The sound through the damp air was flat. Vaelis’s head turned with it, hair whipping once, and then came back. For a heartbeat, the terrace held its breath.

  It wasn’t a long heartbeat.

  Vaelis moved with the clean speed Eryndel had always envied and mistrusted. She lunged. Eryndel braced for another open-hand return, but Vaelis’s right hand flashed and a narrow stiletto came out of her sleeve, a blade made to live in hidden places. Eryndel saw the glint and flinched aside; the tip caught her cheekbone just under the eye. It sliced a narrow line from the outer corner of her eye to halfway to her ear. The pain was sudden and hot and exact. Skin parted. Blood welled, bright and surprised. It ran in a thin line toward her mouth.

  Eryndel caught Vaelis’s knife wrist in both hands and shoved it up and away from her face. Vaelis grunted, not with pain but with effort, and pressed into the hold. Eryndel was not weak. She leveraged posture rather than force. She turned her shoulder into Vaelis’s chest and drove the knife hand back toward the rail. The blade trembled; it was not long enough to reach either of them unless one gave.

  “They are not useless,” Eryndel said through her teeth, and she could not have said why she chose those words. They sounded small compared to the steel between them.

  Vaelis’s eyes were alight with something like thrill and something like anger and something like fear made furious. “Then defend them with more than your ledger,” she hissed. “Come on.”

  “Drop the blade,” Eryndel said.

  “Make me.”

  The old planks were slick with the lichen that always drank dusk. Their boots—Eryndel’s practical—with friction enough for dry weather failed now. Eryndel’s heel slid an inch and she adjusted, and they shifted the struggle half a step toward the edge. Vaelis’s boots, softer and smoother so she could run silently where she chose, found less purchase. Eryndel felt the small give in Vaelis’s balance. She fixed her grip deeper, forefinger and thumb clamping the tendon that controls a hand, and pressed. The knife skittered to the side, bit into nothing. Vaelis’s mouth set in a tight line.

  Something changed in the floor beneath them as the damp overloaded the wood’s small grip. Vaelis’s right boot went first. The sole slipped sideways on lichen, and her weight followed the slip before her muscles could correct. Her center of mass went past the rail. Her left hand released its grip on Eryndel’s shoulder to catch the top of the rail. Fingers scraped. Nails tore on the roughness. The stiletto in her right hand kicked, jammed, then tore free. Eryndel, acting from some deep training that had nothing to do with ledgers, let go of the blade and lunged for her sister’s wrist.

  She caught it. For an instant, they were a chain: Eryndel on the terrace floor, knees scraping wood with splinters pressing into skin; Vaelis hinging over the rail, her ribs striking the top with a hard, hollow sound. Then the damp lichen under Eryndel’s kneecaps slid and she lost the clean purchase she needed to hold a body’s full weight. Vaelis’s wrist, slick now with the sweat that comes when the body looks down into an open space, twisted in Eryndel’s grip.

  “Hold,” Vaelis gasped, and Eryndel heard not pride, not taunt, but the raw word anyone would say.

  “I am,” Eryndel said. Her voice did not rise. That made it worse. She put all she had into her hands, her forearm, her shoulders. The rail bit the soft of Vaelis’s upper ribs and added ruin to fear. Vaelis’s boot toes scrabbled at the smooth outer face for purchase and found none.

  A new small failure split the chain. Eryndel’s left hand slipped from the tendon and caught at skin. Her right hand tried to re-grip. Another fraction of weight passed to the wrong place. The dampness on the rail, the old smooth of wood polished by hands, the slick film over lichen—all the small enemies convened. Vaelis’s body went weightless in that sick way falling bodies do. Her wrist tore free.

  Eryndel threw herself forward into the void to catch something, anything. Her chest hit the rail. Her breath left. She scraped her cheek along the same spot where the blade had cut her, burning the wound open. Her hands closed on air.

  Vaelis went over. The space below the terrace was not pure drop; a long root like a rib curved ten feet down, then another lower. Vaelis struck the first with shoulder and hip. The sound was specific and wet, not the drum of wood on wood. Her head snapped sideways into the root. That sound Eryndel would hear later with precision: the hollow crack of bone that had been part of a face. The stiletto left Vaelis’s hand and fell spinning, glinting once, then lodging with a small sound in a pocket of moss.

  Vaelis did not scream after the first impact. Her body slid and rolled off the root and dropped to the next, a shorter fall, and then the ground bed where roots braided over soil. She lay on her side with one knee drawn up, one arm bent under her in a way arms do not bend. Blood from the gash at her temple had already drenched her hair over that ear. Another line of blood came from her skull’s interior through her other ear in a thin dark track. Her chest did not move in the shallow way that means a body is stunned and will breathe again. Her neck had taken the second blow hard. It did not rest at a living angle.

  Eryndel’s body took too long to understand that the chain had broken. She found herself on her knees with her ribs pressing the rail, breath gone, then dragging itself back in bits. The guards on the far side had not looked away fast enough; now they were running, one down the narrow stair in jolting leaps, one crossing the terrace and trying to pull Eryndel back from the rail.

  “Princess,” someone was saying. It could have been the guard, Ardas, or some other voice. “Princess, step back.”

  “She fell,” Eryndel said, and heard how simple and disastrous the sentence was. She pushed herself upright. The world’s edges blurred and then sharpened. The damp that had made the lichen slick made her cut sting like salt.

  The guard reached the lower root network in time to slow and then stop. He crouched and put two fingers to Vaelis’s neck where the pulse ought to beat and then moved the fingers without looking up. He set his hand flat on her back between shoulder blades where the chest would lift and fall if it was going to. He looked up then and shook his head once at the upper guard. Eryndel watched the motion. It told a simple story.

  “Fetch healers,” the upper guard called, though his eyes said he knew.

  Eryndel went down the stair as if she were moving through syrup. It was narrow and old, and her hand touched the same slick lichen that had undone her. The cut on her cheek left a small blood trail on the inner rail. She stepped onto the root where Vaelis had made her first stop and felt the slight hope, like foolishness, that a body could survive two falls and a head strike if it were placed right. Vaelis lay where she had rolled. Her eyes were not closed. They looked at something that was not here. Eryndel knelt and put a palm to her sister’s face and felt the heat leaving, not quickly but steadily. Heat always leaves steady, the body unwilling to quit its own history until the end.

  “You,” she said, and then, “No,” and then nothing that would make the air useful.

  Healers came, fast for a place with stairs and roots and a low rail, with bags and bands and the thick calm tone of people who fix things. They checked pulse, breathing, pupil response. One healer lifted Vaelis’s eyelid and looked. The eye stared past and did not react to light. Another listened with his ear at the mouth and then at the chest. A third checked a rib near the place where she had struck the rail and found the sharpness that meant the rib had broken and gone inward. No breath had made it under it in the last minutes. The neck noted its own story. The healers looked at one another. The oldest spoke.

  “She is gone,” he said, not to Eryndel, not to anyone, but into the air where a fact should live so it wouldn’t get lost. “Neck broken. Skull fracture. Internal bleeding. Death was likely at the first impact.”

  “Likely?” Eryndel said.

  “Likely,” he repeated gently, and that word cut new.

  Guards called others. The royal signals to silence the terrace’s outer edges went out—two long bells on the small brass chimes, then a raised hand along the walkways to stop talk. A steward appeared, white-lipped, with a rank cord badly tied. Voices around the edges of the scene performed their parts. One of the guards who had first been posted spoke to the arriving captain in a slow, careful way, like a man learning to read. “I heard angry voices,” he said, reciting from a place where fear and duty meet. “The princesses. A struggle followed, brief. I saw… it looked like Princess Vaelis lunged. There was a knife. Then Princess Eryndel caught her wrist. Then the fall. Then the attempt to hold.” The other guard nodded and added, “I left my post to run the stairs when I saw the fall. I did not hear words beyond the first angry voices.” Both guards avoided Eryndel’s eyes. Eryndel stood with her hands set against her own ribcage as if she could hold her ribs in place.

  “Princess,” the captain said to her. He was a careful man with silvery hair. “We need to take your statement.”

  Eryndel looked down at her palms. The right one bore a thin smear of another’s blood from where she had touched Vaelis’s temple. Her own blood from the cheek had dried near the jawline. She said, “She came at me with a blade. I gripped her wrist and we struggled. The floor was slick. Her boot went. I tried to hold on. I lost her wrist. She fell.”

  “You struck her before she drew the blade,” the guard on the upper terrace said as if to fill the silence and be thorough even though it made him blanch.

  “I did,” Eryndel said, because it was true, because the day had begun with order and now needed it even more.

  Healers laid Vaelis on a board with a strap under her chin that did not matter anymore. They lifted her the way one lifts someone who has just fallen asleep, careful beyond the point of use. The root path to the stair was narrow; all their care amounted to keeping the body from striking again on the way up to be put where bodies are prepared. Eryndel followed and walked near enough to see and far enough to keep from touching again, because she did not trust the part of her that wanted to touch and keep touching until she found the shape of a thing that was alive inside what was not.

  The palace changed the minute the news traveled. One can feel the moment when a structure that prides itself on calm is forced to use calm as a shield. Scribes stopped mid-stroke. Messengers collected themselves from motion and put their feet down one at a time as if the floor beneath them had become new. The king’s chimes, the ones used to herald his presence in a public passage, did not sound. Instead the doors to the Hall of Counsel closed with a plain and slow finality. A hand lowered the braided cord that meant: no audience, no petition, do not knock.

  Eryndel stood on the landing outside the hall and looked at the seam where door met door. A steward she knew, Mara, younger than Eryndel by two years and usually bright, came and stood with her long enough to pass a clean cloth and a small earthen pot with healer’s salve.

  “Your cheek,” Mara said, and her voice sat carefully on its line. “Let them look at it.”

  Eryndel let a lesser healer clean the cut. It was not deep and had closed on its own. The stiletto had kissed rather than lodged. The skin’s edges were neat, as if a craftsman had scored them. The healer smeared salve and made a small prudent bandage with thin linen and a plant resin. The bandage tugged. The small pain was almost useful, something to put hands to. The healer finished and waited for Eryndel to say thank you so she could go. Eryndel remembered manners. “Thank you.”

  Serelion’s archivist, arriving too late to know that council had ended badly, met Eryndel near the stair and drew breath to ask for the king. When he saw Eryndel’s bandage and her face, he did not ask. He stepped back and bowed to the air and then went away without turning his back, a painful little dance of etiquette and grief.

  When Haelindor came out, hours after the first bell of night, he had a blankness she had seldom seen. His eyes were calm and lost. The steward tried to guide him toward the small receiving room where family matters were used to be held. He made a slight motion as if to break away and then let himself be steered into the room. Eryndel followed because there was no other clean direction to go.

  They stood with the small table between them. Its surface held small nicks where knives had been laid and lifted. Haelindor looked at his daughter’s face, the bandage, then at her hands. He did not sit.

  “She is dead,” he said. The words were not a question.

  “She is,” Eryndel said. The quiet of the room amplified the sentence until it filled the space.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  Eryndel told him. She told the small insults of morning only through the minimum facts they were: Vaelis had come to the aviary and walked on the keeper’s perches and called the birds something insulting. Eryndel had told her not to. The king’s jaw had tightened then, a small bare movement, more for the disrespect than the trespass. She told him about the evening: the smell, the smear on the trough, the three small bodies arranged on canvas with a careful tie. She told him about the terrace and about her own hand striking first. She kept her voice clean of plea and explained what she had felt without asking for it to be judged as excusing. She said the words about the knife and the cut and the struggle and Vaelis’s boot slipping. She said the words about fingers on a wrist.

  Haelindor listened, head slightly bowed, the way he listened to petitioners with real injuries to present. When she finished he let the silence stand.

  “I told you this morning to come to me,” he said finally. “To bring me misconduct. To bring me a rumor of it, even, if the risk was real.”

  “I meant to spare you,” Eryndel said, and she knew how it sounded once it left her.

  “That is not your task,” he said. His hands were not steady around the edges. “Your sister is dead. The guards heard angry voices. They saw a brief struggle. Then the fall. The healers say she died at once. They say your cut is… light.” The word crushed itself out and fell.

  “It is,” Eryndel said, looking at the table rather than at him. “Light.”

  “I cannot bear this hall,” Haelindor said suddenly and turned away as if the walls had crowded in.

  “Father,” Eryndel started, reaching out, then letting her hand lower.

  He did not look back. He left through the inner door that led to his private chamber and did not ring for any steward. The small chimes for closing an inner door sounded. The rustle of the cord told everyone nearby that audience would not be held tonight or tomorrow morning. The hall’s heart went quiet. Counselors that had pressed near the door with half-formed condolences stepped back without saying them. Words pressed against Eryndel and then left unsaid.

  It is not the nature of a quiet person to flood with sound at such times. Eryndel stood very still for a space and a half of the second bell and then turned away. She went to the aviary, because there was still something to make clean and she could not put order on anything else. She scrubbed the trough’s inner lip with harsh salts and a binding plant and then burned the wood along the lip in a controlled way and set it aside to be retired. She cleaned the basins and counted birds and added a note to her ledger that said three dead, cause unknown, probably poison, cloth with residue delivered to healers for testing. It was the kind of note that made a small neat box inside a day that had none.

  Guards came for her statement in writing. Eryndel wrote slowly to be sure the carefulness of each verb matched the thing as she had seen it. A young guard, sweat at his hairline despite the cool, asked her if Vaelis had said anything that implied intent. Eryndel considered and answered only with the words she would sign under oath: Vaelis had insulted the birds, had insulted Eryndel’s habits, had not confessed to poisoning. The guard tried to ask for more. His captain shook his head once and took the paper when she finished. Witnesses from below said they’d heard angry voices, a brief struggle, then the fall. They had seen Eryndel’s hands on Vaelis’s wrist. They had seen Eryndel fall backward onto the planks when the wrist slipped free. They had seen Vaelis hit the root, and their faces held the memory of that sound, the dull heavy crack of skull bone meeting hard wood.

  Night laid itself over the palace entirely. Watchfires along the outer ring burned steady, their low noise a comfort for people who loved routines. The bells for the late watch told their four long notes and then ceased. Eryndel went to her chamber and closed her window and sat at her desk, the ledger set aside. She took three things from the drawer: a coil of thin cord, a knife with a practical blade for cutting rope and pulling splinters, and a small linen bag with a handful of coins and a ring-seal. She placed them in a simple shoulder bag made of soft leather. She added a change of tunic, spare bandages, a small bottle of healer’s alcohol, and a rolled cloak. On impulse she added the white-blue feather from her pocket. She looked around the room where the familiar objects were patient with her: the three carved birds by the sill, the small cup from Moonwillow that caught late light, the map of the western roads marked with past seasons’ notes.

  Her cheek throbbed in time with her heart. She unwrapped the bandage and dabbed a little more salve and wrapped it again. The skin along the cut had begun to swell in the tired way skin does when it knows it is injured and decides to knit itself with or without permission. She tied the cord snug. In the small mirror above the desk she looked strange to herself but not unrecognizable. She was the person who had held a wrist and lost it. She was the person who had not gone to her father with a canvas and a cloth but had chosen a high terrace, believing in silence.

  Before dawn, she stood. The decision did not surprise her. It had been growing since the canvas had tightened around three light bodies. The palace would hold its breath all day and she would not breathe inside it. She took the shoulder bag and the cloak and kept only the essentials. The rest of her life would stay where it was for someone to inventory. The thought felt both right and cruel.

  On the way to the western approach, she passed a lower landing where a pair of apprentices had fallen asleep on a bench with their heads touching. She adjusted a blanket over their shoulders. She nodded to Ardas at the aviary; he started and opened his mouth and closed it. She climbed down through the levels where dawn had not arrived; the air cool and the torchlight steady. She passed a pair of treant handlers leading a sapling past, the young tree stepping slowly with its tenders’ coaxing murmurs. It lowered a twig as if in greeting. Eryndel touched the twig and felt absurd gratitude.

  At the western gate, the sentry on duty, a woman with a scar across her mouth that made her look angry when she was not, straightened.

  “Princess,” she said, and then, “Eryndel,” because the hour canceled titles.

  “I will be going out,” Eryndel said. The watched word for a royal leaving is “provisioned.” She was not that.

  “Alone?” the sentry asked. “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I call—”

  “No,” Eryndel said, and held the sentry’s gaze. “No bells. No names.”

  The sentry looked at the bag, the cloak, the cut on Eryndel’s cheek, and let a long breath go. “The watchfires burn on the lower bridges,” she said in a not quite whisper. “Mind your step on the lichen. It’s damp.”

  “I will,” Eryndel said, and almost smiled at the bitter smallness of it.

  The gate unfurled. She stepped onto the bridge that led west, across the river’s silver back before it turned gray with full dawn. The watchfires were banked low on the last of the night’s fuel. The bells of Fenrialis spoke then to the city, mourning bells, measured and heavy, and Eryndel understood they had rung not for her, but for Vaelis, and that the sound would ride all morning through the groves. She did not look back. The West Road took her onto the first slope beyond the roots of the capital tree, then onto the ridge toward the Forgewall Highlands, where the stone rose like the back of a sleeping creature and the air always smelled a little of iron. The lichen on the outer path was slick. She walked carefully, not because she was afraid—for she was—but because carefulness had always been the way she moved, and now she needed to know that this one part of her had not changed.

  On the first rise, she met a tinker pushing a cart with cracked wheels. He saw her bandage and offered her a strip of willow-bark with a simple nod. She thanked him and did not take it. An hour later, a caravan of three mules and a man from the Lantern Coast passed her, humming an old work-song. He nodded and did not stop. She saw a pair of Steel Guild runners from Coalkeep pounding eastward with relay satchels; they did not even glance. The city’s last high platforms fell behind. The earth road widened. The bells of Fenrialis softened with distance and then were only something the air forgot as it chose other sounds.

  Eryndel’s thoughts made neat rows and then broke them and then made them again. Once, she reached into the bag and touched the small white-blue feather and then let it go. She did not have a plan beyond the name of a direction. West, Forgewall Highlands. She knew the road and where the water sprang from under certain ferns; she knew which edges to take to avoid clay slides after rains. She knew all this because she had cataloged it when her duties included checking leaf-courier routes. Knowing did not make this leaving smaller. It did not lighten her chest.

  Light started between the trunks before it got all the way up to the canopies. Birds, not hers, turned circles over a stand of birch before dropping out of sight. In a place where the path cut between two large roots like a gate, a child sat with her feet dangling, plucking the stem of some plant until it was only pith. The child’s mother was nowhere visible. The child looked up and said, “Your face is cut,” not with fright but with a plain curiosity like a small official reporting the weather.

  “It is,” Eryndel said, and moved on.

  By the time the first line of the highland’s low pallor became a concrete line on the horizon, Eryndel’s legs had found a rhythm. Her cheek throbbed in time and then not in time and then forgot and reminded her. The city’s noises had become a habit the road could not carry. Somewhere behind, the king had gone into a room and shut a door, and Eryndel had stepped where the air didn’t know her name. That was, in this moment, both relief and punishment.

  A kestrel rode the morning wind across the road and hung there a second in a perfection of balance. It did not care about her ledger. It did not care about a small white-blue feather in a pocket. It went where its eye told it. Eryndel walked under its shadow. The West Road bent left around a stand of oaks and into a small shallow valley where the first stones that would become the Forgewall’s edges made their presence known under moss. She did not stop. The road took her. The day that had begun with routine had learned a new order, and she followed it, because that is what she knew how to do. The bells went on ringing in the city behind her, though she no longer heard them. The watchfires went out one by one. She kept her eyes on the line ahead where the highlands rose, and she did not look back.

  Episode 7 continues in Episode 20.