Chapter 3 What the Prince Did Not Say

"I understand that. I still need to see him."

"Can you tell me why?"

I held her gaze. "Not yet."

She was still for a moment. Then she said, "Finish the I did not sleep after the note.

I folded it into quarters and pressed it flat between my palm and the mattress and lay there until the fire went completely cold and the room shifted from dark to the particular grey that came just before dawn. My mind ran the same loop until the loop wore grooves.

You are not the first girl they have brought here with that magic.

The last one did not leave.

By the time pale light started pushing through the window glass I had made two decisions. The first was that I would not go to Mira with this. Not yet. I did not know her well enough to know what she would do with information like this, and Mira had already told me she had been in this palace since she was fourteen. Fourteen years of surviving somewhere meant fourteen years of making calculated choices about loyalty. I could not assume those calculations would fall in my direction.

The second decision was that I needed to talk to Kael.

Not because I trusted him. I did not trust him. But he was the one who had brought me here and whatever was in that note connected to something he either knew or needed to know, and sitting alone in a room with it was not going to tell me anything useful.

I washed my face in the basin on the windowsill, changed into the grey dress Mira had left  it fit well enough, plain enough, nothing that announced itself  and sat in the chair by the dead fire and waited for morning to properly arrive.

Mira came at what I estimated was two hours past dawn, moving with the brisk purpose of someone who had a schedule and intended to keep it. She stopped when she saw me already dressed and sitting upright and gave me a look that registered the sleeplessness without commenting on it.

"You are awake," she said.

"I need to see Kael," I said.

A pause. She set down the small tray she had brought  bread, something hot in a clay cup  and looked at me with those quick dark eyes doing their quiet assessment. "His Highness has a morning schedule."

bread first. I will send a message to his attendant."

They kept me waiting for an hour.

I used the time to walk the section of corridor Mira had told me was permitted. Three intersections, a window at each end, six doors of which two were storage and four were rooms like mine  empty, as far as I could tell. The palace was not quiet in the way the outside had seemed quiet. It had sounds, just organized ones. Footsteps that moved in patterns. Distant voices that never got close enough to make out. Somewhere below, something that might have been kitchens  the muffled rhythm of work.

I was learning the shape of the place the only way I knew how. From the inside, on foot, through what my own senses could gather.

I was at the far end of the corridor when Mira appeared at the near end and nodded once.

They took me to a different room than the night before.

This one was smaller. More functional. A desk covered in papers, a bookcase that covered an entire wall, two chairs angled toward each other near a window that looked out over a section of the palace's inner wall. No tapestries. No candles arranged for effect. Just a working space, which told me something  that this was where he actually spent his time rather than where he received people.

Kael was standing at the bookcase when I came in. He turned, took me in with that same single comprehensive look, and gestured toward the chairs.

This time I sat without the argument. I needed something from him. Performing stubbornness when I needed something was a waste of both our time.

He sat across from me. Waited.

I took the note from where I had folded it inside my sleeve and set it on the low table between us.

He looked at it without touching it. Read it where it lay. His expression did not change in any dramatic way  but something in the quality of his stillness shifted. Became different. The stillness of someone absorbing a hit rather than simply waiting.

"Where did this come from?" he asked.

"Under my door. Last night, late. The footsteps were gone before I could open the door."

"Did you recognise the handwriting?"

"I have been here less than a day," I said. "I do not know anyone's handwriting."

He picked the note up then. Held it and looked at it and I watched his face and found almost nothing I could read with any confidence. Whatever he was feeling about those five lines, he had put it somewhere I could not see.

"Who is Sera?" I asked.

He set the note down. "Where did you hear that name?"

"It is written on the paper in your hand."

"That is not a name I have heard in that context," he said. "The note says Sera. I want to know if you heard the name spoken anywhere else since you arrived."

"I have spoken to three people since I arrived. You, the soldiers who brought me here, and Mira." I held his gaze. "Mira mentioned a Lady Seraphine. Is that the same person?"

The quality of his stillness shifted again. "Why did Mira mention Seraphine?"

"She told me Seraphine had asked about me within two hours of my arrival. She said I should be careful about what I said and to whom." I paused. "She said it like a warning."

Kael was quiet for long enough that I started counting the seconds. I reached eleven before he spoke.

"Seraphine is the King's primary advisor," he said. "She has held that position for eleven years. She is highly intelligent, deeply experienced, and one of the most politically capable people in this court." A pause. "She is also someone whose interests do not always align with mine, and whose methods I do not always fully understand, even when I can observe the results."

"That is a careful way of saying something," I said.

"It is an accurate way of saying it."

"Is she dangerous?"

He looked at me steadily. "Most people in this palace are dangerous in some way. Seraphine is dangerous in the way that patient people are dangerous  her moves are difficult to see until they have already happened."

I thought about that. "The note says to ask you about Sera, not Seraphine. Are they the same?"

Something moved across his face then. The first thing I had seen on his face that was not controlled. It was brief  a tightening around the eyes, a compression at the corners of his mouth  and it was gone before I could fully read it. But I caught the shape of it.

It was grief.

"Sera," he said, and his voice came out exactly the same as before, "was a name used by someone who is no longer in this palace."

"Who?"

He stood. Moved to the window and looked out at the inner wall and the pale morning sky above it. His back was straight and his hands were at his sides and everything about his posture said this conversation is finished.

I waited anyway.

"Her name was Seraphine also," he said finally, still facing the window. "My sister used that name for her. It was a private thing  an affectionate shortening. Very few people knew it." He stopped. "My sister has been dead for three years."

The room was completely still.

"I am sorry," I said. I meant it, which surprised me slightly  I had not expected to mean it, not yet, not with someone I had no reason to feel anything for. But the grief I had caught on his face before he put it away was real and I recognised real grief in the way you recognised something you had carried yourself.

He did not respond to the condolence. "The note was written by someone who knew my sister personally," he said. "Who knew a name that was not used in public and is not recorded anywhere I am aware of." He turned back from the window. "Which means the person who sent you this message either knew her directly or has access to information about her that very few people have."

"You said she died three years ago." I held his gaze. "How?"

"The official record says it was an accident." His voice was flat. "A fall. In this building."

"And unofficially?"

"Unofficially," he said, "I have spent three years trying to prove what I already know." He came back to the chair but did not sit in it  stood behind it, both hands resting on the back, and looked at me with an expression that was not quite a decision but was close to one. Like someone standing at a door, hand on the handle, not yet turning it. "I have not shared that with anyone in this palace."

"Why are you sharing it with me?"

"Because someone sent you that note," he said. "Someone who knows things they should not know, who wants me to talk to you about Sera, who knew you were here within hours of your arrival." He paused. "And because your magic matches the curse signature, and my sister's magic matched it too."

The breath went out of me.

I sat with that for a moment. Felt it land. Felt the weight of what it meant rearrange something in my understanding of why I was here.

"She had the same magic," I said.

"Yes."

"And she is dead."

"Yes."

"And someone sent me a note telling me to ask about her."

"Yes."

I looked down at the note still lying on the table between us. The small angular handwriting pressed hard into the page. The last one did not leave.

"They are warning me," I said quietly. "Whoever sent this  they are not threatening me. They are warning me."

Kael said nothing. But he did not disagree.

I picked the note up and held it and thought about the seven years I had spent making myself small and careful and invisible and how none of it had mattered in the end, because something larger than my caution had been moving toward me regardless. Something that had already found one girl with this magic and taken her apart.

"I need to know everything," I said. "Everything you know about your sister's death, about the curse, about Seraphine. All of it." I met his eyes. "If I am going to be in this palace I need to understand what I am actually inside."

"That is a significant amount of information."

"Yes," I said. "And you need me here, which means we need each other, which means the information moves in both directions or not at all."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Agreed," he said.

It should have felt like progress. Instead it felt like standing at the top of something very steep and looking down and understanding for the first time exactly how far there was to fall.

He reached into the papers on his desk and pulled out a file  old, the edges of the pages soft with handling  and set it on the table between us.

"My sister's name was Lysa," he said. "She was seventeen when she died. These are the investigation notes I have compiled since then." He paused. "Read them. Then we will talk."

I reached for the file.

The first page was a diagram. A magical signature, drawn in precise careful lines by someone who understood what they were documenting.

It matched mine exactly.

I had seen my own magic leave traces before  in desperate moments, in the brief seconds after use when the air still held the shape of what had moved through it. I knew what my signature looked like the way you knew your own handwriting.

This was identical.

I looked up at Kael. He was watching me with an expression that was still careful, still controlled, but beneath it  beneath the control, in the place where the grief had briefly surfaced earlier  I saw something else now.

Fear.

Not of me. For me.

And somehow that was worse than anything else that had happened since the market.