Chapter 8

She did not sleep.

The carriage rolled through the night without stopping, the northern road growing rougher and wilder the further they travelled from Ravenmoor, and Katina sat in the darkness long after the lantern burned low and watched the moon track slowly across the sky through the narrow window. 

Cassian had returned to his horse sometime after their conversation ended, leaving without ceremony, and she had been grateful for it, grateful for the silence and the darkness and the absence of those crimson eyes that seemed to see straight through every wall she had spent twenty-two years building.

She pressed her hand against her chest in the dark.

The faint pulse was still there. Weak, barely perceptible, like a single candle burning at the bottom of a very deep well. But alive. Stubbornly, impossibly alive despite everything the Moon Council’s witch had done to extinguish it.

She pulled her hand away and said nothing, not even inside her own mind, because some things were too dangerous to think too loudly.

By the time grey dawn bled across the horizon, the landscape outside the carriage window had changed entirely. The manicured fields and stone-walled estates surrounding Ravenmoor had given way to dense ancient forest, the trees taller and older than anything she had seen before, their roots breaking through the road’s edge like knuckles pushing through soil. 

Frost clung to every surface. The air that slipped through the carriage window’s edge was sharper here, cleaner, carrying the scent of pine and cold earth and something else beneath it, something wild and old and vast, like the land itself had a different quality this far north, as though it had never fully agreed to be civilised.

Then the trees broke open, and Katina saw it.

The Northern Palace rose from the landscape the way mountains rose — not built so much as inevitable, as though the earth had simply decided, at some point long before human hands arrived, that something enormous and immovable belonged here. 

Dark stone walls climbed four stories above a wide granite courtyard, every tower capped in black slate, narrow windows glinting like watchful eyes in the early light. It was nothing like the grand marble elegance of Ashbourne Manor. There was no ornamentation for its own sake, no decorative flourish designed to impress visiting dignitaries. Every line of it was deliberate, severe, and completely without apology, a palace built by a people who had never needed to perform their power for anyone.

Katina sat forward without meaning to, her hand pressed flat against the carriage window.

The gates opened before the convoy reached them.

Inside the courtyard, palace staff had already assembled in two straight lines, their breath misting in the cold morning air, faces carefully neutral as the King’s carriage rolled to a stop. Katina stayed where she was until the door opened from outside and one of Cassian’s guards, a broad-shouldered woman with a northern accent and the careful blankness of someone who had long since learned not to react to anything, offered her a hand down.

Katina took it, stepped onto the granite, and felt the cold go straight through the thin soles of her servant’s shoes.

She was still standing there, still absorbing the sheer scale of the walls around her, when Cassian appeared at her side. He hadn’t looked at her when he spoke his first words of the morning, his gaze moving over his assembled staff with the practiced efficiency of a man accounting for things.

“Lady Maren.” A tall woman near the front of the line stepped forward, silver-streaked hair pulled back severely, posture impeccable. “She’ll need a room in the east wing. Something with a fire already lit.” He paused. “And clothing. Whatever she requires.”

Lady Maren’s eyes moved to Katina once, brief and assessing, and then she nodded. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“She is a guest of this palace,” Cassian said, and his voice carried the particular quality of a statement being made rather than an instruction being given. “She is to be treated accordingly by every member of this household. Is that understood?”

A murmur of assent moved down both lines.

He finally looked at Katina then, and something in his expression was difficult to name, not warmth, not quite, but the deliberate absence of coldness, which in a man like him amounted to the same thing. “Lady Maren will show you to your rooms. Rest. You’ve been awake all night.”

Katina opened her mouth to ask how he knew that, then decided against it. “Thank you,” she said instead, because whatever his reasons were, the words were still true, and she was too exhausted to be proud about receiving them.

She followed Lady Maren inside.

The east wing corridor was wide and lined with dark wood panelling, iron sconces casting steady amber light across stone floors softened by long woven rugs in deep burgundy and grey. Lady Maren walked at a pace that suggested she had places to be after this and was committed to getting there, and Katina matched it, taking in everything she passed with the careful attention of someone who understood that knowing a place’s layout was a form of survival.

The room at the end of the corridor was larger than the entire servants’ quarters beneath Ashbourne Manor.

A fire burned in a stone hearth broad enough to stand inside. The bed was canopied in dark fabric, the writing desk beside the window solid oak, the bookshelves along the far wall already stocked with volumes whose spines she couldn’t read from the doorway. Everything in the room was heavy and real and built to last, nothing decorative, nothing fragile, nothing chosen to impress. It simply existed, solidly and without pretence, and for reasons she couldn’t entirely explain that made her throat tighten in a way that Ashbourne Manor’s gilded ceilings never had.

“Clothing will be brought within the hour,” Lady Maren said from the doorway. “Meals are served in the east dining room or brought here, whichever you prefer. If you need anything—”

“Lady Maren.” Katina turned from the fire. “How long have you served the King?”

The older woman paused, reading the question beneath the question with the shrewdness of someone who had spent decades in royal service. “Thirty years,” she said.

“Has he ever done this before?” Katina held her gaze. “Brought someone back like this.”

Lady Maren was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully, she said, “No.” A beat of silence. “He has not.” She pulled the door shut behind her without another word.

Katina stood alone in the firelight.

She crossed to the window. Below, the courtyard had emptied, the convoy dispersed, the granite swept clean by the wind coming down from the northern peaks. She could see the treeline from here, the dense ancient forest surrounding the palace on three sides, and beyond it nothing but grey sky and distance and the suggestion of mountains somewhere far ahead.

She pressed her forehead lightly against the cold glass.

Behind her, the fire crackled steadily, and “beneath her palm.. pressed flat against the window, her breath misting the glass”, she felt it again. That faint pulse. That impossible heartbeat that the Sealing was supposed to have silenced forever.

Stronger than last night.

She pulled her hand back slowly and stared at it, at the fading mate mark still ghosting her wrist, at the faint silver shimmer beneath the skin of her palm that hadn’t been there yesterday, that she was almost certain hadn’t been there an hour ago… 

She felt the first cold tendril of something that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite hope curl quietly through her chest.

Then a knock at her door.

She turned. “Come in.”

The door opened, and it wasn’t Lady Maren.

It was a young palace physician, his medical bag already open in his hands, his expression professionally composed, but his eyes, when they found hers, carried something underneath the composure that made her go very still.

Urgency. Barely concealed.

“His Majesty asked that I attend to you,” he said. “A routine examination. Purely precautionary.” He stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him, and then his voice dropped entirely. “Miss Ashbourne, I need you to listen to me very carefully, and I need you to stay calm.” He held her gaze. “The King doesn’t know I’m about to tell you this. No one does.”

Katina’s pulse spiked. “Tell me what?”

The physician set his bag down on the writing desk, his hands moving with careful deliberateness, and when he looked back up his expression had lost the last trace of professional neutrality.

“You arrived here last night,” he said quietly. “But a rider arrived three hours before you did.” A pause. “From Ravenmoor.” His jaw tightened. “Miss Ashbourne… someone in this palace sent word to the Moon Council the moment the King’s convoy left the city gates.”

The fire crackled in the hearth.

Katina felt the blood leave her face.