ログインTahlia's POV"Get up, Garrick. Please. Get up off the floor and tell me why I'm alive."He didn't move. His forehead stayed pressed to the cold stone between my boots, and his thin shoulders shook. Behind me, I heard Ronan's sword shift in its sheath, and Cassian's quiet breath at the door. The healer had stopped packing her satchel.I knelt and took the old soldier by his bony arms. He weighed almost nothing. "Garrick. Look at me."He lifted his face. Tears had cut tracks through the grime on his cheeks. "I swore I'd say it to you first. Before anyone. Before I died, I'd say it to your face.""Then say all of it. Slowly."He let me help him back onto the cot. His hands shook so badly the healer pressed a cup of water into them, and he drank without tasting it. Ronan stepped closer and stopped, close enough to hear and far enough not to loom."The order came on the fourth night of the sweep," Garrick began. "Our commander called the sergeants into a farmhouse. Captain Doran Ketch, a h
Tahlia's POV"He won't speak to anyone but you."Ronan said it before I'd finished dismounting, before he kissed me, which told me how many sleepless nights he'd spent staring at that hidden room. Greywatch's courtyard lay silent under a sky the color of wet slate. I had ridden four days with a hundred soldiers and a note in my mother's handwriting burning against my ribs. The first thing my husband did was take my face in both hands, as though checking that I was real."Alive," I said."Two words would have done.""I'm told three is more romantic."A strained laugh escaped him. Then the exhaustion in his eyes turned grim. "I've questioned him for two days. Cassian's tried. Priya brought a healer and broth. He eats, he thanks us, and he won't say a word about who chained him.""Who is he?""He gave the name Garrick Vale. He claims he served in the royal guard twenty-six years ago." Ronan's jaw tightened. "He doesn't want me, Tahlia. He doesn't want a king or a council. He said, 'Bring
Ronan's POV"He signed his own name."Priya laid the border post ledger flat on the war table, and I stared at the line she'd marked in red. It was the third night since Tahlia rode north. Alaric had four days left before the council's deadline, and my stepmother's empty hiding place still sat in my chest like a stone. I had read forty pages of watch reports. This was the first line that made my blood go cold."Who signs their own name when they're breaking into a vault?" I asked."Someone who thinks the order protects him." Priya turned the page toward me. "The northern scouts kept a gate log at the old fortress. Every visitor, every escort, every pass. Dawn on the day the vault opened, a royal guard entered with a sealed authorization. Teren Hask, escort detail.""Whose authorization?""It only says 'by order of the throne.' No signature.""The throne has two seals now.""Yes, Majesty." She didn't look up. "I've already checked which one. The wax impression in the log is smudged. It
Tahlia's POV"The dust is wrong."Cassian crouched at the vault's threshold, his lantern held low, and I felt the hair rise along my arms before he explained. Behind us, the fortress courtyard lay silent under a flat gray sky. Kastor had posted fifty riders along the walls. The other fifty waited at the gate with their hands on their swords, and none of them had spoken since we passed the broken seals."Wrong how?" I asked."Look." He swept the light across the stone. "Centuries of dust, undisturbed along the walls. But down the center of the passage, a clean path. Boots, a lot of them, and something heavy dragged between them. Crates, maybe.""Someone carried everything out," Kastor said grimly."Or carried something in," Osric whispered. The old scholar stood at my shoulder, clutching his satchel like a shield, his face the color of tallow. "Luna, please. Let me go first. I've read about this door for forty years.""No.""I only mean...""I know what you mean." I took the lantern fr
Tahlia's POV"Every name. Every hand that touched the first oath, written down and sealed in stone."Osric's voice shook as he read, and the lamplight in the war room trembled with it. He had spent the night with the Elowen scroll and the scraps of Ronan's father's private notes, and he looked ten years older than he had at dinner."Say it plainly," Ronan said. "What's in the northern vault?""The Vault of Oaths. It's listed in a pre-founding index under a heading nobody ever cross-referenced." He pressed a finger to the page. "When the three houses swore the first agreement, the one Elowen refused, they sealed the original records beneath the northern fortress. The full text of the treaty. The first refusal, as she spoke it. And the signature of every person who helped draft it, in their own blood.""Every person," I repeated."Witnesses, scribes, the heads of each house. If your name appears in the oldest treaty, it appears there."Ronan's hands flattened on the table. "That's what
Ronan's POV"Take off the bracelet."My stepmother looked up from her embroidery. Selene sat by the window of her private sitting room with a lap full of green silk thread, as she did every evening since the council postponed her trial. The war had pushed her treason hearing to the bottom of every agenda. She remained confined to the north wing, not quite a prisoner, not quite free."Good evening, Ronan.""The bracelet. Now."Her fingers stilled on the needle. On her right wrist, catching the lamplight, lay a braid of blackened silver, each link ending in a tiny thorn, the clasp shaped like a wolf's open jaw. I had seen it a thousand times without once looking."You've been speaking to someone," she said."To a courier named Ilsa Venn. She described a veiled woman who paid her in gold, and she described a bracelet." I stepped closer. "Tahlia found the same one in your portrait. The portrait I stood beside when it was unveiled.""Plenty of women have thorn bracelets.""With a wolf's ja







