Chapter 47 — What Seraphine Carried

I returned to Vale that evening with the record book carefully wrapped and hidden beneath my cloak, Garrick's reluctant blessing to borrow it weighing almost as heavily as the book itself, and found Seraphine waiting in my room, restless in a way that told me something had happened in my absence.

"Vane asked about you today," she said, the moment I'd closed the door. "Where you'd gone. Why Kael's riders had been seen at our gate two mornings running. I told him you were visiting a sick relative in the eastern villages. I don't think he believed me."

"Did he push further?"

"Not directly. He's too careful for that." Seraphine's hands twisted together, the old nervous gesture I had come to recognize as genuine rather than performed. "But he asked Father, over supper, whether House Vale had any connection to the old Ashworth line. Casually, as though it were idle historical curiosity. Father had never heard the name before in his life, Liora — I watched his face, he genuinely hadn't — but Vane watched him just as closely as I was watching Vane, and I don't think the ignorance satisfied him."

My stomach tightened. "He's narrowing in."

"I think he's been narrowing in for longer than either of us realized," Seraphine said. "I think the ambush wasn't desperation, the way Arlen suggested. I think it was Vane testing exactly how much protection surrounded you, and exactly how far he'd need to go to separate you from it." She sat heavily on the edge of my bed, some of her usual bright composure finally cracking under the accumulated weight of the past weeks. "I'm frightened, Liora. I don't say that easily. I've spent three years being the strong one, the one who manages, the one who carries secrets so you wouldn't have to. I don't know how much longer I can keep doing that alone."

"You're not alone," I said, sitting beside her, and meant it more fully than I had at any point since waking into this second life. "Whatever this becomes, we face it together now. That was the whole point of the chapel, wasn't it? No more pieces kept in shadow."

Seraphine managed a small, tired smile. "It was easier to say that in a ruined chapel at midnight than it is to actually live it, day after day, with Vane watching every meal and every careless word."

"Then we get better at living it," I said. "Together. Starting now." I drew the record book from beneath my cloak and showed her the final pages — Arlen's name, the sketch of the pendant, the unfinished warning about greater cost. Seraphine read it in silence, her face growing graver with every line, and when she finished, she looked up at me with something fierce and protective in her eyes that I recognized, with a small ache, as exactly the expression I imagined our mother might once have worn.

"Whatever that cost turns out to be," Seraphine said, "I want to understand it before you ever have to pay it. Promise me that much, Liora. Don't go reaching for answers alone, not with something this unfinished hanging over what it might take from you."

"I promise," I said, and meant it in the moment I said it, with the full weight of our mother's unfinished warning still fresh in my hands.

Seraphine studied me a moment longer, as though weighing whether the promise would hold against whatever desperate curiosity might eventually test it, and then nodded, some of the day's tension finally easing from her shoulders. "Vane leaves for a council matter in the eastern territories tomorrow," she said, changing the subject with visible relief. "Three days, perhaps four. It's the longest he's been away from Vale since he arrived."

"That's an opportunity," I said slowly, turning the thought over. "A chance to search his chambers properly, without worrying about him returning unexpectedly."

"It's also exactly the kind of thing Arlen would tell you not to attempt alone," Seraphine said, with the particular dry tone she'd begun using more often these past days, the tone of a woman who had decided trust meant occasionally arguing rather than simply agreeing. "If you're going to search his rooms, you're not doing it without me standing watch. That's not a request, Liora. That's the new terms, now that I'm finally allowed to know what I'm protecting you from."

I found myself smiling despite the gravity of everything we'd discussed — a small, genuine thing, the first in what felt like days. "Those are fair terms."

"Good," Seraphine said, rising from the bed with renewed purpose. "Then get some sleep. If we're doing something reckless in three days' time, I'd rather you do it well-rested than exhausted and prone to the kind of mistakes that get people caught."

She paused at the door, her hand resting on the frame the way it had the night she'd first told me about Arlen, and looked back at me with an expression that carried more vulnerability than she usually allowed herself. "I'm glad you're letting me in on this, Liora. All of it. I know it probably doesn't feel like much, compared to everything else you're carrying right now, but it matters to me more than I know how to say properly."

"It matters to me too," I said, and found, watching her slip out into the darkened corridor, that the warmth of the admission lingered long after the door had clicked shut behind her — a small, steady comfort against the much larger uncertainty pressing in from every other direction of my strange, doubled life.

I did not sleep easily that night, despite her advice, my mind circling back again and again to the unfinished warning in Garrick's wife's handwriting, to the cold presence that had brushed against my own attention through the boundary stone, to a mother I was only now beginning to understand had died protecting something far larger than either of her daughters had ever been told to imagine. Sleep found me eventually, thin and restless, and I woke the next morning already turning over the question of what, precisely, we might find in Vane's chambers once he was finally, safely, three days' ride away.