جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 10

Lyra's POVI learned early that mornings belonged to me.Not because anyone gave them to me. Because no one else wanted them.I got up before the sun, dressed in the dark, and slipped out of my room before the house woke. I took the side staircase down to the kitchen. I had stopped using the main one years ago, after a visiting noble walked past me twice in the same hallway without noticing that I was there.The side stairs were fine. They were quieter anyway.In the kitchen, I helped myself to bread and tea. Through the corridor, I could see the family dining room's long table, polished chairs, and two place settings already arranged for breakfast.Not three.It had always been two.I ate standing at the kitchen counter and didn't think about it.By the time I went back upstairs, Elara's room was already alive.I could hear it from the corridor: voices, the clink of perfume bottles, and the rustle of fabric being adjusted. Someone laughed. Then my sister's voice, low and warm, answer

Lyra's POVThe throne room doors were already open when we arrived.That was the first thing I noticed. Not the guards flanking the entrance, not the long walk down the corridor that the palace guard had led me through in silence to the doors. Open and waiting, as though someone had known exactly how long the ceremony would take and had arranged everything around that timeline.I walked in.Queen Isolde was already seated.Not on the throne that was Ronan's—it sat empty on its raised platform at the far end of the room. She had taken the chair positioned to the right of it, the one reserved for the queen mother during formal proceedings. She sat with her back straight and her hands resting in her lap, and her expression was exactly as it had been in the ceremony hall: composed, unhurried, the picture of a woman who had been expecting this meeting.There were four court officials standing in a row to the left, all of them in formal dress, all of them looking at the middle distance betw

Lyra's POVDawn came whether I was ready for it or not.I had not slept. By the time the sky outside my window started to change color, the exhaustion had passed through me and come out the other side as a flat, grey numbness. I washed my face with cold water, changed out of the gown I had spent the night in, and put on the dress that had appeared outside my door sometime in the early hours.Plain white. Nothing decorative. The kind of thing chosen by someone who needed a task completed, not a person prepared.I pinned my hair back myself.I had gotten very good at that.The wedding hall was smaller than the ceremony hall.That was probably deliberate. Fewer seats. Fewer witnesses. The kind of space chosen when the event being held in it is a formality that needs to be completed rather than a moment that needs to be marked. The candles were lit when I arrived, the officiant already in position at the front.I walked in alone.No family beside me. No one holding my arm or matching my p

Lyra's POVBy the time the sun came through the east window, I had already been awake for an hour.I dressed in the grey morning light, chose the plainest thing in the small wardrobe that had been stocked before my arrival, and made a decision: I was going to learn this Keep on my own. No guide, no Gretel waiting in the corridor with a schedule. I hadn't asked for one, and I wasn't going to start now.I had spent years learning spaces that didn't particularly want me in them.I could manage one morning.I found the kitchens on the first try, ground floor, back of the main building, warm and smelling of bread and woodsmoke. A young woman handed me a cup of tea without being asked and decided not to make conversation. I appreciated that, took the tea, and went outside.The main courtyard was different from how it had looked the night before.Last night it had been lined with watching wolves and heavy silence. Now it was full of movement: wolves crossing between buildings, horses being l

Lyra's POVI stood at that window for a long time.The courtyard stayed empty. The torches burned. The forest beyond the walls gave nothing away. Eventually the feeling of being watched faded enough that I could move away from the glass, but it didn't disappear entirely. It just settled into the back of my mind and stayed there, quiet and persistent, like a sound you can't quite identify but can't stop hearing either.I went to bed with it still there.By morning, I had made a decision.If something in Blackthorne was paying attention to me, then I was going to pay attention right back.I had noticed Maret on the third day.She had been assigned to my personal care the morning after I arrived, quiet, efficient, and unremarkable in the way that people are when they have learned to be unremarkable on purpose. She laid out my clothes, tidied my Chambers, and brought water for washing. She did everything she was supposed to do without being asked and without drawing attention to herself.