20

"This is them," she said.

"You are certain," soldier asked to make sure.

"I am certain," Ryska said. "I do not forget the faces of men who put their hands on me."

He nodded and drew the sheets back. Amaeren led her out afterward, back through the cold corridor, and it was only once the door had shut behind them that Ryska allowed her hands to shake.

A door further down the corridor opened onto a small, windowless room lit by lamps rather than the sun. A single table sat at its center, and behind it sat a human man, twenty of age, his eyes found Ryska before his mouth found any words.

"Shadowlord Karnaet," Amaeren said, "head of His Majesty's intelligence," she placed a hand briefly upon Ryska's shoulder and gave a gentle nod.

Ryska gathered the courage and sat down across from him. Karnaet looked at her a moment, then at Amaeren and she understood, she inclined head and left the room.

"Ryska Aen," Karnaet's eyes found her once he heard the door click shut. "Four boys are dead and you are the last woman in Aldaene known to have crossed paths with all four of them before they were," he folded his hands upon the table between them. "I find that a very interesting place for anyone to stand," he leaned forward a little. "Convince me it is not the place I think it is."

Ryska sat upright, unfazed by the storm of thoughts swirling in her mind and told him everything, in the order it had happened, left nothing softened and nothing added.

"Can anyone confirm that for you?" Karnaet asked. "That you were where you said you were the entire time.

She tried to keep her hands from pressing together as she recalled what the boy had told her.

Who in these streets would speak for you against us?

Valere sat through the lecture, wondering why she's not back? There was no reply, but a summons did come for him and Faelen, and when they arrived at Cordaelae's office, Erynae, Rhovyn, Bram, and the healer Shalmali were already present.

"The court of Paendrage has summoned all of you as witnesses," he said. "For Ryska Aen."

The name settled over the room like a stone dropped into still water.

"No one here compels you to speak," he continued. "It is your right, before that bench, to hold your silence on any matter you cannot in conscience answer. Speak plain truth, not the truth you believe will spare her, not the truth you believe will comfort her, or condemn her, or serve whatever fear or loyalty you carry into that room."

Erynae kept her eyes on the floor as she left the office with the others. She didn't want this, her name sitting anywhere near four dead boys and whatever judgment the Paendrage court meant to hand down. A trial was a stain that didn't wash out cleanly, and no one wanted to be remembered as a witness to a killing, however justified, however far removed from their own actions it had been, but her mother's voice wouldn't leave her alone.

The gods heard cowardice as clearly as lies.

Bram thought of his father, a farmer who had faced drought and debt and years hard enough to break most men, who had never once, in all of it, bent the truth to make his own path easier. He remembered watching him tell truth, when a lie would have fed them through winter.

Should I do the same? he wondered and hated that the answer felt so much heavier here than it ever had watching his father say it over a sack of grain.

Rhovyn thought of nothing so tidy, only the old question. Would he even be able to speak, when the moment came, or would he do what he always did in the things that mattered, go quiet and fail the way he always seemed to.

You were always going to be useless when it counted, his father's voice said, as clear as if he stood in the corridor with him.

Maybe he's right, he thought, and hated himself a little for how easily the thought still found its way in.

The carriage rolled to a stop in the small courtyard behind the palace, and Shalmali stepped down first, Erynae came out last, and she took her time about it.

Vast and white and grown from the mountain itself, the palace rose around her and something in her recoiled from it before she'd even set both feet on the ground. She had spent enough of her life inside walls like these, walls that looked like shelter and functioned like a cage, to trust the sight of them.

The palace itself noticed him before anyone announced it. "Your Highness," the guards along the corridor came to attention in one motion, they straightened their backs and inclined heads in unison as Valere passed.

Valere continued on toward the investigation chamber. Bram watched it happen the way he might've watched a lord's procession pass through his village as a boy.

Faelen by the time her feet touched stone, something in her posture had already changed in the exact composed frame she'd been drilled into since she was old enough to understand what it might mean to be chosen bride to Sylvaria's prince. It came to her without thought now, an old habit surfacing the moment the surroundings demanded it.

Rhovyn walked behind Bram and remembered his father telling them about Paendrage empire the way a subject king's son should learn it. He had always taken the stories for exaggeration but walking through it now, watching the whole corridor rearrange itself around one boy's presence, he understood exactly whose empire it was his own kingdom answered to.

This was the imperial house, Erynae thought, the place her tutors had spoken of while she still wore her hair in the simple braids of a child. The place every princess of the twelve lesser kingdoms was measured against and found wanting. She had been drilled, corrected, perfected for the cadence of her step, the angle of her chin and absence of expressions. She had been trained to marry one of Paendrage prince one day.

"The truth ought to be spoken," she said to Rhovyn, low enough that only he could hear, "even when some voice insists you're of no good use."

He glanced at her, he was searching something in the look.

"I'm here," she said and nodded.

A guard led them into a long antechamber off the main hall, where Teram and Amaeren already sat waiting, and gestured for the rest to take the bench along the far wall. Rhovyn sat first, then Bram, then Faelen beside him, the silence of the room settled the way it seemed to settle over everything built into this mountain.

"Erynae Sinhalaese," the guard said.

She rose, walked to door and glanced back once toward Amaeren, who stood near the far wall. Amaeren met her eyes and gave her a slow, gentle blink with a small nod, as if to say, "I’m here," and she meant it.

Erynae held onto that for exactly as long as it took the door to shut between them, and then she turned to face whatever waited on the other side of it.

She stepped inside and found Ryska already seated in the chair set to the left. Karnaet gestured to the chair opposite and she took it.

"Ryska Aen has said she was seated on the ground through the day," Karnaet said, "and that you were seated across from her, not so far removed. Is this the truth as you know it Erynae Sinhalaese?"

"She was on the grounds," Erynae said, she resented being here and it was visible in her tone. "The whole of that afternoon and evening, until the results were called."

Karnaet asked same question to Rhovyn.

His mouth opened, and for a moment nothing came. His heart was going too fast and his fingers curled into his palm beneath the table, nails pressed crescents into his own skin as though the small pain might steady the rest of him. This was it, the moment he'd been dreading since the corridor, the one where he opened his mouth and nothing worth hearing came out, same as always, same as everything.