“I’ve been thinking about this since last night,” Lambert said, “and I think we have a great deal of work to do today, so I’ll be brief.” He looked around the table. “I have a plan. You’re not going to like all of it.”
“Encouraging start,” Wylan said. He had his coffee and looked like he needed it.
The council room held five. Maximilian at the head, correspondence abandoned, the faint warmth in the air that meant he was keeping himself very still. Laila with her hands folded. Isabella and Wylan opposite each other.
The chair where Mirembe had sat was empty.
“The vendetta is a problem,” he said, “but not the one we think it is. A vendetta is old law. Pre-reformation. Since the Church established the tenets of reason, resolving disputes by blade has rather lost its currency. The Church has proper judicial instruments now. Nobody invokes vendetta any more.” He paused. “And yet someone inside the hierarchy approved this one. Sanctioned it. Sealed it.”
He let that sit.
“You think someone in the Church is helping d’Aubigne,” Wylan said.
“I think someone in the Church had to approve it. And we already have a number of threads pointing to someone acting against us within the hierarchy.”
“You think it’s Vaziri,” Laila said.
“I don’t know. And for our immediate purposes, I don’t think it matters.”
Maximilian’s fingers drummed the table. “What do you propose?”
“We override it. There’s a mechanism called Tribune. An ecclesiastical court hearing that would supersede the vendetta because it’s part of the reformed laws, which take precedence. If we invoke it, the Church adjudicates formally. Both houses examined. Both houses judged.” He kept his voice level. Both houses. The words had kept him up most of the night. “Whoever approved the vendetta cannot block a tribunal without exposing their hand.”
“Both houses examined,” Maximilian repeated. “Under theurgic compulsion.”
“Yes.”
“Theurgic truth. Compelled honesty.”
“Yes.”
Lambert had done the same arithmetic himself, most of the night, and the numbers came out the same way every time. If we can demonstrate that d’Aubigne is a dragon cultist, we have the upper hand. But House de Vaillant was not without its own incriminating secrets. He just had to gamble that they wouldn’t ask the wrong questions.
“House d’Aubigne I could face.” Maximilian’s fingers stopped drumming. “A vendetta has rules and honour.”
“That’s precisely the problem,” Lambert said. “A vendetta is both dangerous and distracting. We’d be drawn into an internecine fight, duels, open challenges, and while we’re watching the blade in plain sight, we’re not watching the one behind our backs.” He paused. “We believe d’Aubigne orchestrated the attack on our estate. I would not rely upon her maintaining her honour in conduct. Tribune takes this out of her hands entirely.”
“So instead of meeting d’Aubigne on the field of her choosing, we pull her into one of our own,” Laila said quietly.
“Precisely. Which is why, before we invoke Tribune, we need to make very certain that d’Aubigne has more to hide than we do. We need evidence. Hard evidence.”
And we need it today, he did not add, because every day we wait is a day someone inside the Church has to prepare for us.
“I have an idea,” Laila said. “We can counter one rumour with another. What if the salon circuit were to hear that d’Aubigne has connections to the dragon cult?” She smiled. “There’s a certain irony in weaponising the truth against her lies.”
“You realise,” Lambert said, “that if you’re caught seeding a rumour just before we invoke Tribune, it will reflect very badly on this house.”
“Ah, but you see,” Laila said, and drew a small pot of green pigment from her sleeve. She uncapped it, traced a line across the back of her hand, and the air shimmered. For a moment, the woman sitting at the council table was not Laila de Vaillant but someone else entirely: softer features, powdered curls, an expression of mild scandal. “It won’t be Laila de Vaillant spreading such rumours. It will be Amelia Braithwaite. Widowed. Modest fortune. An eye for gossip.”
The illusion flickered and settled. Lambert had to admit it was convincing.
“There’s an intelligence broker,” Laila said, and her tone shifted to something more careful. “The Marquise de Pompadour. Madeleine de Hiver. She runs an establishment near the docks called the Rogue’s Gallery. If mercenary contracts exist in this city, they pass through her records.”
“Why haven’t we gone to her before?” Lambert said.
“Because she’s the one I hired Phaedra from.” Laila paused. “And I don’t actually know where the Gallery is. Guillaume put me in touch with Madeleine, and she visited me. I’ve only ever heard of the place.”
“I’ll find it,” Isabella said. “Guillaume taught me how to read the docks. It would be easier if he were in Pharelle, but I’ll manage.”
“Actually,” Wylan said, “I was thinking of staying home and working with Divina to bolster our physical defences. If we’re about to antagonise d’Aubigne directly, I’d rather not get caught out by another assault.”
Isabella nodded. “I’ll go alone. It’s cleaner.”
Maximilian looked at Lambert. “And you? What’s your part in all this? Pay the Church a visit, I suppose?”
Lambert smiled. “I think it’s time the Inquisition paid House d’Aubigne a visit.”
The rain had found a new register since morning, colder and more committed. It got between cloak and collar and stayed there. Near the docks it was worse. The air was raw, cutting to the bone, the tang of salt mingling with the acrid bite of burning coal: the sort of weather that either deepened one’s resolve or sent sensible people home for tea.
Isabella adjusted her scarf and pressed on, evidently choosing the former.
She moved through the narrow streets with purpose, reading the walls as she went. Laila didn’t know that Guillaume had walked her through alleys like these when she was fifteen, teaching her to read the signs that polite society pretended didn’t exist.
Thief marks scratched into doorframes. Chalk symbols on cobblestones that told you which buildings were watched and which doors were unlocked because they wanted to be. Guillaume could have led her straight to the Gallery’s front door. Without him, she followed the marks instead, and they told the same story his lessons always had: follow the money downhill.
The Rogue’s Gallery announced itself to those who knew where to look: a faint scrawl on weathered brick, the words blending almost seamlessly into the stone.
The front door had a man on it. He wasn’t large, wasn’t visibly armed, and was doing an excellent impression of a man who happened to be standing in a doorway. Isabella watched him turn away three people in ten minutes, each time with a brief exchange she couldn’t hear. Clients, then. By invitation or introduction. Neither of which she had.
She circled the building. The ground floor windows were shuttered and, she suspected, barred. But the building shared a wall with a chandler’s shop on its east side, and the chandler had a delivery hatch on the upper floor that opened onto a shared roof gutter. The hatch was latched from inside, but the latch was old, and old latches had opinions about cold weather.
It took her three minutes. Guillaume would have done it in one, but Guillaume had longer fingers.
She dropped into a storeroom that smelled of tallow and dust, found the connecting door, and emerged onto an upper gallery overlooking the main floor of the Gallery below. From here she could see everything without being part of it.
The place was a tangled maze of tables, booths, and shadowed alcoves, each occupied by figures radiating the quiet menace of professionals.
Isabella’s gaze swept the room, cataloguing exits, threats, sight lines. Two exits visible, a third probable behind the bar, fourteen patrons, most armed, none paying her any attention. Good.
Then she saw the woman.
She sat at a table near the back, not in shadow but in light she had clearly chosen. Dark hair, sharp features, an expression of cultivated disinterest. Her eyes missed nothing.
Dressed to communicate wealth without inviting questions about its source. Two men flanked her, both armed, both watching the room with the focused blankness of professionals.
Madame de Pompadour. Madeleine de Hiver. Isabella filed the face away and moved on.
The ledger sat on a small desk in the far corner, its cover plain but worn, its edges curled from frequent handling.
The figure behind it, a wiry man with a permanent scowl, was engrossed in an argument with a patron whilst something in the back room produced an alarming quantity of smoke.
The ledger slipped under her cloak as smoothly as a bad idea voiced at a family gathering.
? The Rogue’s Gallery maintained a strict policy against theft of its own records. They also prohibited murder on the main floor, which was observed with roughly the same consistency.
She found a shadowed corner and worked fast. The ledger was a brokerage record, not a personal diary: requisitions, fees, operatives available, operatives retained. The entries were encoded in shorthand that Guillaume had taught her to read.
She found the requisition first. A commission placed three weeks before the attack on their estate, requesting six operatives by specialisation: a cleric for cleansing operations, a warrior for shock deployment, an illusionist for decoys, a monk for eliminations, a rogue for retrieval, and a generalist endorsed simply as always delivers.
The client was listed under a codename that wasn’t trying very hard. La Comtesse Noire.
She cross-referenced the requisition against the sketches in the operative listings. The faces matched. Every one of them: the mercenaries who had come through the walls of their home.
One sketch had a heavy line scored through it. The elven rogue, Soren. Isabella remembered him, and the arrow.
Isabella drew her dagger. The blade caught a faint glimmer of lantern light as she sliced both pages cleanly from the ledger, smoothed them flat, and tucked them inside her coat. The book went back.
She was three streets away before the ledger-keeper returned to his station, covered in soot and coughing faintly. He stared at the slightly skewed alignment of the pages.
“Bloody fire,” he muttered, none the wiser.
Around the corner from the Pharellian salon, Laila paused to steady herself.
“Amelia Braithwaite,” she murmured under her breath. “Widowed. Modest fortune. An eye for scandal. Loves a bitter brew.” She adjusted her cloak and glanced down to ensure her clothing matched the fabricated persona. “Flawless,” she assured herself, though the quaver in her voice suggested otherwise.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
She drew a small brush from inside her sleeve and worked quickly, tracing pigment across her cheekbones, along the bridge of her nose, down the line of her jaw. Green for the base layer, ochre for warmth, a touch of violet at the temples for age. The Enchanter’s craft was precise work, each stroke a deliberate instruction: this is what you see. This is what you believe. In the rain-specked reflection of a window, she watched her features transform. Softer cheekbones. Powdered curls. A face that belonged to someone who attended salons because she had nothing better to do.
She practised an imperious tilt of her head. “Not too much, Laila. Amelia is discreet.”
Satisfied, she stepped out of the shadows.
The rain met her immediately. It was colder than it had been this morning, more insistent, and it found the pigment on her face with the thoroughness of a critic. The colour ran in thin rivulets down her temples, taking the illusion with it. The borrowed features softened, blurred, and quietly dissolved.
Laila, chin high, walked on. Utterly convinced her disguise was flawless.
A competent Enchanter would have accounted for the weather. Laila was a very competent Enchanter. But competence required focus, and focus required a mind that wasn’t turning over the same thought on a loop: I caused this. The vendetta exists because of what I did in the salons, and here I am, doing it again. The guilt sat behind her eyes like a headache she couldn’t shake, occupying exactly the space where she should have noticed her face was running.
The salon’s golden glow spilled onto the cobbled street, its windows alive with candlelight. Inside, Pharelle’s most ambitious socialites gathered amid the clink of porcelain teacups, the rustle of fans, and the hum of intellectual sparring.
Into this strode Laila.
The room fell silent. Not the companionable silence of shared understanding, but the exquisite silence of a social catastrophe in progress. Every head turned as they recognised Madame de Vaillant beneath a faint smear of green pigment and borrowed confidence.
Recovering swiftly, Laila swept an elegant curtsey. “Mesdames,” she began, her voice carrying the poise of a seasoned performer. “What a delight to join such a distinguished gathering.”
The assembled crowd, far too polite to call out such an obvious masquerade, leaned in with the enthusiasm of spectators at an amateur play. The sight of Madame de Vaillant pretending to sow gossip under a false name was scandal enough to fuel their conversations for weeks.
Seated near the centre of the room, Laila accepted a porcelain cup of steaming chocolate from a footman. She joined a group of artfully dishevelled ladies, affecting the manners of the identity she believed she still wore.
“You’ve heard about the vendetta, of course,” she said, her tone suggesting she was merely confirming what everyone already knew. “Dreadful business. But I find myself wondering.” She paused, tilting her cup. “A vendetta over salon gossip? Doesn’t that strike you as rather disproportionate? Unless the Countess is trying to ensure nobody looks too closely at her affairs.”
A rustle of silk, and the faint clatter of a dropped spoon.
“I have it on good authority,” Laila continued, drawing the circle closer, “that the Countess has made several private visits to the Mountains of Auvergne. Unaccompanied. At considerable expense to keep them quiet.”
The Mountains of Auvergne. Where a dragon had made her lair. Every person in this room knew that story. Laila didn’t need to say more. She could see the connections forming behind powdered faces, the slow widening of eyes.
“Curious?” echoed a powdered gentleman, his wig tilting precariously as he leaned forward. “My dear Madame Braithwaite, that is rather more than curious.”
“And there’s the matter of the attacks,” Laila added, as though the thought had only just occurred to her. “The d’Amboise estate fire and the assault on the de Vaillant home. The same day, if you can imagine.”
“Surely you’re not suggesting the Countess was behind both?”
“I’m merely observing,” Laila said, “that both families have been outspoken against dragon cultists, and both their houses were struck shortly after the Countess visited the de Vaillant estate.” She sipped her chocolate. “It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it’s all coincidence. I’m sure the Countess would say so.”
The libel sent ripples through the group, murmurs that would soon echo through the city’s drawing rooms and boudoirs. Laila watched the implications take root with each exchanged glance, like weeds finding purchase in fertile scandal.
Her triumph was short-lived. A voice cut through the rising din.
“My dear Madame,” purred Enzo Valerius, the self-appointed host of the salon and its most notorious rumourmonger. A Bard of no small renown, whose words could skewer reputations as easily as his lyre could pluck at heartstrings. “You do seem remarkably well-informed for someone so... discreet.”
Laila froze. The smile plastered across her face faltered for a fraction of a second before she regained composure.
“One picks up little things here and there,” she replied smoothly.
Enzo’s knowing smirk, and the poorly stifled snickers from a few bold participants, said everything.
Laila excused herself with the poise of a woman who had meant to leave at exactly this moment. She made it as far as the entrance hall before she caught her reflection in a gilt-framed mirror.
The green pigment had run in long streaks down her cheeks. She looked less like Amelia Braithwaite and more like a woman who had been crying in watercolours.
For one terrible moment she stood very still.
Then she moved. The blue pigment was in the inner pocket of her sleeve, reserved for emergencies she had been certain would never arise. She uncapped it, pressed her thumb into the paste, and traced a symbol on the inside of her wrist. The Enchanter’s craft for memory was delicate work, a suggestion rather than a command: you remember a woman called Braithwaite. Powdered curls. Modest fortune. You do not remember Laila de Vaillant.
She pushed the working outward and felt it settle across the salon like a fine mist.
A room this size, two dozen guests, perhaps more. Some would take the suggestion cleanly. Others would retain fragments, a nagging sense that something wasn’t quite right, a face that didn’t match the name they recalled.
And Enzo was a Bard. His mind was trained to resist exactly this kind of influence. She couldn’t be certain it had touched him at all.
It would have to be enough.
Laila wiped her face with as much dignity as the situation allowed, straightened her cloak, and stepped into the rain.
“Well,” she muttered, “at least they’re talking about the Countess.”
Lambert, resplendent in his Inquisitorial regalia, stood before the gates of the d’Aubigne estate. His collar was starched to a severity that matched the weather, which had deteriorated since morning into something between rain and sleet. The cold found gaps in ecclesiastical armour. His breath hung in the air.
In his hand, Lambert held a writ of investigation: a bureaucratic weapon as sharp as any sword. He had composed the final draft in the carriage, the language precise, the authority unimpeachable. Everything they were about to do would be legal, documented, and devastating.
The gates creaked open reluctantly as his retinue entered: a procession of drenched clerics clutching their robes, guards invigorated by the drama of the weather, and scribes hunched over their ledgers like beleaguered turtles. The countess’ servants lingered at the edges of the courtyard, pale and twitchy under the relentless downpour.
“By the authority vested in me by the Church of Invictus,” Lambert declared, his voice cutting through the rain, “this estate is subject to an Inquisitorial search. Any obstruction will be considered defiance against the Church.”
The steward, visibly miserable, gestured for them to proceed, fully resigned to catastrophe.
Lambert’s team spread out without need for direction, boots echoing in the gilded halls. The estate’s grandeur surrounded him: gilded mirrors, opulent tapestries, chandeliers that trembled whenever the storm remembered they were there. This was a house with secrets.
Hours of searching led them to a bookcase. Its ornate carvings practically announced themselves. In Lambert’s experience, hidden chambers were never behind the plain bookcases. A guard gave it a firm shove, and it groaned aside to reveal a concealed room, proving once again that interior decorators had no sense of subtlety.
? The Countess’s decorator had also installed a suspiciously heavy portrait on a hinge mechanism in the upstairs corridor. Lambert’s team found it in the first ten minutes.
Lambert entered cautiously. On the desk, scattered documents hinted at a network of unsavoury dealings. The names Theodora, Celeste Boucher, and Gilbert Fontaine stood out: figures tied to alchemy, experimentation, and artefact procurement. Nearby, a ledger recorded payments to mercenaries, the sums substantial and the descriptions clinical. Contract work. The kind of language that made violence sound like bookkeeping.
It wasn’t enough. Ordinary noble conspiracy, not heresy. Lambert murmured a prayer for guidance, his gaze sweeping the room.
A faint shimmer drew his attention: a whisper of light breaking through the gloom. He cleared the desk, his fingers tracing the edge until a vibration revealed a hidden compartment.
With a soft click, it opened.
The statuette was carved from obsidian so dark it drank the light. A coiled dragon, its surface alive with an eerie hum that Lambert recognised as theurgic residue. The base bore an inscription: By flame reborn, by shadow ascended.
Lambert held it in both hands.
This was not noble conspiracy. This was heresy.
This was enough for Tribune.
“Catalogue everything,” Lambert ordered, his voice hard. “Ensure every detail reaches the tribunal.”
He pocketed the statuette carefully. When they finally departed, the servants watched with expressions ranging from terror to vindication.
Outside, the rain had turned to sleet. Lambert’s breath came in clouds. The cold was sharper now, and the weather was making up its mind about something.
Lambert climbed into the carriage and allowed himself, for precisely three seconds, to close his eyes.
Wylan had spent the afternoon doing useful things with his hands and useless things with his mind.
The defences were solid. He and Divina had reinforced the eastern approach with alchemical tripwires, enough light and noise to wake the household without bringing down masonry. The western wall had new compound in the mortar, fast-setting and resistant to the tools that had breached it last time. Practical, measured work.
When Maximilian showed promise at birth, we allowed the experiment to iterate. Seraphina’s words, precise as a formula. We thought something had gone amiss when you turned out to be... normal.
Normal. He’d turned that word over so many times it had lost its edges. An alchemist understood experimental methodology. You controlled your variables, you ran your iterations, and when one trial produced unexpected results, you noted it and moved on. That was all he’d been. A noted anomaly. An iteration that didn’t take.
Except it had. Eventually. But you broke through eventually.
Every one of them had become a Hero without a trial. No crucible, no divine selection, no moment of crisis that forged the bond between mortal and something greater. They had simply... arrived. Lambert’s theurgic gifts, Isabella’s Siren nature, Maximilian’s pyromancy, Wylan’s own alchemy. He had always assumed they were exceptional. The uncomfortable truth was simpler: they had been designed.
And Aurora was next.
He found Maximilian in the study. Not the council room. The study, where Max went when he needed to think without performing authority. The door was warm to the touch.
Inside, the evidence of a difficult afternoon. A scorch mark on the desk where Max’s hand had rested too long. The curtain nearest his chair had a blackened edge, recently stamped out. A glass of water on the mantelpiece had been boiling at some point; the level was lower than it should have been. Max was standing by the desk, not sitting, which told Wylan everything about the kind of day his brother had endured.
“How are the defences?” Max asked.
“Solid. Divina is thorough.” Wylan closed the door behind him. The air was several degrees warmer than the corridor. “Max, I need to talk to you about Seraphina.”
“I thought the debriefing would wait for the others.”
“This part shouldn’t.”
Maximilian looked at him. Whatever he saw in Wylan’s expression made him pull out the chair and sit down. He didn’t ask Wylan to sit. Wylan didn’t.
“When we visited Seraphina, she told us things about the family. About the bloodline.” Wylan’s hands wanted to find his notebook, his tools, anything to hold. He clasped them behind his back instead. “She was already a vampire when she married Artan. That wasn’t an accident. The marriage, the children, all of it — it was a breeding programme.”
The word sat in the room like something that had fallen off a shelf and broken.
“She selected each pairing deliberately. Lambert’s mother, Lampetia, carried an ancient vampiric strain. Laila’s fey heritage was chosen for what it would add. Our parents — yours and mine — were chosen because the combination had already produced results with Maximilian.” He paused. “You showed promise. I was the control trial.”
The air in the study shifted. Wylan felt it precisely, the way he felt temperature shifts in the laboratory. Certain thresholds, once crossed, produced irreversible reactions.
“She said none of our births were left to chance. Every conception was planned for what it would produce. And what it produced, in every case, was a Hero. Without a trial. Without a crucible. Without anything the Church would recognise as legitimate selection.”
“The Church,” Maximilian said. His voice was very even.
“Yes. If Tribune examines our family under theurgic compulsion, and the Church discovers that every de Vaillant Hero came into their power through vampiric breeding rather than divine selection —” Wylan stopped. Max was already there.
“Aurora,” Maximilian said.
“She’s next. Seraphina said as much. If none of us prove suitable, there’s always the next generation.” Wylan heard his own voice and hated how clinical it sounded, but one of them needed to stay cold. “She called it potential. She said potential is never wasted.”
The temperature climbed. The correspondence on Max’s desk curled at the edges. The glass on the mantelpiece began to bubble.
“Lambert knows this.”
“We all know. We learned it the night of Seraphina’s visit. The same night the vendetta was declared.”
“And nobody told me.”
“There wasn’t time. The vendetta hit, then Lambert’s plan this morning, and —”
“There is always time.” Max’s voice was quiet. That was worse than shouting. “You are telling me that my family has been engineered. That my daughter is a subject in an experiment conducted by a vampire who considers us breeding stock. And that the plan I approved this morning — Lambert’s plan, the one that invites the Church to examine us — will expose all of it.”
“Yes.”
Maximilian stood, the chair scraping back. The heat came with him.
“She called my daughter potential?”
“Max —”
“Does Lambert have an answer for this?”
“Lambert’s answer is that we make d’Aubigne look worse than we do. That’s what today was about.”
“And if it’s not enough?”
“I stayed behind today because I wanted to tell you myself,” Wylan said. “Not in a briefing. Not with everyone performing their roles. Just you and me.”
Maximilian looked at his brother. The study was warm, the glass on the mantelpiece had boiled dry, and outside the sleet drove against the windows.
“Thank you,” Max said. It cost him something to say it. Wylan could hear the invoice.
Wylan left him to it. He returned to his workshop and tried to focus on the compound he’d been mixing for the western wall. The batch of iced cream he’d synthesised as a reward for a productive afternoon sat untouched beside his apparatus.
Half an hour later, the manor shuddered.
The iced cream he had just synthesised liquefied in his hand. The compound on his workbench bubbled. Somewhere above him, he heard a crash and then silence, and then the sound of sleet where sleet should not have been audible from inside a building.
He could feel the cold pouring through the estate from wherever the wall had been.