The council meeting had lasted three hours longer than it should have.

  The Duchess of Foher — wrapped in layered wool, flanked by fading inkpots and cooling tea — listened as the last of the councillors droned on about tariffs in the eastern baronies. Something about grain shortages. Something about poor record-keeping. Something that was definitely, somehow, not his fault.

  She nodded, murmured a few final remarks, and called the session to an end. Most of the members fled like hounds released from a leash. Only Thalyra Velgrin lingered, as always — calm, quiet, the same meticulous expression she had worn since the day Fran arrived.

  As Fran gathered her notes, Thalyra approached.

  "Your Grace," she said. "A minor matter — hardly urgent."

  Fran suppressed a sigh. "Go on."

  "The archival vaults in the western wing. We’ve begun cataloging the sealed sections, as you instructed." She paused, choosing her words with care. "Some of them were never opened after Duke Alric’s passing. They remain marked under his personal seal. Red wax, imperial crest."

  Fran blinked. "Still sealed? Why?"

  "His orders. No one questioned them." A pause. "Until now, of course."

  "Are they... sensitive documents?"

  "Unclear. Personal letters, ledgers, old correspondence — possibly mundane, possibly not. The archivists were hesitant to break the seal without your approval."

  Fran nodded slowly. "I’ll consider it."

  "Of course," Thalyra said, with a slight bow. "Whenever you see fit."

  And then she left, heels soft against stone.

  Fran stayed seated long after the chamber emptied, the carved edge of the council table digging into her palm.

  Personal letters. Of course.

  She stared at the ledger in front of her without reading it, her eyes instead tracing the curling grain of the old wood beneath. Her jaw tightened.

  She had been lied to for thirty-five years. Lied to by a man who had left her nothing but power, silence, and ghosts in the walls.

  She didn’t want his letters. She didn’t want his sentiment. Not now. Not when the barons of the East—those same ones he’d let run wild while wasting away in shadows—were slowly bleeding her treasury dry.

  Let his correspondence rot in the vault.

  She had enough of his legacy to clean up already.

  The steward found her still at the council table, scribbling terse annotations in the margins of a shipment manifest.

  “Another request from the eastern ports, Your Grace,” he said, placing a folded parchment beside her elbow. “They claim the roads are impassable again. Late grain shipments. Rising tariffs. And… a formal complaint from Lord Harren of Estvar, citing—”

  “Let me guess,” she said flatly. “Highway banditry and insufficient guards.”

  The steward inclined his head.

  Fran sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “They’ve made the same complaint four times this winter.”

  “And three in autumn,” he confirmed. “Each time, the numbers have grown more… elaborate.”

  Her eyes skimmed the complaint, noting the inflated figures, the carefully vague language.

  “If half their claims were true,” she muttered, “the eastern roads would be ruled by crownless kings by now.”

  She stood and gathered the papers in one smooth motion. The room felt colder in Gale’s absence. He was only gone for a few days, summoned back to the Society on some matter of arcane relevance, but she had grown used to his presence—his dry remarks, his infuriating charm, his quiet, precise observations. He was the only one who looked past titles and saw her mind.

  And right now, she could’ve used that mind.

  Instead, there were letters. Complaints. Inventories that made no sense. And a tightening in her gut she couldn’t quite explain.

  She made her way down the corridor toward her study, passing two servants bent over a ledger of ship arrivals. They straightened and stepped aside with quick bows.

  “Your Grace.”

  “Continue,” she said, without slowing.

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  Her study was warm, blessedly so—late afternoon light pouring through the high windows, casting long shadows across the floor. The cats had claimed her chair again. Rudy blinked sleepily at her; Nymph didn’t even open her eyes.

  Fran moved past them, setting the reports on her desk. She tapped her fingers on the wood for a long moment, then opened the first bundle from the eastern baronies.

  The numbers weren’t just wrong.

  They were off—consistently, and only from a handful of towns along the river. Every other barony had gaps, yes, but this… this was something else. Too neat. Too coordinated.

  Something wasn’t just broken.

  It was being hidden.

  And now, without meaning to, she found herself echoing one of Alric’s most maddening habits: circling a single line of ink over and over with her stylus, as if pressure alone could force the truth to appear.

  The documents remained unread on her desk. The ink blurred. Her thoughts refused to follow.

  She rose from her chair and slipped a shawl over her shoulders. It was early spring, and though the sun had begun to warm the air, the breeze still carried winter’s edge. In the hall, the servants she passed bowed low, but she didn’t linger. She needed air. Space. The kind of quiet she used to find in Candlekeep’s wooded paths, in the scent of herbs and turned soil.

  The gardens had changed.

  Once choked with weeds and long-neglected hedges, they now breathed with colour and care. Stone paths had been cleared and widened. The ivy-covered pergola at the southern end had been coaxed back to health, its lattice now stretching like green ribs over beds of violets and flowering thyme. The ornamental pond had been drained, cleaned, and refilled; frogs and dragonflies had already returned, like they’d only been waiting for the right moment.

  She wandered without purpose, hands buried in the folds of her shawl, until the sound of voices halted her steps.

  They came from the other side of a clipped yew hedge—two maids, seated on a bench just out of sight, unaware of her presence.

  “—told me the shipment was half short,” one said. “And not for the first time.”

  “Eastern baronies?” asked the other.

  “Always. And yet not a word from the tax collectors. Either they’re blind, or someone’s paid to keep their eyes shut.”

  A soft clatter of a spoon against a tin cup. Tea, she guessed. Probably taken from the kitchens without permission.

  “The Duchess’ll notice.”

  “She already has, I think. That wizard of hers too.”

  “Is he hers?”

  A pause. A little laugh. “Wouldn’t you like to be the one who knows?”

  They giggled, and Fran found herself still and silent, not moving a single muscle. Her first instinct was to interrupt, to scatter them with a glare. But instead, she lingered—listening. Measuring. Every bit of information had its use, even gossip. Especially gossip.

  She waited until the laughter faded, and the conversation turned toward a seamstress who had been caught kissing a stable hand in the hayloft, then moved quietly on.

  So it’s not just the books, she thought, passing a row of flowering hellebore.

  Her hands were cold. She hadn’t brought gloves.

  The discrepancy wasn’t a matter of poor scribes or mistaken crates.

  Someone was stealing. Boldly. Repeatedly.

  And it wasn’t just the treasury that was being tested—it was her. Whoever was behind this thought she was too new, too distracted, too far removed to see it. Or too weak to stop it.

  At the edge of the pergola, she paused, breathing in the faint scent of crushed lavender underfoot.

  She didn’t speak aloud.

  But her thoughts echoed in perfect clarity: They’re wrong.

  The library welcomed him like an old friend — cool stone, warm lamplight, and the dry perfume of parchment and ink. Outside, Vartis slept under a thick spring mist, the walls glistening with dew. But here, the world was still and sharp and comfortably alive with rustling pages.

  Gale slipped in without fanfare. He looked like a man who had travelled long and hard, and dressed quickly to pretend otherwise. His dark coat was brushed clean, but his boots still wore dust from the road. A scarf — charmed against sea wind — hung loose around his neck.

  He exhaled, stepping between the high shelves with the kind of reverence others reserved for temples.

  And then he saw her.

  She hadn’t noticed him. Not yet.

  Frances — Duchess of Foher, Mistress of the Western Court, Slayer of Councils and Gardener of Renovated Gardens — was hunched over a wide desk beneath the central arch, sleeves rolled, hair half-pinned and already falling again. Her left hand scribbled notations in a tight, precise script; her right rested on a volume of grain levy codes, visibly annotated. A second book was propped beside it, opened to a chart on baronial grain yield over the last decade.

  For a moment, he didn’t move.

  Fifteen days. He had crossed half the kingdom and back. Suffered committee meetings that felt more like war crimes. Eaten one suspicious meat pie and two moldy oranges. And somehow, all of that was forgotten watching her mutter quietly at a ledger and correct a margin error with such singular focus.

  He cleared his throat. “You’ve rearranged the south shelves.”

  Fran didn’t look up. “Master Dekarios returns. Is the capital still standing?”

  He stepped closer, slipping his scarf off. “Only partially. I believe one committee disbanded out of collective shame.”

  “A mercy.”

  “Your absence was noted in every room that echoed too cleanly.”

  Only then did she glance up — a flicker of something between acknowledgement and amusement.

  “I expected you tomorrow,” she said.

  “I arrived early,” he placed a hand on the back of a chair but didn’t sit. “I think I developed an allergy to yet another committee’s opinion.”

  “Symptoms?”

  “Verbal violence. Chronic eye-rolling.”

  She made a small, noncommittal noise. Not quite a laugh, not quite a dismissal. “Missed your tower?” she asked after a moment.

  “Terribly. The leaks have developed character.”

  “And the gardener’s cat?”

  “Still sovereign.”

  Fran tapped the page once. “So what did you miss more — the plumbing or the paperwork?”

  He leaned on the chair now, lowering his voice a fraction. “You mean beyond the chance to be corrected mid-paragraph?”

  “I wouldn’t deny you the pleasure.”

  “No,” he said, slowly, “you never do.”

  She looked up again — and this time held his gaze a little longer.

  “You’ll find the ledgers where they always are,” she said, quiet now. “Left of the scrolls. Beside the paper that smells like lemon and poor decisions.”

  He smiled. “You sorted them.”

  “Someone had to.”

  He crossed to the shelf and returned with the stack, pages ribboned and tagged, her careful script marking each report.

  “I see you’ve been thorough.”

  She didn’t answer. Just turned a page.

  He sat opposite her and mirrored the motion.

  “You look tired,” she murmured.

  “You sound surprised.”

  She almost smiled again. “You usually pretend not to be.”

  “And you,” he said, dipping his pen, “sound like someone who’s had more arguments with parchment than people this week.”

  “I won most of them.”

  “Astonishing.”

  The silence between them now was gentler. Not quite ease — but something orbiting close.

  He reached for the edge of her page, adjusted the light just slightly.

  Their pens moved again. Not quite in sync. But not apart, either.