Winter does not loosen its grip easily.

  Snow spirals slow and silent beyond the tall, narrow windows of Blackwood Citadel, laying soft siege to the rooftops, muffling the courtyards in a hush that feels more like mourning than peace. The wind slips through the tower slits and crenellations like something half-alive, low and searching, brushing cold fingers across the stone. Frost clings to the sills, pale as breath held too long. But inside, the hearth burns steady. Cedar crackles in the grate, its scent sharp and comforting, wrapping about the room. The fire’s warmth coats the stone, the skin, filling the parchment-thick air of the Office of Strategic Planning.

  The warmth feels false.

  A thin illusion dressed in cedar smoke.

  Children stolen from their worlds, fed to a war no one will name.

  My fist clenches tight. Tighter. Until something shifts deep in the meat of my palm. A jolt. A pop. A sharp realignment. I want it to break. I want pain loud enough to drown out the rage rising in my chest.

  It rises again. That pressure. That crack in the foundation. A scream without a mouth, rattling the frame that holds it.

  The chair creaks. The desk groans. The stone beneath my boots hums, low and steady, like the Citadel itself is bracing for impact. Mana spilling out in waves of anger. It feels like a warning. A tremor before the collapse. Something ancient remembering how to burn.

  No answers. No reason. No one speaking the truth.

  For a heartbeat, I’m lost, vision and memory tangled. Past lives, and what this one might become. Falkensgrave, and cities like it, swallowed by smoke and ash. Screams shredded on the wind. Blood choking the gutters. The powerful skewered on their own spires. Magistrates flayed and quartered. Justice poured out in buckets, not measured on scales.

  Then it all stops.

  Stillness.

  The room has gone deathly quiet.

  Yaerith is hunched at his desk, one trembling hand still holding a quill, the other white-knuckled on the edge of the wood like he’s holding back more than fear. The two new clerics have vanished beneath their station, hands over their heads, cowering beneath layers of wood and paper. One of them is muttering a prayer he likely doesn't realize he's saying. The courier is gone. Dispatches lie scattered across the floor. The door yawns open. He didn’t wait to be dismissed, just ran.

  And Isla.

  She’s staring at me like I’m something she doesn’t recognize.

  Her eyes are wide.

  Her hand is halfway to the knife she keeps hidden in the seam of her jacket. And it’s shaking.

  Gods.

  Her hand lowers an inch, then freezes. As if even gravity doesn’t dare interfere.

  She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t speak. But the shame crashes through her anyway. I see it in the way her lips part, just slightly, as if she might explain. Might plead. Then close again, sealed tight. I notice the quiver of the muscle at the corner of her eye, the hint of the implosion of guilt. Whatever words she almost said would have scorched her worse than silence.

  Because it was me.

  And some buried reflex, however fleeting, however small, told her I might need to be stopped. That I was the threat.

  Her posture doesn’t change. Her face stays still. But she looks like someone who’s just been carved open, hollowed out, and left standing.

  I breathe. Once. Twice. Force it steady. Let the rage bleed out slow.

  And Isla stares at her own hand, still half-raised, still trembling, as if it no longer belongs to her at all.

  My fingers loosen. Slowly. Reluctantly. The thunder of my pulse in my ears fades. I let my hands settle against the desk, palms flat to the wood, grounding myself in grain and heat. As if I could press the anger down, force it into the seams. Bury it beneath lacquer and discipline.

  “It’s fine,” I say, softly. My voice doesn’t crack. “I’m fine.”

  No one believes me, not really, but no one argues.

  The tension thins, like a room remembering it has air again. It seeps, slowly, carefully, like heat from cooling coals.

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  Yaerith shifts first. The motion is stiff, mechanical, like his body's only just remembered how to operate under its own command. He blinks several times in rapid succession, as if trying to reset something behind his eyes. Then, with shaky breath, he dips his quill again and resumes scribbling. The nib scratches too sharply against vellum, every stroke a man insisting he’s fine by sheer volume.

  Across the room, one of the clerics peeks out from under the desk. His eyes are wide, his hair mussed, the ink-stain on his sleeve still wet. He doesn’t speak, just stares at me as if uncertain whether the storm has truly passed or merely shifted shape. His partner beside him remains curled beneath the table, still muttering faint prayers that bleed between languages, Temple Elessian and something older, barely remembered.

  The moment holds, stretched thin as silk, fragile, glittering, threatening to tear. It doesn’t. Not yet. I continue to breathe, slow and quiet, and the silence that follows is no longer one of fear. Just aftermath. A low, trembling exhale halting between tremors.

  Isla stays still. Unmoving. I watch the tension bleed from her limbs, composure knitting itself slowly back into place, each breath a quiet stitch.

  She’s been back for weeks now. Her report lies open before me, the pages fanned across my desk like wings that forgot how to fly. I’ve read it a dozen times or more. I know it like scripture. And yet it feels shrunken, fragile and small against the truth Alistair handed me like a double-edged blade with no grip.

  The fury comes in waves. Shocking crashes of emotion each time I think on what he showed me. On the book. That truth.

  This is his fault.

  This is the book’s fault.

  He gave me a sliver of a truth too vast to hold, then told me to wait for someone else to explain it. As if knowledge can be returned to the box once seen. As if truth doesn’t reshape everything it touches.

  But I know better.

  Even as the blame rises in my throat like bile, I know he was right. Right to show me. Right to warn me. Alistair didn’t reveal this to wound me, he knew I was already walking toward it. If I’d found it in pieces, buried in ledgers and whispers, I would have torn at it blindly, trying to drag it into the light. And I would have left a trail of blood and innocent names behind me.

  I don’t know how I will face my father.

  Once, he worried he had lost my trust. He showed real care. But now… now I don’t know if I can believe it. I try to steady myself. It’s supposition, I remind myself. I don’t know yet if this has been acted on. I don’t know what he has done.

  But the doubt sticks, like ash on my tongue.

  We are a month and a half from Sven and Catharine’s return. Spring is close, but winter isn’t done yet. I need focus, to handle Isla's report, to tie off the remaining issues from Lord Corvis abuse of peerage. The magistrates hearing of the treasury heads has already concluded, the four returned to their positions but with a new oversight office separated from the treasury. And still, I must deal with what Isla has found.

  Seven agents.

  Not two. Not four. Seven.

  All active in Falkensgrave. Embedded. Funded by Verdane coin, coordinated with Bastien shadow accounts, and moving with the kind of precision that smells of military training. This wasn’t an experiment. It was an infrastructure.

  Four vanished before we could even act. One left a steaming mug on the table. Another disappeared mid-shift, uniform folded, boots polished. Gone without a trace. Professionals.

  Two are now in custody, caught with cipher wheels, transit routes, and coded orders tucked into the lining of a coat. They didn’t resist. They knew better. The seventh… no one’s seen them since.

  I close the report.

  And yet, even this feels small now.

  My hands rest on the carved edge of the desk. The wood is worn smooth where my palms press day after day. The desk’s surface is cluttered with small things. A child’s carving of a horse, uneven and painted in Larkin black and silver. The legs wobble. The tail is chipped. A gift from a Forgewell boy who said nothing as he handed it over, just shoved it into my palm like it might burn him. Then he ran.

  Beside it: a wool cap. Storm-blue. Thick. It smells faintly of smoke. An old woman in the market gave it to me unasked, scolding under her breath about the wind and how “no proper head should be left bare in this season.” She wouldn’t take coin.

  Symbols of presence. Of being seen. And they weigh more than any polished medallion.

  When I walk through the market now, I hear it whispered. Little Lord Blackwood. Never shouted. Just… said. The way one says a name remembered from a story their grandfather half-believed. The Archdukes bore that title, long before the Dominion arrived. Before there were ledgers and quotas and the Founder's Law. There was a man who walked this city and called it his own.

  And now, they whisper it again. Little Lord Blackwood.

  But the warmth of those whispers does not reach me. Not fully.

  Because something has lodged beneath my ribs like a splinter I can’t dig out.

  The book. The revelation.

  The gaps in history where children appear in footnotes. Where foreign names flicker and vanish from annals. Where awards are given posthumously to those with no recorded birth. The edges of stories that never had a middle. I see them everywhere now, those summoned children, those weapons given names and futures only to be marched into something that they had no part in.

  No location. No nation. Just a word with a capital letter and a silence wrapped around it.

  Isla’s report should matter more.

  Seven foreign agents in my city, in my home. That should be the fire in my blood. But it isn’t. Because Verdane and Bastien still play games of coin and steel. That, at least, I understand.

  But the Dominion?

  I don’t even know where to begin. And Alistair won’t say more. Just sits behind his desk with those heavy eyes and heavier silences and pretends that’s enough. But what else does he know?

  I can’t tell Isla. Not even in pieces. This is the kind of truth that warps the walls if spoken aloud.

  So I wait.

  I lead. I reform. I inspect the barracks. I finalize the city mapping project. I route funds with clean hands and clear eyes. The treasury’s flow is honest again. Roads are being paved. Clinics stocked. Firewood delivered ahead of frost.

  But every success feels hollow. Like I’m building a house on land I now know is cursed.

  And above it all, the calendar ticks forward.

  A month and a half until my father returns. Until the Archduke rides up the eastern road with banners flying and expectations sharp as razors.

  And I am no longer sure what role I’m meant to play when spring comes.