The royal archives—deep in the western wing of the palace.
The room smelled faintly of dust and vellum; rows and rows of books and documents rose like low city blocks, neatly stacked on ordered shelves. Lantern light pooled in corners, and somewhere beyond the stacks, a clock ticked. In the middle of it all stood Gabriella Lancaster. She had been here for hours. A file lay open in her hands; her sharp eyes flicked over the heading: General Rosethorne's Records of the Altherian War, Year XXX, Vol. II.
It was a past record, dry and official, and she was searching for every scrap of name or note that might point toward what she needed to find. Her fingers marked pages, then turned them again. She read slowly, deliberately, looking for anything that might have been overlooked the first time history was written.
A name finally snagged her attention: Raphael Winston. The general's right-hand man. Maybe he'd know. Maybe he wouldn't. But he was the best lead she had—after all, she couldn't exactly question the dead general.
The suspicion had been gnawing at her for a while. At first she had agreed with Aiden and Elliott: Carlson fit the signs, the appearance, the clues seemed to point toward him. But then the shadows attacked, and something didn't sit right. She remembered that night too clearly: the shadows had not gone straight for Carlson. They had zeroed in on Aiden. At the time she'd accepted the explanation offered—perhaps the moon-forged sword had made Aiden a target—but the more she replayed that scene in her mind, the less that reasoning satisfied her. Shadows, by their nature, had one priority: the person they were made to kill. If Carlson truly had been the target, why would the shadows sweep past him and fix on Aiden instead?
That inconsistency planted a seed of doubt. Once doubt took root, other odd pieces began to align. The signs they had taken as proof of Carlson's identity—pale skin, midnight-blue hair, the shadows—could apply to someone else, too. Someone who had been in plain sight the whole time.
And then she remembered the sword. When Aiden had first lifted the moon-forged blade, it had felt normal in his hand—lighter than it should have been, almost as if it recognized him. But when a priest later tried to take it from him, the sword had suddenly become heavy in the priest's grip, like a living thing reluctant to be parted from its true keeper. That small, overlooked detail nagged at her: artifacts that recognize their owners didn't make mistakes easily.
Her mind moved through the evidence like a careful archivist. The ascension disruption—Aiden had been there, too. The shared physical features—hair color, skin tone—were not unique to Carlson in a region with long histories of migration between empires. And then the personal history of Aiden himself: he simply hadn't appeared out of nowhere. He belonged to the Rosethornes, a reputable noble house. Yet the fact that no one has actually seen last rosethorne in any stage of pregnancy in any event had come back to Gabriella. Rumors had once swirled that Lady Rosethorne was barren, which was why the couple had no children for years. Then, suddenly, a child appeared after General Rosethorne returned from the border which they claimed was their miracle child. Coincidence? Or a story carefully shaped so the infant would be accepted as noble instead of an orphan pulled from a river?
The pieces snapped together in her head with a cold precision. If James Corvette had indeed crossed into Velluria by the Aurelia River during the chaos of war, who else at the border might have found an abandoned infant and taken him in? A general on campaign who returned with a child in his company—what better way to cloak the truth than to present the boy as your own, give him a name and place him at court? It would be the safest lie to make a noble child rather than the truth that the infant was an orphan found in a river. And anyone close to the general—his right-hand man, his camp companions—would have known what happened.
She was not looking for an explicit entry that read, "General Rosethorne rescued a foreign infant." That would be absurdly direct. She was searching for traces: mentions of a newborn in camp logs, references to a child's presence in the general's retinue, the names of men who had served consistently beside him—those were the breadcrumbs. Raphael Winston's name stood out because a right-hand man would be the one who might have been privy to such an oddity. If the general had taken the infant into his tents, his closest officers would know. If Winston had been there, he might remember odd details; he might remember a river, a child, a brief secrecy, or a transfer of responsibility.
Gabriella shut the Rosethorne volume and moved to another ledger, one that listed veteran officers and their estates. Winston was a minor noble—a viscount—so she expected to find a reference to his household or holdings. Her fingers skimmed the index. There it was: a note tucked in the back of a post-war roster—"...after the war with Altheria, Raphael Winston largely withdrew from court life, choosing instead to live quietly on his family's estate." Beside the note, an address: a remote villa in the Winston territory.
She closed the ledger carefully, sliding it into the stack she had already gathered. Plans began to form—simple, deliberate steps that relied on discretion, not dramatic confrontations. She had to summon Raphael Winston to the capital quietly. If Winston had been at Rosethorne's side in those camps, he might remember the infant, or recall odd orders given by the general that explained why a child had been taken into the retinue and then presented as the general's. If so, that would be the concrete proof she needed to tell Elliott and Aiden without forcing them to leap on circumstantial suspicion.
The archives seemed particularly still the moment she stood. The distant clock ticked once, twice. Gabriella set the file beneath her arm, tucked the ledger into the satchel at her hip, and smoothed her dress. Her jaw tightened; the weight of what she now suspected pressed at her. This was not a minor suspicion anymore. If Aiden were the child found on a battlefield and raised as a Rosethorne, the implications were enormous—personal, political, dangerous.
She straightened her shoulders, the cool surface of resolve hardening in her chest. "Very well," she murmured to herself, more to break the hush than because she wanted to be heard. "Time to summon Raphael Winston to the capital, then."
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