They came back to the capital with fog still clinging to their boots. Willowford seemed farther than it had been on the walk out; the city raised its walls like a man waking and putting his hands over his face. Kaelen dropped the ledger onto Varin's table with the gravity of a thing that could not be set down lightly. The pages were smeared and smelling of river mud, but the ink was there—names and sums and little notations in the margins that made the scholar in Varin's eyes go thin and hungry.
"You shouldn't have come alone," Varin muttered, not a rebuke so much as a fact. He spread the pages on the table and bent like a man tuning a fragile instrument. "Paper tells you what men buy, ledger tells you what they fear."
Isolde sat with her chin in her hand, watching. Bria stood with arms folded like a wall, boots planted the way they'd been at Coldridge. Kaelen felt the crown as a weight in his chest rather than on his head. He had the ledger and he had promises to keep and no clean way to stitch them together.
Varin read aloud the clearest entries: shipments from Redmarsh, notes of payment to Garrin, repeated line items that read like "For Silence" and "For Feast." Two names in the margins had the kind of care a forger gives: Brother SeluanandMaster Tallet, Ivory Needle.
"Seluan," Kaelen said. The name lodged like a splinter. "That's one of the Sun Temple's attendants—he taught children at the outer cloister. Soft-voiced. He preached to mourning crowds."
"Soft-voiced men are dangerous when they press rope around people's throats," Bria said. "They make you think comfort is law."
Varin tapped another line. "This notation—'Bright Quarter'—recurs. An informal order of the Sun Temple. Not the High Order, but a small quarter within that does affairs for certain sponsors. They have no official seal but keep their own books. They are a nest for men who want sanctity with a ledger."
Isolde spit "So the temple has a faction that thinks setting the city on fire is holy. Charming." She twisted the corner of a page between her fingers. "And the Ivory Needle? That tailor guild—someone's using their stamp to make it look northern, like at Willowford."
Kaelen heard the city around them: carts, hawkers, and the small animal worries. "If the Bright Quarter paid for the feast—if men in the Sun Temple wanted Aldric silenced—then this isn't simply a merchant's crime. It's an inside job."
"And dangerous," Varin added. "Temples are islands that draw men who will fight to keep their sanctuaries. Expose a temple and you break a bone in a town. People will choose sides by faith more readily than by coin."
Kaelen paced. "We need proof. Names are not enough. I cannot order a raid on sacred cloisters without showing the city what we found."
Bria's laugh was a short rasp. "You think the priests will give you their papers?"
"No," Kaelen said. "But Seraphine will go. She knows their rites and she is still one they like to trust. If anyone can move through that place and leave with a truth rather than an accusation, it is her."
Isolde's eyes flicked up. "You want Seraphine to go into the belly of the temple?"
"I do," Kaelen said. "She is of Serefin. She has the right manner and the right temper. She will not be obvious. I need you to come with her—quietly. You can look for ledger marks, seals, the little things a tailor leaves."
"It's a risk," Varin said. "If they suspect her, or if they suspect you, the capital will not be the only thing to burn."
"I know the risk," Kaelen said. "But we can't stand in the sun and do nothing. We have to move."
They arranged it fast and quietly. Kaelen insisted the plan not be shouted into the council. Instead they chose an emissary: Seraphine would visit the Sun Temple in the guise of consolation work—distribution of grain, prayers for the dead—and Isolde would come as a helper. Bria would remain nearby at the house with a small, chosen guard in case a rope needed cutting. Varin would wait with an interpreter of temple scripts and be ready to accept any small page that might be smuggled out.
Seraphine accepted without flourish. She had the practiced gentleness and the habit of folding herself into other people's grief in such a way that they felt less alone. She tied her hair back, wrapped a plain cloak about her, and set out with Isolde at her side.
---
The Sun Temple looked harmless at the appointed hour—pillars and incense, priests passing like slow birds. Seraphine walked the aisles with the quiet gravity of someone who had grown sedate under watchful eyes. She offered coin and watched the children who came for the loaves the temple handed out. She let her hands linger over the altars and asked the right questions with the right pauses: "When did Brother Seluan next speak? Whom do you call when your roof leaks?"
The priests she met were smooth as marble. One of them—Brother Seluan, the same man whose name made Varin's teeth tighten—met her with a smile the size of a sermon. He took her hands and spoke of hope and binding the nation with peace. It was the cordiality of a man who had practiced being what a prince's supporter wanted to see.
Seraphine watched him and watched how his hands were never empty. He caressed gifts or stroked the cloth of strangers. He moved as a man who had learned how to disarm suspicion with ceremony. He spoke of Aldric's death as "a darkness that must be washed with light," and Seraphine found the words practiced, not felt.
She waited until he left a small door ajar, then slipped inside. The back rooms smelled of cloth and dust and the faint iron tang of old prayers. In the storeroom the Ivory Needle had indeed been—sewing tools hung like small liturgical instruments, and in a cracked chest she saw a scrap of cloth with the Needle's mark. Tucked into the cloth was a small ribbon dyed with a peculiar yellow—an odd sign for a temple—embroidered with a single stitched sun-quarter mark.
Isolde had drifted away to the inner sewing rooms and returned with something small and flat: a leather purse. "It's not much but it's weighty," she said, fingers nimble. "Look."
Inside the purse were parchments—little lists—names and sums and a small seal of someone called *The Bright Quarter Committee.* There were also notes of payments to Garrin and a list of people who'd been to the great hall that night, including an odd notation beside "Aldric: favor promised." Someone had not hidden this ledger well.
"Careful," Seraphine whispered. "If this is shown—if this is known—it could take the temple apart."
Isolde lifted the parchment and slotted it into her sleeve. "We bring this to Varin. We bring proof, and we move quick."
"Proof and speed," Seraphine echoed. Her heart beat oddly; there was guilt in it—this was a temple she'd visited since childhood. If men in its walls had bought a feast to burn a hall, then the sanctity of every altar smelled of smoke.
They left as they had come—quietly—and found Bria pacing by the outer lane like a caged thing. She took the papers and Varin met them in the shadow of a safe house. The old man's eyes went to the leather purse and he did not make a sound for a long time.
"You risked them, Seraphine," he said, soft. "You knew the stakes."
"I know," she said. "But I cannot sit as a witness to this without doing the part I can do."
Varin opened the purse with fingers that trembled. The ledger was rough but legible. He read the lists twice, then turned the page and froze on a line that made him look like someone who'd felt sudden cold.
"There," he said. "A shipment not noted elsewhere. 'For Master Goodway—Seal: Sun's Hand.' Goodway is a minor trade house. Seal of the Sun's Hand is not the High Order. This is deliberate misdirection."
"Meaning?" Kaelen asked when he came with Bria and saw the circle of them, eyes on the ledger like men watching a slow fire.
"Meaning—someone within the temple's shadow is working with merchants and with the Ivory Needle to create a narrative," Varin said. "They wanted a spectacle and a scapegoat. They planned it and they paid for it."
Harlan, leaning against the wall, spat. "And someone in the city signed their checks."
"That someone may be more than a man with a purse," Varin went on. "All temples have men who act without the High Order's knowledge. They are loose teeth: priests, cupbearers, artisans. If the Bright Quarter arranged the feast, they wanted a war that would let certain men rise out of the ashes."
Kaelen felt the ledger heavy under his palm when Varin handed it to him. "What do we do?"
Varin's face was older than before. "We expose them, but carefully. We do not storm the Sun Temple at dawn. We do not ask the High Priest to strip the quarter in public. We pull the thread slowly, so that when the world hears the noise it will be that the temple has cleansed itself, not that the crown has desecrated the house of the Sun."
"Or the temple will close ranks and call us blasphemers," Isolde said. "Either we do this softly or the city will fracture on faith."
"We do both," Kaelen decided. "We show the ledger publicly, yes. But we present it with the temple's involvement—invite neutral observers, offer to have a tribunal with Varin and Father Malric and a representative from the Brotherhood. If the High Order refuses, that says more than any accusation."
Bria spat again. "You trust the Brotherhood to be honest?"
"No," Kaelen said. "But their men are visible. They cannot simply vanish into the night and be believed. We use the show to force the temple's hand."
Varin rubbed his temple. "And we prepare. If the Bright Quarter resists, they will not fight with swords only. They have hidden men. They will try to turn this into martyrdom. They will make any action of ours into sacrilege."
Kaelen heard the warning as if it had a bell. He sealed the ledger in a small box and felt its weight like a promise to a dead boy. He would stand in the square and show the city what was in the pages; he would do it as a man who sought truth more than vengeance. He would bring the Sun Temple into the light and force the High Order to answer. He would call the Brotherhood and invite them. He would try to make the act be about law, not power.
They began to move—letters to be sent, envoys to solicit, a public reading to be arranged for the market square the next dawn. Kaelen's mind worked in lists: witnesses, guards, Varin's translation, Father Malric's presence, a neutral scribe.
Before he could think more, a guard burst in, breathless and red-faced. "Sire," the man panted. "The ring—Aldric's—has gone missing from the chest. The chest in your private chamber was slashed. No sign of forced entry, but the jeweler's bag is gone."
For a heartbeat everything telescoped. The ring—a thing that meant more than gold, a token of counsel and history—had been taken. The ledger in the safe would not matter if someone could steal such a thing from within the palace.
Kaelen felt the room go narrower. "Who saw?" he asked.
"No one, my lord. The guard last on duty swore he checked the lock. The chamber door was latched from within and then found undone. The chest was moved as if someone had known where to look."
Isolde's hand tightened on the box with the ledger. "Someone inside the palace is working with them," she said quietly.
Bria's face became carved. "Then they want a war and a crown without having to explain their name."
Varin looked at Kaelen with the tired, patient eyes of a man who had spent his life counting worn coins. "You will be blamed for that theft whether you ordered it or not, Prince. Men will say you took the ring to cover something. Men will say you have corrupt hands."
Kaelen swallowed. The ledger sat like a coals-filled glove against his ribs. He had chosen to pull the thread of the Bright Quarter from the temple because he wanted truth. Now the house he kept had been violated.
"We go public at dawn," he said. The words might have been brave or merely necessary. "We show the ledger and call the tribunal. We show that the palace is as much a victim as the temple could be."
Bria grabbed his arm. "And you will not go alone to the square. You will have a line of men who will not flinch."
He nodded. They would need more than words. They would need shields. But even shields could not stop a story turned by the mouths of a thousand fears.
Night fell like a hand closing the book. Outside, the city quieted into its usual hum of rats and breath. Inside, a small thing had been taken—a ring that had once rested in Aldric's hand—and that theft threaded them all. A man in a temple preached about binding the nation; someone had bought a feast and burned a hall; a tailor's guild had been used to point blame like a finger.
Kaelen lit a single candle and sat with Varin until it guttered low. The ledger sat between them like a map that might either find the enemy or lead them into a trap. Above them, the Sun Temple's tower caught the moon and threw back a slice of burned light.
At the edge of sleep, Kaelen realized the hardest truth: pulling a thread in a tapestry always risks unravelling more than you intend. He had pulled once. The world around the crown had begun to tangibly shift.
He closed his eyes and tried, briefly, to imagine a town that would not be torn by faith or by hunger. For a breath he could see the fields whole and people walking with their hands empty and content. Then the ledger hissed in his memory, the ring's absence like a hole in a sea of coins.
Dawn would come and the market square would fill. Men would want names. The city would cheer and then two days later die for those cheers. Kaelen rubbed his forehead until the skin warmed. He had one plan: show the ledger, force the High Order's hand, and hope the truth held when the temple answered.
Outside, in the shadow of the Sun Temple, a cloaked man watched the palace and his fingers closed on something cold hidden under his cloak—a small, sharp blade with a notch in the hilt, the mark of the Ivory Needle cut into the handle like a promised signature. He smiled, a small, satisfied thing, and walked away toward where the river would take secrets that never surfaced.