Kael dragged Lyros to a secure chamber beneath the eastern tower, binding his wrists with starlit thread that glimmered faintly in the torchlight. The captain's expression remained maddeningly calm, as if he were an instructor overseeing a lesson rather than a prisoner in chains.
"Leave us," Elara ordered the two guards at the door. "No one enters until I say."
They hesitated. She did not. Power crackled over her skin—unbidden, impatient—and the men withdrew without protest.
Lyros chuckled once the door thudded shut. "You've grown into your magic quickly, Your Majesty. Faster than I expected."
Elara ignored the tremor of emotion in her chest. "Who do you serve?"
Lyros tilted his head, studying her like a curious relic. "I serve the realm."
Kael stepped forward, blade at Lyros's throat in a glint of chilled steel. "Name your master."
The captain watched Kael with an unreadable gaze. "You're far from the haunted sellsword who arrived in her camp. Careful. Loyalty is a thorny crown."
"Enough riddles," Elara snapped. She drew in the starlight, feeling the sigils on the walls hum to her call. "That mark on my wrist—did you place it?"
Lyros's gaze flickered to her arm. The smallest smile touched his mouth. "Someone had to keep you alive long enough to be worthy."
Kael's blade pressed harder. "Worthy of whom?"
"The Night Regent," Lyros murmured, reverence and dread mingling in his tone. "The true heir to the promise that founded this kingdom. The pendulum swings, Princess. Every dynasty has a shadow. Ours wishes to bring balance."
Elara's breath hitched. She had read the name only once, in a forbidden chronicle hidden beneath the west library. A sovereign of myth—part judge, part executioner—who appeared when the order of crowns turned rotten. But myths did not lace tracking sigils into a queen's skin.
"Balance?" She took a step closer. "You helped slaughter my family."
For the first time, Lyros flinched. "I kept you alive. I diverted blades. I steered the hunt. I placed you in the path of the one man who could protect you." His eyes cut to Kael. "I defied orders more times than you will ever know."
Kael's jaw tightened. "Don't try to make yourself a martyr."
Lyros smiled without warmth. "I won't need to."
Elara released the starlight with a slow, controlled exhale. "The letter from Malachar listed names. Give me the rest. Give me the network. Give me the Night Regent."
"Even if I wanted to," Lyros said, "I cannot. I know only the lieutenants and the signals." He nodded toward the brazier. "One coal extinguished is a summons. Two is a warning. Three means run."
Kael glanced at the brazier, at the three glowing stones. He kicked it—hard—and embers scattered across the floor. "What does four mean?"
Lyros's eyes glittered. "Four means you're already late."
A deep bell sounded, muffled by stone. The torches guttered as if sucked by a sudden inward breath. Elara felt the mark on her wrist burn—a brief, searing sting—then the pain vanished, leaving behind a cold emptiness.
Kael's gaze met hers. "The tracking link broke."
Lyros sighed. "No. It was harvested."
Shouts echoed down the corridor. The door shook against an impact, then another. Kael seized Elara's arm, pulling her back behind the rune circle inscribed on the floor.
"Who else is in our guard?" Elara demanded. "How deep does this go?"
"Deep enough," Lyros said. "But not as deep as you fear. Fear is a blade you're sharpening against yourself."
"Elara," Kael warned, eyes on the door. "We need to move her."
Her. Not me. The implication cut through the panic like a lance. Elara reached toward the tether of starlight that connected her to the wards—and found it frayed, a spider-silk thread where a rope should be.
The door burst inward. Two figures in gray masks surged through, moving with the synchronized precision of dancers. They didn't attack. Instead, they threw something—small glass baubles that shattered on the stone and released a fog of sparkling dust.
Kael shoved Elara behind him, dragging his cloak over her mouth and nose. "Don't breathe it."
She didn't. But the dust didn't need breath. It drifted like intention, like memory, like a lullaby sung by a mother she could no longer remember. The world tilted. She planted her feet, called the starlight—but it slid off her skin.
"Bind the captain," one of the masked figures said, voice distorted. "Take the queen alive."
Lyros laughed then, a soft, incredulous sound. "Oh, you fools." He surged to his feet—Elara's threads snapping like twine—and slammed his shoulder into the nearer figure. Chains clattered to the floor. Kael struck, and the second masked assailant crumpled, but more shapes were already pouring through the doorway.
"Elara!" Kael caught her as she stumbled. "On me. We're moving."
The corridor outside was chaos. Shadows darted between pools of torchlight, the air a tangle of smoke and shouted orders. Somewhere above, another bell began to toll—a higher, faster peal that set Elara's teeth on edge.
They moved like a single creature: Kael clearing the path with efficient violence, Elara forcing her will into the wards to open doors and seal others, Lyros behind them like a storm untethered, breaking attackers with the brutal economy of a lifetime spent training soldiers.
Down one stairwell and up another. Through a narrow arch where Elara had hidden as a child, watching the court parade. Across the old armory, where the scent of oiled leather and steel tried to pull her into memories of her father's steady hands buckling her training cuirass.
They reached a sally port that opened onto the outer wall. Cold night wind hit Elara's face like a slap. She gulped it gratefully, fighting the residual fog in her lungs.
Kael scanned the courtyard below. "The eastern gate is compromised. We go north."
"North is a kill-box," Lyros said. "They'll herd you into the blind steps."
Kael didn't spare him a glance. "I wasn't asking."
Elara raised her hand. The star in her blood sang, a clear, bright note cutting through the noise. The wards shivered—and obeyed. A section of the parapet slid silently aside, revealing a stair that spiraled down into darkness.
Lyros whistled. "A queen of doors."
"Move," Elara said.
They descended into the wall's marrow. The stair opened into a long, narrow passage where moonlight poured through arrow slits at regular intervals, striping the floor with pale rectangles. At the far end, a portcullis waited, wrapped in vines of iron and ward-sigils.
Kael reached the winch and froze. "Trap."
Elara saw it then: fine wires threaded through the winch's gear-teeth, leading to a clay jar tucked beneath the mechanism. She bent, whispered to the metal, and the wires unwove themselves like spider silk returning to dew.
The portcullis rose. Cold grass, the smell of damp earth, the world beyond. Freedom.
"Split," Lyros said. "If the queen is the goal, then divide their sightlines. I'll take the northern path and make noise. You two head for the river gate."
"Not a chance," Kael said flatly.
"He's right," Elara said. Kael stared at her. She nodded toward Lyros. "If he dies making a feint, then either he was lying and we lose nothing, or he was telling the truth and we owe him. Either way, the Night Regent expects me, not him."
Lyros's mouth twitched. "You're learning to speak like a ruler."
She met his gaze. "If you betray me again, I will end you."
"Then let us both pray I don't."
They split. Lyros vaulted the wall like a younger man, vanishing into the dark. Shouts followed him almost immediately. Kael stayed close at Elara's side as they slipped along the outer ditch, moving from shadow to shadow until the roar of the river rose ahead.
The river gate crouched beneath the wall like a sleeping animal. Two figures stood guard—hers, by their stance and armor—but when Kael hailed them with the night countersign, they didn't answer. Elara felt the starlight recoil from them like a hand from a hot iron.
"Not ours," she whispered.
Kael's hand tightened on her arm. "Left. The boathouse."
They slid along the wall and ducked through a low door into the boathouse. The smell of pitch and tar mingled with the crisp scent of river water. A single skiff bobbed at the dock, tethered by a frayed rope.
Kael scanned the corners. "Clear."
Elara exhaled—and a voice behind them said, "No, it isn't."
They turned as one. A woman stepped from the shadow as if it had unknotted itself to make her shape. She wore gray—not the dull uniform of the attackers, but a robe cut with an elegance that made the eye slide off the details. Her hair was the color of old ash. Her eyes were the color of tidewater.
Kael shifted, blade angling. "Name."
She smiled. "Messenger."
Elara felt the starlight in her veins coil, alert and wary. "From whom?"
"From the one you seek and dread in equal measure," the woman said. "From the Night Regent."
Kael took a step, but the woman raised a hand. The air shimmered. Kael froze in place, not bound, but caught as if every muscle had remembered its injuries at once. Sweat beaded along his temple.
Elara moved between them. "If you're a messenger, then speak."
The woman dipped her head. "A course correction, Your Majesty. You stand at the hinge of an age. The Regent would rather not break the door if it might be opened." Her gaze slid to the skiff. "Take the river to the old pier below Starfall Bridge. Come alone. Bring the blade you found beneath the tomb."
Elara's heartbeat stumbled. "How do you know about the blade?"
"Your line forged it." The woman's voice softened. "Your mother hid it with her own hands."
The words struck with the force of a memory: soft hands, a lullaby like the sparkle-dust's song, a stone lid sliding shut above a small, hard bundle wrapped in silk.
Kael found his voice through clenched teeth. "She isn't going anywhere alone."
The messenger studied him. "Your devotion is almost touching." She lifted her hand, and the air around Kael eased. "Almost."
Elara forced her voice steady. "If I refuse?"
"Then the Regent will come to you, and there will be more smoke in your halls than your tapestries can stomach." The woman smiled. "But we prefer queens who choose their doors."
Elara glanced at Kael. He shook his head once. She looked back at the messenger. "If I come—and I make no promise that I will—how will I know I'm not walking into a noose?"
"You won't," the woman said simply. "That's what makes it a choice." She stepped backward into the shadow, and the boathouse swallowed her like a tide receding.
Silence. Elara realized she had been holding her breath.
Kael wiped his blade, sheathed it, and turned to her. "We're not doing this."
"I know," she said. "We're doing it smarter."
He waited.
"We don't go to Starfall Bridge," Elara said. "We go to the catacombs beneath the west library. That's where my mother hid the blade." She met his eyes. "If the Night Regent knows about the weapon, then the weapon matters. And if the weapon matters, we don't let it out of our sight."
Kael nodded once. "Then we move now. Before the castle resets its traps."
They slipped from the boathouse, keeping low along the riverbank until a postern gate admitted them back into the warren of passages. The castle was settling around them, alarms dimming, patrols drawing tighter nets across the known exits. But Elara and Kael did not take the known ways.
Beneath the west library, the air was cool and dry, smelling faintly of old vellum and dust. Elara whispered to the stones, and they remembered her—remembered her mother. A slab shifted, revealing the narrow stair that descended into a chamber carved out long before the castle's first foundations.
The blade lay where she recalled it from flickers of childhood memory: on a pedestal of black marble, wrapped in moon-silk that had not gathered a speck of dust. Elara's hands trembled as she peeled the silk away.
It was beautiful—if beauty could be sharp. A slender sword of pale metal that drank the light and returned it as a soft glow, like starlight trapped in ice. Sigils ran along its fuller, ancient glyphs that hummed at the edge of hearing.
Kael's breath was a reverent whisper. "The Starforged."
Elara nodded. "My father called it a key."
"To what?"
Before she could answer, a soft chime sounded from above—the discrete tone of a ward acknowledging someone with a royal seal.
Kael's hand went to his blade. "We were followed."
Footsteps on the stair. Elara raised the Starforged.
"Stand down," a voice said—familiar, beloved, and impossible. "Please."
Elara's world narrowed to a point of white fire. She knew that voice from dreams and from the hollow places between them. She knew the cadence of those footsteps, the way they count-marked the years she had lost.
She looked up as a figure reached the bottom step and lifted a hood.
And her mother stepped into the light.