Raff gave the order to clear the receiving hall within minutes of Seraphine kneeling on the palace floor, and by the time the last servant had backed out through the doors with the untouched tray still balanced in her hands, only Aniel, Laviel, and the six dragons remained with him in the wide, echoing room. He asked the guards to hold the corridor outside and admit no one, not Nixia, not Oguro, not even a runner from the treasury with an emergency that could wait until morning. Whatever Aniel needed to say, she would say it without an audience beyond the people who already carried enough of her secrets to be trusted with the rest. She did not speak right away. She set the folio down on a side table with the exaggerated care of someone whose hands weren't entirely steady, smoothed the front of her dress, and stood facing the tall windows for a long moment with her back to the room, as if the story needed distance before it could be told at all. Laviel moved to stand beside her but

Word of the Zeth delegation reached Xandria's capital five days before Ferrando's carriages actually crossed the border, carried by the same diplomatic channels that handled every minor trade inquiry between the great kingdoms and the smaller states that depended on them. Nixia's court received the request for audience with the ordinary courtesy such things demanded, and nothing in the wording of it, the careful talk of northern tariffs and grain quotas, suggested anything beyond what it claimed to be. Aniel read the correspondence herself before it reached Nixia's desk, a habit she had kept since the earliest days of Raff's household, and found nothing in the language that struck her as unusual. She noted only, in the margin of her own private copy, that Zeth had never once in the history of the two kingdoms' dealings sent a delegation over an issue as small as border tariffs, and that the timing of it, arriving so soon after the dragons had knelt in the receiving hall and spoken

News of Zeth's mobilization reached the allied courts faster than Raff had expected, carried not by his own network but by the elven kingdom's own proclamation, read aloud in every border town and repeated by merchants who had no reason to keep it quiet. Within days, Xandria's palace had become the center of a diplomatic scramble unlike anything the kingdom had seen since the war against Vanir, envoys and messengers arriving at all hours from Rosenthal, from Draxos, from smaller states that had never before bothered sending anyone to Xandria's court at all. King Ethan arrived in person rather than sending a representative, traveling with a smaller escort than protocol demanded, and told Nixia plainly, once the formalities had been dispensed with, that Rosenthal's own army could not match Zeth's numbers on its own, but that his kingdom's survival now depended on Xandria's survival in a way that made the calculation simple regardless of the odds. Rosenthal would commit what soldiers

The second week of the border war began with silence, and silence, Raff had learned by now, was never a good sign from an enemy who had already proven willing to spend thousands of lives on a single push. Zeth's commanders stopped attacking the northern pass directly on the eighth day. Naviel reported it first, relaying through Toru's skill that the vanguard which had bled itself against her earthen walls for a week had simply withdrawn overnight, leaving behind only scattered fires and the trampled ruin of a camp abandoned in haste. Tinuviel wanted to call it a retreat. Naviel didn't. She said the enemy didn't leave that many usable supplies behind if they were running, and Raff, hearing the report from the map room three days' ride south, agreed with her reading before Eru had even finished laying the new information across the table. He was right to be wary. By the tenth day, scouts confirmed that the bulk of the northern column had shifted its march east, curving around the p

By the twenty-fourth day of the siege, word reached the central ford that Regent Cadris himself had crossed into contested territory, traveling with the remnants of the northern column that had bled itself dry against Tinuviel and Naviel's earthen walls. Naviel's scouts confirmed it first through Toru's link, describing a personal guard nearly a thousand strong moving under a banner that had not flown outside Zeth's own capital in living memory, the regent's own colors rather than any general's standard. Aniel took the news standing over Eru's maps with the same stillness she had carried since the assassination attempt inside the command tents, and said, when Raff asked what she made of it, that a man who had ruled from behind sealed doors for fifteen years did not risk his own person on a battlefield unless the stalemate had already cost him something he couldn't afford to keep losing quietly. Three noble houses had withdrawn support after the exposed seal. A war that dragged past