It rained on the morning they opened the book.The round hall at the top of the palace felt colder than before, with the windows streaked grey and the lake invisible behind a curtain of water. Ysolde sat at the head of the table in her plain gown. Sorrel stood at her left shoulder, pale and rigid. Across from Kael, Aurelia sat with her hands flat on the wood and Captain Renn behind her, and nobody had touched the tea.Kael had slept two hours. He could hear everyone's heartbeat, which was not helping. Sorrel's was too fast. Aurelia's was steady but tight, like a rope under strain. The Matriarch's was the strangest. It was slow and even, and every few beats it paused, as though she were holding something in."Before we begin," Ysolde said, "I want it understood that I have never read this. I do not know what is in it. If it names my clan, I will not stop you from reading it aloud." She laid her small hand on the cracked cover. "Sorrel. Would you?"The Fox swallowed. "Me?""It is your f

Sorrel knew four ways out of Lanternreach, and he hated all of them."There's the sewer," he said, counting on his fingers as they walked the lower galleries after midnight. "The smugglers' tunnel under the east wall, which floods at high tide. A goat track down the cliff on the north side, if you don't mind a fall. And the old water gate." He winced. "Nobody has used the water gate in thirty years, because the last person who tried drowned.""Which is the best?""The best is the one where you drown least."Kael almost laughed. He did not, because the Emperor's army was camped across the lake, and he could see its campfires from every window, a vast field of small orange stars spread across the plain. He had tried counting them and given up at four hundred.They were crossing a deserted guardroom when the door at the far end opened and a Fox captain stepped through with her hand raised."Highness. There are visitors at the water gate. Wolves." She hesitated. "Five of them. They crosse

Her father had not aged.That was what Aurelia noticed first. She had braced for a general in iron, or a tyrant with the cold face he wore in council. Instead he stood in the mist on the wet stones of the causeway in a plain dark riding coat, silver at the temples, tired around the eyes, and he looked like a man who had been awake all night worrying about his daughter.That was the terrible part. He probably had."Aurelia," he said again, softly, as though the first time had not been enough."Father.""You are thinner.""I've been riding.""You've been doing a great deal more than that." He stepped closer. He did not touch her. He seemed to understand that if he did, she would either break or strike him, and he preferred neither. "I read your letter. It was well made. Dull, and dutiful, and entirely false. I have taught you very well."The mist drifted between them. Behind her she could hear Renn's breathing and the faint creak of thirty saddles. Behind him, on the shore, three thousa

Ysolde was alone in the round hall when Aurelia found her, sitting at the long table with the ledger closed in front of her and a single sheet of folded paper in her hands.She did not look up. The rain had stopped, and the crystal windows showed a pale yellow sky over the lake, and across the water the Lion fires burned like a second city. The Matriarch's tea had gone cold. Her small grey figure sat perfectly straight, as though she were holding herself upright by will alone."I thought you might come," she said. "Sit, Highness.""I want to ask you for something.""I know. I want to give you something first." She turned the paper over once, gently. "Close the door."Aurelia closed it. Renn took up her post outside, and the latch clicked."Seventeen years ago," Ysolde said, "your mother and I were friends. I do not say that lightly. A Fox does not make friends easily, and an empress makes them more rarely still. She used to come to my garden in the mornings with a book she never read

The Fox with the green ribbon came to her at the third hour before dawn.Aurelia was sitting on the edge of the glass bed, fully dressed, with her boots on and her hands folded in her lap. She had not tried to sleep. She had watched the lake darken and the lanterns gutter, and listened to Renn's slow pacing in the antechamber, and she had told herself every half hour that no answer was also an answer.The knock was so soft she almost missed it.A slight, quick-eyed girl in a grey servant's tunic slipped through the door and shut it behind her. A strip of green ribbon was knotted around her left sleeve. She did not bow. She drew something from inside her jacket and held it out in both hands."From the Lion camp, Highness. A young man in a captain's coat. He gave it to me at the picket line and told me to run." She swallowed. "He was crying. I didn't think soldiers did that."Aurelia took it.It was a flat bundle wrapped in a man's handkerchief, tied with a bootlace. Under her fingers s