THE LAST SWORD MONARCH

Chapter 8: What Serelis Believed

Serelis sat at the window of her chambers long after the candles had burned low, watching the courtyard below where torches still moved between the buildings, guards searching corners of the estate that had already been searched twice that day.

Her attendant, Mira, entered quietly with a fresh pot of tea and found the princess exactly where she'd left her an hour before, untouched plate of food cooling on the table beside her.

"You should eat something, Your Highness. You've had nothing since morning."

"I'm not hungry." Serelis didn't turn from the window.

Mira set the tea down and hesitated, choosing her next words carefully. She had served the princess long enough to know when silence needed filling and when it needed leaving alone, and tonight, she suspected, was the former. "You're thinking about the boy. The one from the hearing."

"I'm thinking about a lot of things."

"Serelis." Mira rarely used her name without title, and it was enough to finally draw the princess's attention away from the window. "I've known you since you were small enough to hide behind my skirts from your tutors. I know what your face looks like when something's eating at you."

Serelis let out a breath and finally turned fully from the glass. "Do you believe he did it? What they're saying he did?"

Mira considered the question honestly, rather than offering the easy comfort a lesser attendant might have reached for. "I don't know him, Your Highness. I only know what the court decided to believe."

"That's not an answer."

"No," Mira admitted. "It isn't."

Serelis rose from her seat and crossed to the small writing desk near her bed, where a single book still sat, one of the volumes Garrick had returned to her beneath the plane tree only days before. She picked it up, turned it over in her hands the way he had, and set it back down without opening it.

"He returned my books before I even asked," she said. "He apologized for not being able to read them properly, like it embarrassed him more than it should have. He didn't ask me for anything. Not a coin, not a favor, nothing. Do you know how rare that is, Mira? Everyone in this palace wants something from me the moment they learn who I am."

"Perhaps he didn't know who you were yet."

"He found out. I watched his face when I told him my name wasn't just Serelis." She shook her head slowly. "He didn't change. Most people change the moment they learn. Their voice gets softer, or their eyes get sharper, like they're already calculating what my favor might be worth to them. He just kept talking to me like I was a person who liked books."

Mira poured the tea anyway, setting a cup within reach even though she doubted it would be touched. "And at the hearing?"

"He looked terrified," Serelis said. "Not guilty. Terrified. There's a difference, and I've watched enough liars stand before my father's throne to know it when I see it. Guilty men get angry when they're accused, or they get too calm, too rehearsed. He looked like a boy who genuinely didn't understand how the truth had turned into something so far from what actually happened."

"Lord Zephar's son tells a very different story."

"Lord Zephar's son has told different stories about servants before," Serelis said, sharper than she meant to. "Do you remember the laundry girl two years ago? The one who was dismissed for supposedly stealing silver that turned up in Darian's own chambers a month later?"

Mira's expression flickered, uncomfortable. "That was never proven either way."

"No. Because no one wanted to prove it. Because proving it meant accusing the High Chancellor's son of lying, and nobody in this palace has the stomach for that fight." Serelis sat back down, the fire gone out of her voice as quickly as it had come, replaced by something more tired. "I don't have proof, Mira. That's what eats at me. I have a feeling, and a feeling isn't enough to stand against Lord Zephar in open court. I watched two guards' deaths get pinned on a boy who couldn't even hold a sword properly, and I couldn't do anything but stand there and watch it happen."

"You could still look for proof," Mira said gently. "If you truly believe there's something to find."

Serelis looked up at her. "Where would I even begin?"

"You said there was a laundry girl in the storeroom that day. The one who ran." Mira set the teapot down fully now, giving the conversation her full attention. "Someone silenced her, Your Highness. You said so yourself. If someone silenced her, then someone was afraid of what she'd say."

Something shifted in Serelis's expression, the exhaustion giving way, slowly, to something more purposeful. "I don't know her name."

"I might," Mira said. "The laundry staff talk. I could ask, quietly, without drawing attention to why."

"Quietly," Serelis repeated. "If Lord Zephar learns I'm asking questions about his son's story, he'll make sure I never get close enough to ask a second one."

"Then we'll be careful," Mira said. "But I think you already know you're not going to simply let this rest, Your Highness. I've known you too long to believe you'd sit here doing nothing while a story you don't trust gets carved into truth."

Serelis looked back toward the window, toward the torches still moving in the dark below, searching for a boy who was, by now, likely far beyond the reach of any of them.

"Find her," she said quietly. "Whatever it takes. I want to know what actually happened in that storeroom before the rest of the kingdom finishes deciding who Garrick Arundel is without ever asking him."

Mira nodded once, and let herself out without another word, leaving Serelis alone again with the cooling tea and the boy's book still resting on the desk beside her, and the first quiet certainty she'd felt all day that she wasn't going to simply wait for someone else to find the truth for her.