The Festival

Seven days ago, Dame Seraphine Ashcroft walked to the edge of the Veyrath Cliff — and vanished.

The Grand Festival of the Vermirel Empire was the kind of spectacle designed to make you forget that anything could go wrong.

Lanterns the color of persimmons had been strung from every colonnade in the palace grounds, swaying in the warm summer dark. The courtyards were thick with the silk and velvet of noble houses, the air sweetened with wine and roasted spice and the particular perfume of a thousand people performing happiness at once. Music came from three directions — a string quartet near the east pavilion, a drum ensemble somewhere beyond the garden wall, a lone flautist on the upper terrace whose melody wandered through everything like someone quietly looking for a door out.

Dame Seraphine Ashcroft stood at the edge of the crowd and watched it all with the composed stillness that seven years of knighthood had given her. Her dress was wrong — she was one of the few women present in uniform rather than gown, the dark grey of the Eclipse Oath against the festival's jeweled brightness — but she had long ago stopped apologizing for the ways she did not match her surroundings.

She had other things to think about.

The night had begun three hours ago with a threat she couldn't name and an itch between her shoulder blades that wouldn't resolve. The Eclipse Oath's intelligence had flagged two known Lucien operatives entering the capital two days prior. Sir Theodore had briefed them at dawn: heightened vigilance, doubled patrol routes, no unnecessary proximity to the Second Prince. Seraphine had listened, catalogued, and spent the twelve hours since quietly unable to identify what was wrong with her.

She was good at identifying what was wrong with things. It was, perhaps, her most reliable skill.

Lucas appeared at her elbow holding two cups of wine he hadn't been asked to bring. He was grinning, which meant he had been talking to Charlotte again, which meant he had wandered from his assigned post, which meant Seraphine should say something.

She didn't.

"You look like someone who is about to tell me something is wrong," he said, extending one of the cups. She didn't take it.

"Something is wrong," she said. He made a face.

"It's a festival. Something is always wrong at festivals. The wine is bad, someone is wearing something offensive, the Emperor is breathing." He set the second cup on the nearby balustrade and leaned against the stone. "Which category of wrong is this?"

Seraphine considered. She had learned, in seven years of working alongside Lucas, that he processed threat through humor the way other people processed it through silence — not avoidance, exactly, but a kind of pressure valve. She did not share the tendency. She processed threat through information.

"I don't know yet," she said. "That's what's wrong."

He looked at her sideways. He had a particular look — half-fond, half-resigned — that she had catalogued into a category she thought of as the 'Seraphine face', which was the face he made when she said something that was obviously correct and obviously going to ruin his evening.

"Alright," he said. "Tell me when you know. In the meantime—"

"Lucas."

"—the fish course is excellent and Charlotte says—"

"Go back to your post."

He sighed the sigh of a man martyred by competence. But he went.

Seraphine picked up the second cup of wine, held it without drinking, and watched the festival continue without her.

— ✶ —

She saw him once in the three hours that followed.

That was how it always was with the Second Prince — present and then not, a figure that moved through rooms the way a blade moved through water: no resistance, no sound, and the understanding only afterward that something had passed through. Prince Cassian Thalric Vermirel Eryndor was the kind of beautiful that stopped thought before it started, dark-featured and precisely controlled, the kind of face that had been designed by someone who understood exactly what a weapon should look like. She had spent three years learning not to notice it.

She was, on balance, better at some things than others.

He was standing with his aides near the east pavilion when she crossed to reposition herself on the upper terrace, and for exactly one moment — three seconds, she counted them, she had developed the habit of counting things she should not be feeling — he looked up and their eyes met across the lantern-lit distance.

He looked away first. He always did. Not from discomfort but from the particular precision of a man who did not give anything, not even a glance, without having considered the cost.

Seraphine breathed out. She climbed the terrace stairs.

She told herself, as she had told herself for the better part of three years, that the warmth in her chest was simply the proximity of someone she was sworn to protect. That the particular sharpness of her attention whenever he entered a room was professional vigilance. That the way her mind catalogued the details of him — the set of his shoulders, the way his hands moved when he was reading, the quality of his silence when he was thinking — was purely observational and entirely appropriate for a junior knight whose assignment was to understand everything about her charge.

She was very good at telling herself things.

She was significantly less good at believing them.

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