POV: Seraphina

The fourth day came whether she wanted it to or not.

The bed was cold. She had been sleeping in it alone for weeks, but this morning the empty space felt different. Heavier. Before Thornwall, the emptiness had been temporary. Something to endure until the front was handled and he came back and they could finally stop meeting in borrowed rooms and secret hallways for a few hours at a time.

They had never had a real night. Not a full one. Not in a bed that belonged to them, with nowhere to be in the morning and no one to hide from. There was always a door to lock, a window to check, a reason one of them had to leave before dawn. At Flamekeep, the one night they finally stopped holding back, they barely slept. She remembered Caelan's hands shaking when he touched her face, his voice cracking when he said her name. The carriage ride to the palace the next morning, she had dozed against his shoulder and he pressed his lips to her hair when he thought she was asleep. She kept her breathing steady so he would do it again.

He did it again, and then they arrived at the palace and everything fell apart and he rode to Thornwall and did not come back.

She had been planning to fix that. After the trials. After the wards. She was going to bring him somewhere with no war dispatches and no court politics and no one else's crisis and she was going to sleep next to him until the bed smelled like both of them. She wanted to know whether he snored. Whether he kicked in his sleep. Whether he would reach for her in the dark without waking up or if she would have to chase him across the mattress. She had been looking forward to finding out for years.

None of that was going to happen now. The bed was just cold. The sheets never shifted in the night. It would stay cold.

She sat on the edge of it for a long time. Her hands throbbed inside the wrappings, a dull beat that matched her pulse.

The D'Lorien fire could heal them. Close the skin in minutes. Yona had offered twice. She refused both times.

She told herself the pain kept her focused. That without it the grief would take over completely and she would stop functioning. That was part of it. Maybe even most of it.

But there was another part she did not look at directly. The part that said she deserved the torn skin and the throbbing and the blood that seeped through the wrappings when she gripped too hard. Her mother had died to send her back. Servants had died in the curse she failed to prevent. Caelan had held a line for six hours because she told him not to rush, and now he was ash at Thornwall.

Everyone who got close to her paid for it. The hands were cheaper than a life.

Eleanor had given her three days, and it had nothing to do with kindness. Three days of acceptable grief, and then back to work, as if losing someone could be handled on a schedule.

Getting dressed took longer than it should have. Her fingers fumbled twice with the clasps. The healing skin cracked under the cloth and she had to stop and breathe through it.

Her hand went to the letter tucked inside her robe without thinking. His letter. The paper was soft from handling, edges worn to nothing. Wait for me.

She was still waiting. She would wait forever now.

She tucked the letter back into her robe, smoothed the fabric over it, and faced the door.

Maren's face passed through her thoughts. Still in the secure quarters. Still waiting for the audience Seraphina had promised. Another person she was failing by standing still.

Her footsteps faded down the corridor.

Eleanor's study smelled like lamp oil and paper. Four people were already seated when Seraphina arrived, and one was standing.

Thalion stood near the window with his arms crossed. He looked like he had slept, which irritated her. Eleanor sat behind her desk. Lucien occupied the chair nearest the bookshelves with a leather folio on his lap, and Yona perched at the far end of the table.

"Sit down," Eleanor said. The words carried authority without sharpness.

Seraphina sat. The chair was stiff. Everything in this room was stiff. Designed that way on purpose, probably. Hard to fall asleep in chairs that punished slouching.

"Lucien." Eleanor nodded once.

Lucien opened his folio. His voice was measured and clear.

"The ward network across the seventeen estates is in critical decline. Keeper families who maintained the feedback buffers were eliminated over the past century. The records call it natural attrition." He paused. "The pattern suggests coordination."

He knew exactly what had happened to those families. She noticed that and said nothing.

"Without keeper families, all feedback pressure flows directly to the Celestine heir. The primary node is the most unstable. If it collapses, the rest fail within days." He closed the folio. "Each anchor she stabilizes redistributes the load. The goal is to reach enough of them fast enough to prevent the cascade."

"And the Ember Sanctum?" Eleanor asked.

"Opens on the Warden Moon. Eight months from now."

"That is not the priority."

"No, Your Majesty. The wards are the priority. If the network collapses before the Sanctum opens, the question of awakening becomes academic."

Silence. Then Yona spoke quietly.

"Medically, Seraphina is capable of travel. The fire-scars are stable. Her stamina will be limited for the first several weeks, but she can function."

Seraphina felt Yona's eyes on her, checking the way she always did.

"The territory between estates," Lucien said, "is largely abandoned. Demon incursion activity has increased along the outer corridors since Thornwall. Several of the estates sit in contested zones."

Thornwall. He said the name with the same flat tone he used for everything else. Just a location. Just a report. Not the place where Caelan died. She heard the word and felt nothing. That was worse than pain. Pain at least meant something was still working inside her.

Her hands went still under the table. Her fingers pressed flat against her thighs and she held them there until the tightness in her chest moved past.

Yona noticed. Nobody else did.

"Seraphina." Eleanor spoke louder than the others and the room went quiet. "You are the last living Celestine heir. You are bound to the ward network through your mother's bloodline. You are the only person who can stabilize those anchor nodes."

"I know."

"Then you understand what I am about to do."

Seraphina looked at her. Eleanor's face was composed and hard and certain.

"I will not hide this. No cover story. I am going to tell them exactly what you are."

Seraphina nodded. The motion felt automatic. She needed to move, needed to get on a horse and ride toward something that required her hands and her power and her full attention, because sitting in this chair with these people looking at her meant sitting with nothing to do except think about him.

"When?" she asked.

"Today."

The announcement went out before midday. Eleanor handled the court alone. The decree named Seraphina as the last Celestine heir and the only person capable of reinforcing the ward network.

The court response split fast. The Harwick and Delmonte factions saw a cursed woman claiming the oldest bloodline in the realm, and the succession whispers started within hours.

Liora brought the rumors to her, angry and flat-voiced. "Harwick is telling anyone who will listen that every estate you save is a power base you're building against the Empress."

"Eleanor knows what she's doing."

"And when they convince her you're a threat?"

"Then we deal with it when it happens."

She walked away before Liora could answer. The politics did not touch her. She could hear the words and respond correctly but none of it felt real. The part of her that used to care about court games was somewhere she could not reach.

Thalion received his orders and his displeasure was obvious even though he said nothing about it. He organized the escort formation with sharp, clipped commands and did not look at her while he did it.

Whatever he thought about her, his face made it obvious. She could not figure out whether the distrust came from politics, from the resonance, or from something else. She did not have the energy to care. A month ago she would have built a strategy around his reactions. Now she just watched and waited for it to pass.

He caught her looking at him. His jaw tightened. She looked away first, not because she was uncomfortable, but because it did not matter enough to hold.

Preparation moved fast. Yona coordinated medical supplies. Liora ran security on every route between the capital and the first failing estate.

Seraphina packed. Her movements were precise and automatic. When someone brought the travel saddlebags to her chamber, the leather smell hit her before she could brace for it. She set the bag down on the bed and finished packing with her back to it.

Later, sorting provisions, she set aside a second portion of dried rations before she caught herself. She stared at the extra portion. Calculated the weight. Told herself it was in case someone else needed it. Then put it back and kept moving.

The letter happened after everyone left her alone.

The room was quiet. Wrong quiet. The kind that used to end with a knock at the door and his voice on the other side, low and certain and meant only for her. She had started to hate quiet rooms.

She pulled parchment and ink from the writing desk and sat in a chair that creaked under her weight.

This was not for him. He would not read it. He was ash and rubble at Thornwall and the dispatch had said no survivors and she had read those words so many times that they sat permanently behind her eyes.

The pen moved anyway. Because if she did not write the words down she would have to keep thinking them, and she could not survive another day of that.

She told him about the ward network. Seventeen estates. Four to six weeks. She told him about the Sanctum, eight months from now, and her hand shook when she wrote that because eight months was what they were supposed to have.

Then she stopped writing about logistics and started writing the truth.

She told him that Yona kept watching her and waiting for her to fall apart. That Liora had been sleeping outside her door and pretending she was not. That his horse was still in the stable because no one wanted to be the person who admitted he was not coming back for it. She told him she did not know how to do this without him and she hated that she had to learn.

Before Thornwall, she had written him a letter. Told him the scars were stable. Told him not to rush back. He listened. He always listened to her. She had told him there was time.

There was no time. There had never been any time, and she just did not know it yet.

The writing stopped. She looked at the words and could not see them because her eyes had gone blurry and her throat had closed and she was crying again. She thought the tears were done. They were not done. She pressed her fist against her mouth and held the sound in because if Yona heard her she would come in and hold her and Seraphina did not deserve to be held.

She sat like that until the breathing steadied.

Then she held the parchment over the candle flame and watched it catch. The paper curled and blackened and the words disappeared. A piece of ash landed on her wrist and she felt the heat before she brushed it off. She held the rest until the fire reached her fingers, then dropped what was left into the basin.

His letter was still under her robe. The one he had written to her. The edges had started to fray from how often she touched it. She pressed her palm flat against it and kept it there.

The universe didn't give me a second chance. It gave me a trade.

The courtyard gate was worse than she expected.

The thought had not occurred to her until she stood at the gate. The same stone underfoot, the same iron frame. The last time she stood in this spot she had watched him ride out with the column behind him, Gravenor at the front and Delca checking the horses. Caelan had looked up at her window one last time before he turned his horse and gave the order and did not look back.

Now she was the one riding out. There was no one at the window. She did not look up again.

The reins pressed against her wrapped hands when she mounted, and the healing skin stung. She adjusted her grip and said nothing.

Thalion rode beside her. Gave final orders to the guard formation. Did not speak to her, did not look at her. He was furniture, something that existed in her peripheral vision without requiring acknowledgment.

Behind them, the palace shrank. The capital's outer walls passed on either side and then they were on the open road, the detail spreading into formation around them, hooves striking packed earth in rhythm.

The news they left behind would travel faster than they did. By nightfall, every trade route and noble estate in the realm would know that the last Celestine heir was coming.

Yona pulled alongside her after the first hour. Said nothing. Just rode beside her, matching pace, close enough that their horses nearly touched.

Seraphina kept her eyes on the road and her hand pressed flat against the letter under her robe. The numbness had settled in deep enough to be almost useful. She could ride and breathe and keep her back straight, and as long as nobody asked her how she was doing, the performance would hold.

By the second hour, the farmland thinned. The fields gave way to scrub, then to stretches of dead earth where nothing grew. Fence posts stood without fences. Stone walls had collapsed into rubble that no one had bothered to clear. The houses they passed were empty, doors hanging open and roofs collapsed inward where the timber had rotted through.

No one had lived here in a long time, and the land made that clear with every mile.

One of the forward scouts dropped back and said something to Thalion. She watched his jaw tighten. He adjusted his sword belt and signaled the formation to close ranks.

"What is it?" Yona asked.

Thalion did not answer her. He answered Seraphina, and for the first time since they left the capital, his eyes met hers.

"The first estate is three days' ride." His voice was flat and professional and carried no comfort at all. "The territory between here and there has been unprotected since the wards failed. Demon sightings in the last two weeks. Four caravans turned back. One didn't come back at all."

He held her gaze for exactly long enough to make sure she understood what he was saying.

Then he turned his horse and rode to the front of the column without another word.

The road stretched ahead, empty and quiet. Nobody spoke. The horses kept pace and the guards kept formation and the only sound was hooves on packed dirt and wind through dead grass.

Seventeen estates. The first one was already killing people, and she hadn't even arrived yet.