Read Chapter 1: The Summons

The raven arrived at dawn, its wings black against the grey sky of the northern aerie. Elara read the message twice before the frost on her fingers numbed them to the parchment. *Return to the capital. Your presence is required.* It bore her father's seal, but the hand was the Chancellor's—sharp, precise, and utterly without warmth.

She did not wait for an escort. She rode through the mountain pass with two guards, the wind tearing at her cloak, and reached the gates of Valdris Keep by nightfall of the third day. The city smelled of smoke and wet stone, the same as it always did, but the streets were too quiet. Banners hung at half-mast, though no one in the royal family had died. Not yet, anyway.

King Aldric received her in the war room, a place she had not been permitted to enter since she was twelve. The maps on the table were old, their edges curled and yellowed, marked with lines of red and blue that had not moved in decades. Her father stood at the window, his back to her, and the firelight carved deep shadows into his face when he finally turned.

“You look well, Elara.”

“You look tired, Father.”

A flicker of something—irritation, perhaps—crossed his features before he smoothed it away. He gestured to the chair across from him, but she remained standing. Old habits. In this room, sitting felt like surrender.

“I have signed a treaty,” he said. “With Aurenne.”

The words landed like a blow to the chest, but she kept her face still. “The Hundred-Year War does not end with a signature.”

“It does when both sides are bleeding out.” He moved to the table, his fingers tracing the border between the two kingdoms. “Alaric of Aurenne has agreed to a marriage alliance. His crown to your hand. Peace through blood, as it has always been done.”

“You mean peace through *my* blood.”

“Your mother would have understood.”

Elara’s jaw tightened. Her mother had been dead for nine years, and her father had never once invoked her memory to win an argument before. The tactic was desperate, and desperation in a king was a dangerous thing.

“You want me to marry the enemy,” she said slowly. “The man whose father burned our southern farms. The man whose armies killed Uncle Thom.” She paused. “The man who, according to every report we have, is a brutish warmonger with the temperament of a rabid dog.”

“Reports can be wrong.”

“And if they are not?”

Aldric looked at her, and for a moment, he was not the king. He was just a man, grey and tired and afraid. “Then you will smile and bear it, and when the time comes, you will find a way to make it serve Valdris. You have always been cleverer than me, Elara. Cleverer than anyone in this court. I am not sending you there to be a bride. I am sending you there to be a weapon.”

She should have been angry. Part of her was angry—a cold, furious knot in her stomach that wanted to scream at him for sacrificing her to a peace that would not last a decade. But the other part of her, the part that had spent years learning the language of Aurenne in secret, the part that kept a map of their fortresses hidden beneath her floorboards, felt something else entirely.

Opportunity.

“When do I leave?” she asked.

“In a fortnight. But the treaty—” He hesitated. “The treaty has already been signed. Your marriage is a formality. The peace begins now.”

She left the war room without another word, her boots echoing down the stone corridor. The keep was quiet, the servants moving like ghosts, and she found herself walking without purpose, her mind racing ahead to a court she had never seen, enemies she had never met.

That was when she saw him.

A man in a dark cloak, hood pulled low, slipping out of her father’s private study. The door swung shut behind him with a soft click, and he moved with the practiced ease of someone who did not want to be followed. Elara pressed herself into the shadow of an alcove, watching as he crossed the corridor and disappeared around a corner.

Her father’s study was off-limits to everyone except the King and his most trusted advisors. And this man—this stranger with his hidden face and his silent footsteps—had no place in it.

She waited until the sound of his boots faded, then moved to the study door. It was unlocked. Of course it was. The King had never feared thieves in his own keep.

The room smelled of old paper and candle wax. Elara crossed to the desk, her fingers brushing over the smooth wood, and found what the masked man had left behind: a packet of letters, tied with black ribbon, stamped with a seal she did not recognize.

A seal that was not Aurenne’s. Not Valdris’s.

She reached for it, hesitated, and then took it. The letters were cold in her hands, weighted with secrets she could not yet decipher. She slipped them into her sleeve and left, her heart beating too fast beneath her ribs. She could not read them here. Too many eyes, too many ears.

She found a quiet corner in the library, a forgotten alcove where the dust lay thick and undisturbed, and untied the ribbon. The first letter was written in a careful, sloping hand, and the words made her blood run cold.

*The princess is to be delayed. The King of Aurenne grows impatient, but our friends in the north will see that the wedding does not take place.*

There was no signature. Only a sigil—a serpent coiled around a crown.

Elara read it twice, three times, her mind turning over the implications like a merchant weighing coins. Someone wanted the wedding stopped. Someone who had access to her father’s study. Someone who had sent a masked man to deliver a message that should never have seen the light of day.

She was still holding the letter when the door to the library creaked open. She shoved the packet back into her sleeve, smoothing her expression into one of idle curiosity as her father’s steward entered.

“Princess Elara,” the man said, bowing. “I did not expect to find you here.”

“I was looking for a book,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the shelves. “A history of Aurenne. I thought it wise to study before I depart.”

The steward smiled, but his eyes were sharp, assessing. “An excellent idea, Your Highness. The King has asked me to inform you that the treaty documents have been placed in your chambers. He thought you would like to review them before the official announcement.”

“Of course.” She inclined her head. “Thank you.”

He lingered a moment too long, and Elara felt the weight of his gaze like a physical thing. Then he bowed again and left, pulling the door shut behind him.

She remained still, listening to his footsteps recede until they were swallowed by the silence of the keep. Then she pulled out the letters again, staring at the serpent sigil, and thought of the masked man slipping through her father’s halls like a ghost.

Someone in this keep wanted her death. Or, at the very least, wanted her never to reach Aurenne.

But they had made a mistake. They had left their letters where she could find them. And Elara had never been one to waste a gift.

She walked to her chambers, the packet hidden in her sleeve, and found the treaty documents waiting on her desk. The wax seal was fresh, the signature bold across the bottom. Her father’s hand. And beside it, in a darker ink, a name she had been raised to hate.

*Alaric of Aurenne.*

She touched her fingers to the signature, tracing the curves and angles of his name as if she could read the man himself from the shape of his letters. Then she looked out the window, past the grey towers of Valdris, toward the south.

Somewhere beyond those mountains, a king she had never met was waiting for her with a crown and a promise. And somewhere closer—much closer—a serpent wore a crown of its own, coiled and patient, ready to strike.

Elara smiled, thin and sharp as a blade.

She had been sent to be a weapon. Let them all see what a weapon could do.