Read Chapter 7: The Ashen Trail

The chapel was a carcass of stone and silence, hidden behind a screen of overgrown yew at the edge of the royal gardens. Elara had found it by following the word *Ashen* — carved into the base of a statue of the Saint of Lost Things, its letters fresh enough to leave pale wood dust on her fingertips.

She pushed the iron-bound door inward, and the hinges screamed like wounded animals.

Dust motes swirled in the shaft of dying light. The altar was cracked, the pews rotted through, and the air smelled of damp and old wax. Elara stepped carefully, her gown hissing over the flagstones, when a sound stopped her cold.

A whimper. High and thin, like a hurt pup.

She rounded the altar and found the boy.

Corin was wedged between the stone bier and the wall, his knees drawn to his chest, his face blotched red with weeping. He wore traveling clothes — wool too thick for the Aurenne spring — and his boots were caked with mud that had dried brown and cracked.

“Corin?” Her voice came out a whisper. “Corin, gods above, what are you *doing* here?”

He looked up, and the terror in his eyes broke something inside her. He was eleven years old, small for his age, with their mother’s pale hair and their father’s serious mouth. His lower lip trembled.

“Elara,” he choked. “You came. I thought — I didn’t know if you’d come, the men said you hated me, they said you’d left because you didn’t want to be my sister anymore.”

She crossed the space in three strides and pulled him into her arms, heedless of the grime. Corin buried his face in her shoulder and shook.

“I don’t hate you, you little fool,” she murmured against his hair. “Who told you such poison?”

He pulled back, sniffling. His small hands gripped her sleeves. “The Regent’s men. They watch me. They say I’m to be a hostage if the marriage fails, but Father said Aurenne is safe, Father said —” His breath hitched. “But Father is *dead*, Elara. Father is dead, and they won’t say it, they just keep smiling and telling me he’s on campaign, that he’ll write soon.”

The world tilted.

Elara heard the words, but they refused to take shape. Her father. The King of Valdris. A man who had taught her to play chess and to read a man’s lies in the set of his jaw. Dead.

“That’s impossible,” she said. It came out flat, mechanical. “I received a letter from him not a fortnight past, sealed with his ring. Chancellor Roland would have told me — the court would have told me —”

“He wouldn’t.” Corin shook his head violently. “The Regent is *himself*, Elara. Lord Maerwych, the old one with the gray face. He told me Father was sick and that I was to stay in the capital, but I saw the physicians leaving the royal wing with black ribbons on their arms. I asked the seneschal when Father would be well, and he looked at me like I’d struck him. So I ran.”

Elara’s mind raced, tripping over itself. The Regent. Maerwych. Roland’s co-conspirator. Veyron, her father’s own envoy, plotting in Aurenne’s gardens to abduct a boy who was already — who was already —

“How many days have you been traveling?” she demanded.

“Six. I stole a horse and rode the back roads. I slept in ditches. I thought if I reached you, you’d know what to do.” His voice cracked. “You always know what to do.”

She did not know what to do. For once in her life, Elara of Valdris had nothing — no clever scheme, no carefully layered deception, no map of alliances she could consult. Her father was dead. Her brother was a fugitive. And she was a stranger in an enemy court wearing a smile she could not maintain.

But she was also a diplomat. She could feign composure long enough to think.

“Listen to me,” she said, gripping his shoulders. “The Regent — Maerwych — has spread a story among the court that you remain in the capital, is that correct? That you are safe and well?”

Corin nodded miserably. “He told the foreign ambassadors I’d taken a chill and could not receive visitors.”

“Then your absence will already be discovered. They will be hunting for you, and they will not stop until they find you.” She pressed her palm to his grimy cheek. “They will use you, Corin. They will blame Aurenne for your disappearance and use it as a reason for war. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

He did. She saw it in the way his small jaw set, the way his eyes hardened with a grief far older than his years.

“What do I do?” he asked. It was not a child’s question. It was the question of a prince who had just learned that the world was a place where fathers died and no one admitted it.

Elara made her decision in the space of one heartbeat.

“You come with me,” she said. “And you trust no one. Not a single soul — do you understand? Not the guards, not the servants, not the priests. No one but me.”

They slipped out of the chapel under a deep violet dusk, hugging the shadow of the hedgerow. Elara’s heart hammered a war-drum rhythm against her ribs. Every guard they passed could prove friendly or fatal; every open window an eye.

The kitchens were busy with the evening meal prep. Cooks were red-faced over steaming pots, scullions running between the larders. Elara pulled her hood low and hurried Corin across the courtyard’s edge, close enough to the smokehouse that the smell of curing pork masked their passage.

She made straight for the servant’s stair and pressed her brother against the cold stone wall. “Wait here. Don’t move. If anyone comes, pretend you’re lost on an errand for Lady Seraphine. Say her name and look annoyed. I will be two minutes.”

He nodded. She squeezed his shoulder once, then went to find Annette.

The maid was in the linen room, folding sheets with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had learned to make herself indispensable. She looked up as Elara entered, and her hands stilled.

“Your Highness.” Her voice was carefully neutral. “You should not be in this part of the castle.”

“I need your help,” Elara said, cutting through the pleasantries. “And I need your oath that you will not speak of what you see or hear.”

Annette’s dark eyes flickered, calculating the cost of refusal. Then she set down the sheet. “My oath is given, Your Highness. What do you need?”

She had chosen well. Elara knew it in her bones. Annette was no spy — spies did not volunteer their lies so readily, nor did they carry scraps with single words they feared to explain. Annette was a survivor, and survivors could be trusted with secrets, because they knew the price of repeating them.

When Annette saw Corin pressed against the stones — small, frightened, unmistakably royal — her face went through a dozen expressions in the span of a breath. But she did not scream. She did not faint. She simply bowed her head.

“The old nurseries in the north tower are closed for the season,” she murmured. “No one will think to look there. I will bring food and a change of clothes.”

Corin was installed behind a bolted door within the hour, wrapped in blankets and clutching a warm roll Anne had produced from her apron. Elara crouched before him.

“I will come when I can,” she said. “Do not leave this room for any reason. Do you hear me? For any reason at all.”

He nodded, his eyes huge in his pale face.

She turned to Annette in the corridor. “I need a rumor spread. Something that will pull their attention away from the castle and toward the border.”

Annette’s lips curved — the smallest, deadliest smile. “The border. Two riders seen crossing the river, one small, one cloaked. Fled north into the wilds.”

“Make it believable,” Elara said.

“I always do, Your Highness.”

Elara walked back toward her chambers with the steady stride of a woman who had already decided her next lie. Somewhere in Aurenne, Roland and Veyron were plotting the abduction of a hostage who no longer needed to be taken. The Regent of Valdris was dead, and the truth of it was a weapon she could wield — if she could only find the right throat to point it at.

She would start with Alaric.

She would start by learning whether the King of Aurenne had known all along that her father was gone. And if he had, she would bring the whole rotten edifice of his crown down around his ears.