Read Chapter 12: The Queen's Riddle

The chamber beyond the sigil door was not a crypt. It was a study, preserved in dust and silence as if the air itself had been held captive for a decade. A tall arched window let in the pale grey of a moonless night, and beneath it sat a slim writing desk, its surface neat save for a single leather-bound volume.

Anya stepped forward, the ring cold and heavy in her sleeve. Behind her, Kael lingered at the threshold, sword still drawn, eyes cutting to the dark opening they’d just come through. Voss’s soldiers had not yet reached the door, but their boots echoed in the stairwell, a steady drumbeat of pursuit.

“Close it,” Anya said, not turning.

Kael hesitated, then pressed his palm to the sigil-carved stone. It ground shut, sealing the passage with a soft hiss. The footsteps faded to nothing. He exhaled, sheathed his blade, and crossed to her side.

Anya’s hand hovered over the book. The leather was dyed a deep wine red, almost black in the low light, and stamped with the same split crescent that marked the door. Her mother’s sigil. Her mother’s desk.

“This was hers,” Anya whispered. Her voice cracked on the word.

Kael said nothing. He simply stood close, a quiet presence at her shoulder.

She opened the cover. The pages inside were fine vellum, creamy and unworn, filled with a flowing hand that slanted slightly to the right—her mother’s script, unmistakable in the way it looped the tails of letters, the same way Anya’s own hand betrayed the same habit. She flipped through the entries. Most were dated, brief, practical. *Garden accounting. Harness the brown mare. Speak to the steward about the north gate.*

Then she reached the final page.

It was undated. The ink was darker, pressed harder into the vellum, the letters cramped, as if written in a hurry or in fear. A single entry, no greeting:

*To undo the forgetting, one must remember what was stolen.*

Anya read it aloud, and the words hung in the stale air like a bell struck in an empty hall. She stared at the page. The ink had bled slightly at the edges, and beneath the final word, there was a smear—a small dark oval, the ghost of a thumbprint pressed too hard, the print itself whorled and faint.

“Stolen,” Kael repeated. “The curse takes your memories each night. Something stolen. A memory?”

Anya shook her head slowly. Her hand drifted to her sleeve, to the ring’s cold band pressed against her skin. She pulled it out, laid it on her palm. The metal was black iron, unadorned except for a single thin line of silver that coiled around the band like a vine. The blackened veins on her arm had crept to her forearm now, stark against her pale skin in the dim light.

“I remember this,” she said. Her voice was thick. “Not from you. From before. My mother… she wore two. One on each hand.” She turned the ring over. The inside was smooth, uninscribed. “I used to pull at them when she held me as a child. She said they kept her warm.”

Kael’s brow furrowed. “Two?”

“A pair.” Anya’s gaze lifted to meet his. The cold from the ring curled up her arm, not painful now, just present, like a hand resting on her wrist. “Where’s the other one?”

Kael shook his head. “I’ve never seen it. Not in the royal vaults, not in any official record of her effects. After her death, everything was inventoried.” He paused. “I read those lists, searching for anything about the curse. There were brooches, gloves, a prayer book. No ring.”

Anya looked back down at the diary, at her mother’s cramped final entry. The words seemed to darken as she stared. *Remember what was stolen.* She thought of the fragments the ring had shown her—her mother’s face, younger, leaning over a cradle, humming a tune Anya could not quite place. The image had felt less like memory and more like a window, a glimpse from the other side of glass.

“She knew,” Anya said slowly. “My mother knew about the curse. She wrote this down, knowing someone would find it.”

“Or hoping,” Kael said quietly.

Anya’s throat tightened. She pressed her palm flat against the page, as if she could absorb the words through her skin. “They said her death was an accident. A fall from the east tower. The railing gave way.” She looked up, and there was something hard in her eyes now, something new. “The east tower railing was checked every spring. The steward logged it. I’ve read his ledgers—I used to memorize everything, before the curse took my own story.”

Kael went very still. “Then it wasn’t an accident.”

“My mother didn’t fall,” Anya said. “She was pushed. Or she was taken. Or she walked off that tower willingly to keep something hidden.” She lifted the ring, let the silver line catch the dim light. “And this—this was part of her protection. The cold, the visions—it’s not a weapon. It’s a key.”

“To what?”

Anya looked past him, at the sealed stone door, at the crypt pressing in around them, at the entire hidden wing of the palace that had existed beyond every map and every record. The tomb of her mother’s secrets.

“Whatever she was trying to keep safe,” Anya said, “she hid it in the same place she hid the curse.”

Kael’s jaw tensed. “Your mother isn’t the one who cursed you.”

“No.” Anya’s voice was barely a whisper. “But she knew who was. And if the ring is a pair, then the other one is still out there—worn by the person who stole it from her. The person who stole her.”

She turned the ring over in her fingers. The cold seeped deeper, and in the quiet, she heard it—faint as a breath, a woman’s voice, distant and sad, humming a lullaby she had almost forgotten.

Anya’s eyes widened. She knew that tune.

Her mother had hummed it the night before she died.