Read Chapter 20: The Confrontation

Voss’s office smelled of oiled leather and old paper, the kind of smell that ought to have been comforting. Anya let the door latch click behind her and watched the Commander rise from behind his desk, his face a careful mask of courtesy. Kael stood at her shoulder, close enough that she could feel the tension radiating off him like heat.

“Your Highness,” Voss said, dipping his head. “You should not be out of your chambers at this hour.”

“I should not have to be,” Anya replied, and she laid the crescent-moon locket on his desk. It was a cheap thing, tarnished silver on a worn chain, and it looked absurd among the Commander’s neat stacks of reports. “But I have questions, and I find I am running out of people willing to answer them honestly.”

Voss’s eyes dropped to the locket. For a long moment, he did not move, and Anya watched the mask crack—just a hairline fracture along the line of his jaw, a flicker in the set of his shoulders. Then he exhaled, slow and deliberate, and gestured to the chairs before his desk.

“Sit,” he said.

Anya did not sit. Kael did not either. They stood like a matched pair of blades, and Voss seemed to measure the distance between them before he sat back down, the locket still untouched before him.

“I knew your mother,” he said quietly. “Better than most.”

“The vision showed you. The ring pulled me into it.” Anya lifted her hand, the onyx gleaming dark on her finger. “She gave you that locket. Made you promise to protect me. You’ve kept that promise, haven’t you, Commander? You’ve been my shadow since before I knew I needed one.”

Voss’s mouth tightened. “I have tried.”

“Then tell me the truth,” Anya said. “Why did she give it to you? What was she afraid of?”

The Commander reached out and touched the locket, turning it over in his palm. When he spoke, his voice was rougher than Anya had ever heard it. “Your mother was not sick, Highness. She was poisoned—slowly, methodically, by someone she trusted with access to her chambers. She knew it before the physicians did. She knew she was dying, and she knew who was doing it.”

“Who?” Kael’s voice cut through the silence.

Voss looked up at him, and something passed between them—a glint of recognition that Anya did not like. “The court sorcerer, Elara,” he said. “She was the one who brewed the poison. And she is the one who laid the curse on you.”

The name landed like a blow. Elara. The woman who had been missing for a decade, the healer who had tended Anya’s nursery, the soft-spoken woman with lavender soap on her hands and a gentle laugh. Anya remembered her—or thought she did, though the memories were threadbare things, worn thin by years of midnights. Elara had been kind. Elara had been constant.

“The healer,” Anya said slowly. “The one who disappeared when I turned ten.”

“She did not disappear,” Voss said. “She ran. She knew the King would not protect you—he was paralyzed by grief and guilt, and he missed what was happening under his own roof. And when she was gone, I found the remnants of her work.” He opened a drawer and withdrew a folded paper, yellowed at the edges. “This is her confession. Signed, sealed, witnessed by the steward before she fled.”

Kael stepped forward, but Anya was faster. She took the paper, unfolded it, and read. The hand was neat, feminine, unhurried—the hand of someone who had already made peace with her choices. *I, Elara Vell, confess to the slow poisoning of Queen Isolde at the behest of a patron whose name I dare not write. I confess to the sealing of a curse upon Princess Anya, struck at midnight, binding her memory to the crown. I confess that these acts were done not in malice, but in obedience to a greater design I was not permitted to question. I leave this record with the Commander of the Royal Guard, and I flee knowing that my life is forfeit if I am caught.*

Anya read it twice. Then she looked at Voss. “She names no patron.”

“No,” Voss agreed. “She did not dare. But I have my suspicions.” He paused, and Anya saw the mask come back up, the careful curtain drawing across his face. “Her chambers were searched after she fled. We found correspondence—not signed, but the writing was court-trained. The letters referred to the Queen’s death as a ‘necessary pruning’ and to you as ‘the instrument to be shaped.’ Anyone in the court could have written them. I could not prove more.”

“Prince Marius,” Kael said flatly. “You think it was him.”

“I think,” Voss said, “that your father’s disgrace came only months after Elara vanished, and that the papers your father burned were very likely records of the same correspondence. I think there are circles within this court that turn without the King’s knowledge, and that both your families were caught in them.”

Anya’s mind spun. Kael’s father, disgraced. Voss’s oath. The locket. The ring. Her mother, dying slow, smiling through poison because she had no other choice. And through it all, a curse binding Anya’s memory to the crown, stealing her every midnight so that she could never piece the pattern together.

“If Elara poisoned my mother,” Anya said slowly, “then she is the one who can break the curse. She is the one who made it.”

Voss met her eyes. There was something in his gaze that she had not seen before—a weighing, a measuring. As if he were deciding how much more she could bear. “Elara was apprehended eleven years ago, Highness. She did not flee far.” He rose from his chair and moved to the far wall, where a bookcase stood flush against the stone. He pressed a knuckle against the spine of a red-bound volume, and the bookcase swung inward on silent hinges.

Behind it was a narrow stair descending into darkness.

Kael drew a breath. Anya heard it, sharp and quick, but she did not look away from the shadowed opening. “Why hide her?” she asked. “Why not hand her to the King for justice?”

“Because the King would have hanged her before she could speak,” Voss said simply. “And because she is not a poisoner, Highness. She is a pawn. The true player sits in the court, watching, waiting. If I executed Elara, I would lose the only witness who can name them.” He gestured to the stair. “She has been in the cell beneath this tower for a decade. She is weak, but she is alive. And if you want the truth of what was done to your mother, to you, to Kael’s family—she is the one who must speak it.”

Anya stared into the dark. Somewhere below, in a cell carved from the foundations of the castle, the woman who had cursed her was waiting. The woman who had killed her mother. The woman who held the key to everything.

The onyx ring on her finger pulsed, warm as a heartbeat.

She turned back to Voss. “Take me to her.”