Read Chapter 28: The Broken Pieces

The ledger lay open on the escritoire, its pages dense with Anya's own handwriting—the only truth she could trust. She ran her fingers over the words, over Kael's name repeated like a prayer, over the warning she had scrawled in a moment of panic she could no longer remember: *Do not trust.*

"Do not trust whom?" she asked without looking up.

Elara stood by the window, the shattered fragments of the locket spread across a velvet cloth on the sill. She had been studying them for hours, turning each shard with careful fingers, but now she straightened and crossed the room.

"The warning may not be about a person," Elara said. "It may be about an action. A choice. The ledger recorded your fear, but not its source. That is what we must reclaim."

Anya finally looked up. "You said I must confront each buried memory. Claim it as my own. How do I claim something I cannot see?"

Elara pulled the chair from the writing desk and sat across from her, close enough that their knees almost touched. Her face, usually guarded, had softened into something almost motherly.

"The curse does not erase memories so much as bury them," Elara said. "Each night at midnight, the ring seals them beneath layers of forgetting. But the memories are still there—scars on the mind's surface. If you press hard enough, they bleed through."

"Press how?"

"Through the body." Elara reached out and took Anya's hands. Her palms were warm, calloused from years of service. "The body remembers even when the mind refuses. Close your eyes and recall a sensation. A scent. A touch. The memory will follow if you let it."

Anya hesitated. Trust was a currency she could not afford to spend freely, and yet here she was, in a room with two people whose names filled half her ledger. Kael had proven himself in the ledger's pages—his courage, his devotion, written in her own hand from nights and days she could not recall. Elara's name appeared fewer times, but always in contexts of aid.

"Very well." Anya closed her eyes.

"Think of your mother," Elara said softly. "Not her face. Her presence. How did she feel when she held you?"

Anya's breath caught. She had no memory of her mother's face—the year of loss had stripped even that—but something stirred beneath her ribs. A warmth. A scent like lavender and old paper.

"I smell ink," Anya whispered. "And lavender. And—" Her throat tightened. "She smelled of rain. Like the garden after a storm."

"Stay with it," Elara urged. "What did her voice sound like?"

"Low. A little rough. She laughed at her own jokes before finishing them." Anya felt the corners of her mouth lift, unbidden. The memory was not yet an image, but it was *real*. It belonged to her.

"Where were you? What were you doing?"

Anya's brow furrowed. The sensation was there—the faint scratch of wool against her cheek, the weight of a small body pressed against a larger one. "A carriage. I was small. Very small. She was holding me, and the window was open, and I could see the mountains." A pause. "She was taking me somewhere. She was frightened."

The warmth curdled into something cold. Anya's eyes snapped open.

"She was frightened of my father," Anya said. "Why would she be frightened of my father?"

Elara's grip tightened. "Stay with the memory. Do not run from it. What else do you see?"

Anya forced herself back into the darkness of her closed eyes. The carriage swayed. Her mother's arms tightened around her. There was a voice—not her mother's—calling from outside, and her mother's hand pressed over Anya's mouth, silencing her before she could cry out.

"She was hiding me," Anya breathed. "From someone. She pressed her hand over my mouth and I bit her because I was scared, and she didn't even flinch. She just held me tighter and whispered—" Anya's voice cracked. "She whispered, 'I will not let him take you.'"

"Who? Your father?"

"No." Anya shook her head, frustrated at the fog. "Not my father. Someone else. Someone she was running from."

The door burst open. Kael stood on the threshold, breathless, his sword still sheathed but his hand resting on its pommel. His eyes went from Anya to Elara and back.

"You summoned me," he said, uncertain. "You didn't—I came as fast as I could."

Anya blinked. She had not summoned him. But the ledger lay open, and a page at the back had been marked with a small dagger she kept for cutting threads. She crossed the room and looked down at the page.

The last entry, written in her own hand in a moment she had already forgotten, read: *If I begin the memory work with Elara, send for Kael. Do not face the past without him. He will not think to enter unless called.*

She turned to face him. He stood framed in the doorway, torchlight catching the silver of his hair, his expression caught between worry and readiness. The ledger had told her he was loyal. The memory work had shown her a mother who ran. Both truths pressed against her chest, demanding space.

"I did summon you," she said. "Just not consciously. My past self—she thought ahead."

Kael's brow furrowed. "You wrote to yourself?"

"I wrote to you," Anya corrected. "Because I knew I could not face what lies beneath alone." She glanced at Elara. "Is that wise? To have him here?"

Elara studied Kael with an unreadable expression. "The memory that surfaced was tied to your mother's flight. The person she fled from wore a ring like yours." She gestured to the crescent moon on Anya's finger. "But there is a deeper thread we must follow. Your mother did not merely flee—she sought someone's aid. Someone at court."

"Whose?"

Elara hesitated. The silence stretched, and Anya felt the warning in the ledger pulse beneath her skin. *Do not trust.*

"I do not yet know," Elara said. "But the fragments of the locket bear an inscription I have been unable to read. It is worn away at the edges, but the center is clear." She picked up a shard of silver and held it to the light. "It reads 'From your king, on the day you became my queen.'"

Anya's blood turned to ice. "The locket was from my father?"

"A wedding gift," Elara confirmed. "But the locket itself was not the cage. It was the key." She set the shard down carefully. "A key meant to open a lock that he—your father—keeps hidden. The true anchor of the curse is not the ring you wear. It is the ring's twin, hidden in the King's study."

Anya felt the floor tilt beneath her. She gripped the edge of the escritoire. "My father bound me to this curse? On purpose?"

Elara's silence was answer enough. Kael stepped forward, his hand hovering near Anya's arm but not quite touching.

"Then we go to the study," he said. "We take the twin ring, and we end this."

"No," Anya said. The word came out harder than she intended. "You do not understand. My mother ran because she feared what my father would do to me." She looked at Kael, and in his eyes she saw the beginning of a truth she was not yet ready to claim. "What did the ledger tell you about him? My father."

Kael's jaw tightened. He did not answer.

"He is capable of this," Anya said slowly, the pieces sliding into place like stones in a mosaic she had built without knowing. "He loved me. He still does, in his way. But he loved the kingdom more. And if I am the price of its safety—" She looked down at the ring on her finger, cold and unyielding. "He would pay it."

She raised her eyes to meet Kael's. And for the first time since waking with no memory of the past year, she did not feel lost.

"Then we do not take the twin ring," she said. "We confront him with it. Tonight. Before midnight, when I forget this too."