Read Chapter 29: The Locket's Origin

The fragments lay on the velvet cloth like scattered stars, each one catching the candlelight in a way that made Anya's chest ache. She had gathered them herself, piece by piece, from the ballroom floor where the sorcerer had stood. Where her mother's locket had saved her.

Elara's tweezers hovered over the largest shard, her breath held steady as she angled it toward the flame. "There's something here. An engraving, inside the rim. I've never seen lettering so fine."

Anya leaned closer, Kael a solid presence at her shoulder. She could feel the heat of him through her sleeve, could sense the way his hand hovered near the small of her back without quite touching. A stranger's courtesy. A guard's instinct. Nothing more.

"What does it say?" she asked.

Elara's brow furrowed. "The script is old court dialect. Give me a moment." She set down the tweezers and pulled a magnifying glass from her workbench, positioning it over the shard with the care of a surgeon. "It's a dedication. 'To my sun and stars, on the day our light becomes two.'"

Anya felt the words land like stones in still water. "That's from my father. He used to call her that—his sun and stars. After I was born, he said we were both his heavens."

Kael shifted beside her. "A wedding gift, then."

"Not just any wedding gift." Elara's voice had gone strange, thin and tight. She was staring at the fragment with an intensity that made Anya's skin prickle. "The engraving matches the style of the crown jeweler from thirty years ago. The same man who crafted the royal signet rings."

Anya's mind raced ahead of her. "The ring. The one the sorcerer wears. They're a set, aren't they? The locket and the ring were made together."

Elara looked up, her face pale in the candlelight. "Twin anchors. That's what the curse requires. Two objects, bound at their creation, separated and hidden. One to hold the spell's power. One to maintain its shape." She swallowed. "Your mother carried the locket. The sorcerer carries the ring. But the ring he wears—it's the lesser of the pair."

"The lesser?" Kael's voice was sharp. "He seemed powerful enough with it."

"Because he's channeling through the greater anchor. He doesn't possess it himself. He's drawing power from somewhere else, something that amplifies the spell." Elara's hands trembled as she set down the tweezers. "Anya, there's a second ring. The true anchor of the curse. And I believe it never left the palace."

The words hung in the air like smoke, impossible to grasp and impossible to ignore. Anya's heart hammered against her ribs as understanding dawned cold and terrible.

"My father's study."

Elara nodded slowly. "The King commissioned the pair. The locket was the Queen's, but the ring—the one you've seen him wear, the signet with the emerald—that's the lesser. The true ring would be his private seal. Something he kept close, something no one would question."

"The twin ring," Anya breathed. "He's been wearing the anchor of my curse on his finger every day of my life. Every day I forgot, he sat across from me at breakfast, wearing the reason I couldn't remember."

"A ring he'd have had since before you were born," Kael said quietly. "Since her death. Since he bound his own daughter to a spell that steals her mind."

Anya pressed her palms flat against the table, steadying herself against the wave of fury that threatened to unseat her. "He did this. My father made the curse possible. He gave the sorcerer the tools."

"Or the sorcerer used him," Elara offered, but her voice lacked conviction. "We don't know the full bargain."

"We know he kept the ring." Anya's voice was stone. "We know he watched me struggle, year after year, and said nothing. We know he let me believe I was broken when all along, he could have ended it with a word and a piece of jewelry."

Kael's hand found her arm, a grounding pressure. "Anya. If we're going to do this, we need to do it tonight. Sunset is hours away, and when midnight comes—"

"I know." The words came out gentler than she intended. He was right. She had, perhaps, hours left of who she was today. Hours of knowing her father's betrayal. Hours of remembering that Kael had fought a sorcerer for her, that Elara had sifted through broken glass to find her truth.

Hours, and then the ledger and its cold, cryptic warnings would be all she had.

The warning she'd written days ago echoed in her mind, scrawled in her own hand without context: *Do not trust.*

"Do not trust," she whispered. "That's what I wrote after the first time the sorcerer came to me. Before I knew his identity. Before I knew anything."

Kael was watching her with those dark eyes, full of questions he wouldn't ask. She wanted to answer them. She wanted to tell him that her warning might have been about her father, about the man who raised her and cursed her in the same breath. But the words felt too fragile to voice.

"The study," she said instead, straightening. "Kael and I will go tonight. During supper, when the guards will be at the hall. Elara, you stay here. Keep the fragments safe."

"And if your father catches you?"

Anya met Elara's gaze. "Then I'll finally have the conversation I should have had a lifetime ago."

---

The palace corridors were quiet in the way they only were during the supper hour—servants dismissed, guards rotated to the dining hall, the great halls left to dust and silence. Anya moved like a ghost through familiar shadows, her feet finding the paths her body remembered even when her mind did not.

Kael walked a half-step behind her, his hand resting on his sword hilt. She noticed the way his eyes tracked every alcove, every curtain, every possible hiding place. The vigilance of a man who had already failed once and would not fail again.

"The King's study is past the eastern gallery," she murmured. "There's a hidden passage behind the tapestry of the hunting scene. I used to hide there when I was a child, after my mother died. He never found me."

"You've never mentioned that."

"Today is the first day I've remembered it." She felt the strangeness of the words even as she spoke them. So much of her life was archaeology—digging through layers of days that had collapsed into each other, finding flecks of memory that might or might not be true.

They rounded a corner and stopped. The study door stood before them, dark oak banded with iron, the royal crest picked out in gold above the frame. It was locked, of course. But Anya knew the lock. She had grown up watching her father turn his key in it, had memorized the mechanism in those lost years of childhood.

Kael stepped forward. "Allow me."

"Standing guard is what I pay you for. Wait—" She laughed, a sharp-edged sound. "I don't pay you at all, do I?"

"You pay me in purpose." He knelt before the lock, producing a thin set of tools from his belt that made her eyebrows rise. "Many things I learned while I was away. This was among them."

The lock clicked open within seconds. Kael pushed the door inward, and they slipped into the study like shadows joining the dark.

Anya's breath caught. The room was smaller than she remembered, or perhaps she was simply larger now—the space filled with the weight of her father's life: bookshelves stuffed with ledgers, a desk scattered with correspondence, and above the mantle, watching over it all with painted eyes, her mother.

The portrait was new. Or at least, she had never remembered it in the years since the curse took hold. Her mother stood in a garden of impossible flowers, one hand resting on her stomach, the other raised as if reaching toward the viewer. She was smiling.

"The safe," Kael said. "If the ring is here, it would be somewhere guarded."

Anya's gaze dropped from her mother's painted face to the mantle beneath it. And there, nearly invisible in the shadows, she saw it. A seam in the stonework, barely a hairline, traced around a section of the fireplace's face.

"Behind the portrait," she said. "He always kept his secrets closest to what he loved."

Kael crossed to the mantle and lifted the portrait from its hooks with careful hands. Behind it, the stone held a recessed panel, smooth and featureless—no visible lock, no obvious handle.

"Pressure mechanism," Kael murmured, running his fingers along the edges. "Old design. The crown used these in the Marches outposts." He pressed a corner, then a point along the bottom, then paused.

"Here." Anya moved beside him, her hand finding the place without thought. The spot where she'd hidden a child's secret beneath her mother's picture. She pressed, and the panel slid sideways with a soft hiss.

Inside, nestled in velvet, sat a ring of dark gold, banded with silver thread, crowned by a single black stone that seemed to drink the candlelight.

Anya reached for it.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

The voice came from the doorway, and Anya's blood turned to ice. She turned, Kael's sword already half-drawn, to find her father standing in the threshold, his face unreadable in the shadows.

In his hand, he held the emerald signet. The lesser ring. Bathed in the pale light of the corridor torches, it seemed to pulse like a second heartbeat.

"Anya." His voice cracked on her name. "I had hoped you would never find this."