Read Chapter 6: A Scrap of a Map

The candle guttered and nearly died as Anya leaned over the map, her breath coming in short, uneven bursts. Dust coated her fingers, smudging the parchment as she traced the faded ink lines of the palace corridors. The library smelled of rot and old secrets, of paper too long untouched.

“Here,” she said, tapping a spot near the eastern edge of the map. “This is where we stood when the door reacted to me.”

Kael crouched beside her, his shoulder brushing hers as he squinted at the markings. The light was poor—only a single taper they’d dared to bring through the hidden passage—but the runes on the paper were unmistakable. The same angular symbols she’d seen flare on the west wing door.

Then her finger moved past the symbol, following a thin, almost invisible line that snaked away from the palace’s main corridors, past the old chapel, and ended at a small circle drawn in the margin. Inside the circle, in handwriting too precise to be casual, someone had written two words.

*The Deep Well.*

“That’s not on any map I’ve seen,” Kael said quietly.

“It’s not on *any* map,” Anya replied. “I’ve studied the palace plans since I was a child. I know every corridor, every servant’s stair, every forgotten alcove. This—” she tapped the circle again, “—is not a place that exists.”

Kael reached out and turned the map slightly, catching the candlelight at a better angle. His brow furrowed. “It’s torn. Look—someone cut this deliberately. The rest of the map is whole, but this section was separated from a larger document and trimmed to fit.”

Anya’s stomach tightened. “Whoever hid this didn’t want the full picture intact.”

She thought of her father, of his hand pressing hers into the west wing’s rune-carved door three days ago, though she couldn’t remember it. She thought of the argument—the one that still clawed at the edges of her mind like a half-remembered dream—and the way the King had looked at her since, as if she were a stranger wearing his daughter’s face.

“What do you know about the well?” she asked.

Kael was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Rumors. Whispers in the guardhouse when the older men think the new captain isn’t listening.”

“Tell me.”

“They say it was sealed during your grandfather’s reign. Not because it had run dry, but because something was found at the bottom of it. Something the King at the time—your grandfather—ordered buried and forgotten.”

Anya stared at him. “What was found?”

“No one I spoke to knew. But they all made the same sign when they said it.” Kael touched two fingers to his chest, just below the collarbone. “The old ward against evil spirits. They believe the well was corked like a bottle, and whatever was in it was left to drown in the dark.”

The candle flame danced, throwing strange, shifting shadows across the map. Anya’s hand, where the emblem had burned and then healed itself, prickled with phantom pain. She flexed her fingers.

“My father’s writing is on this map,” she said. “I’d recognize it anywhere. The way he loops his ‘e’s, the pressure he puts on his downstrokes. ‘Beneath’—he wrote that word here, beneath the well’s circle, in a different ink than the rest of the map.”

Kael leaned closer, and she pointed at the faint, almost invisible word scratched into the parchment’s margin. *Beneath.* It was smaller, messier than the other annotations, as if it had been added in haste, in fear.

“Beneath the well,” Kael repeated. “Or beneath the palace.”

“They could be the same place.” Anya’s voice was barely a whisper. “My chambers. This library. The west wing. I’ve lived my whole life above rooms and passages I never knew existed. What else is down there, Kael? What else is my father hiding?”

The question hung between them, unanswered, as a soft sound filtered down from above. A muffled knock, repeated three times—the signal Lisbet had agreed to use if someone came looking for Anya.

They exchanged a glance. In one fluid motion, Kael folded the map and tucked it inside his tunic. Anya blew out the candle, plunging the library into darkness, and they moved by memory and touch back through the hidden passage, through the narrow gap behind the tapestry, until Anya stood once more in her chambers, heart hammering, dust in her hair.

Lisbet was waiting by the door, wringing her hands. She was a small woman with sharp eyes and a talent for seeming invisible, which was why Anya trusted her with her life.

“Your Highness,” Lisbet said, dipping into a quick curtsy. “Forgive the intrusion, but I couldn’t wait. The King has summoned a healer.”

Anya’s blood chilled. “A healer? For what purpose?”

“For you, Highness.” Lisbet’s voice dropped. “One of the Valdris envoy’s personal physicians, I’m told. A woman of some repute from the eastern provinces. She arrived not half an hour ago and was taken straight to the King’s study.”

“The Valdris envoy,” Kael said slowly, “has no authority over the health of a princess of this court.”

“No, Captain,” Lisbet agreed. “But the King granted her access anyway. He was seen leaving the study with a face like thunder, and the healer was seen leaving with a sealed letter bearing the royal crest.”

Anya’s mind raced. Marius was behind this. He had to be—her brother had been circling her like a hawk since the moment her memory had begun failing, and now he was bringing foreign physicians into the palace under their father’s nose. If a healer declared her unfit, medically unsound, her father would have no choice but to accept Marius’s guardianship over her. She would be confined, examined, locked away in the east tower with her traitorous mind and no one to tell her who she had been.

“What was the letter?” she asked. “Did you see who the healer gave it to?”

Lisbet hesitated. “I only caught a glimpse through the keyhole of the study door. She handed it to Commander Voss.”

Kael went very still beside her. Anya felt the change in him more than saw it—the sudden tension in his shoulders, the way his hand drifted toward the sword at his hip.

“Voss,” he said. “The commander with the rune on his sword.”

“The same,” Anya said. “Lisbet, where is the healer now?”

“She was being shown to the guest quarters in the east wing. The blue room, if I heard correctly.”

Anya made a decision. “Kael, will Voss be guarding her?”

“He could have assigned anyone,” Kael said. “But if he’s involved with this healer, he’ll want to control her movements. I’d wager he escorts her himself.”

“Then I need you to find a way to speak with her before Voss does.” Anya met his eyes. “She’s young, you said? Too young to know this court?”

“Reported as unusually young for a physician of her reputation,” Lisbet supplied.

“Then she’s either extraordinarily gifted, or she’s a liar.” Anya’s voice hardened. “And if she’s a liar, I need to know who she’s lying for. My brother came early to the throne room this morning. He’s been waiting for the Valdris envoy since before they arrived. What if he hired this healer himself, to certify me incompetent and clear his own path to the crown?”

Kael’s jaw tightened. “If that’s the case, she won’t speak to you freely. She’ll have been instructed to distrust you.”

“Then we don’t ask her.” Anya reached into her sleeve and withdrew the map—no, not the map, but the scrap of it she had torn away in the library when Kael hadn’t been looking. The section containing the circle and the words *The Deep Well.* “We beat her to the truth. Voss has the rune, Marius has the envoy, and someone has my mother’s locket. But I have this.” She held up the scrap. “And I have a well that no one has visited in over thirty years. If the answer isn’t in that healer’s mouth, it’s at the bottom of that well.”

Kael stared at her, and for a moment, something flickered in his eyes—respect, or maybe fear, or maybe both.

“Princess,” he said slowly, “if that well is as dangerous as the rumors suggest, you may not come back from it. Not whole.”

Anya looked down at the scrap of parchment, at her father’s hurried handwriting beneath the circle. *Beneath.*

“I stopped being whole three days ago, Captain,” she said softly. “I just keep forgetting it.”