Read Chapter 8: The First Midnight

The candles had burned to fists of wax, and the midnight bell was a distant tremor she felt more than heard. Anya sat at the writing desk in her private study, Kael a shadow against the door, and she was still talking—about her mother, about the locket, about the anger she could not place.

“…and I remember the way she laughed when Father brought her the winter roses. She called them ‘thorns with good intentions.’ I must have been six, maybe seven. The snow was so deep it swallowed the courtyard whole, and she lifted me to the window ledge so I could see—” Anya stopped.

The word *see* hung in the air, unfinished.

Her hand, which had been gesturing toward the window, fell slack to the desk. Her eyes did not close. They simply emptied, like a cup tipped over and left to drain. The amber of her pupils went flat, and Kael saw the moment the life behind them went out—not violently, but politely. As if the curse had been trained to curtsy.

“Princess?” He stepped forward.

Her lips moved. A whisper, torn and frayed. “Don’t…”

“Don’t what?” Kael crossed to her in three strides, dropping to a knee beside the desk. Her face was blank as parchment. “Anya. *Anya.* Look at me.”

She blinked, a slow and terrible blink, and for one moment her eyes found his with a clarity that cut through the haze. Her hand scrambled across the desk, knocking over a brass inkpot, and she seized the corner of a blank page.

“Don’t let them win,” she breathed, the words slurred and barely audible, half-formed on a tongue that was forgetting how to shape them. Her fingers dipped into the spilled ink—black as a raven’s heart—and scratched the words onto the paper in a jagged, desperate scrawl.

Then her hand dropped.

Her breathing evened. Her eyelids fluttered once, twice, and then her gaze swept the room with the placid curiosity of a stranger who had never seen a study before. She looked at Kael, at the sword at his hip, and a polite smile rose to her lips.

“Forgive me,” Anya said, her voice smooth and untroubled. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

Kael stared at the smear of ink on her fingertips. At the paper beneath her hand, the words still wet and gleaming. *Don’t let them win.*

He reached for the page.

“I am Captain Kael,” he said carefully, easing the paper from under her fingers. “Of the Crown Guard. I… was assigned to your protection.”

“Was you? How delightful.” She turned her head, watching the candlelight skim the spines of the books on her shelf. There was no recognition in her eyes. No depth. She was a painting of herself. “I hope you’ll forgive my manners. I seem to have lost the thread of the evening. The hour is late, isn’t it?”

“Very late, Your Highness.”

“Then I shan’t keep you.” She rose, grace automatic as a court-trained marionette, and offered him a nod that was pure protocol. “The guards outside will see you to your quarters. Good night, Captain.”

She was halfway to her bedchamber door when Kael found his voice.

“Your Highness. The journal.”

Anya paused. The blank stare she gave him was worse than mockery, worse than fury. Kharkiv hostility with no memory of the crime. “Journal?”

Kael pulled the empty leather book from his belt. Her father’s blank page still awaited her first entry—which would now, he realized coldly, be nothing but the scratches of a dying hand and the confession of a woman who no longer remembered him.

“You asked me to keep this for you,” he said. “I will read it to you in the morning.”

“How morbid.” Her smile was courteous, distant. “But I’m sure you know best, Captain. You seem the type to know many things.” She tilted her head, studying him with bright, empty eyes. “Have we met before?”

“Not yet.”

He bowed, and she stepped into her bedchamber, pulling the door shut behind her with a soft click that sounded final.

Kael stood alone in the study, the ink-stained page in one hand, the blank journal in the other. The midnight bell tolled its last note, and he heard the faint sound of Anya humming a tune she had never learned tonight—some lullaby from a childhood that had been stolen from her an hour ago.

He looked down at the page.

*Don’t let them win.*

The ink was still wet, still wet after minutes that should have dried it, and he noticed for the first time that the letters were not the princess’s tidy court hand. They were crooked, desperate, almost illegible. Below the last word, her finger had dragged a line of ink off the edge of the page—a smear that pointed, he realized, not toward the desk, but toward the bookshelf.

Toward the tapestry of the hunt.

Toward the hidden passage beneath her chambers.

Kael crossed to the shelf, pressing the loose board he had discovered the previous night. Wood slid soundlessly aside, revealing the dark stairwell that led down to the forgotten library. A draft of cold air climbed out, smelling of old paper and something else—something mineral, like iron filings left in rain.

He descended.

The library lay in its perpetual twilight, dust motes orbiting the cracks in the ceiling stones. He lit the stub of a candle left on the lectern, its light fetching shadows from the shelves, and cast about for the map they had found. It was still there, spread on the reading table, edges held down with a brass candlestick that Anya had used as a paperweight.

But it was wrong.

He narrowed his eyes. The river bend was off. The village name was inked in a different hand. And the bottom edge—

The bottom edge was clean. A fresh tear, where yesterday the map had simply frayed with age.

Kael’s blood went cold. He pulled the page from beneath the candlestick, held it to the candlelight. The section marking the Deep Well, with her father’s handwriting curling the word *Beneath*, was gone. Not lost. *Removed.* With a blade, by the look of the edge.

He thought of Anya, hours ago, smiling as she told him the map was too fragile to handle. Let me store it properly, she had said. I know the way the royals keep their parchments.

He had believed her.

Above him, the floorboards creaked. A soft footfall. And then the scrape of something being dragged—furniture, perhaps, drawn across the study floor.

Kael went still, hand falling to his sword hilt. The shadow of a figure passed over the crack in the ceiling boards, and he heard a woman’s voice—not Anya’s. Lower. Harder.

“…the captain is gone. The girl has no memory until dawn. Take the map from the study, and be quick about it.”

His jaw tightened. He heard the rustle of fabric, the click of boots, and then the sound of the study door opening—and closing—on the far side.

He waited until the silence stretched thin and fragile as spun glass. When he climbed back up into the study, the room was exactly as he had left it: candles burned low, the ink still wet on the page, Anya’s bedchamber door shut tight.

But the empty journal—the one that held Anya’s first and only entry—was gone from the desk where he had set it down.

The page was still there. The page with *Don’t let them win* dripping black and accusing.

But the book itself had been taken.

*They had taken the ledger.*