The Chapel No Priest Enters

Mara dreamed of a window with no image in it.

Only lead.

Lead ribs. Lead veins. Lead lines narrowing into smaller lines, and smaller still, until the whole window was nothing but a black net stretched over light. Something moved behind it. Not a figure. Not quite. A pressure. A shape made visible by the refusal of everything around it to remain still.

In the dream, Mara held her knife.

In the dream, the leadwork was warm.

In the dream, someone on the other side of the glass set a hand against hers.

She woke with her own hand pressed flat to the dark window of the palace workroom.

For a moment she did not move.

Her breath had fogged the pane. Beyond it, the royal chapel stood across the garden, hard-edged and pale beneath the moon. Snow lay clean along the roofline. The iron screens over the windows made each opening look barred. No lamp burned inside.

Mara lowered her hand.

The skin of her palm tingled.

She stepped back and nearly struck the worktable with her hip.

“Idiot,” she said.

The word did not improve the room.

The fire in the small grate had sunk to coals. Her travel dress lay across a chair, stiff with dried mud at the hem. Her own tools had been delivered while she slept—or while she had failed to sleep properly—stacked beside the door in their wrapped leather cases. Someone had also left a tray: cold meat, dark bread, a jug of water, and a small folded card bearing the thorned crown.

She opened it.

His Majesty will receive Mistress Vey when his strength permits. Inspection of the Royal Chapel may proceed after morning bell under supervision of Lady Vesta Lorne and Secretary Ilvath.

No signature.

Of course not. A court had written it. Courts loved passive verbs because they made blame harder to locate.

Mara crumpled the card, then thought better of it, smoothed it flat, and tucked it into her satchel. Written evidence was written evidence, even when useless.

She did not return to bed.

Sleep, once betrayed, could not be trusted twice.

Instead, she lit the lamps, unwrapped her tools, and laid them out on the worktable in strict order. Knives and irons first, then measuring tools, brushes, linen and gloves.

The palace tools remained in their racks, watching like polite corpses.

Mara ignored them.

A new place always tried to rename a craft. It gave a person new rooms, new patrons, new rules, new dangers, and expected the hands to become grateful strangers to themselves. Tools prevented that. A knife with the right worn handle could make even a royal palace temporary.

By the time dawn flattened the chapel garden into shades of iron and white, Mara had inventoried the glass sheets, tested the worktable for warp, rejected two lamps, accepted four, and discovered that the brazier smoked if fed too quickly. She had also inspected the previous restorer’s tools more closely.

They were excellent.

Annoyingly excellent.

Whoever had owned them had not been a dilettante. The leading vise had been modified by hand to hold narrower came than standard. The scraper had been sharpened so many times that its blade had thinned to a crescent. One grozing iron bore tiny notches along the handle, not decorative but counted. Years of service, perhaps. Or completed panels. Or days survived in Aurelune.

At the bottom of the tool chest, beneath a folded piece of rotting linen, Mara found a small packet wrapped in oilskin.

Inside was a sliver of glass no longer than the first joint of her thumb.

Clear at first glance.

Not clear when she lifted it to the lamp.

The sliver held a suspended thread inside itself. A dark line too fine to be wire, too clean to be a seed or flaw. Mara turned it slowly, watching the inner thread catch and lose the light.

Hair.

No. Too straight for hair.

Ash in a sealed vein.

Perhaps.

She breathed once, carefully, and set the sliver on the felt.

Hollow glass, apprentices said, could hold anything a maker dared to trap.

Memory.

Blood.

A name.

Nonsense.

She wrapped the sliver again and put it in her own satchel.

When someone knocked at the door, she had her knife in her hand before the sound finished.

The door opened without waiting for permission.

Soren Ilvath stood on the threshold. His eyes dropped to the knife, then returned to her face.

“Good morning,” he said.

“That remains speculative.”

“You enter rooms badly.”

“I will wait next time.” He closed the door. His morning court dress was finer than his traveling black; a plain silver pin with one gray bead had replaced the thorned crown.

“Mourning?” she asked.

“Office.”

“Where are Vesta and the king?”

“She is at prayer. His Majesty is resting.”

Soren crossed to the window and looked toward the chapel. Morning had made him no warmer. It merely clarified the shadows beneath his eyes.

Mara picked up the oilskin packet from her satchel and held it out.

He did not take it.

“What is that?”

“Something left by the previous restorer.”

He took the packet at last, unfolded it, and looked at the glass sliver. For a second, some old disgust—or old grief—moved beneath his composure.

“Where did you find it?”

“In the dead man’s tool chest.”

“Do not call him that.”

“What was his name?”

Soren refolded the oilskin. “Master Oren Pask.”

“Was he buried with honors before or after someone searched his tools?”

Soren’s eyes lifted.

Mara held his gaze.

There were many forms of silence. This one had teeth.

“Master Pask served the chapel for twenty-nine years,” Soren said. “He was loyal, skilled, and discreet.”

“He died of a seizure,” Soren said.

“In the chapel?”

He did not answer.

Mara took the packet back. “I will keep it for now.”

“That may not be permitted.” His eyes dropped to the knife.

Mara set it down. She had meant to ask about a fragment, not threaten him over it.

“Is the chapel open?” she asked.

“It will be.”

“Good.”

“Lady Vesta will meet us at the east gallery. The chapel keys are held by the relic office.”

“Bring what you need for initial inspection,” Soren said. “Vesta will not allow removal today. If a panel is unsafe, speak to me before touching it.”

They left the workroom by a narrow stair used by servants or by people important enough to avoid public halls. The stone steps were worn in the center and freshly swept. Small slit windows showed pieces of the city below, each view cut so thin it seemed censored.

Mara carried her inspection satchel over one shoulder and her folding rule in hand.

They descended into the east gallery where the palace began to wake in earnest. Servants moved silently along walls. Courtiers drifted toward breakfast rooms in dark velvet and pale fur, their morning faces arranged into expressions of practiced boredom. Twice, conversation stopped as Mara passed. Twice, Soren looked toward the speakers and the conversation resumed too quickly.

Useful man, she thought.

Dangerous man.

Often the same thing.

At the end of the gallery, Lady Vesta waited beside a pair of bronze doors embossed with saints’ hands. Today she wore gray, not black. It made her look no less severe, only more carved from the weather. The chain of glass saints lay against her collarbone, each miniature panel gleaming with impossible cleanliness.

With her stood a priest.

Mara knew he was a priest because the Church rarely allowed anyone else to look so pious while being so visibly miserable. He was broad-faced, middle-aged, and wrapped in a white wool cassock beneath a heavy cloak. A silver sunburst hung at his chest. His hands were red from cold despite the gloves clenched in them.

He stared at Mara as if he had expected someone taller.

Or holier.

Lady Vesta said, “Mistress Vey, this is Father Caldus, Keeper of the Dawn Office.”

The priest bowed. “Mistress.”

“Father.”

His eyes flicked to her satchel. “You carry iron?”

“I carry tools.”

“In the chapel, iron should not touch the altar screen.”

Mara looked at his gloves, clenched rather than worn.

“Will you inspect with us?”

“I enter only during appointed rites,” Caldus said.

“You enter for coronations?” she asked.

“Only as far as the outer rail.”

“Funerals?”

“There have been no royal funerals in the chapel during my service.”

Lady Vesta stepped between them. “The clergy honor boundaries established before current doctrine.”

“What boundaries?” Mara asked.

Father Caldus surprised her by answering. “I have no wish to be remembered by the glass.”

The hall chilled around the words.

Not literally. Mara knew literal cold. This was subtler. The way a room changed when someone spoke too plainly and everyone felt the architecture listening.

Lady Vesta’s pale eyes moved to the priest.

Father Caldus looked at the floor.

Mara considered him again.

Not pious, perhaps. Not only pious.

Afraid. Yes.

But not ignorant.

That made him more interesting.

The bronze doors opened onto a covered passage leading down to the east garden. Morning struck hard and white from the snow. The cold entered Mara’s lungs like clean glass.

The chapel stood at the end of the garden.

By daylight, it was worse than by dusk.

Not because it looked haunted. It did not, in any ordinary sense. There were no gargoyles, no skulls, no theatrical rot. The Royal Chapel of Saint Alis was elegant, narrow, and almost unbearably restrained. Its pale stone had been cut in long vertical lines that drew the eye upward. Its buttresses were slim. Its slate roof rose steep and black against the snow. The iron screens were worked as thorned vines. Their brackets anchored in the exterior stone, leaving a hand’s breadth between iron and glazing. They could bar an approach without touching whatever was sealed in the glass; they did not make the panels themselves safe.

That was what troubled Mara.

Ugly buildings confessed. Beautiful ones negotiated.

A low wall enclosed the garden around the chapel. Snow lay untouched inside it except for a single shoveled path from palace door to chapel threshold. No footprints strayed. No birds marked the roof. No ivy grew on the stone. Even the winter weeds seemed to have chosen death at a respectful distance.

Father Caldus stopped at the gate in the low wall.

Lady Vesta did not.

Soren did not.

Mara stopped because the priest had.

He withdrew a key from beneath his cassock. It was long, old, and black with handling. He fitted it into the gate lock, turned it, and whispered something in a language Mara did not know. The gate opened inward without a sound.

“Dawn admits what dusk refuses,” Father Caldus said.

Mara looked at him.

“Entry prayer,” he said.

“Does dusk have a response?”

His face was gray now. “Dusk collects what dawn admits.”

Lady Vesta said, sharply, “Father.”

He stepped back from the gate as if from a flame.

Mara walked through.

The chapel garden had no scent. No earth smell, no crushed weeds, no damp stone, though the snow had begun to soften under the morning sun. Even the air seemed to hold itself apart here. Her boots made hard little sounds on the cleared path.

She studied the exterior as they approached.

The stone was finer than the palace stone, close-grained and pale with faint blue veining. North quarry, probably. Expensive to cut, difficult to transport, excellent under freeze if the bedding was properly set. The pointing had been redone recently in several places, though not well. Hairline cracks ran from the bases of two buttresses. The east wall showed subtle displacement around the central window. Not much. Enough.

Mara stopped ten paces from the door.

“Your surveyor lied.”

Soren looked at the wall. “About?”

“The stone is moving.”

Lady Vesta said, “The chapel has stood nearly four centuries.”

“It has been patched recently,” Mara said. “I need to know why.”

Mara pointed with the end of her folding rule. “There. Crack from the lower shoulder of the buttress to the third course. There, the mortar has been patched where water entered. There, displacement at the east tracery. Your central window is under stress.”

Soren followed each indication carefully. Not pretending. Learning.

Lady Vesta said, “Can it be corrected?”

“Perhaps.”

“Before the coronation?”

Mara did not answer.

That was answer enough.

At the chapel door, Father Caldus performed the entry prayer from the garden side. He did not cross the threshold. His voice was low, almost steady, and the words made a shape Mara felt more than understood. Not a blessing. A permission asked of someone who might refuse.

The door was banded in iron and carved with Saint Alis’s tools: knife, grozing iron, brush, hammer, soldering rod. Above them, the saint’s hands held a sheet of glass toward the sun.

Beneath the carving, someone had scratched a line in the wood.

Not recent.

Not old enough to be part of the door.

Mara crouched.

The scratch was almost hidden beneath years of oil and polish, but the letters remained legible if read from below.

NOT LIGHT. TEETH.

She touched the groove.

Soren said, “What is it?”

“An opinion.”

Lady Vesta leaned down, saw the scratch, and straightened.

“This will be removed.”

“No,” Mara said.

“It is defacement.”

“And evidence. It stays until I have recorded it.”

Lady Vesta’s mouth hardened.

Soren reached for the door ring before the argument could ripen.

The chapel opened.

No dramatic gust of dead air emerged. No candles guttered, because none were lit. No ghostly whisper coiled around the threshold.

It smelled of cold stone, dust, old wax, and metal.

Mara stepped inside and forgot, briefly, everyone else.

The chapel was beautiful.

Damn it.

The nave was narrow and high, proportioned so perfectly that the body understood it before the eye did. Pale ribs climbed from clustered columns and met above in a vault painted deep blue, though age had darkened it almost black. Faint stars remained there, silver leaf dulled to smoke. The floor was black stone veined with white. The altar stood at the far end beneath the east window, simple and severe, a single block of pale marble with no cloth laid over it.

There were no pews.

Only a central aisle and, on either side, low stone benches beneath the windows.

Thirteen major windows. Forty-seven minor panels. Six oculi.

Mara counted instinctively.

The side windows showed not saints, as she had expected, but kings and queens. Each figure stood beneath an arch of painted glass, crowned, robed, hands lifted or folded, faces tilted toward the east window. Their colors had faded unevenly. Some blues remained strong. Some greens had browned. Ruby flashed in fragments like old wounds.

The lower panels beneath each royal figure showed scenes.

A child at a cradle.

A crown above a bier.

A mountain split by lightning.

A queen holding a key.

A prince kneeling before a glass coffin.

A man with no face.

Mara’s gaze snagged there.

The man with no face occupied a lower panel in the north wall. Not damaged. Deliberately blank. His clothes had been painted with delicate care: dark cloak, silver belt, one hand resting on a sword hilt. But where his face should have been, the glass was a smooth oval of smoky white.

No eyes. No mouth.

No identity.

Soren noticed where she looked.

“Later addition,” he said.

Mara noted the mismatch in her tablet. Lady Vesta said it was not relevant to the central repair.

Mara walked deeper into the chapel.

Her boots clicked too loudly. The sound went up into the vault and returned thinner.

The chapel was unlit except by daylight through screened windows, but the glass carried more light than the weather deserved. Color lay in narrow pools across the stone. Violet over black. Green over white. Red across the altar step, like a throat cut cleanly.

The iron screens outside muted the windows but did not kill them. Instead, the screens broke the light into latticed shadows that crossed the painted figures like cages.

Clever.

Cruel.

She moved to the south wall and examined the first royal window. The lead was fatigued but not catastrophic. The paintwork had surface loss near the lower border. Prior repairs were visible under the loupe: competent in some places, hurried in others, increasingly desperate near the east end.

A story, then.

The chapel had not failed all at once. It had been kept alive by hands that understood it less and feared it more with each generation.

She pressed one gloved finger gently to a bulging section of lead.

A faint tremor moved through the panel.

Mara froze.

Not structural movement. Too quick. Too localized.

She pressed again.

Nothing.

“Is something wrong?” Soren asked.

“Many things.”

“With that panel?”

“It may need removal.”

Lady Vesta said, “No panels are to be removed today.”

“If it is unsafe, inspection may require removal.”

“Then you will report it,” Lady Vesta said.

Mara looked back at the bulging lead.

Something tapped from inside the panel.

Once.

Lightly.

Like a fingernail against glass.

Mara did not move.

The sound came again.

Tap.

Behind her, Father Caldus was still murmuring from the threshold. His prayer had changed. Or perhaps his breathing had.

Soren had gone still.

Lady Vesta said nothing.

Tap.

Mara removed her glove.

“Mistress Vey,” Soren said.

She ignored him and set her bare fingertips against the painted border.

The glass was cold.

Only cold.

No warmth. No pulse. No hidden hand.

She waited.

Nothing.

Then, from the lower panel showing the faceless man, a thin line of moisture appeared on the inside of the glass.

It gathered at the blank oval where the mouth should have been.

Slowly, impossibly, the moisture drew itself downward.

A tear without an eye.

No.

Condensation, Mara told herself.

Temperature differential. Breath trapped between layers. Faulty seal. Capillary action. There were explanations for everything if one had sufficient information and refused to be theatrical.

The droplet reached the painted collar.

Stopped.

Then slid sideways.

Not down.

Sideways, against gravity, tracing the edge of the faceless man’s throat.

Mara snatched her hand back.

The droplet vanished.

Her heart struck once, hard.

The chapel held its breath around her.

Soren said quietly, “You saw something.”

“I saw poor sealing.”

Lady Vesta’s face had lost what little color it possessed. “Do not touch the glass without gloves.”

Mara looked at her.

There it was again. Too fast. Too sharp. Not concern for preservation. Not concern for Mara.

Concern for contact.

“You knew,” Mara said.

“Do not touch consecrated glass with bare skin.”

“Here glass cries sideways,” Mara said.

Father Caldus stopped praying. Mara flexed her fingers; they tingled as they had in the workroom, like the memory of a struck bell.

Soren moved closer. “Put the glove on. We can inspect the east window without repeating this.”

She did. Whatever had happened, she had not prepared to test it.

She moved toward the east end.

The side windows became stranger as she approached the altar. Older glass gave way to repaired sections. Borders did not match. Paint styles overlapped. Some panels had been rearranged, perhaps during past restoration, perhaps for reasons less defensible. A small saint’s hand had been inserted upside down in one border. A crown appeared twice in adjacent panels with different kings. A tiny red cradle had been broken and mended with blue glass.

Errors.

Or coded repairs.

Mara took notes quickly.

At the crossing before the altar, she stopped.

The east window rose above her.

Queen Seraphine.

The figure dominated the chapel, not by size alone but by composition. Every line in the building seemed to bend toward her. The ribs of the vault. The aisle. The altar. The gazes of the royal windows. Even the floor veins appeared to run toward the east wall, though that was impossible unless the stone had been selected with obscene deliberation.

Seraphine stood beneath a crown of mountain stars. Her robes were deep blue, or had been. Time had darkened them toward night. One hand held a spindle. The other held a key. Around her feet, roses grew from what might have been snow or bone. Her hair fell in pale ropes over her shoulders, each strand cut from different glass so that even muted daylight gave it movement.

Her face was broken.

Not shattered randomly.

Removed.

That was the first thing Mara saw. The central facial pieces were not merely cracked from impact. Several had been taken out and replaced with ill-fitting fragments of smoky glass. The result was worse than damage. The queen had eyes but no gaze, a mouth but no expression. Her face seemed to have been interrupted mid-thought and forced into another person’s silence.

Mara’s professional anger arrived so cleanly it steadied her.

“Oh,” she said.

Soren, beside her, asked, “What?”

“Someone butchered her.”

Lady Vesta’s voice was low. “The queen-window was damaged during Prince Kael’s treason.”

Soren turned his head sharply.

There.

The name entered the chapel like a dropped lamp.

Prince Kael.

No thunder. No screaming glass. No rush of ghosts. Only that sharp alteration in the air when a forbidden thing discovers it has been spoken aloud and waits to see who will punish it.

Father Caldus whispered something from the threshold.

Lady Vesta looked furious with herself.

Mara filed away the detail. Lady Vesta could be made to err if anger preceded doctrine.

“Damaged, perhaps,” Mara said. “But not like this.”

She climbed the three altar steps before anyone could stop her.

“Mistress Vey.”

Soren’s voice, not Lady Vesta’s.

Warning, not command.

Mara stood beneath the queen-window and studied the tracery.

The main impact line—if there had been an impact—ran from the lower left of the face through the cheek and into the throat. But the missing pieces had been cut out afterward. Fine cuts, too. Done by someone with glass skill, under time pressure, with shaking hands. The replacement pieces were not original but had been chosen to obscure the absence from below.

Amateur deception.

Professional wound.

She set down her satchel and unfolded her measuring rule.

Lady Vesta came to the foot of the altar steps. “You may inspect from the floor.”

“I cannot inspect a wound from across the room.”

“The altar steps are restricted.”

“Mara,” Soren said.

It was the first time he had used her given name. His face told her what his voice did not: careful. Not because of Vesta or the priest. Because of the chapel.

Mara had spent her life resenting caution offered by men who confused her survival with their authority. This was different enough to be inconvenient.

She lowered the measuring rule.

“Fine,” she said. “Have a scaffold brought.”

Lady Vesta’s relief lasted less than a breath.

“No scaffold touches this floor without inspection,” Mara added. “The altar rail must be removed or padded. I need access to the full height of the east window, including tracery. I need daylight, moonlight, and lamplight assessments.”

“No moonlight assessment,” Lady Vesta said.

“Then I cannot give you a complete assessment.”

Vesta ascended one step. “The chapel has rites.”

Mara looked at the queen’s broken face.

Up close, the smoky replacement glass did something strange. It did not reflect the chapel. It seemed to reflect depth. Darkness layered behind darkness. She could see no image in it, but the longer she looked, the more certain she became that the absence had structure.

A locked room behind a painted mouth.

A held breath behind a wound.

She took one step closer before remembering she stood on the altar steps.

The red light across the stone touched the toe of her boot.

It had moved.

Mara looked down.

A strip of ruby light from the queen-window lay across the altar step. It should have been fixed according to the sun, the screen, and the window. But the light had shifted toward her, narrow as a ribbon, bright as fresh blood.

She moved her boot away.

The light followed.

Soren said her name again.

Lady Vesta turned.

The red light vanished.

Mara went cold in a way the weather could not account for.

For one moment, she had the sensation—not thought, not belief, not even fear—that the chapel had reached for the place where her body touched the world and missed.

Then the moment was gone.

Mara crouched and examined the light path. A curved fragment, a shift of cloud, an opening in the screen: there ought to have been some mechanism. She found none. That did not prove there was none, but she no longer trusted herself to look at the window alone.

“What happened here seven years ago?” she asked.

No one answered.

Mara stood.

“Prince Kael’s treason,” she said. “That is the phrase. What happened physically to the glass?”

Lady Vesta’s face shut.

Soren’s did the opposite: not open, exactly, but turn inward.

Father Caldus spoke from the threshold. His voice was barely audible.

“The bell rang without hands.”

Lady Vesta said, “Enough.”

The priest’s eyes remained on the queen-window. “All bells in the palace rang. Every glass vessel broke in the west wing. The chapel door opened by itself.”

“Father Caldus.”

“And the prince came out covered in blood.”

Mara looked at Soren.

Soren did not look at her.

“Which prince?” she asked.

The priest swallowed.

Lady Vesta descended the step and moved toward him. “You are dismissed.”

Father Caldus seemed to become aware of himself all at once. His face went mottled. He bowed too deeply, nearly stumbled backward over the threshold, and retreated into the garden.

The chapel door remained open behind him.

Winter light lay beyond it, ordinary and immense.

Mara looked again at the faceless man in the north window.

Covered in blood.

Do not speak Prince Kael’s name.

Official records are official.

A chapel that remembers conversation.

Lady Vesta turned back to Mara, and this time there was no ceremony in her expression.

“You will not question clergy without my permission.”

“Then answer the questions yourself.”

Soren said, “Enough. Both of you.”

The authority in his voice surprised them all.

Perhaps him most.

Lady Vesta looked at him as if he had stepped out of rank.

Mara looked at him because she had heard, beneath the command, the edge of something strained close to breaking.

He gathered himself quickly.

“We have confirmed initial deterioration,” he said. “Mistress Vey requires scaffolding, records, and controlled access. Lady Vesta requires preservation of chapel protocol. His Majesty requires a completed restoration before coronation. None of those requirements will be met if this continues as theater.”

A very good speech, Mara thought. Almost neutral enough to be false.

Lady Vesta said, “You forget yourself, Secretary.”

“I am trying to get the inspection completed.”

Another silence.

The chapel seemed pleased by this one.

Mara did not like that thought. Buildings did not feel pleasure. They did not approve. They did not wait. People did, and then blamed the stone.

She knelt by her satchel and began packing her notes.

“I need the records of every intervention made to the east window,” she said. “Dates, names, materials, drawings. I need Master Oren Pask’s chapel logs. I need the surveyor’s structural report. I need access to the royal glasshouse records and any stored fragments removed from the queen-window.”

“I will gather what exists,” Soren said.

“What exists?”

“The archive roof failed during thaw,” Lady Vesta said. “Other records were lost to fire.”

Mara closed her satchel.

There was a pattern. She could not yet see its whole shape, but she knew the feel of it. Missing records. Fearful clergy. Forbidden names. A window repaired to conceal damage rather than heal it. A chapel treated as sacred until it became useful to call it dangerous.

And beneath everything, glass that did not behave.

She walked toward the door, pausing at the north window with the faceless man.

The blank oval reflected nothing.

Mara leaned closer.

The glass was smooth. Unpainted. Smoky white with a faint internal swirl. Not original to the surrounding panel. It had been inserted with care, but the lead around it was newer than the rest.

She saw her own face beside it, distorted in the uneven surface.

Dark hair escaping its pins. Skin too pale from travel and poor sleep. Eyes narrowed against a world determined to be less sensible than advertised.

Then, for less than a heartbeat, the blank face was not blank.

A mouth appeared in the smoky glass.

Not painted.

Not reflected.

Formed from shadow on the far side.

It opened.

Mara stopped breathing.

The mouth shaped one word.

She did not hear it.

She understood it anyway.

Run.

Then the panel returned to blankness.

Mara stepped back so sharply her heel struck stone.

Soren caught her elbow.

His hand was warm through her sleeve. Too warm for the chapel.

“What did you see?” he asked.

Mara pulled free.

“Bad restoration.”

His eyes searched her face.

She had the irritating certainty that he knew she was lying. Worse, that he knew the shape of the lie because he had told versions of it himself.

Lady Vesta watched them both from the altar.

“Mistress Vey?” she said.

Mara adjusted her satchel. Her fingers were steady. She was pleased by that. The rest of her could become unreasonable if it liked, but her hands knew their work.

“This chapel should not be touched by anyone who does not understand glass,” she said.

Lady Vesta’s mouth curved faintly. “At last we agree.”

“I was not finished. It should also not be trusted by anyone who does.”

The faint curve vanished.

Mara walked out of the royal chapel into cold daylight.

At the garden gate, Father Caldus stood with his head bowed and his hands tucked into his sleeves. He did not ask what she had seen. He watched her face as though waiting for confirmation. She could not tell whether he wanted it or feared it.

As Soren locked the chapel door behind them, the bells in the palace began to ring the hour.

Small silver voices shivered across the snow.

Mara looked back.

The east window was dark from outside. The queen’s face could not be seen through the iron screen. The faceless man in the north wall could not be seen either.

Still, she felt watched.

Not by the queen.

Not by Lady Vesta.

By someone lower in the glass.

Someone hidden where a face had been removed.

Someone who knew enough to warn her and not enough to save himself.

Mara folded her gloved hands to hide the tingling in her fingertips.

“Well,” she said.

Soren turned the key.

The lock clicked shut with a sound like teeth meeting.

“Well?” he asked.

Mara looked at the chapel, then at the palace, then at the priest who would not cross the threshold.

“I will need a scaffold,” she said. “A better lamp. Three assistants who can follow instructions without fainting. And every record you are currently hoping I will forget I requested.”

Soren held her gaze.

Then he slipped the chapel key into his coat.

“I will see what can be done.”

Lady Vesta stepped through the gate and drew her cloak tight. “His Majesty will receive you at dusk.”

Her eyes flicked once toward the chapel.

By the time they returned to the palace, the sun had climbed high enough to strike the east gallery windows.

Colored light fell across the floor in long, broken panes.

Mara walked through them carefully.

Not because she feared stepping on color.

Because this time, when the red light touched her boot, it stayed where it belonged.

For now.