The Lower Relic Vault

Soren had stolen badly.

Mara knew this within the first five minutes.

Not incompetently. Never that. Secretary Ilvath could probably forge a royal decree while drowning and still leave margins equal. But badly in the sense that he was not used to stealing for himself. He moved through theft like a man reading from an unfamiliar liturgy: precise, quiet, grimly aware that every step damned him a little further.

Mara followed him down the servants’ stair with her satchel against one hip, a lamp in one hand, and the lower relic vault key tucked into the lining of her glove.

The stair narrowed after the second landing. The dressed palace stone gave way to older blocks cut rougher and darker, sweating cold despite the dry winter above. The air changed as they descended. Wax, ash, locked paper, old wool, metal. The smell of things kept too long because someone important had once touched them.

At the bottom of the stair, Soren lifted his lamp and paused before a low door banded in iron.

“From here,” he said, “speak only when necessary.”

“Are you worried?”

“I am terrified.”

The plainness of the answer unsettled her.

His hand on the lamp was forced still, his attention on the door.

Mara lowered her voice. “Of the vault?”

“Of what is in it. Of what is missing from it. Of what happens if Vesta learns I brought you here.”

“Then why bring me?”

Soren slid a narrow tool from his sleeve and inserted it beside the lock.

“Because last night, when the chapel bell rang, every covered portrait in the west gallery began to bleed behind its cloth.”

Mara’s breath stopped.

Soren worked the tool with care.

“Not much,” he said. “Not enough to be seen by anyone who did not already know where to look.”

The lock gave a soft internal click.

Soren looked at her then. “Whatever is happening is no longer waiting for the coronation.”

The door opened.

Cold breathed out.

Not ordinary underground cold. This had edges.

Mara pulled her cloak tighter and stepped after him.

The relic office was not an office.

It was a chapel for paperwork.

Rows of cabinets stood beneath vaulted stone, each painted black and labeled in silver script. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, packed with boxes, silk-wrapped bundles, sealed jars, reliquaries, ledgers, rolled banners, pieces of broken statue, sword belts, funeral masks, crowns too small for adult heads, and glass. Always glass. Glass cases, glass eyes, glass beads, glass-framed parchments, little glass coffins holding locks of hair. Lamps burned behind blue panes in iron sconces, turning every object slightly drowned.

At the far end, behind a waist-high rail, stood three narrow doors.

The middle one bore an image of Saint Alis cut into blackened silver.

The saint held a pane of glass in one hand and a knife in the other.

No halo.

No smile.

Soren shut the door behind them.

The sound seemed louder than it should have.

“How long until the guard returns?” Mara asked.

“Eleven minutes.”

“You said twenty.”

“We lost nine getting here.” He handed her his lamp. “Work quickly.”

They crossed the relic office, past a child’s shoe mounted on velvet, a little cracked crown, and a case of human teeth. Mara did not stop.

At the silver Saint Alis door, Soren took the iron key from her and unlocked three separate bolts. The key turned reluctantly in each, as if the door had strong opinions about being useful.

“The black cabinet,” Mara said. “Saint Alis panel.”

Soren glanced at her. “How do you know?”

“Professional intuition.”

“That is a lie.”

“Yes.”

He looked at her for one more heartbeat, then opened the door.

The lower relic vault was smaller than the office and much older.

Its ceiling was low enough that Soren had to duck. The walls were not paneled or shelved with courtly neatness. They had been carved directly into the mountain stone. Niches held objects wrapped in dark cloth. Silver tags hung from each by thin chains. The air smelled of rock, cold wax, and something mineral that made Mara’s teeth ache.

At the center of the vault stood a single black cabinet.

Behind it, mounted on the wall, was a stained-glass panel of Saint Alis.

Mara forgot the cabinet.

She walked toward the panel as if pulled.

It was not large. Perhaps three feet high and half as wide. Old. Older than the palace fragments upstairs. Older than the devotional style that made saints smooth and harmless. This Saint Alis was shown at a workbench, sleeves rolled, hair bound in a cloth, mouth set in concentration. Her hands were cut and bleeding. One palm held a piece of clear glass toward a furnace. The other held a silver stylus over a drawing.

No halo.

Again, no halo.

Instead, a ring of unpainted glass surrounded her head, clear enough that the dark stone behind it showed through.

Leave room for the light, Mara thought.

Her grandmother’s voice, not her own.

She had not remembered that sentence in years.

Soren came to stand beside her. “This was removed from the original glaziers’ hall before it burned.”

Mara lifted the lamp.

The panel was damaged but not dead. The border had lost several pieces. A crack ran through the furnace. The saint’s left hand had been repaired, though skillfully enough that she had to lean close to see the join.

At the lower edge, half hidden beneath old grime, was a signature.

Not a painted inscription. A maker’s mark.

A small V cut into the lead, crossed by a line.

Mara’s pulse gave one hard beat.

She had seen that mark before.

Not exactly. But near enough.

Her grandmother had used something like it on the backs of repaired household panes when neighbors paid in bread instead of coin. Mara had once asked why a village glazier marked glass no one would ever read.

“So the work knows who touched it,” her grandmother had said.

Mara had been six and unimpressed.

Now she stood under the mountain in a stolen vault, staring at the same shape cut into the saint’s lead.

“Vey,” she whispered.

Soren heard and looked from the mark to her.

“Your family?”

“Perhaps. We need the logs first.”

He turned to the cabinet.

Mara stepped back from the panel.

The cabinet had four drawers and seven locks.

He unlocked the first three with the iron key. The fourth required a smaller key from his own chain. The fifth he picked. The sixth opened when he pressed a hidden catch beneath the cabinet’s side molding.

The seventh did not open.

Soren tried again.

Nothing.

Mara crouched beside him. “Move.”

He stepped back.

Mara examined the lock. Good metal. Old work. Not palace locksmithing. Guild work, perhaps. A lock made by someone who expected other craftsmen to respect it and courtiers to lose patience.

She smiled slightly.

“Friendly,” she said.

Soren looked toward the vault door. “You have three minutes.”

She selected two tools from her satchel.

False-set pins, paired wards, a delicate pressure that punished force. Mara respected the maker. It would not save the lock.

The final pin lifted.

The lock opened with a soft, excellent click.

Soren stared.

Mara opened the cabinet. “Guild work. I know the wards.”

The smell came first.

Old paper, leather, dust.

And blood.

Not fresh. Not strong. But there, sealed into time.

Inside the cabinet lay six leather-bound volumes, a flat case tied with black ribbon, a packet of rolled drawings, and a narrow glass box no longer than Mara’s forearm.

Soren reached for the top volume.

Mara stopped his hand.

“Order matters.”

He withdrew.

She scanned the spines. The cabinet list carried a heading: Edran regnal years; present year 31. Not years of Pask’s employment. A service note beneath it recorded apprenticeship under Orven and twenty-nine years in the household before Pask’s death in year 29.

PASK, O. — Chapel Maintenance, Years 21–24

PASK, O. — Chapel Maintenance, Years 25–27

PASK, O. — Queen-Window Incidents

PASK, O. — Private Notes, sealed

Unattributed — Alis Pattern Fragments

No title

Mara took Queen-Window Incidents, Private Notes, and the flat case.

Soren took the rolled drawings and the no-title volume.

The glass box remained.

Mara looked at it.

Inside, wrapped in yellowed silk, lay a shard of smoky glass.

Even through the box, even through the silk, even under blue relic light, she knew it.

A piece of Queen Seraphine’s face. The surviving paint curved along an eyebrow: a different fragment from the mouth pieces Mara had inspected on the scaffold.

Her marked palm burned.

“No,” Soren said.

“I have not done anything.”

“You are reaching for it.”

She drew her hand back.

The office door opened beyond the vault.

A distant sound, but unmistakable.

Soren froze.

Voices.

One guard. Possibly two.

Then a woman’s voice, low and clear.

Lady Vesta.

Soren moved at once.

He put the drawings back.

The voices came closer.

Lady Vesta was asking something about inventory seals. She sounded calm. That was bad. Calm people had already decided whom to punish.

Soren reached past Mara and took the three most useful objects from her pile: Queen-Window Incidents, Private Notes, and the flat case. He shoved them into her satchel.

Then he took the no-title volume and put it inside his coat.

Mara blinked.

“You are improving.”

“I am committing treason. Praise later.”

He closed the cabinet drawers, relocked four of the seven locks with terrifying speed, then stopped at the last.

The friendly lock.

Mara took over.

The voices reached the outer relic office.

A guard laughed nervously.

Lady Vesta did not.

Mara’s hands moved in silence.

The lock closed.

She stood.

They had perhaps thirty seconds.

Soren looked toward the vault door, then at the Saint Alis panel, then at Mara.

“No time,” he said.

“For what?”

He reached up and pressed the crossed V maker’s mark at the lower edge of the Saint Alis panel.

Stone shifted.

Mara stared.

A seam opened behind the panel, narrow as a confession.

“You knew?”

“No. You recognized the mark.”

“That is not a reason to touch it.”

“Inside. We can argue when they leave.”

They slipped through the seam as Lady Vesta’s footsteps entered the lower vault.

The stone closed behind them.

Darkness swallowed Mara whole.

She did not breathe.

Soren stood beside her in a space scarcely wider than a coffin. His shoulder pressed against hers. His lamp had been left outside. There was no room to move, no room to turn, no air except what had come in with them. Stone at her back. Stone before her. Soren’s body warm and rigid beside her.

Beyond the panel, Lady Vesta entered the vault.

Mara could see nothing, but sound traveled through the glass with cruel clarity.

“Why is this door open?” Vesta asked.

A guard answered, “It was locked when I passed, my lady.”

“You passed badly.”

Silence.

Lady Vesta crossed the vault. Her skirts whispered over stone. A key entered one of the cabinet locks.

Soren’s breath stopped.

Mara felt it because his chest was pressed near her shoulder.

She also felt something else.

The Saint Alis panel at her back was not cold.

Glass should have been cold in the lower vault.

This glass held warmth.

Not from her. Not from Soren.

Old warmth.

The kind a stone hearth gave back at dawn after a fire had died in the night.

Mara’s marked palm began to burn.

She clenched her fist, but there was no space to keep her hand from brushing the wall.

Her bare wrist touched the back of the panel where the glove had ridden up.

The world opened.

Not visibly.

Violently.

Mara was no longer in the secret slit behind the Saint Alis panel.

She stood in the royal chapel.

Not as it was now.

As it had been.

Candles blazed by the hundreds. The windows shone without moon or sun, every royal figure lit from within. Incense choked the air. The altar had been draped in white cloth embroidered with thorns. Beneath the queen-window knelt a young man in a ceremonial shirt, his dark hair loose around a face too gentle for the room.

Ren.

Mara knew him before anyone named him.

Crown Prince Ren Avaric knelt with his hands bound in silver cord.

His eyes were open.

Terrified.

King Edran stood beside him, younger by seven years and older by something deeper. His white hair was darker then, streaked with black. He wore no crown. In one hand he held a glass knife.

Lady Vesta stood at the altar with a bowl of red ash.

Soren was there too.

Fourteen years old, narrow-faced, wearing page’s gray, pressed against the wall with another boy’s hand clamped over his mouth to keep him silent.

And Prince Kael—

Kael came through the chapel door like a storm given human shape.

He was younger. Clean-shaven. Dressed in black and silver, sword drawn, eyes wild enough to frighten even the armed men who turned toward him.

“Get away from him,” he said.

No glass in his voice then.

No fracture.

Only fury.

Ren looked up.

The relief on his face was so naked it hurt to see.

“Kael,” he said.

The vision lurched.

Hands drew swords. A priest cried out. Lady Vesta stepped back but did not flee. The king did not move.

Kael crossed the nave too quickly for ceremony to stop him. His blade opened the first guard’s throat. Blood struck the black stone floor. The chapel windows brightened.

Mara tried to look away.

Could not.

Another guard lunged. Kael took the blow along his arm, drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, and sent him down against the altar step. His face was not noble. Not heroic. It was stripped bare of every courtly mask. He looked capable of anything.

He reached Ren.

“Stand,” he said.

Ren could not. His bound hands shook. “You should not have come.”

“Later.”

“No.” Ren’s voice broke. “Kael, listen to me.”

The king spoke then.

“Always late to obedience,” Edran said.

Kael turned, sword red to the hilt. “You call this obedience?”

“I call it succession.”

“I call it murder.”

“You call many things by their ugly names. It has never made you wise.”

Ren grabbed Kael’s sleeve with bound hands. “Break it.”

Kael looked down. “What?”

Ren’s eyes lifted to the queen-window.

Not the face.

The mouth.

“Break her,” Ren whispered. “Before it finishes.”

Kael went still.

Lady Vesta said, sharply, “He is afraid. He does not understand what he asks.”

Ren laughed once.

A terrible sound.

“I understand at last.”

The chapel began to hum.

Not with bells. With hunger.

The queen-window brightened until Seraphine’s face looked almost alive. Not kind. Not cruel. Watching.

Edran lifted the glass knife.

Kael moved.

Not toward the king.

Toward the window.

“No,” Lady Vesta said.

It was the first time Mara heard fear in her voice.

Kael seized a silver candlestick from the altar and hurled it at the queen’s face.

The chapel screamed.

Glass exploded inward and outward at once.

Light became knives.

Ren cried out.

Kael shouted his brother’s name.

Then the vision shattered.

Mara came back to darkness with Soren’s hand over her mouth.

For one delirious second, she thought he was the boy in the chapel, fourteen years old and forced silent while princes bled.

Then she understood.

She had made a sound.

Beyond the panel, Lady Vesta had stopped moving.

“What was that?” Vesta asked.

Soren’s hand remained over Mara’s mouth.

Mara’s heart beat so hard she felt it in his palm.

One guard said, “My lady?”

“Quiet.”

Footsteps approached the Saint Alis panel.

Soren’s other hand found Mara’s wrist in the dark.

Not gripping.

Warning.

Lady Vesta stopped on the other side of the glass.

Mara could feel her there.

A presence separated by saint, lead, and old conspiracy.

“Alis,” Lady Vesta said softly.

Not prayer.

Not quite.

“Still keeping doors for ungrateful hands?”

The words slid through the panel and into Mara’s bones.

Soren went rigid.

Mara did not move.

Lady Vesta touched the glass.

The warmth in the panel vanished.

Cold rushed through the narrow space.

Mara’s marked palm burned so sharply she bit into Soren’s hand to keep from crying out.

He did not pull away.

For one impossible moment, Mara saw through the panel.

Not with eyes.

With memory.

Lady Vesta standing in the vault, one hand against Saint Alis’s painted workbench. Older now than in the vision, but not less dangerous. Behind her, the black cabinet stood closed. Beside it, the glass box containing Queen Seraphine’s shard pulsed faintly beneath silk.

Lady Vesta’s gaze narrowed.

Could she see them?

No.

Perhaps.

She leaned closer.

Then a voice called from the relic office beyond.

“My lady? Secretary Ilvath has been requested in the east gallery.”

Mara knew that voice.

Dorian.

Lady Vesta turned her head.

“He is not here.”

“No, my lady. That is the difficulty.”

A pause.

Then, colder: “Explain.”

“I would if I could. His Majesty’s physician sent for him. There is some distress over a missing seal, a misplaced conservator, and a rumor that the coronation tutor has been found locked inside the music room.”

Silence.

Mara could almost hear Lady Vesta deciding which offense most deserved immediate violence.

Dorian continued, beautifully unhelpful. “I believe the tutor is blaming me, though to be fair, he does that most mornings.”

Lady Vesta moved away from the panel.

“Seal the cabinet,” she said to the guards.

“It is sealed, my lady.”

“Check again.”

Keys turned. Locks clicked. One by one.

Mara counted.

All seven.

Her lock held.

Lady Vesta’s footsteps left the vault.

At the door, she paused.

“Search the office before leaving.”

Mara closed her eyes.

Soren’s hand tightened around her wrist.

Dorian said, “For what?”

Lady Vesta answered, “Whatever has learned to hide.”

The vault door closed.

Footsteps receded.

The guards remained.

Mara and Soren stood in darkness, breathless and pressed together behind Saint Alis’s warm-cold panel, while two guards began a slow search of the relic office.

The guards spent six minutes opening cabinets, moving boxes, and checking beneath tables. Mara counted while Soren listened for their return to the vault. At last, they left.

The outer door closed.

Silence returned.

Soren removed his hand from Mara’s mouth.

She felt his shoulder shift.

His hand still circled her wrist. She eased it free once the guards were gone. They needed room to work, not another moment of forced silence.

“Can you open it?” she asked.

“I do not know.”

“Press the mark again.”

“From this side?”

“Try beside the join.”

Soren found the back of the panel by touch. Mara shifted her satchel out of his way.

Then something clicked.

The stone seam opened.

Cold blue light entered like mercy.

They stepped out into the lower vault.

Mara inhaled too sharply and coughed.

Soren closed the hidden seam behind them, then leaned one hand against the black cabinet. His head bowed.

For a moment, he was not secretary, not conspirator, not survivor of whatever the court had trained into him.

Only a man who had been fourteen once and had seen a prince come out of a chapel covered in blood.

Mara took one breath.

Then another.

The vision remained inside her, hot and broken.

Ren bound beneath the queen-window.

Kael’s sword.

The king’s glass knife.

Lady Vesta with red ash.

The chapel brightening when blood hit the floor.

Mara looked at Soren’s hand.

She had bitten the side of it hard enough to leave marks through the glove.

“Sorry,” she said.

He checked the glove. “No skin broken.”

She turned toward the panel, remembering Ren’s face. Soren saw.

“What happened?” he asked.

Mara looked toward the Saint Alis panel.

The saint’s painted hands remained bent over her work. Cut. Bleeding. Making something beautiful enough to become dangerous.

“I saw the chapel seven years ago.”

All softness left Soren’s expression.

“What did you see?”

She told him.

Not everything. Not yet. She did not know enough to separate useful truth from weapon. But she told him the shape: Ren bound, Edran with the glass knife, Vesta with the ash, Kael entering armed, the fight, Ren telling Kael to break the queen-window.

Soren listened without interrupting.

At the end, his face looked older.

“I did not know Ren was bound,” he said.

“You were there.”

“I was in the chapel.” His voice was rough. “I was not permitted to understand it.”

“That is a distinction?”

“It was the only one they left me.”

Mara accepted that, though not comfortably.

“I saw Ren ask him to break it,” she said. “The sequence ended before I saw what killed Ren. I cannot use that to clear Kael.”

Soren’s eyes closed briefly.

“Maybe.”

“You think the vision lied?”

“I think this palace lies even when it tells the truth. I think the chapel may do the same.”

That was irritatingly sensible. Her mark had opened the memory; it had not supplied the missing end or a way to judge what the sequence withheld. She would need a record and another account before treating the sequence as proof.

Mara looked at the black cabinet.

“We need to leave.”

“Yes.”

She opened her satchel and checked the stolen volumes. Still there. The flat case. The two logs. The sample papers. The hollow-glass sliver, warm again.

Soren looked at the glass box on the cabinet.

Queen Seraphine’s shard inside pulsed once beneath silk.

Mara looked at it too.

“No,” Soren said. “That shard is listed in the crown inventory.”

“Then it stays.”

She opened the flat case from the cabinet.

Inside lay paper, not glass.

A cartoon.

Old, brittle, and astonishing.

A full preparatory drawing for Queen Seraphine’s face.

Not the damaged version. Not the court version. The original.

Mara forgot the shard.

The queen in the drawing did not look like a traitor or saint. She looked tired. Young, perhaps, though grief had altered the planes of her face. Her gaze was lowered, but not submissively. More as if she were looking at someone kneeling before her and deciding whether to forgive them.

At the corner of her mouth, where the clear fragment now sat in the window, the artist had drawn a small symbol.

The crossed V.

Beneath it, in a hand so faded Mara had to tilt the paper to see, were four words.

Only maker answers queen.

Mara’s throat tightened.

Soren read over her shoulder.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

Mara looked at Saint Alis.

At the mark.

At her palm.

“I am beginning,” she said, “to dislike my family.”

They left the vault through the relic office proper, because the guards had gone and because secret panels were best not used twice in one theft unless one wanted to become part of the architecture.

Soren relocked the lower vault. Mara watched his hands. They were steady now, though the bite mark must have hurt.

When they reached the servants’ stair, Dorian waited at the bottom with a lamp in one hand and an expression of bright, false innocence.

“You are late,” he said.

Soren stopped. “Your Highness.”

Dorian glanced at the satchel. “Did you get the books?”

Mara nodded.

Dorian’s smile faded as he took in the heavy satchel.

For a breath, they stood in the stairwell: the heir, the secretary, and the disgraced restorer with stolen books in her bag and a dead prince’s warning in her hand.

Then Dorian stepped aside.

“Vesta is in the east gallery,” he said. “Furious, but creatively. My uncle is awake, which makes everyone worse. If you want to return unseen, you have three minutes before the physician discovers I never delivered his message.”

Soren stared at him. “Why?”

Dorian’s smile returned, thinner.

“Because if the chapel is going to kill me, I would prefer literary support.”

Neither answered. Dorian looked away. “I needed you to get the books. That is all.”

Mara watched him carefully.

There were many kinds of fear in Aurelune.

Dorian’s had learned to dance.

“What did the chapel show you?” she asked.

Soren made a low sound of warning.

Dorian’s eyes moved to her.

For once, no smile.

“Myself,” he said. “Wearing the crown. With no face beneath it.”

Then he turned and walked up the stair without another word.

They reached the workroom unseen, or at least unchallenged, which in a palace was the closest approximation.

Once inside, Mara locked the door. Then wedged the chair beneath it. Then, after a moment’s consideration, pushed the heavy tool chest in front of the chair.

Soren watched this with the weary approval of a man who had finally met paranoia equal to the occasion.

Mara set the stolen volumes on the table.

Her hands were cold now.

Not shaking.

Cold.

She opened Queen-Window Incidents first.

Oren Pask’s handwriting was cramped, disciplined, and increasingly unstable as the years advanced. The earliest entries were maintenance records: cracks, cleaning, solder, weather, screens, wax deposits. Then the entries changed.

Year 22, Frostwane 3: Lower right queen-robes warm to touch during dawn office. No visible cause. Reported to Lady V. Told to observe, not intervene.

Year 22, Frostwane 17: Red light at altar without sun. Lasted seven breaths. No blood present. Father Caldus refused entry afterward.

Year 23, Thawbell 9: Voice heard by apprentice M. from north panel. Apprentice dismissed. No further record.

Year 23, Thawbell 10: Apprentice M. missing.

Mara read faster.

Year 24, First Snow 1: Her Majesty’s face clouding from within. Not paint loss. Not mineral bloom. Depth effect. Advised removal of replacement mouth fragment. Denied.

Year 24, First Snow 2: Do not touch mouth fragment.

Year 24, First Snow 4: Do not let anyone bleed near east window.

Year 24, First Snow 8: The prince is not gone.

Soren, reading beside her, stopped breathing.

Mara turned the page.

The next entry had been written in a different ink, darker and rushed hard enough to tear the paper in places.

He says he did not mean to kill Ren. I believe him when I am in the chapel. I doubt him when I leave. This is how the glass works: it makes grief persuasive.

Below it:

He asks for Vey. Not a person. A bloodline? Maker-line? Alis mark responds to old name. Check glaziers’ hall remnants. Vey/Veyr/Veyne. Crown erased artisan records after Seraphine binding.

Mara’s mouth went dry.

Soren looked at her.

She did not look back.

The next line was written in a hand barely controlled.

If a Vey comes, do not let her touch the queen’s mouth. If she touches, the chapel may choose.

Mara slowly opened her marked hand.

The black line in her palm had darkened.

Soren stared at it.

Neither of them spoke.

On the table, the hollow-glass sliver clicked.

Once.

Then again.

Mara looked down.

The dark thread inside it had straightened into a line pointing toward the covered workroom window.

The curtains were drawn.

Beyond them lay the garden.

Beyond the garden, the royal chapel.

Beyond the chapel’s east wall, the queen-window.

And inside it, if the stolen logs were true, a prince not gone enough to bury and not alive enough to trust.

Soren whispered, “You touched something.”

Mara thought of the Saint Alis panel warming under her bare wrist.

“I saw something.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“No.”

The lamps flickered.

The curtain stirred.

No wind entered the room.

A shadow formed against the fabric, taller than before, less like a hand now and more like a man standing very close on the other side.

Soren reached for the knife at his belt.

Mara lifted one hand to stop him.

The shadow did not move.

Then words appeared in darkness across the curtain.

Slow.

Uneven.

As if written by someone using pain as ink.

PASK LIED TOO LATE.

Mara looked at the open log.

Then at the shadow.

“What did he lie about?” she asked.

The answer came letter by letter.

ME.

Soren’s face went white.

Mara’s marked palm burned hard enough that she almost gasped.

The shadow leaned closer to the curtain.

A voice passed through the room, faint as breath under a door.

“Ask what they feed her.”

The lamps went out.

This time, they did not come back.