The Mountain Kingdom

Aurelune did not begin at a border.

It began with the road narrowing.

On the third day north, the carriage left the broad trade road and entered a country of black pines, iron-colored streams, and stone markers shaped like kneeling saints. The markers stood every half mile, their carved faces worn featureless by snowmelt and wind. Each held a little square of colored glass where the heart should have been.

Most were red.

Some were blue.

One, set deep in the pass where the cliffs pressed close enough to crush the sky into a strip of white, was black.

Mara noticed that Soren Ilvath did not look at that one.

She did.

The glass heart had been set into the saint’s chest with admirable precision. No visible mortar. No leakage. The maker had known how to cut into stone without bruising the surrounding surface. The black glass was not truly black, either. When the carriage rolled past and the pale sun struck it at an angle, the heart flashed a dark, bruised purple, like blood seen through closed eyelids.

Mara leaned closer to the window.

The carriage lurched over a rut. Her shoulder struck the door hard enough to send pain down her arm.

Soren did not glance up from the packet of papers in his lap.

Mara settled back against the leather seat and flexed her fingers inside her gloves. The carriage was warmer than any vehicle she had ever traveled in, lined with fur and equipped with a foot warmer that smelled faintly of cedar ash. It was still a box on wheels dragging her into winter, and no quantity of royal upholstery could make roads behave.

Outside, the hills had become mountains by gradual conspiracy. First low blue ridges at the horizon. Then pine-dark slopes. Then stone faces split by white streams. Now the mountains rose on both sides of the road like the walls of an unfriendly cathedral.

The air itself seemed altered.

Sharper. Thinner. Less patient with warm-blooded things.

Mara had tried, on the first morning, to ask Soren reasonable questions. Which glassworks supplied the royal chapel? Had the king’s surveyor produced proper drawings? Were the damaged panels still installed? Had anyone tested the stone around the east window for settling? Was the chapel glazed in local glass, imported glass, or a mixture?

Soren had answered the practical questions, evaded the useful ones, and ignored the rest.

The chapel glass, he said, was primarily local, though some of the ruby was believed to predate the current dynasty. The damaged panels remained in place. The king’s surveyor had produced drawings, but Soren was not a craftsman and could not judge their quality. The stone, according to official assessment, was stable.

She had asked to see the assessment. Soren said he would request it, then returned to his papers. Silence left room for observation, though she could not tell whether he was withholding answers or did not have them.

Aurelune, she observed, was wealthy in ways that did not announce themselves by comfort. The road was well maintained despite the grade. The retaining walls were new. At each bridge, the stonework bore the thorned crown and mountain star of the Avaric kings. The villages they passed were small, steep-roofed, and severe, but their windows were good. Not large, not showy, but fitted tight against the cold, with panes that caught light cleanly.

No shutters hung open after sunset.

Mara noticed that on the first night in the mountains.

The carriage stopped at an inn called the Glass Hart, a long, low building crouched beside a frozen river. Its sign showed a white stag with antlers of blue panes and a wound of red glass in its side. The host greeted Soren by title, bowed to Mara because she had arrived with him, then took one look at her tool satchel and bowed more cautiously.

Restorers were always welcome in places where windows mattered.

Or feared.

Often both.

The common room was warm, crowded, and thick with the smells of lamb stew, wet wool, smoke, and spiced wine. Glass charms hung above the hearth in clusters: stars, tears, saints’ hands, little crowns, little coffins. They chimed whenever the door opened.

Mara stood beneath them and looked up.

“Tourist work,” she said.

The innkeeper’s wife, a square woman with forearms like rolling pins, paused while setting down a tray. “Mistress?”

“These.” Mara touched one of the charms. It was badly annealed. She could feel the stress in it with the pad of her finger. “Made fast for travelers. They’ll crack if hung too near heat.”

The woman glanced at Soren.

Soren removed his gloves. “Mistress Vey repairs sacred glass.”

The nearest conversations thinned.

Not stopped. People with local manners knew better than to stop talking all at once. But voices lowered. Eyes moved. Someone at the far end of the room crossed two fingers over the rim of his cup and touched them to his throat.

Mara pretended not to see.

The innkeeper’s wife reached up and took the charm Mara had touched from its hook. “I’ll move them from the hearth.”

The woman examined the charm. “We hang them for the house, mistress, not for travelers.”

Mara let her take it. She knew the glass, not the custom.

Soren took the room key and led her upstairs.

Her room had a narrow bed, a basin of hot water, and a window whose shutters had been closed from the outside.

Mara discovered this after setting down her satchel. The latch was within reach. The bar was not. Someone had fixed a metal hook across the shutters from beyond the wall, locking them against the night.

She stared at it for a moment.

Then she took a blade from her tool roll and lifted the hook through the gap.

The shutters opened onto the frozen river and the black pines beyond it.

Nothing looked in.

Nothing moved.

A few stars burned between the clouds. They looked colder here than they had in the south, less like lamps and more like holes punched through the sky.

Mara stood there until her wet hair began to chill her neck.

Downstairs, someone began singing.

The song was soft at first, one voice under the noise of cups and spoons. Then another joined. Then another.

Mara did not know the words, but she caught the shape of them: queen, mountain, cradle, crown. Something about glass shoes. Something about a baby who would not cry.

Then the song ended so abruptly it seemed cut.

A bell rang once outside.

Every lamp in the village was shuttered.

Mara closed the window. It was cold, and she did not like how quickly the village had gone dark.

The next morning, she found Soren waiting beside the carriage with a cup of black tea in one hand and her breakfast wrapped in cloth in the other.

“You opened the shutters,” he said.

Mara took the food. “Yes.”

“Please leave them closed tonight,” he said.

The horses stamped in the snow. Their breath rose in white plumes. Beyond the inn, the village was waking in narrow lines of smoke and pale faces at windows. No one opened a door until after the sun cleared the eastern ridge.

Mara bit into the bread. It was dense, dark, and full of seeds. Better than expected.

“What happens if one opens the shutters after dark?” she asked.

Soren handed his tea to the driver and pulled on his gloves. “Ask the innkeeper before opening them again.”

Mara studied him. There were shadows at the corners of his eyes and a rawness around his mouth. She had taken his silence for disdain; it might have been exhaustion.

“What happens?” she asked again.

Soren opened the carriage door.

“Nothing that can be proven,” he said.

That, Mara thought, was not the same as nothing.

They climbed higher.

By afternoon, snow appeared in earnest, first in old patches beneath the pines, then in white veils blown across the road, then packed thick on the ledges where the mountain did not bother to thaw. The carriage wheels were changed for runners at a coaching station built into the side of a cliff. Men with scarred hands and red faces worked quickly under Soren’s supervision. Each wore a string of glass beads around his neck.

Mara watched from beneath the station awning.

The beads were not decorative. Or not only decorative. They were too uniform in size, too carefully strung. Some were clear. Some milky. A few dark red. One man wore a single bead of smoky gray on a separate cord, tucked beneath his collar but visible when he bent.

Mourning, perhaps.

Or status.

Aurelune seemed the kind of place where those were easily confused.

A boy brought hot broth in tin cups. He stared at Mara’s satchel.

“You the window woman?” he asked.

“I have been called worse.”

His eyes widened. “You going to the queen-window?”

Soren turned.

The boy saw him and went pale.

Mara crouched enough to put herself nearer the boy’s height. “Is that what people call it?”

The boy gripped the tray with both hands. “No, mistress.”

“Then what do they call it?”

“Mistress Vey,” Soren said.

The boy looked as if he might be sick.

Mara took one of the broth cups from his tray. “Thank you.”

He fled.

Soren watched him go.

“You frighten children,” Mara said.

“He knows where I am taking you.” Soren watched the boy disappear through the station door.

Mara sipped the broth. It burned her tongue and tasted of bone, onion, and pepper. She welcomed the pain. It made the world simple for a second.

She nodded toward the men changing the wheels. “Those beads. Mourning?”

“Yes.”

“For whom?”

“Everyone.”

Mara waited.

Soren gave her the look he used when deciding whether to answer.

Then, perhaps because the boy had already spoiled the shape of the silence, he said, “In Aurelune, glass is worn for the dead. Clear for a child. White for a parent. Red for a spouse. Gray for a sovereign. Black for a traitor.”

“And the living?”

“The living wear wool.”

That did make her smile. Soren offered a hand when the driver called; she climbed in herself.

The road beyond the station crossed a bridge so high above a gorge that the frozen river below looked like a crack in a mirror. At the center of the bridge stood two statues: a king with a sword and a queen with a spindle. Their faces had been chiseled away and replaced with glass ovals.

The king’s was silver.

The queen’s was red.

Mara pressed her fingers to the carriage window as they passed.

“What did Queen Seraphine look like?” she asked.

Soren’s papers remained unopened in his lap. “No reliable portrait survives.”

“A kingdom of glass has no portrait of its cursed queen?”

“It has many. That is the trouble.”

“Different faces?”

“Different crimes.”

Mara turned from the window. “Meaning?”

“In some she is beautiful, in some deformed. In some she carries a dagger. In some a dead child. In one very old tapestry, she holds the crown in her teeth.”

“That one sounds honest.”

“That one is kept in the west archive and shown to no one.”

“You have seen it.”

“Yes.”

The runners hissed over snow. Pines bowed under white weight. Somewhere high above, unseen birds cried like hinges.

Soren said, “You should understand something before we reach the capital.”

“Aurelune is a court,” he said. “A word may reach six rooms before you have finished the sentence. You have been hired because you are competent. That is not protection.”

“What should I not say?” she asked.

“Do not speak Prince Kael’s name.”

The carriage seemed to grow smaller.

Mara had heard that name only in rumors, old broadsheets, tavern talk, and the kind of whispered histories people enjoyed because the dead could not sue for correction.

Prince Kael Avaric. Second son. Beloved spare. Court darling. Duelist. Heretic. Kinslayer. Monster.

The prince who murdered Crown Prince Ren seven years ago and vanished into the northern passes.

“He is dead?” she asked.

Soren looked out the window.

“The official record states that Prince Kael died in exile.”

“Is that record true?”

Soren did not answer.

His jaw tightened. A small reaction, but real.

“Do not speak his name,” Soren said again. “Do not ask after him at court. Do not ask where he died, who saw the body, or whether one was ever recovered. Do not ask why the chapel was sealed after his disappearance. Do not ask why the king keeps no portrait of his sons in the public hall.”

Mara absorbed each prohibition carefully.

They were gifts, though he likely did not mean them to be.

A good restorer could learn a great deal from what previous hands had tried to hide.

“You are very helpful for a man trying not to be,” she said.

“I am trying to keep you alive until the work is done.”

“And after?”

Soren’s eyes returned to hers.

“That will depend on the work.”

By late afternoon, the mountains opened.

The carriage crested a ridge, and Aurelune’s capital appeared below in a basin of stone, snow, and smoke.

For a moment, Mara forgot to be suspicious.

Valharrow rose from the valley as if carved from the mountain rather than built upon it. Black roofs stacked along terraces. Bridges leapt between towers. Narrow streets wound upward toward a palace of pale stone set against the cliff face, its walls catching the lowering sun with a faint gold sheen. Silver bells hung from high arches and bridge spines, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, each one small enough to fit in a palm. They trembled in the mountain wind but did not ring.

Above the city, the palace windows flashed.

Not warm yellow. Not domestic light.

Glass light.

Blue, green, wine-red, smoky violet. Every tower had windows shaped like lance tips. Every chapel, every guildhall, every noble house seemed armored in color. The city caught the sun, broke it, and scattered it across snow until the whole valley looked wounded and jeweled.

Mara leaned forward despite herself.

“Beautiful,” she said.

Soren looked at the city without affection. “Yes.”

He gave her no more than that. She turned back to the city.

The carriage descended through switchbacks cut into the mountain. As they approached the outer wall, Mara saw that Valharrow’s beauty had rules.

Saints’ hands and thorned crowns marked the lintels. The city gates were set with coin-sized glass circles containing hair, scraps of paper, tiny curls of gold wire. Mara wondered who had put them there, and under what terms.

The guards at the gate wore black cloaks over silver breastplates. Their helmets had no plumes, only narrow glass discs set above the brow. Mourning beads hung at every throat.

When Soren presented the king’s seal, the captain bowed and looked past him into the carriage.

His eyes found Mara.

Not her face. Her hands.

Restorers had identifiable hands if one knew how to look. Fine scars along the fingers. Thickened pads. Nails cut short. Burns from soldering irons. Tiny colored ghosts beneath the skin where pigment never fully washed free.

The captain touched two fingers to his own throat.

Not greeting.

Not blessing.

Recognition, perhaps.

The gates opened.

The bells began to ring.

Mara started, then almost laughed at herself. Of course city gates rang bells. That was their purpose in songs, alarms, festivals, funerals, and royal entries.

But these bells did not sound like celebration.

Their voices were silver and thin, too many at once, falling over the city in a shivering cascade. The sound entered the carriage through the walls, through the floor, through Mara’s teeth. Every bridge answered. Every tower. Every arch. Bells upon bells upon bells, none large enough to command, all small enough to insinuate.

Valharrow looked up.

Faces appeared in windows. Shopkeepers paused beneath awnings. A woman selling apples touched the glass beads at her throat. Children pointed at the royal carriage until their mothers pulled their hands down.

Mara searched their faces for curiosity.

She found it.

She also found pity.

That irritated her more.

“They know why you are here,” Soren said.

The carriage passed through a market of frost-stiff awnings, smoked fish and crown-shaped loaves. Glass lay on every other stall: mourning beads, marriage cups, funeral tokens, tiny painted windows for pilgrims she had not seen on the road.

The city steepened as they climbed toward the palace. The streets narrowed. The buildings grew taller and closer, their upper stories leaning toward one another as if exchanging secrets above the carriage roof. Snow lay in the gutters in gray ridges. Thin bridges crossed overhead, crowded with people looking down.

At one turn, Mara saw a procession entering a side chapel: six women in white veils carrying a glass box between them. Inside lay a single lock of hair on a cushion of blue silk.

At another, a group of children played a game with colored shards, arranging them into patterns on the snow. One child placed a black shard in the center, and the others shrieked, scattering before laughing and returning.

Then an old woman at a nearby door slapped the child hard across the face.

The laughing stopped.

The carriage moved on.

Mara’s earlier wonder cooled.

This was the trouble with beauty. It drew the eye first. By the time one noticed the hooks, they were already in.

They passed beneath a final arch and entered the palace precinct.

The palace of Aurelune was less a building than a verdict.

It rose from a shelf of pale stone at the mountain’s base, fused to the cliff behind it. Towers climbed where no tower had any right to stand. Narrow windows burned with sunset color. Buttresses arched like ribs. The central hall faced the city with a façade of saints, kings, queens, and martyrs carved in ranks above the gates. Some had lost hands to weather. Some had lost noses. None had lost their glass eyes.

The eyes were recent.

Mara could tell from the shine.

“The palace was restored recently?” she asked.

“The west façade, two years ago.”

“Badly.”

Soren looked at her.

“The carving is old. The glass eyes are not. Whoever set them cut too deep into the sockets and patched the edges with lime mortar. It will fail within five winters.”

“You have been looking at the palace for less than a minute.”

“It began failing before I arrived.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost.

The carriage stopped beneath an entrance arch blackened by torch smoke. Footmen opened the door before the wheels fully settled. Cold air rushed in. Mara stepped down into a courtyard paved with dark stone and veined with ice.

A dozen people waited to receive them.

Not servants. Not exactly courtiers.

Functionaries, Mara decided. The kind of people who performed rank without owning it. They wore deep gray with silver fastenings. Each had a small glass bead sewn at the left shoulder.

At the center stood a woman in a high-collared black gown, her white hair braided so tightly against her head it looked carved. She was tall, spare, and composed with the unapproachable neatness of a blade returned clean to its sheath. Around her neck hung not beads, but a chain of small glass panels, each painted with a different saint.

Mara knew authority when she saw it.

She also knew trouble.

Soren bowed. “Lady Vesta.”

The woman’s gaze moved over him, found no interest, and settled on Mara.

“Mistress Vey,” she said.

Her voice was low, refined, and cold enough to keep meat.

Mara inclined her head. Not a bow. Not quite.

“Lady Vesta,” Soren said, “this is Mistress Mara Vey, retained by His Majesty to assess the Royal Chapel of Saint Alis.”

“Assess,” Lady Vesta repeated. “His Majesty commissioned restoration.”

“I must see what can safely be restored first.”

Lady Vesta stepped closer. She smelled faintly of vellum, cold wax, and cloves.

“You have been told of the chapel’s significance?” she asked.

“I have been told it is old, damaged, politically urgent, and surrounded by people who prefer ominous implication to useful fact.”

A pause.

Then Lady Vesta smiled.

It transformed nothing.

“The chapel is the spiritual heart of this kingdom,” she said. “The burial place of our founding sorrow. The witness to every coronation since Queen Seraphine’s betrayal. It is not merely an object.”

“No window is merely an object.”

“Then remember that when you make your report,” Lady Vesta said.

Soren spoke. “Mistress Vey has been traveling for several days. Her rooms?”

Lady Vesta held Mara’s gaze another moment, then turned.

“This way.”

The palace swallowed them.

Inside, Aurelune changed again.

The entrance hall was vast, vaulted, and dim. Not from poverty or neglect. From design. The windows were narrow and high, admitting light in controlled shafts that struck selected surfaces: a saint’s hand, a king’s crown, a reliquary door, the polished curve of a black marble stair. Everything else waited in shadow.

Mara’s boots clicked on stone.

The air smelled of beeswax, old smoke, winter fur, and something mineral beneath it. Ground glass, perhaps. Or damp stone. Or the peculiar cold odor of rooms where too many dead things were honored too carefully.

They passed beneath a row of windows removed from older buildings and mounted along the corridor wall like trophies. Each panel was backlit by lamps set into niches. Saints glowed in fragments. A blue hand here. A gold wing there. A martyr’s open mouth. A dragon’s tail. A crown split down the center and repaired with lead so clumsy Mara almost stopped walking.

She did stop at the next panel.

It was a small lancet, perhaps two centuries old, showing Saint Alis at her workbench. The saint wore no halo. Instead, the glass around her head had been cut in clear panes so the lamplight formed one. Her hands were red with painted blood. Not symbolic. Trade blood. Cut-finger blood. Honest blood.

Mara lifted one hand before she remembered herself and let it fall.

Lady Vesta had turned to watch.

“This is not from the royal chapel,” Mara said.

“No.”

“Where was it taken from?”

“A dissolved guildhall.”

“Dissolved by whom?”

“The crown.”

“Of course.”

Lady Vesta’s expression did not shift. “His Majesty preserved what might otherwise have been lost.”

“Preserved it by removing it from the building that gave it meaning.”

“Buildings fall.”

Mara looked at the window again.

Saint Alis looked back with her clear-glass halo made by borrowed light.

The technique was beautiful. Whoever designed it had understood restraint. Leave room for the light and people would call it miracle.

Mara hated that she loved it.

They moved on.

Servants appeared and vanished with trained softness. Courtiers crossed distant galleries in jewel-toned silks and dark fur. Some looked openly at Mara. Others performed the more insulting trick of almost looking and then dismissing her as furniture.

She saw more mourning beads. Red at one throat. White at another. A young man with a string of clear beads wrapped twice around his wrist, fingers worrying them one by one. An older woman wore gray beads so heavy they dragged the lace at her collar downward.

Everyone here carried the dead visibly.

Or displayed them.

Mara was still deciding which when they reached a long gallery overlooking the city.

The view should have been magnificent. Valharrow lay beneath them in a drift of roofs, smoke, glass, and snow. The bells on the bridges trembled in the wind. The mountains ringed the valley in blue-black teeth.

But the gallery’s inner wall held portraits.

Dozens of them.

Kings and queens of Aurelune, each painted in the same formal pose: seated, crowned, gloved hands resting on the arms of a silver chair. The style changed across centuries. Collars rose and fell. Sleeves widened and narrowed. Paint darkened, brightened, grew more lifelike, more severe. But the pose remained.

And each sovereign had a pane of glass set into the canvas where the heart should be.

Mara walked more slowly.

The older portraits had plain glass, slightly green at the edges. Later ones used colored glass. Red. Violet. White. Silver. One near the end had smoky gray glass cut into a many-faceted jewel shape.

The newest portrait had been covered with a black cloth.

Mara stopped before it.

Lady Vesta did not.

“Your rooms are prepared,” she said.

“Is that the king?” Mara asked.

“His Majesty does not sit for portraits while living.”

“Then who is under the cloth?”

Soren said nothing.

Lady Vesta said, “A mistake.”

Mara looked at the covered painting, then at the gap beside it. There were no portraits of sons. No children. No heirs smiling beside dogs or ponies or tutors. No princesses holding books. No princes in miniature armor.

A royal gallery stripped of its children looked less like a family than a procession of verdicts.

Do not speak Prince Kael’s name, Soren had said.

Do not ask why the king keeps no portrait of his sons in the public hall.

Mara asked nothing.

She was not foolish enough to spend all her disobedience in one corridor.

Lady Vesta led her to a suite in the east wing, up two flights of stairs and through a narrow hall where the windows were glazed in pale amber. The suite consisted of a bedchamber, a sitting room, and an adjoining workroom with a long table already prepared beneath a row of lamps.

Mara forgot Lady Vesta for half a breath.

The workroom was good.

Not charming. Not comfortable. Good.

The table was broad, level, and covered with clean felt. Tool racks lined the wall. There were trays for glass fragments, shallow drawers, a lead vise, a small kiln, a brazier, two stands for inspection, and shelves stocked with glass sheets wrapped in linen. Pot-metal blue. Green. Pale gold. Wine-dark ruby. Clear crown glass. Several pieces of flashed glass that made Mara’s fingers itch.

She crossed the room before she meant to.

The glass had been stored properly. Vertical, supported, dry, not too close to the heat. Someone had listened to a craftsman at least once in the last hundred years.

She unwrapped the corner of a ruby sheet.

Deep color. Good body. Slight ripple. No visible seeds.

“Local?” she asked.

“From the royal glasshouse at Veyr Salt Road,” Lady Vesta said.

Mara looked up sharply.

Veyr.

Not Vey. Not her name. Close enough to irritate the nerves.

“May I inspect the glasshouse records?”

“Request them through Secretary Ilvath.”

“I will have them sent,” Soren said from the doorway.

She moved to the tool rack.

Half the tools were new and uselessly clean. The other half were old and very fine. She lifted a grozing iron, tested its weight, and felt a reluctant thread of respect. Whoever had prepared the room had not merely purchased an impressive inventory. They had found working tools.

“Whose were these?” she asked.

Lady Vesta was silent for too long.

Then she said, “The previous chapel restorer’s.”

“The one who fled, the one who joined the monastery, or the one who died?”

“The one before them.”

Mara set the iron down carefully.

“And where is that restorer now?”

“Buried with honors.”

“That is not usually where I prefer colleagues to be.”

“Few of us choose the final location of our colleagues.”

Mara turned.

Lady Vesta watched her set the iron down. There might have been grief behind the composure, or merely vigilance. The chapel mattered to her beyond royal property; Mara could not yet tell why.

“My terms include access to the chapel at all hours,” Mara said.

Lady Vesta’s gaze cooled again. “No.”

Soren looked at her.

Mara set both hands on the worktable. “No?”

“The chapel may be inspected by daylight. No one enters after sunset.”

“I was told priests do not enter after sunset.”

“No one enters after sunset.”

“That will make restoration difficult.”

“It will make restoration proper.”

“Glass is not restored according to bedtime.”

“The royal chapel is not a country window with pigeon filth in the tracery.”

“No,” Mara said. “Apparently it is a royal window with secrets in it.”

The silence that followed was very precise.

Not shocked. Not confused.

Precise.

Mara had struck something, and everyone in the room knew it.

Soren’s face had gone still.

Lady Vesta stepped closer to the worktable. The little glass saints on her chain caught the lamplight one by one.

“Do not mistake employment for license,” she said. “His Majesty has not authorized entry after sunset.”

Mara felt Soren shift beside the door. She had royal gold, but no written terms. Until she did, this was Vesta’s room.

Lady Vesta turned to Soren. “His Majesty will receive her tomorrow before chapel inspection.”

“Tomorrow?” Mara said.

“The king rests today.”

“The coronation is in six weeks and your chapel is falling apart.”

“You have not yet inspected it.”

“Which is why I object to delay.”

Lady Vesta walked to the window and drew back the curtain.

Dusk had gathered while they spoke.

The city below was losing its color. One by one, lamps appeared behind shutters. Smoke flattened beneath the descending cold. The bells had stopped trembling. The palace glass darkened from jewel to mirror.

Beyond the east wing, separated from the palace by a narrow walled garden, stood a building Mara had not noticed from the courtyard.

The chapel.

It was smaller than she expected and worse.

Not ruinous. Ruin had honesty. This was intact in the way a sealed tomb was intact. Its stone walls were pale and narrow, its roof steeply pitched in black slate, its buttresses thin as folded hands. No lamps burned within. The windows were tall and dark, veiled by fitted iron screens mounted outside the stone reveals, clear of the glass and its leadwork.

The east window rose above the rest.

Even in twilight, Mara could see the shape of it.

A queen.

Or the absence of one.

The central figure stood beneath a crown of stars, hands lifted, face turned slightly downward toward the nave. But the head was wrong. Broken somehow. Not merely cracked. Visibly damaged even from this distance, a dark wound in the composition where the face should have gathered light.

Mara stepped to the window before she knew she had moved.

Cold from the glass touched her through the air.

Below, in the garden between palace and chapel, a line of men crossed the snow carrying lanterns. They moved quickly, heads down. At the chapel door, the first man unlocked something, pushed the door open, and waited while the others entered.

Their lantern light flickered briefly inside.

Then a bell rang.

Once.

The men came out faster than they had gone in.

The last one shut the chapel door. Another locked it. A third made the sign Mara had seen at the gate: two fingers to the throat.

Then they left the chapel to the dark.

No priest accompanied them.

No light remained.

Mara stood very still.

Behind her, Lady Vesta said, “Sunset.”

Mara watched the queen-window darken until it reflected only the last thin silver of the sky.

“When do I inspect?” she asked.

“After His Majesty receives you.”

“No. When?”

Lady Vesta allowed the curtain to fall.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “By daylight.”

Mara looked at the clean felt waiting for broken glass, then at Soren, who had said nothing that can be proven.

“I will need my tools brought up,” she said.

“They are already here,” Soren replied.

“My tools,” Mara said. “Not the dead man’s.”

He inclined his head.

Lady Vesta moved toward the door. The functionaries followed as if tugged by invisible thread.

At the threshold, she paused.

“One more thing.”

Mara waited.

“The Royal Chapel of Saint Alis is not to be discussed with servants, courtiers, clergy, guards, tradesmen, petitioners, or guests. You will report only to His Majesty, Secretary Ilvath, or myself.”

“That is a long list of people I cannot discuss my work with.”

“It is a short list of people you may.”

“Does the chapel object to conversation?”

Lady Vesta’s eyes cut back to her.

“The chapel remembers it,” she said.

Then she left.

The door closed.

Mara stood alone in the workroom, listening to the palace settle around her.

Old buildings spoke at night. Timber shrank. Stone cooled. Pipes muttered. Wind found cracks and played them like flutes. A restorer learned the difference between danger and complaint, between the harmless sigh of age and the sharp little note that meant something load-bearing had begun to give.

This palace was full of sounds.

Too many footsteps behind walls. Too many doors closing softly. Too many faint chimes from glass hung somewhere out of sight.

Mara crossed to the curtain and drew it back.

The chapel waited in the garden.

The queen-window was black now, featureless, blind.

Mara placed her fingertips against the cold palace glass.

For one instant, she thought she felt something answer.

Not through the window before her.

Through the dark one across the snow.

A pressure, light as breath on the inside of her hand.

She snatched her fingers back.

Nothing happened.

No bells rang. No ghosts whispered. No cursed queen turned her broken face.

Only night, snow, glass, and Mara Vey standing in a borrowed room with royal gold hidden in her coat and a kingdom’s unease gathering around her like frost.

She looked down at her hand.

Her fingertips tingled.

“Drafty palace,” she said aloud.

Her voice sounded too small in the workroom.

Beyond the curtain, the dead royal chapel gave no reply.