Chesa stared for a long moment in Hyderlin’s direction, then turned slowly and continued walking. Hyderlin let out a careful breath from her position behind a pillar.
The far end of the fourth floor of the east wing connected to the old wing by means of a stone archway bridge. Chesa was already crossing it.
The old wing, at the castle’s northern end, had been shut away for years. Once, two centuries or so ago, it had housed the royal family—but after a great fire swept through it, the building had simply been closed off. Neither rebuilt nor demolished, it had been left to stand where it was, and the walls had gone soft with moss and running ivy.
The old wing had a reputation. Servants had long warned that the towers were haunted by the ghosts of knights and household staff who had burned there. Hyderlin, as a child, had been told sternly never to go near the towers at the northern end—not because of ghosts, she eventually understood, but to keep the royal children from playing in a dangerously crumbling building.
That was what she had thought as a child.
When she was older, she learned what the old wing actually was.
Beneath the building ran passages that seemed to connect to nowhere—or perhaps everywhere; no one had successfully mapped them. And throughout the building above were traps capable of killing silently and instantaneously. There were interrogation chambers somewhere in its depths. There were iron doors with iron locks that never opened, in positions that made no architectural sense.
Those doors, according to those inclined toward the mystical, connected to spaces that should not physically exist.
Such as, for instance, secret underground tunnels.
And so the rumour persisted: that those who had wandered through the iron door at the base of the old wing were still down there, working their way through the passages.
Hyderlin was beginning to understand where Chesa was going.
He was heading for the tallest tower in the old wing.
It was a place where the brothers of King Chesaleto had lived out and ended their lives. Before that, it had housed a prince who had gone mad and needed to be confined. Before that, a king in flight from traitors had thrown himself from its height. Before that—
She did not know. Only that it was a place where blood and madness had accumulated for a very long time.
Instead of following any further, Hyderlin retreated to the shadow of a pillar on the fourth floor of the east wing and settled in to wait for Chesa to come back.
He did not reappear. Two hours or more passed. Hyderlin looked up at the sky—still the grey of early dawn, not fully light yet. She had pushed her time.
She gave up on waiting and made her careful way back.
The room was steeped in thin darkness. Most of the hearthfire had gone out—only a faint glow remained at the core of the coals, small and unsteady as a dying star.
Early dawn had seeped in through the window. Everything in the room existed in planes of shadow and pale light rather than in colour. In that half-dark, Sarg’s forehead and cheekbone showed as a cool, bluish white. His silver hair had fallen loose across his brow. His grey eyes—tired-looking, unmistakably tired—were fixed on her from the armchair.
He had been sitting there with his legs crossed, waiting.
“…Where have you been?”
The voice was tightly contained. The composed face showed the clear marks of a long and sleepless worry.
Hyderlin passed him on the way to the wardrobe and pulled off her coat.
“Walking.”
“At this hour?”
“I don’t sleep late.”
“You don’t seem to sleep at all. Four hours is a long time to walk.”
Hyderlin paused.
“…You were awake?”
“I woke when you got up.”
His hearing was uncommonly sharp.
“You could have simply gone back to sleep…”
“I couldn’t. I was too worried about you. Tell me what you were actually doing.”
He looked exhausted. The shadows under his eyes were deep.
Hyderlin exhaled quietly.
“I’ll tell you later. For now—sleep.”
She pointed at the bed. She had no need of rest herself.
“Just a few hours. Get into the bed and close your eyes until morning.”
“I’m fine. You take the bed.”
The chivalry again.
“Then we share it. There’s room enough for both of us.”
Sarg said nothing. He reached out to the side table and picked up the holy text he’d left there, set it on his knees, and slowly opened it.
Hyderlin said bluntly:
“Right. You’re saying no.”
Sarg stared at the scripture and said through barely parted lips:
“Do I look like a monk to you?”
Well, he was—technically—clergy, so. Sarg nearly ground his teeth.
“What you’re suggesting to me is an exceptionally cruel thing to do.”
“I’ve never been considerate a day in my life—I’m not going to start now. Refuse if you want to.”
“Who said anything about refusing?”
Sarg flung the scripture aside and got to his feet in one movement. He crossed to the bed in three strides, fixed Hyderlin with an expression that could most charitably be described as murderous, and stood there.
Hyderlin, who had been lying in the middle, rolled over to make room.
“Here. Your side.”
Sarg did not lie down. He stood over the space she had made, staring at her with the same terrible look—the look of a man one bad moment away from doing something dramatic.
Hyderlin was entirely unbothered.
“Don’t look at me with those burning eyes—you’re making things difficult.”
“You are genuinely cruel.”
Sarg dropped the blanket over her in a single decisive motion—not a covering so much as a burial—and lay down on the vacated side, stretching out in one long, rigid line.
Hyderlin fought her way out of the blanket and glared at him. He was already lying flat on his back with his eyes closed.
Then one eye opened, just slightly. His voice was perfectly level.
“Don’t look at me with those burning eyes. I meant what I said—it makes things difficult.”
“…”
“That was not a joke.”
Hyderlin’s composure gave out entirely. She threw the blanket over his face.
“Go to sleep.”
When the cockerel crowed in the small hours of the morning, someone knocked softly at the door. Hyderlin opened it without a sound. A handmaid stood in the corridor.
“Her Highness the Queen has asked for you.”
“Tell her I’ll be there shortly.”
Hyderlin changed into day clothes and ducked her head back around the curtain of the bed. Sarg was still sleeping—the small, steady rhythm of someone genuinely at rest.
He looks like an angel when he’s quiet.
Never mind that when awake he made a habit of saying things with a perfectly composed face that turned her chest inside out—when he was like this, eyes closed, mouth shut, she found it genuinely difficult not to feel something unreasonably fond.
She did care for Sarg. Enormously, if she was honest.
“Listen. Me caring about you—that’s all right. You caring about me—that’s where it has to stop.”
Hyderlin whispered it quietly and reached out to brush his silver hair back from his forehead, the lightest possible touch.
Sarg was someone. Even now, half-ruined, he had been something remarkable before all of this—a holy knight with a future ahead of him that most people never had. The knight the saint chose. The son of House Gloriosa.
Once he came back to himself, he would be the Duke of Gloriosa.
And who was she? Someone who had never hesitated to dirty her hands when power or reputation demanded it. A coward, by any honest accounting. A convicted traitor—executed—whatever the truth had been.
“We are not a match. Not by a very long way.”
Sarg’s thin eyelids stirred, and he opened his eyes. The grey of them—clouded, slow to focus—found her face.
He blinked once, twice, slow and heavy with sleep. His voice was rough.
“…What did you say?”
Hyderlin placed her hand over his eyes. She felt his lashes flutter against her palm.
“Go back to sleep.”
Hyderlin was shown to the queen’s chambers. Through several rooms and then an antechamber—and there was Margarite, alone.
She had been sitting at the window, turning her hands over in her lap. When Hyderlin entered, she started up from her chair with a blanched face.
“Where is Beronis?”
She could barely wait.
“Here.”
The moment Hyderlin held out the baby, Margarite gathered her close and held her—pressing kisses to every part of the small face, touching her forehead to the baby’s.
After a while, Margarite set Beronis gently on the chaise longue.
Hyderlin smiled.
“I told you I’d come to see you properly—and here I am.”
It had been a somewhat improvised arrival, but the intent had been real.
“It’s late to say this, but—thank you for caring for Beronis. I am truly grateful.”
“Please don’t thank me. Lord Sarg did far more of the work.”
“He is good with children.”
There was something uneasy in Margarite’s bearing. She said, as if squeezing the words out one by one:
“…Aren’t you going to ask about what happened yesterday?”
“It isn’t important.”
“Chesa told you I was mad.”
Margarite’s thin arm was trembling.
Hyderlin gave a quiet nod—and Margarite erupted.
“I am not—”
“Your Highness—”
“That murderer—he’s been putting something in my food. He’s trying to make me seem like a lunatic. Everyone thinks I see things that aren’t there, that I’m—unhinged—”
Margarite was panting now, shaking in full earnest. Hyderlin stepped close and put her arms around the queen’s shoulders.
“Your Highness. Breathe slowly—there is no need to rush. It’s all right. You are safe.”
“You think so too—don’t you. Don’t you! You think I’m a—a mad woman, a pathetic—you look down on me, I can see it—”
Margarite seized the front of Hyderlin’s dress. Her eyes, barely in focus, were filled with a desperate, aching want.
“Anyone else I could bear—but not you. Maybe before—maybe once it was different—but not now. Not now. I woke you up. I gave you life. I am your mistress—so you of all people cannot look down on me—you can’t—”
The queen’s grip was weak. She was trembling harder than she was gripping—her own effort shaking her more than it shook Hyderlin.
Hyderlin felt a deep, helpless pity.
The cheeks were gaunt. The lips were bloodless. There was less life in this woman than in Hyderlin herself, who was technically dead. The Margarite she had met some weeks before—fragile, yes, but possessed of a cold clarity and a careful, hidden resolve—was nowhere to be seen. In her place was only this: a woman weeping and shaking, with nothing left to hold herself up.
Hyderlin steadied her with both hands and said quietly:
“Your Highness. I have never, in any moment, thought less of you. And I believe every word you say.”
“Lies—it’s all lies—you always—you’re always lying—always—!”
“You are right. I am an incomparable liar.”
Hyderlin held the queen’s wrists gently.
“But the promise I made to you—that I would see Chesa dealt with—that one is true.”
The words landed like a thunderclap, soft and final all at once. Margarite went still. She looked up at Hyderlin with enormous eyes.
“…Really?”
“Yes. Without fail.”
Hyderlin smiled. A small, tentative smile answered her from Margarite’s face.
Whether Margarite had always carried the seeds of this—whether she had come fully unravelled or only partially—none of that mattered to Hyderlin.
What mattered was two things, and two things only.
To learn why Chesa had killed her—to silence, at last, the question that had been with her since the end—before her time ran out.
And to keep the promise she had made to the woman who had given her a second chance at the world.
Satisfy those two things, and she would go back under the earth without a single thing left undone.
The dead knight took the queen’s hands in hers and whispered:
“So set your heart at ease, Your Highness.”
Margarite nodded. Hyderlin opened her mouth to tell her about the plan they had prepared before entering the palace.
“No—don’t tell me.”
Margarite shook her head. She murmured with quiet bitterness:
“The information might leak from my side.”
