Corren's stomach went cold, the wax seal's second mark rising unbidden in his memory, the closed eye ringed by a broken circle pressed into it where no royal seal should have carried a passenger. "The letter was sealed when I found it. I never opened it in front of anyone who could have reported the contents to him."
"No," Vaelith agreed, "but someone marked that wax before it ever reached the Queen's writing desk, and I don't believe for one moment that mark was decorative. Someone, or something, is watching for exactly the kind of tampering you did to that letter, and reported it to Maravent within hours of your doing it." Her red eyes moved over him with the same weighing patience she'd once given students under far less pressure than this. "I don't know what that mark is. I've asked, quietly, among people who owe me answers, and gotten nothing back but the same unease you're apparently already carrying about it. I only know it means he's coming, Corren, and considerably sooner than any of us had planned around."
"Then we tell the King tonight," Corren said. "Double the guard on the family. On all of us."
"I already have," Vaelith said. "I don't think it will be enough. I think you should prepare yourself for that possibility honestly, rather than let hope do the planning your training should be doing instead."
The attack came two nights later, not at the feast itself but the evening before it, while the palace slept under guard doubled twice over and still, in the end, not doubled enough.
Corren woke to the sound of the alarm bell before he'd fully registered what had woken him, its note carrying across the rooftops with none of the ceremonial dignity it usually reserved for marking the hour, and was dressed and moving before Wrenna, sharing the room's second bed at her own quiet insistence that she wasn't sleeping through this particular night in a separate wing, had finished asking what was happening.
"Palace guard," Voss said, already at the door when Corren reached the corridor, his gauntlets already fastened, his usual unhurried calm replaced by something considerably sharper. "The western wall's been breached. Whoever's coming through it isn't wasting time announcing themselves politely first."
"Karma and Elara," Corren said, already moving.
"With Doss and Nyla," Voss said. "I sent word the moment the bell rang. They're the two people in this palace I trust most to get your mother and sister somewhere safe without needing to ask anyone's permission first." He fell into step beside Corren, Wrenna close behind them both, refusing without a word to be left in the room she'd only just insisted on sharing. "The King, Elandrie, and Aldous were in the private study an hour ago, going over tomorrow's arrangements. That's where we're going."
They found the outer corridor already choked with fighting, palace guards in gold and red locked against soldiers wearing no crest at all, their armor scrubbed deliberately anonymous, and Corren drew the Morning Star and felt the familiar drain settle into his chest with the first corrected lightning chant he spoke, arcing current between two attackers close enough together that the working dropped both at once, an honest toll paid before he'd taken more than a dozen steps into the fight. Smoke had already begun crawling along the ceiling in thin, acrid ribbons, catching the torchlight and throwing everyone's shadow twice as large as its owner, and somewhere behind him he heard Wrenna's voice rise sharp and clear over the clash of steel, directing a wounded guard toward the nearest doorway rather than freezing at the sight of his own blood the way the old, guilty version of her might once have. Voss fought without a single chant at all, his gauntlets meeting blade after blade with a controlled, economical brutality that reminded Corren, distantly, of the very first time he'd watched the man fight in this exact style in a much smaller room, and Corren found himself grateful, in the middle of everything else demanding his attention, that at least one person beside him had no mana debt left to worry about spending too fast.
It was in the second corridor, past a knot of fallen guards neither side had stopped to claim, that a figure stepped out from a side passage moving with a stillness that didn't belong to any ordinary soldier, and Corren's breath caught hard enough to hurt at the sight of him.
Torvent. Thinner even than the last time Corren had seen him carrying laundry through Blackmere's halls, a plain blade held loose and competent in one hand, his eyes finding Corren's face without a flicker of recognition in them at all, only the same blank, patient readiness of a man following an order he had no capacity left to question.
"Torvent," Voss said, low, his voice carrying a weight Corren hadn't heard from him before, not command, something closer to grief arriving early. "You don't have to do this. Whatever binding they've laid over you, I know its shape. I helped write half the theory it's built from, before I understood what it would cost the people it was used on."
Torvent's blade came up without a word, the same flat, patient readiness carrying him forward, and Voss met the strike with an open palm rather than a weapon, catching the blade's flat against his own gauntlet and speaking, low and fast, a string of syllables that carried no chant's rhythm at all, only the cadence of a man reaching for something considerably older and more personal than magic.
For one long, suspended second, something flickered behind Torvent's empty eyes, a recognition arriving from somewhere the binding hadn't fully reached, his blade wavering, his mouth working around a word that never quite finished forming.
"Voss," he said, and it was the first thing he'd said in that voice, his own voice, since the arena guards had dragged him out of Fyre Academy in chains. "It hurts. I didn't know it would still hurt, after everything they took."