The world seemed to freeze in the space between heartbeats. Kaelen Frost's grip on Gil's wrist was not brutal, but it was absolute, like ice locking around a twig. The steward gasped, the color draining from his face. The suspect cup, halfway to my table, wobbled dangerously, a single drop of amber tea sloshing over its gold-rimmed edge.
All eyes in the immediate vicinity snapped to the Duke. His presence was a winter storm crashing a garden party. He wasn't in formal court attire but in his customary dark northern tunic and trousers, with a heavy fur-lined cloak thrown back over his shoulders. He looked immense, out of place, and utterly, terrifyingly real amidst the confectionery splendor. His scar stood out starkly against his cheek, a testament to a world of violence this pavilion pretended didn't exist.
"W-well, Your Grace, I—" Gil stammered, his voice a terrified squeak.
"I said it looks chipped," Kaelen repeated, his voice a low rumble that didn't ask for argument. His silver eyes weren't on Gil, but on the cup. Then they flicked to me a searing, unreadable glance that held me pinned as surely as his hand held the steward. There was a question in them, a fierce protective intensity, and a warning all at once. What is happening here?
He had seen. He had seen the steward's panic, the deliberate targeting, and the tremor in the hand. Kaelen, who fought monsters by reading the shift of muscle and the flicker of intent, had spotted the poison in the ritual from a league away.
"The Duke is quite right," I said, my voice slicing through the tension with cultivated calm. I leaned forward, peering at the cup in Gil's frozen hand. "There, on the inner rim. A hairline flaw. How observant of you, Your Grace." I was giving him an out, a plausible, public reason for his intervention that had nothing to do with poison or plots. A noble protecting another noble from a servant's carelessness.
Kaelen's eyes narrowed slightly, understanding the gambit. He released Gil's wrist. "See to it," he said, the command leaving no room for discussion.
"Y-yes, Your Grace! At once!" Gil's relief was a palpable wave. He fumbled the offending cup back onto his tray, nearly dropping the whole thing, and scuttled away towards the service entrance as if demons were at his heels. The planned switch was aborted. The timeline was shattered.
A beat of awkward silence hung over our table. Then Prince Cassian's voice, smooth as oiled silk, flowed across the pavilion. "Duke Frost! What an unexpected… pleasure. We were not informed of your visit to the Academy." His tone was welcoming, but his eyes were chips of blue ice. Kaelen's dramatic entrance was a disruption he had not orchestrated, and Cassian hated variables.
Kaelen turned his head slowly, acknowledging the prince with a curt nod that was just shy of disrespectful. "Business with the Headmaster. Finished early. Saw the gathering." His explanation was a series of grunted clauses. He didn't bother with apologies or pleasantries. His gaze swept the pavilion, a predator assessing a field of sheep, before landing back on our table. "Lady Elara informed me her friend would be here." He said it as if it explained everything—his presence, his intervention.
Elara, who had been watching with wide eyes, gave a tiny, imperceptible nod. She had sent for him. My ally had called in the cavalry. The warmth of that loyalty warred with the sudden, terrifying complication of his presence.
Cassian's smile was brittle. "How fortuitous. Please, join us. There is room here." He gestured to his own table, the place of honor. It was a power move, an attempt to absorb and neutralize the threat.
"I prefer the view here," Kaelen said flatly, and before anyone could object, he pulled out the empty chair at my small table and sat down. The chair creaked under his weight. His presence dominated the space, a wall of fur, muscle, and simmering danger between me and the rest of the pavilion. The message was unequivocal: This one is under my protection.
Conversation resumed around us, a buzzing hive of shocked speculation. The Crown Prince had been subtly defied, and a lady under his pointed interest had been claimed, however brusquely, by the North. The social calculus of the room had just been violently recalculated.
My mind raced. Kaelen's intervention had saved me from Gil's attempt, but Seraphina was not defeated. She was adaptable. I saw her across the pavilion, her sweet smile still in place, but her eyes were calculating, darting between Kaelen, the fleeing Gil, and the Prince. She leaned over and whispered something to a different servant, a woman with a stern face.
The ritual was resetting.
"You shouldn't be here," I murmured to Kaelen under the cover of the renewed chatter, my eyes on the servers.
"Clearly, I should," he replied, his voice a low vibration I felt more than heard. He didn't look at me, his gaze also scanning the room with tactical precision. "Elara's message was… concerning. Your father's command is foolishness. This—" he made a minute gesture encompassing the pavilion, "—is a hunting ground."
"I know," I said, the words tight. "But you can't stop the hunt by standing in front of me. You can only change the prey."
He finally turned his head, his grey eyes boring into mine. "What do you know, Rosalind?"
"Enough," I evaded. "Please, trust me. Do not intervene again unless… unless it is life or death." I needed him to be a shield, not a sword. I needed the plan to play out, just not as written.
He studied my face for a long, hard moment. I saw the conflict in him—the instinct to drag me from this place warring with something else, a grudging respect for the steel in my request. He gave a single, sharp nod. "I am watching."
It was all I could ask for.
The tea service, momentarily derailed, resumed with renewed vigor, as if to prove no northern duke could disrupt Imperial tradition. The senior steward himself, flustered, brought over a fresh pot of tea and a new, flawless gold-rimmed cup for me, pouring with trembling hands under Kaelen's impassive stare. This cup was clean. I thanked him and took a small, symbolic sip. It was fragrant, perfectly steeped, and utterly irrelevant.
Then, Seraphina made her move. She rose from her table, a vision of pink solicitude. "Oh, do let me help!" she trilled, gliding towards the main service cart where a fresh pot of the Prince's prized Silver Needle tea was being prepared. "His Highness is so particular about the pour. The water must be just off the boil, and it must steep for precisely one hundred heartbeats." She smiled at the head server, a charming, self-deprecating smile. "I've watched him do it a hundred times. Allow me?"
It was a brazen act, taking over the service for the Crown Prince himself. But delivered with her practiced innocence, it seemed like adorable, devoted familiarity. The head server, unsure how to refuse a marquis's daughter showing such deference to the prince, bowed and stepped back.
This was it. The sleight of hand. The personal touch that would embed the poison at the heart of the ritual.
Kaelen tensed beside me. I placed a hand, very lightly, on the table near his arm. A plea for stillness.
We watched. Everyone watched. Seraphina, the perfect hostess, took the scalding pot with a delicate, cloth-protected hand. She poured with exaggerated care into a line of fresh gold-rimmed cups on a waiting tray. She counted under her breath, a playful smile on her lips. "…ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred!" She set the pot down.
And in the flurry of that motion—as she reached to adjust the placement of a cup, as her body momentarily blocked the view from the Prince's table, as her pink sleeves fluttered—it happened. Her right hand, which had been tucked slightly against her skirt, moved. A tiny, crystal vial no longer than a thumbnail appeared between her fingers, was uncorked with a flick of her thumb, and its contents—a fine, white powder—were dumped into a single, specific cup. The vial disappeared back into her palm and then, presumably, into a hidden seam of her gown. The entire act took less than two seconds. A masterclass in misdirection.
But I had been waiting for it. My senses, heightened to a razor's edge, caught the minute glint of crystal, the barely-there puff of powder, and the way her eyes flicked to that one cup with a flash of triumph before her mask of sweetness slammed back down.
"There!" she announced cheerfully. "Perfectly poured for His Highness and his honored guests!" She gestured to the server to begin distribution.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I had seen the crime. But seeing and proving were continents apart. The poison was in the cup. The next move was delivery.
The servant, a stern-faced woman, picked up the tray. She moved with efficient grace. She served the Crown Prince first, placing the cup at his right hand with a bow. He didn't even look at it, engrossed in a conversation with a duke. She served the Duke of the East. She served a foreign ambassador.
She moved through the pavilion, the tray growing lighter. Each time she approached a table, my breath hitched. Was it now? No. Not yet.
Then she turned toward our table. Kaelen's presence was a palpable deterrent, but she had her orders. She approached, her expression impersonal. On her tray, three cups remained. My eyes, trained from a life of healing where a single misidentified herb could mean death, scanned them. They were identical. Except… the one closest to her, the one she would naturally reach for first to serve the lady… Was it my imagination, or was the liquid inside ever so slightly cloudier? A faint, milky haze against the pale gold tea?
Seraphina, from across the room, was watching. Not openly, but in the reflective surface of a polished silver vase. Her gaze was fixed on the servant's hands.
The servant stopped. She looked at me, then at Kaelen, her professional mask slipping for a microsecond into uncertainty. Serving a duke took precedence, but the poisoned cup was meant for me.
Kaelen solved her dilemma. He gave a curt, dismissive wave of his hand. "I do not drink… floral water." His disdain for the delicate tea was evident.
The servant's shoulders relaxed minutely. Protocol satisfied. She turned her full attention to me. Her hand moved, steady and sure, to the front of the tray.
To the cloudy cup.
She lifted it, the gold rim gleaming in the dappled sunlight. She bent forward, the perfect image of servile efficiency, to place it on the table before me.
As the cup descended, its shadow falling across the white lace tablecloth, Kaelen's leg shifted under the table. His booted foot came down, not on mine, but on the hem of my grey-blue gown, pinning it—and me—subtly but firmly in place. At the same time, his hand, resting on the table, casually knocked his own clean, empty cup over. It toppled with a sharp clatter, rolling toward the servant. The woman flinched, her attention broken, her hand faltering. The poisoned cup wavered, a single, crucial inch from its intended destination on the linen in front of me. In that frozen instant of distraction and noise, his silver eyes locked with mine, and his message was as clear as a shout: Now.